World Population

If you listen to powerful people, it seems like someone’s always trying to convince people how they should live their life. The good ones use reason to convince people to be good, to try new things, to appreciate what they have or to just simply be happy. Of course, no one has figured out one way that suits everyone because we still have war. To propose yet another set of reasons why we should be good, let’s do some math:

According to this website,
106,456,367,669 is a rough estimate of the number of people who have ever lived. Granted, we’ll never know, but instead of just saying they couldn’t know, this random website I found put a little formula together and came up with this number.

The estimated world population in 2007 was 6,377,600,000 (The Economist Pocket World in Figures)

So, right now, every living person represents just under 6% of all of the people who have ever graced the earth.

In other words, every living person represents 16.69 people, almost 17 lives.

Whether we do ever figure out some kind of moral code that suits everyone, all we can really do is reason. We don’t know how many people have ever lived, and we don’t really know how many are living right now. However, if I can convince myself that my presence here on earth represents the lives of 17 people who spent their life working to provide for their children, ultimately me, that’s enough reason for me to wake up everyday and try to live the life they wouldn’t shake their head at.

What makes me shake my head? Whenever I do something dumb, I stop and kind of curse at myself. I try to ingrain in my memory not to do it again, or how to avoid this problem the next time around. I try to realize this as an opportunity to learn something and possibly improve my life.

Hmm, opportunity. How many people in the world have opportunity? Or what about how many people have the opportunity to provide opportunity for other people? How many people are wedged into the human system such that they, if they chose, would have a chance to reasonably influence a number of people? Not many.

What do you need to influence people? Power, money, yeah… no. That’s how you impose influence. How do you influence people?

What about consistently being good? If you’re consistently a good person, I think people will mirror your behavior, just as they mirror bad. They will respect you and show you that respect in their actions and kind of reverence of you.

I think though because the way our society is structured, it’s difficult for truly good people to get money and power. It almost takes being ungood to reach those levels of authority. And, subsequently those people with authority can distort people’s image of what being good is.

What if people with power and money were good? It’s possible but we need a system of checks and balances to keep them straight. It’s difficult for leaders to consistently be good because when people have an opportunity to sacrifice their morals for personal gain and get away with it… at some point, they’re likely to do so. Because they are human.

Things are changing though. People’s lives are becoming more transparent. We’re dumping more of our lives online and allowing people to know more things about us, voluntarily. And those things we don’t want people to know about, well, count the number of powerful people who have been politically disabled because of the transparency of the Internet. I think this kind of transparency is what the world needs and will depend on in order to consistently put good people up front and keep them honest.

In fact, instead of ever proving morality through mathematics or a perfect government or something, will the ultimate argument for morality be allowing everyone to choose their influence? Will it be for each of us to create our own argument for how one should live their life and not be imposed on by taxes? Will our social authority, or the direction of our taxes, be commanded by where Internet users choose to spend their money? In other words, will people of power be the ones who have the best ideas how to spend money and consistently spend that money wisely?

In the near future, influential people will be selected by the populace and can be replaced the moment the populace believes they aren’t telling the truth. Until we get there though, all we can do is to try and imagine ourselves as leaders of the 17 people who stand behind us.