Worldometers

Watch the counter on human births tick by, a life a second, and tell me that Worldometers is anything other than an absolutely incredible website. It gives you an amazing sense of the living earth, its dynamism, and cumulative human activity by giving you something to sense. 6.6 billion is a big number, but it seems more tactile when watching the population ticker flit by. With every tick, I try to recall someone I know as if they were just being born. It is a heady experience to try and conceive of a life with every second, potential and actual lived experience and meaning compressed into a moment replaced only by the next and the next. What a wealth -- and what a burden. Probably your entire world will be exhausted in about 100 ticks. And for all that exhaustion, you then have to figure the sensation needs to be repeated another 66 million times before you've accounted for the human population of earth.

Try the same experiment with the other tracked objects. Testing the limits of the imagination to track the number of bikes produced in a minute (can you visualize 100 bikes as each pops into existence?) or the number of lightening strikes per second on earth (about 100) gives you a good sense of your sense of the earth, and your slice of it, on a daily basis.

April 29th, 2008 / 0 Comments / Tags: simultaneity, worldometers, phenomenology, proximity