Beyond us

There are six billion of us running around on this little globe in the corner of the Milky Way, six billion human beings who are all unique. This seems incredibly paradoxical to most people. Six billion is such an unimaginably large number for us that we have real trouble grasping the idea that each and every single one of those could be unique, different and original.

The thing is, six billion isn’t actually all that big of a number in the grand scheme of things. There are probably more than a hundred billion (that’s 100,000,000,000) galaxies in the universe. Each of those galaxies, in turn, will hold many millions of stars. Each human body is made up of somewhere in the vicinity of a hundred trillion cells. The age of the universe is guessed to be somewhere in the vicinity of 13 billion years and each of those years, we can be pretty sure, was very unique. The period at the end of this sentence holds somewhere around 500 billion protons.

Six billion is puny compared to most of those numbers. The reason we see it as big is simply because we lack the imagination to really grasp any number bigger than a few thousand. For almost our entire existence we’ve only ever had to work with numbers in the tens, hundred or (in extremes) thousands.

Six billion isn’t that big, we’re just not built to understand it.

This is a real shortcoming. It is what leads to our inability, for instance, to think outside of our immediate environment. Most of us will only ever be interested in our direct surroundings, because we just cannot grasp the true size of the world or humanity.

Joseph Stalin famously said ‘one death is tragedy; a million is a statistic.’ He is right. Even if we look at a page with a million dots, we still can’t fully grasp what that means. When I looked at it I just scrolled left and right, with my eyes glazing over slightly.

Yet we can’t blame ourselves for this. It is simply how we’ve come to be. Thousands upon millions of years of evolution were spent with everything that mattered under a hundred. Now we’re suddenly expected to understand things thousands upon millions of times bigger.

So what does that mean? It means we must accept that we can’t fully understand our world anymore, it has outgrown us. The thing is, that simply because we can’t fully grasp it, that doesn’t mean we can ignore it or think that our limited ability to understand means we don’t have to try. It is important for us to understand that while we will only ever be able to really grasp a few hundred we must still learn to care care about relatively small few billion.