EA - What happens on the average day? by rosehadshar

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: What happens on the average day?, published by rosehadshar on August 17, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. “No man is an island, entire of itself”. John Donne, Meditation XVII I want to know what’s going on in the world. I’m a human; I’m interested in what other humans are up to; I value them, care about their triumphs and mourn their deaths. But: There’s far too much going on for me to keep track of all of it I think that some parts of what’s going are likely far more important than others I don’t think that regular news providers are picking the important bits to report on I would really like there to be a scope sensitive news provider which was making a good faith attempt to report on the things which most matter in the world (see digression one for more thoughts on this). But as far as I know, this doesn’t exist (see digression two for some cool things which do exist). In the absence of such a provider, I’ve spent a small amount of time trying to find out some basic context on what happens in the world on the average day. I think of this as a bit like a cheat sheet: some information to have in the back of my mind when reading whatever regular news stories are coming at me, to ground me in something that feels a bit closer to what’s actually going on. Methodological notes I picked the scale of a day because it felt easiest to imagine. I think that weeks, months and years would all be interesting scales to have something like this for. (For decades and centuries, I mostly think you should just read most important century, and I strongly recommend doing so.) The numbers I’ve used are rough, but I think they are ballpark right, and a big improvement on no numbers. Please read all of the numbers as having a ‘~’ in front of them. I used the most recent years I could find, but this varied (2014-2022). I mostly pulled numbers from Our World In Data, and sometimes other places. I’ve only put links into the text directly where the number in the text is an annual figure that you can find directly in the original source. For everything else, I think looking at the spreadsheet of my workings makes more sense than going straight to the original source. I’ve included a bunch of charts to give a sense of trends over time. The charts are all in years, so the numbers they are tracking on the y axis are different to the daily numbers I give in the text. I picked some things that happen on an average day that I care about and think are important. I expect there are big gaps here, particularly where it comes to technology. I’d love for people to suggest things which should be added to this post. Headline version Things that happen on an average day: Almost 170,000 people die. 380,000 babies are born. Humans kill 800,000 cows, 1.6 million sheep, 4 million pigs, 200 million chickens, and 300 million fish. $263 billion is spent. 95.4 million tonnes of CO2 are emitted. Humans launch 5 objects into space. Warning: these numbers are ~nonsense 898,271 people fall in love. 628,350,575 people cry. Things which remain the case on an average day: 8 billion humans are alive. A quadrillion fish are alive (a thousand trillions), 550 billion wild mammals, and 100 billion wild birds. There are over 9,000 stockpiled nuclear weapons. There are around 56 active state-based conflicts. Spreadsheet version here. Things that happen on an average day Almost 170,000 people die. Since 1950, this number has been up and down, at around 140,000 deaths per day. Tomorrow, the number of deaths will be more than today, by around 6 deaths - and this number will keep growing every day for the next 80 years or so (nearly 30,000 days). On the average day in 2100, around twice as many people will die as did today. 15,000 of these people are under 5 years old. 5,000 of them die from diseases which are preventable by v...