What is The Scale of Life?

Our site is a "real-time" visualization of the relative scale of different life events and natural phenomena (details on what real-time means below). You can select from various categories, time periods, and some unique units of measure that we created in the dropdowns to modify the counter lists.

Each counter counts up in sync with the event listed unless the pause button is selected. You can also click each counter to get sources as well as thought provoking articles and videos that explore the topic in depth.

Some important tidbits:

All statistics are based on worldwide data unless otherwise indicated

Examples where "otherwise indicated" would apply are: "in the US", "in your body", etc. Any general terms like "Births" or "Steel manufactured" would be worldwide data.

The counters should be considered "edutainment" and are not 100% accurate

While we do provide sources for each statistic (click the counter box to view), and generally try to select from higher quality sources, the numbers presented should be assumed to have an unknown margin of error. Even with the best scientific knowledge, new discoveries can take place and estimating worldwide events (especially human ones) is not an exact science.

Take, for example, this new research on trees that now shows earth is home to 3 trillion trees. Previously, the "gold-standard" study from 10 years before showed 8 times fewer trees, a bit of a difference...

However, this is also a fairly extreme example as estimating the total number of the trees on the planet isn't quite as simple as counting the number of X widgets produced.


How do you choose sources and calculate your final data?

We make a point of generally choosing statistics that are researched by professional agencies or institutions or are provided directly from a company, person, etc. involved (e.g. production volume of a product). Many of these types of statistics like births, commercial flights, red blood cells created, legos manufactured, the speed of light, etc. are very well tracked or researched.

While this site is intended primarily for a lay audience, we make our best efforts to obtain the most accurate data available; if we can't find data for a statistic that meets our (patent pending) "Scale of Life Data Trustworthiness" standards, we don't use it.

When creating a final calculation, we will generally weight and average multiple data sources depending on their percieved quality. In some cases we select a single, most authoritative data point. This is a highly subjective process, which is why we make the "per day" calculation and sources available so you can evaluate for yourself.

If you think you have spotted a calculation error, have a better or more recent data source, or want to pitch a new counter idea, click and let us know.

We also know that some of the counter names themselves are still a bit too vauge. For example, does "vehicles manufactured" include commercial trucks, etc. (in this case the sources indicate yes but it isn't fully clear)? We want to make it easier to determine at a glance and are are working on adding more specific notes within the expanded sections and have added some parentheses to the statistics with additional clarifications.

For counters showing statistics that occur "in your body", see the attached studies for body sizes/demographics used, however, many studies generally use a 70kg "reference man" or a similarly average sized person to based their estimates on. If you are larger or smaller, your exact data would obviously vary on items like "new cells created".


What about daily fluctuations, seasonal variations, etc. - are the counters displaying the data in real-time?

These counters do not adjust for daily, seasonal or other variations. They are simple linear counters that use a fixed daily rate of occurrence (which you can view by clicking on each counter) divided over 86400 seconds (in a day) and refreshed over a hundred times per second to make them run smoothly.

While we have received suggestions to simply place drones across the globe to track each event in real-time and relay them to our servers, we have determined that this may not be feasible at this time.

The data sources for the statistics have been updated as of June 2024 (where applicable) so they are "real-time" in that regard.

The COVID-19 pandemic did affect some statistics and we found post-pandemic data where possible or used projections to predict data as best as possible during the pandemic period.

We also try not to choose statistics that have very significant seasonal variations in general.


And...that's it for now. Thanks again for checking out The Scale of Life!