One psychological effect of the 'quake (the damage of which likely to cost the equivalent of about 1% of Japan's GDP) could be, that people feel small and helpless in the confrontation with calamitous, brute forces of nature which are so large, that they practically defy comprehension. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpei22c3SDM There exists something much bigger and more powerful than we are, in other words.
If you assume a grand average weight per human being of 70 kilos, and a world population of 6.9 billion people, you get about 483 billion kilos of human bodymass, or 483 million tonnes (rounded figures). The planet earth is supposed to weigh about 6,585,000,000 trillion tonnes. Thus, the weight of all people on earth would be about 0.000,000,000,000,073% of the total weight of the planet earth, not even one hundreth of a trillionth of that weight. The Dutch "Big History" guru at Amsterdam University, Fred Spier, explains the size of the biosphere we inhabit with an analogy: "For the sake of simplicity, let us assume that the Earth weighs as much as an average American car (about 1000 kg). The weight of all planetary life combined would then amount to no more than seventeen micrograms. This equals the weight of a very tiny sliver of paint falling off that car". http://www.socionauki.ru/journal/articles/128203/ Jurriaan _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
