The # Of Us

Last week I ended my family holiday in Sri racha and flew east from Bangkok through Inchon to JFK on a mixed crew from several nations. The Airbus A 380 was the biggest passenger aircraft in the commercial fleets, but we were on a Boeing 777. When I asked the stewardess about the seating, she replied with a French accent, "546 passengers and a crew of 34, but we're traveling light tonight" "Merci." I thanked her in French. Our sixteen hour trip to America coasted over the Bering Sea to make landfall in Alaska. I had already exhausted the movie offering on the outward trip to Thailand. More than 200 million people speak that language out of a global population of 7 billion and I took out my cellphone to calculate the percentage people were on this massive plane. The figure came out to be .000000081428571%. 580 was the same number of townspeople living in Isleboro, Maine, but this number is only .0000000058% of the total number of people who have lived since 50,000BC. This demographic number comes from a study by the Population Reference Bureau in Washington, which I read on BBCNEWS. Arthur C Clarke in 2001: A Space Odyssey wrote back in 1968, "Behind every man now alive stand 30 ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living." We are numerous. By the way the total number of people who have lived has been calculated to 107,602,707,791. Thankfully only 420 of them were on that Boeing 777. Another 200 and the behemoth would have never left the Earth.