Now stats some reason for global positivity

So for example there is last week's brain-tingling news that the ACT Integrity Commission is going to have to examine "more than 1 million relevant documents" relevant to the more than $8.5 million in contracts awarded by the CIT.

In recent days and out in the same blizzard containing the CIT statistics I have been alerted to new and old matters as diverse as Scott Morrison having collected five secret ministries.

In the USA Republicans are 14 per cent more likely than Democrats to use condoms and that 71 per cent of Democrat-voting college students would never go on a date with a Trump voter.

That Nick Kyrgios audibly accused a vocal woman courtside at Wimbledon of being drunk after glugging "700 drinks" and now she is suing him for shaming and defaming her.

That more than 300 different animal species engage in a diverse array of behaviours that are forms of homosexuality and that our seas are still such mysteries to us that scientists are finding 2,000 new marine species a year.

That in the Californian wild there are Giant Sequoia trees (the species starring in forest 33 of Canberra's National Arboretum) more than 3000 years old.

That last weekend's 466 points scored in one eight-game round of the NRL was an NRL record.

That a Finnish opinion poll finds 42 per cent of Finns "strongly agree" their prime minister Sanna Marin, 36, should be able to relax and enjoy herself in her free time but that 39 per cent say the famous video of her "dancing intimately with Finnish celebrities" doesn't correspond with how they think a Finnish prime minister's job should be conducted.

That researchers planning to "de-extinct" the Tasmanian Tiger claim they can produce an animal that is roughly 90 per cent thylacine within the next decade and hope one day to develop an animal that is a 99.9 per cent match.

That this year's Floriade will bedazzle with "more than 1 million blooms", that (to repeat) Scott Morrison collected five secret ministries and that, to quote from a new piece on longtermism: "Our planet might remain habitable for roughly 1 billion years and if we [humans] survive as long as the Earth stays habitable this would be a future in which 125 quadrillion children will be born.

"A quadrillion is a 1 followed by 15 zeros: 1,000,000,000,000,000."

Attentive readers will have noticed right at the end there a sudden, qualitative change in the nature of the statistical "blizzard" this columnist has been describing and marvelling at. The statistics that come up whenever and wherever the newsworthy philosophy of longtermism is discussed can seem to dwarf and to make frivolous statistics of everyday things like Finnish opinion polls, prime ministerial portfolio grabs, Floriade tulip bulbs and footie results.

Longtermism, Wikipedia helpfully explains, has the key argument that "Future lives matter morally just as much as people alive today; ... there may well be more people alive in the future than there are in the present or have been in the past; and ... we can positively affect future peoples' lives ... it is the responsibility of those living now to ensure that future generations get to survive and flourish."

Late in the week of the stats' blizzard I've just nattered about I read a new, exciting, statistics-stippled online piece from Max Roser - Longtermism: The future is vast - what does this mean for our own life?

I feel grateful to this longtermism piece and its cosmologically mighty data for its reminder of how trivial daily "news" (Morrison's foibles! Finnish opinions about partying! Republicans' condom use!) really is and for the way it, longtermism, nudges us towards looking at humanity's bigger pictures.

"If we manage to avoid a large catastrophe, we are living at the early beginnings of human history," Roser imagines.

"The future is immense, and the universe will exist for trillions of years. We can use this fact to get a sense of how many descendants we might have in that vast future ahead.

"We are mammals. One way to think about how long we might survive is to ask how long other mammals survive. It turns out that the lifespan of a typical mammalian species is about 1 million years.

"Let's think about a future in which humanity exists for 1 million years: 200,000 years are already behind us, so there would be 800,000 years still ahead.

"Let's consider a scenario in which the population stabilises at 11 billion people (based on the UN projections for the end of this century) and in which the average life length rises to 88 years.

READ MORE IAN WARDEN COLUMNS:

"In such a future, there would be 100 trillion people alive over the next 800,000 years."

Sobering, invigorating, perspective-restoring blizzard of statistics of the human future! How trivial and irrelevant our preoccupations with today's news (even the reports of the more than 1 million relevant CIT documents).

If there are 800,000 years more of humanity there are going to be 292,000,000 days (think how many editions of The Canberra Times that will mean!) rather shrinking the significance of any one day here and now on our little planet's speck in a universe destined to carry on, keeping calm, for trillions of years.

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