The other day, my son asked me how many people were in the world. I told him it was between 6 and 7 billion and figured he really couldn’t grasp a number that big. Then he asked me how many insects there were in the world. I have to admit, my guess wasn’t close. I guessed it was in the trillions, but that we’d have to look that up and see.
Today, I got around to that. According to the Smithsonian, there are approximately 10 quintillion insects in the world. That’s a 1 with 19 zeroes. Of course, Tate can’t comprehend this at all, but doing the math….if we wanted to eradicate them…and assuming that they didn’t breed any new insects while we were doing this….we’d only need each person on Earth to kill about 166,000 insects. Or, put another way, if each person on Earth killed 500 insects a day, we could rid the world of them in just under a year.
Of course, that would almost certainly mean that shortly thereafter, we will have eradicated ourselves too. Please understand, I don’t advocate this. I’m just playing with the numbers……
The other fun fact I ran across was that the estimate for just the United States was over 91,000 species of insects. Wow…..