I drop the number into a numbers-to-words converter and get “seven trillion six hundred twenty-five billion five hundred ninety-seven million four hundred eighty-four thousand nine hundred eighty-seven”. (I don’t do it by hand, because a script that somebody tested is likely to make fewer errors than me). Google says there are roughly 7 billion people on earth at the moment. Does that mean that each person gets roughly 1089 dust specks, or that everyone who’s born gets one dust speck until the 7 trillion and change speck quota has been met? I ask because if each person is allowed multiple specks, you could have one person getting all 7-odd trillion of them in their lifetime, and that sounds like an outcome that the sufferer might describe as “horrible torture for 50 years without hope or rest” while they were experiencing it.
The answer that looks initially obvious to me is the specks, but that’s because I calculate it with a societal system of morality in which it’s absolutely not okay to perform certain experiments on humans which would be expected to make minor alleviations to the biological inconveniences experienced by all subsequent humans.
This seems to hinge on an intuition that if you have to do something to people without their consent, it’s do-unto-others-wise better to do a small thing to more people than a big thing to a few people. If the torture or specs would only be done to consenting parties, it’d be very different—I think people could get to competing to see who could last to 50 years of torture, or who could take the most specks in the Dust Speck Challenge, because the human organism is a strange and beautiful thing.
I drop the number into a numbers-to-words converter and get “seven trillion six hundred twenty-five billion five hundred ninety-seven million four hundred eighty-four thousand nine hundred eighty-seven”. (I don’t do it by hand, because a script that somebody tested is likely to make fewer errors than me). Google says there are roughly 7 billion people on earth at the moment. Does that mean that each person gets roughly 1089 dust specks, or that everyone who’s born gets one dust speck until the 7 trillion and change speck quota has been met? I ask because if each person is allowed multiple specks, you could have one person getting all 7-odd trillion of them in their lifetime, and that sounds like an outcome that the sufferer might describe as “horrible torture for 50 years without hope or rest” while they were experiencing it.
The answer that looks initially obvious to me is the specks, but that’s because I calculate it with a societal system of morality in which it’s absolutely not okay to perform certain experiments on humans which would be expected to make minor alleviations to the biological inconveniences experienced by all subsequent humans.
This seems to hinge on an intuition that if you have to do something to people without their consent, it’s do-unto-others-wise better to do a small thing to more people than a big thing to a few people. If the torture or specs would only be done to consenting parties, it’d be very different—I think people could get to competing to see who could last to 50 years of torture, or who could take the most specks in the Dust Speck Challenge, because the human organism is a strange and beautiful thing.