Photo by Cooper Hofmann
Numbers often give us fits, from simple transactions in daily life to the more advanced accounting of salaries, taxes, and rent. Just like words, numbers can be manipulated, although never as bad as by today’s internet-aided charlatans, fraudsters, and scam artists who want more than our money, including a US president who liestreams everything. None have been so flummoxed as New York Yankees legend Yogi Berra, who when asked if he wanted his pizza cut into four or eight slices answered “Four, I don’t think I can eat eight.”
Although a googleplex is the largest named number – 10 to the power of a google or 10^(10^100) – there are so many zeros a googleplex can’t be written out in full. If one had started writing one zero per second at the start of the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago, you would still be writing today and through all our tomorrows. Note, the Big Bang isn’t a point in space, but a point in time, as an already vast universe started expanding when dark energy turned into matter and light. What universe? The only stupid question is an unasked one.
A whole other question is infinity, which isn’t a number, nor is infinity plus 1 as in Buzz Lightyear’s call “To infinity and beyond.” It is tempting to ask what is beyond that supposed line between something and nothing. Same goes for dividing by zero and the singularities of quantum mechanics, fudged into an incomplete answer by Cornell and Caltech physicist Richard Feynman to explain quantum electrodynamics, the physics of the fast and small.
One might as well count clouds, another conundrum echoed in God’s rebuttal to Job after he lamented the mounting injustices in his life amid the madness of existence: “Have you journeyed to the springs of the sea? Have the gates of death been shown to you? Have you comprehended the vast expanses of the earth?” We, the hopeful, are forever expecting perfection in imperfect poetry. Billie Holiday asked the same in her soulful lament about existence and love: “How deep is the ocean? / How high is the sky? / How far is the journey / From here to a star?” We are still working out life on our own star-orbiting planet, never mind the countless planets sprinkled among two trillion galaxies in the known universe with hundreds of billions of stars in each.
How old is the world? According to James Ussher, the seventeenth-century archbishop of Armagh, our tiny, third planet from the sun is a little more than 6,000 years old, created at nightfall on October 23, 4004 BC. Ussher’s idea was simple, adding up the ages of Jesus’s ancestors listed at the beginning of the Book of Matthew, where “Abraham begat Isaac; and Isaac begat Jacob; and Jacob begat Judas and his brethren,” and so on 38 generations to Joseph, Mary, and Jesus in 4 BC (yes, we got that wrong too, due to a sixth-century Anno Domini miscalculation).
According to the radioactive matter present in uranium-containing rocks, created in the formation of the solar system, the earth is 4.5 billion years old. The uranium may have come from the accretion of heavy metals after the sun’s birth in the remnants of a supernova or the collision of neutron stars. We don’t know yet, but are still investigating. Our own existence certainly took more than a day, starting somewhere in Africa 300,000 years ago.
How many colours are there, a seemingly simple question? Isaac Newton counted six when he first split sunlight into component colours with a prism at his family’s Woolsthorpe home during the 1666 plague in England, but added a seventh (indigo) because of his religious beliefs. Six or seven may seem trifling compared to the description of colour as a broad wavelength continuum between red (780 nanometres) and violet (380 nm). Using today’s digital precision as coded in RGB hexadecimal triplets, there are 16.8 million colours, where #000000 is black (the absence of colour), #FF0000 is red, #00FF00 is green, #0000FF is blue, and #FFFFFF is white (the presence of all colours; in this case, 100% red, green, and blue).
The Church has a lot to answer for, oddly more Old Testament than New Testament. Interring Galileo for reporting on his discovery of four mysteriously moving objects near Jupiter, seen for the first time in 1656 through a simple two-lens telescope. Galileo correctly deduced they were orbiting moons, confirming that the earth was not the centre of all things. Science soon replaced religion as the main authority of understanding, now being usurped again by another batch of titans dictating another centre – themselves. Men also have the same number of ribs (24), teeth (32), and chromosomes (46) as women. Alas, numerous Americans still think Noah’s Ark will soon be found somewhere in eastern Turkey, dislodging evolution and the diversity of all creation.
Numbers in the everyday realm of commerce and geopolitics are just as hard to comprehend, especially greenhouse gases in our 100-km thick atmosphere (426 ppm carbon dioxide, 1,939 ppb methane). Percentages may simplify the problem as compiled by the Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research (EDGAR): China 30%, US 11%, India 8%, EU 6%, Russia 5%, and Indonesia 2.5%, the top six emitters of a record 54 billion tons in 2025, growing by almost 2 billion tons/year. Saudi Arabia (22.7 tons per person), Australia (21.5) Canada (19.5), Russia (18.1), and the US (17.5) were the largest emitters per capita.
Burning carbon comes at an enormous price. Who pays for the destruction wrought by a warming earth as the glacial third pole melts, washing away downstream towns and villages? Who pays for the damage from deadly forest fires and storms? During the 2021 UN COP26 in Glasgow, European Commission VP Frans Timmermans noted, “European wealth was built on coal and if we don’t get rid of coal, European death will also be built on coal.” The same goes now for oil and gas, easier to do in the richer nations, but harder elsewhere.
The numbers are so bad there are calls to rename our current geological epoch – started at the end of the last glacial period 11,700 years ago – from the Holocene to the Anthropocene, characterized by human changes to the planet since 1952 when plutonium from nuclear weapons testing started appearing in the rock record along with spikes in atmospheric carbon dioxide and methane. The International Union of Geological Sciences is stuck between the proverbial rock and a hard place: “event” or “epoch.”
