Consider any single human individual on the planet. That gives you the numerator: 1.
Now consider the estimated sum of all human individuals on the planet. That gives you the denominator: 9 billion. For clarity, ease of computation, and to avoid writing all of the 9 zeroes in the number 9 billion, use calculator shorthand scientific notation for 9 billion: 9e9.
Thus you have the relative numeric importance of a single human individual on earth: 1/9e9.
Of course 1/9e9 rounds to 0. That is to say, the resulting relative numeric importance of a single human individual is 1.1e-10, or 0.00000000001, a number so small that it is effectively zero.
This humbling mathematical representation of a human individual does not imply that each individual is insignificant, as the 1 that comes after the decimal place in 1.1e-10 is actually a repeating decimal, meaning that there are easily 9 billion significant digits in the result.
I maintain that there are 9e9 * 10 significant digits on earth, when you count the approximately 10 fingers on the hands of each of the 9e9 individuals.
In the next post I outline Grassroots Gaia, an open-source strategy for putting those 9e10 significant digits to work regenerating the functions of earth’s ecosystem.
Kirstie Stramler