Looking at life through the numbers
Numbers describe our world, help us make sense of the world, shape our perceptions of our existence. Credit: Getty Images/iStockphoto/patpitchaya
I saw a number this week.
170 trillion.
It's an impressive number. It was in a story about the plastic we dump in our oceans. A team of international researchers estimated that's how many pieces are out there, polluting our deep blue seas, washing up on our shores. It apparently does not include the number of pieces of plastic ingested by the creatures of the sea. And, yes, some of those pieces are very small. But still.
170 trillion.
It's a difficult number to wrap your head around. Until you break it down: It's more than 21,000 pieces of plastic for every last one of the 8 billion humans on this planet. 21,000 for me, 21,000 for you, 21,000 for every person you know.
Then the picture gets clearer.
That's the thing about numbers. I'm a numbers geek. I adore them. I love to work with them, combine them, use them. I like to put them in charts and graphs and plug them into equations. I'm happy inventing numbers problems for my grandson and happier when he solves them. I get excited each year when Pi Day rolls around, as it does on Tuesday. I love my birthday when my age becomes a prime number (like this year).
People who abuse them might lie about them but the numbers themselves don't lie. Whether rock-hard or derived by estimates, they are what they are. Numbers are pure.
And yet, as those pieces of plastic show, when it comes to numbers, context matters.
I saw another number not so long ago.
20 quadrillion.
A bunch of biologists estimated that's the number of ants in the word. How do you comprehend 20 quadrillion? You can say it's a 2 with 16 zeros after it. You can write it out: 20,000,000,000,000,000. Or you can augment: It's 2.5 million ants for every human on Earth. Some numbers are the stuff of nightmares.
Numbers describe our world, help us make sense of the world, shape our perceptions of our existence.
Take 81 and 6. The first is the number of missiles Russia unleashed on Ukraine in a single day this past week. The second is the number that were hypersonic missiles, which travel five times the speed of sound and are almost impossible to shoot down. 81 and 6 give a sense of that still-unfolding catastrophe, but what do they mean without us also working to understand the cruelty they represent and the damage they cause and the fear they instill in the people whose homes and schools and roads and offices and power grids are being devastated.
Take 18. That's the number of years Sheldon Thomas spent in a New York prison on a murder charge before being released Thursday with an apology from the Brooklyn district attorney's office. Back in 2004, police officers showed a photo of a different Sheldon Thomas to a witness and used that I.D. to make the arrest, and prosecutors and the original trial judge knew of the false photo ID and proceeded anyway, and a young man — Thomas is now 35 — spent more than half his life so far behind bars. And the 18 becomes more meaningful when you know that, and when you think of the experiences he never had and the relationships he missed forming and the precious time and liberty he lost.
Take 400, the average number of Americans still dying every day from COVID-19. And 1.1 million, the total number who have died. And if you set aside your numbness, you see the awfulness of those numbers, the pain and heartbreak they signify for so many who lost friends and family and continue to do so, and for those still struggling with symptoms no one quite understands.
Numbers sketch our world. We fill the outline.
Columnist Michael Dobie's opinions are his own.
Michael Dobie is a member of the Newsday editorial board.
