The future might just be bright...

I wrote this back in 2016. Possibly a different era, but I think the point remains the same. 
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I was reading the frankly excellent “Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think” by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler recently and came across an interesting statistic that I thought worth sharing.

As of April 2008, the combined number of hours spent creating and editing Wikipedia came to 100 million. 100 million hours of effort from millions of contributors to create a repository of human knowledge pretty much unmatched by anything else — arguably in terms of quality and accessibility. As a reflection of human thought and knowledge it is pretty dependable (just ask Watson).

That was almost 8 years ago and I’m sure the number of hours put into it has grown substantially. The actual stats are hard to come by but my back-of-an-envelope estimation puts it at just over 1.2 billion hours. That seems at first to be a huge number, but is it really?

I thought it would be fun to point out a few comparisons.

• The average US commuter spends 42 hours per year in traffic. That adds up to over 5 billion hours per year sitting behind a wheel doing pretty much nothing.
• The average UK adult spends about 3 hours per day watching TV (specifically TV). That’s 150 million hours per day, or just over 1 billion hours per week. Consuming video. On a TV screen.
• Women in sub-Saharan Africa spend around 16 million hours per day collecting water. That’s 6 billion hours per year.
• Different sources will provide slightly different numbers for each of the above calculations but the orders of magnitude are the same.

Just think what might be accomplished if we managed to redirect some of that time, energy and focus on other projects.