Big numbers lie!

If you walk on sand dunes or a beach above high water mark in a strong wind you find the experience most uncomfortable, if not unpleasant. Particles of sand are whipped up and painfully lash the exposed parts of your body, in particular, your face. This also happens in deserts, if you ever happen to find yourself in one. And in finely cultivated fields when the surface has dried out. Since most of you are generally not in these situations, you rarely have experienced such an event  Except when you are measuring the location of sand dunes which do move over time thanks to the wind and, perhaps, Spring Tides.

Now, there is an astounding fact to be found in Michell Symons Diary 2010. Did you know that 2,000 pounds of space dust and other debris lands on the Earth every day? I thought not. It's a staggering 909.1 kg for the metrically inclined. Or 331,818.2 kg per year. This sounds an awful lot of stuff which would form an enormous pile if it were all in one place. But I suppose it falls roughly evenly over the whole of our planet. The Earth's area is 510,072,000 square kilometres. This means that 0.0065 kg (6,5 grams) of the stuff falls on 1 square kilometre per year. Let's say I occupy 1 square metre. Because 1 square kilometre contains 1,000,000 square metres, that means it would hold that many people. So 6.5 grams of space dust falls on 1,000,000 people. Each of these people gets bashed on the head by 0.0000065 grams of debris every year. And even less per day. My calculator can't/won't do the calculation of 0.0000065/365 grams per day. (My calculator was bought for £1.50 in 1988 and has not been updated. Is it a museum piece?)

So the number that started out sounding pretty impressive, turns out to be nothing to worry about after all. Always work out what impressive sounding figures mean. Especially if they come from politicians of all stripes.