The “Wreck of Time” by Annie Dillard makes you think about things in a whole new way. The many people who have walked this planet astounded me when I found their number is 70 to 100 billion. Reading these numbers makes me feel incredibly insignificant. There have been many people whose names will be remembered for generations to come, but the majority of us will just be another number on the deceased list. The picture below is a crowd of people in Asia.
-Here is a fun fact about Asia “Asia has a population of over 4 billion people or better than 60% of the world’s population. This many people standing side by side holding hands would reach around the world at the equator more than 100 times.”
http://www.panasianbiz.com/2009/01/15-fun-facts-about-asia/
With a rapidly growing population we are becoming even more unimportant as time flies by. A number in this essay that blew my mind mostly was the LAX airport with 25,000 parking spaces. I come from a town of approximately 28,000 people. We would almost all have our own parking spaces there.
-The Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. It is the busiest airport in the world. This airport is the largest employer in the state of Georgia with approximately 56,000 employees. That is over twice the number of parking spaces at LAX airport and twice as many employees as the total population of the town I grew up in.
http://www1.istockphoto.com/file_closeup.php?id=680507
http://www.panoramio.com/photo/575110
The following quotes from “The Wreck of Time” really boggle my mind. “One tenth of the land on earth is tundra. At any time, it is raining on only 5 percent of the planet’s surface. Lightning strikes the planet about a hundred times every second. The insects outweigh us. Our chickens outnumber us four to one.” The lightening strike information is especially mind boggling. That is over 8 and ½ million strikes a day!
It is sad how easily people overlook other countries’ tragedies. I have asked a few people, old and young, about the 138,000 deaths in Bangladesh in 1991. No one I have asked so far has even heard of this horrific event. This irritates me the most because when the twin towers collapsed and killed only some 3,000 people everyone heard, as well as other countries. There have been memorials established and if you ask anyone about “911” they remember it all very vividly. They even remember what they were doing when it happened. Every year there has been anniversary celebrations for the event and pictures of the fallen were shown on the news for a long time after the event. There have even been movies about the event. Sure these deaths were caused by humans and not a natural disaster like the Bangladesh tragedy, but either way these humans should not be forgotten just because they aren’t us in the United States.
This essay by Annie Dillard (there is a picture of her below) has made me think a lot differently about life in general. It makes you realize very easily that you can live your days out and become another one of the estimated 80 billion numbers or you can strive to make a name for yourself and be remembered.
