Your morning dose of perspective

We all know that there are lots of people on this earth. But most of us have only a handful of close friends. We've got a social circle of dozens. Our acquaintances number in the hundreds. Our towns, for the most part, can be measured in the thousands, if not the hundreds. Few of us have been part of a crowd more than 40 or 50 thousand people, and even then only for a few hours at a concert or sporting event. Maybe we've seen pictures of massive demonstrations attended by hundreds of thousands - or even more than a million - but the odds are we've never been part of one ourselves.

How do we wrap our head around a number like 6.5 billion - the number of souls living their lives at this very moment on our earth?

We visit Population : One, that's how.

When you click over to check it out, you'll find a colored box on the right-hand side of your screen, with a single white dot in its upper-left corner. That dot, as the arrow that points to it, is you. The colored box is me. And Al Gore. And David Hasselhoff. And Maya Angelou. And Charles Klau. And, well... everyone else. All 6,499,999,999 of us.

Not impressed by the picture? Ahhh... that's because you haven't yet noticed the scrollbar that's quietly appeared at the bottom of your browser window. Go ahead - hit the right arrow key. I'll wait.

This is taking a while... maybe you'd better click on the scrollbar instead.

Aw, heck, just drag the thing all the way to the right, or we're going to be here all day.

That, friends, is 6.5 billion people. That is the population of our earth. That is the reason that selfishness = silliness. Spend a while taking it in - if it doesn't take your breath away and make your head spin, then you need to go back and press the right arrow key a while longer.