5 numbers I can’t unsee
I got stuck on a weird question and asked my ChatGPT researcher to sanity-check it: which numbers are so upside down they change how I look at the world? The rabbit hole was worth it.
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Sharks - fear is upside down 🦈
ISAF confirms 4–10 unprovoked fatalities per year recently. Humans kill on the order of 70–150 million sharks annually. Culture says “Jaws.” Data says “us.” Caveat: the shark-kill range is wide because of illegal/unreported catches. -
Chickens - ~200 million per day
FAO headcounts imply 72–75 billion chickens slaughtered per year. Scale is the story. Thought experiment: if 8B people ate a 100 g chicken portion daily, we’d need roughly 400–550 million chickens per day depending on yield. Reality is closer to 200M because diets vary and a lot of food is wasted. -
The map we don’t have
Only about 26–27% of the seafloor is mapped to modern standards; roughly 0.001% of the deep seafloor has been seen up close. We run cables, ships, climate models…mostly on guess-textured maps. “Mapped” here means proper bathymetry, not coarse global grids. -
Concrete now outweighs life
Around 2020, human-made stuff - concrete, steel, asphalt, plastic - surpassed all living biomass by mass. That’s not a metaphor. It’s us literally tipping the scales from biosphere to technosphere. Timing has uncertainty, the signal does not. -
Sand is the hidden denominator 🏗️
We move 40–50 billion tonnes of sand and gravel every year. Cities, glass, chips, land reclamation - all hungry for the right kind of sand. Not all sand is interchangeable, and the monitoring is messy. That’s exactly why it’s risky.
Where this works in practice: using ranges and dated sources to reweight attention - procurement on sand, right-to-repair for e-waste, funding seafloor mapping. Where it fails: single-year or single-number hot takes. I wouldn’t use the “credit card of microplastics per week” line at all - the best reviews say it’s shaky and wildly variable. And for satellites/debris, counts shift monthly; timestamp or skip.
Would I trust these today? Yes for sharks, chickens, seafloor mapping status, anthropogenic mass, and sand - with the caveats above. No for tidy microplastics intake claims. If you’re making a beach decision, don’t use global shark stats; use local advisories.
My takeaway: the loud risks aren’t the big ones. The quiet denominators are. Which number here rewired your mental model - and what would you add to the list?