flickering pictures

They’re not good at all.

I’m not terribly good at math, but I really like numbers. I like their finality, and although they’re often misused, it’s not their fault — numbers don’t mislead people; people mislead people. If the town of Boulder, Colorado has 91,685 residents, then you can say what you like, but that’s pretty much that.

On that note, there are 6.7 billion people on our little planet. That sounds like a big number, until you consider that the lowly chicken outnumbers us three to one. You could say that if the only living creatures on Earth were humans and chickens, we’d have about a 24% chance of being born human — lower actually, because chickens reproduce a lot more than we do. A person born into this bizarre set of circumstances could understandably think to himself: “Geez, I sure am lucky to have been born without feathers.”

But our planet is not populated solely by humans and chickens — we also have ants. Something in the area of 1,000,000,000,000,000 of them, apparently. All of a sudden, our odds of being born human are looking pretty slim — and even a chicken’s life is looking pretty good.

So what’s with all the numbers, and why am I pelting you with poultry stats and rows of zeroes? To make a point, I guess. If you live in the United States, as 56 per cent of you apparently do, you get about 78 piddling little years on this planet — including several where you haven’t yet formed the faculties needed to really enjoy this place, and probably a few more where you’ve started to lose them. Canadians (18 per cent of you) have cheaper health care and don’t shoot each other quite so much, and on average we hang on for two extra years. Most of the rest of you aren’t so lucky.

So the point, finally. Even if there were nothing but ants, chickens and humans on this planet, you’d have about a 0.0000067 per cent chance of being human, or pretty damn near zero. In spite of our best efforts to overpopulate this place, we’re incredibly rare, even on this floating island of life in what so far looks to be a pretty barren galaxy. We’re born human against impossible odds, and then we’ve got a few good decades to leave our mark and hopefully leave this little sandbox a little wiser than we were when we got here. Knowing all this, how can we still spend them working jobs we don’t like and doing things we don’t want to do, with people we really don’t like all that much?

Way back in March, just a few weeks after this little site launched and well before most of you stumbled onto it, I put up a post called “job/degree/relationship/life sucks? get a new one.” I included a little extract by John Scalzi, a writer-type who was laid off from AOL and fought fiercely to make sure it was the best thing that ever happened to him. I guess that whole preamble you just read is sort of an intro to his story — check it out if you feel like you’re in a dead-end job/degree/relationship/life, and then go out and get a new one.

And remember too that even if we’re born human by unlikely random chance in a cosmic lottery, once we win this giant grand prize of a brain we don’t have to play by the same rules the chickens do.

Image via Channel 4.

• plug this post
  
  • Digg
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • NewsVine
  • Reddit
  • StumbleUpon
  • Technorati