Scale

I was recently fooling around with Wolfram Alpha, especially in regards to the whole feed the oceans thing I wanted to do. The following preposterous things were discovered:

• The cost would be about $100 million for the first run, then $50 million after that
• Getting the carbon levels down to the way they were when I was a child would triple the biosphere
• Reversing the carbon to pre-industrial levels would increase it to ten times

These numbers give me a headache. By tripling the biosphere, I mean that imagine every fish there is in the world. Now imagine three times as many. Three times as many seagulls. Three times as many whales. Three times as many squids. Three times as many sea cucumbers. And sooner or later, it works back to the land, and you have three times as many crows, and three times as many snakes, and three times as many owls, and mice, and cows.

Meanwhile for me, an unexpected expense that came up that amounted to my entire paycheck for a two-week period threw everything through a loop for a month.

The big numbers are discouraging, but the journey of a million miles begins with a single step. Even stopping things from getting worse makes it that much easier to get around to making things better.