The number-one culprit is infrared-absorbing carbon compounds from burnt fossil fuels, still being fought over to run and heat our world. No coincidence that a “no new wars” US president targets oil and gas hot spots, particularly the global oil triangle of Venezuela, Iran, and Greenland. Venezuela has 300 billion barrels of oil reserves, the world’s largest at 18%, ahead of Saudi Arabia (16%), Canada (10%), and Iran (10%). Iran controls the world’s largest natural gas field with Qatar, the two Gulf countries that control more than a quarter of global natural gas. Greenland has about 13 billion barrels, potentially worth $1 trillion, strategically important for future oil and gas exploration as Arctic sea ice continues to melt, along with a wealth of critical minerals (especially the rare earths used in magnets).
Of course, Donald Trump lies so often, no numbers are safe. True, numbers aren’t his thing, as in bankrupting a casino that comes with a 5.3% built-in edge on roulette (only 2.7% on European wheels that don’t have a 00). Trump regularly makes up the math as he goes – a systematic not random error – inflating votes (not the most), audience sizes (not the largest), business assets (not legal) in which he was fined $454 million by a New York court.
At the 2026 UN General Debate in New York in September, Trump made numerous false claims (a.k.a. lies). The biggest was “When you add the United States and Venezuela together, we have more than 60% of the oil in the world,” nowhere near correct, even if American oil companies could deliver on his inflated investment boasts in a rusted market that ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods declared was “uninvestable.” Trump’s most revealing line was “To the victor belong the spoils.” Aggression was never so naked.
But is it “spoils” as in war booty or “spoils” as in killer air pollution and planet-warming greenhouse gases. After more than a century of oil extraction, Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela is so polluted fishermen can’t fish there and children can’t swim. The World Health Organization calculated that seven million people die a year from pollution, including particulate matter, carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, and sulfur dioxide, along with increased respiratory illnesses (asthma, bronchitis, pneumonia), cardiovascular diseases, and cancer. Global consumption is 100 million barrels/day, 20% by the US, a country of plenty with about 4% of the global population.
Fake numbers and disinformation roll off the presidential tongue like spittle, from diesel prices and war costs to inflation and the cost of living. In reality, gas prices are 50% higher (diesel double) since the start of the Iran war. “Record amounts” of oil are not being “taken out” of the Strait of Hormuz in a war that was supposed to last six weeks, now passing seven months. The war in Ukraine was supposed to end on “day one” as Trump noted more than 50 times during his 2024 election campaign, “Before I even arrive at the Oval Office, shortly after I win the presidency, I will have the horrible war between Russia and Ukraine settled.” More like one horrible lie after another.
In the “greatest economy” inflation is now higher and economic growth lower since Trump became president, while his illegal tariffs – raised or lowered by executive whim – are increasing prices for all. He thinks money spent outside the US is a loss, the simplest economic fallacy. Who knows what a 1,000-percent reduction in drug prices means? Free drugs? One whopper after another.
Some people lie about the size of the fish they caught or their poker winnings; Trump lies about everything. The reality is that billions of dollars are being spent to cover increased trade imbalances ($137 billion goods deficit), billions more on war (a single Patriot battery system with 32 missiles costs $1 billion), money not spent on education, hospitals, or potholes, while fewer taxes on the rich adds trillions of dollars to the US debt (now over $40 trillion), double just ten years ago at the start of Trump 1.0 with a debt-to-GDP of over 125%.
Correlation is not causation as everyone learns in an introductory statistics course, but there is a connection between excess wealth and inequality. Ten Americans control half the world’s wealth according to the latest Bloomberg Billionaire Index: Musk $1 trillion, Page $300 billion, Bezos $280 billion, Brin $280 billion, Dell $270 billion, Zuckerberg $260 billion, Huang $200 billion, Ellison $180 billion, Buffet $140 billion in a world-wide free-for-all. The socio-economic contract, where wealth follows effort and constructive living, is broken in the me-first, super-libertarian cesspool created by Trump and his cronies. No wonder trust in government is so low, less than half of people living in OECD countries.
Not all numbers are negative. The positives include the green transition: increased renewable energy, battery storage, and electric vehicles. More solar and wind energy has been installed in the past two years than in the previous two decades. According to BloombergNEF, global installed solar was 100 GW in 2012, 1,000 GW (1 TW) in 2022, and 3 TW in 2026, with 9 TW expected by 2036. Batteries are no longer an expensive afterthought, but an essential component needed to condition plentiful, real-time power production, flattening the peak noon-time solar curve to usable all-day power. Today’s green energy is no longer a question of “Can we” but “How do we” live abundantly?
The increased sales of electric vehicles are helping to clean our streets, 20 million in 2025 or 25% globally, rising 20% in a year. Stanford engineer Tony Seba predicted years ago that “gasoline cars will be the 21st century equivalent of the horse carriages by 2030,” referring to the next generation of cars as “computers on wheels.” The tipping point was a 200-mile-range electric vehicle priced at under $20,000. As Seba further noted, “What the resource-based industries don’t get is that technology adoption happens in an exponential manner. It never happens in linear fashion.” Even ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods has done the math, stating, “Every new passenger car sold in the world will be electric by 2040.”
Indeed, the numbers don’t lie. Personal computers, mobile phones, and now home solar panels and electric vehicles follow the basics of increased adoption by consumers who want to see a return on their everyday purchases. Sales of solar, wind, storage batteries, and EVs continue to rise, not just because they are our best chance to counter a century of damage to the environment and global health from burning fossil fuels (coal, oil, and gas), but because of the economic advantage from lower costs and more efficient technology (photovoltaics, rechargeable batteries, electric induction). The growth is staggering as renewable energy installations have doubled in the last three years, a doubling game we can all get behind.
Oil and gas won’t last forever and neither will we. Is time running out as we transition from a failed energy system of extraction, pollution, and warming controlled by uncaring money men to a new paradigm that allows everyone to be in control of their own energy future? How long will the sun last – another 4 or 5 billion years, give or take.
