Your Finest Hour
I felt the urge to do some math and calculate how many people are currently experiencing their finest hour. For any given hour, how many people around the world will count it as their finest?
- World population: 6,738,085,903
- Worldwide life expectancy (average): 66.12 years
- 66.12 years/life * 8,736 hrs/year = 577,624 hrs/life
- Finest hour = population / life expectancy = 11,665
11,665 people will count this hour as their finest.
Of course there are lots of caveats:
- Age is not evenly distributed.
- Population is not evenly distributed. Fewer people are awake during some hours, so the number of people likely to have their finest hour is smaller.
- "Finest hour" is a relative term. Your finest hour may not compare to someone else's. Infants who die young will find their choice of hour unfairly limited ("You lived what anybody gets, Bernie. You got a lifetime. No more. No less." --Gaiman).
- "Finest hours" are not evenly distributed over lifetime. Many older people feel that their golden years are behind them. However, this feeling might just be based on the probability of their finest hour occurring in the past vs. the time remaining.
- "Finest hours" are influenced by external events. Depending on whether you believe the world is progressing or imploding, opportunities for finest hours might be better in the future or the past. Wars, elections, the space race, etc., also bring out "finest hours" for many people at once (cf. 1938-1945).