AMAZING BUT (ROUGHLY) TRUE

Cristiano Ronaldo (not to be confused with the great Brasilian Ronaldo – whose name is on his new shirt) is moving to Saudi Arabia on a reported annual income (including €130 million commercial rights and sponsorships) amounting to €200 million. This equates to €16.7 million monthly, €3.85 million weekly or €550.000 daily. Each day he will be earning 17 times the average annual salary in Spain, which is about €32´600.

Every day our hearts beat 100,000 times and we breathe in and out 22,000 times. This means that by the age of 80, we will have taken 673 million breaths (in and out, of course) and chalked up almost 3 billion heartbeats. On average we have between 6,000 and 8,000 thoughts a day (and night).

The fairy-fly, although smaller than a grain of salt, has a brain containing several thousand cells. The brain of an ant contains 250,000 cells. The average human brain has 40,000 times more (a mere 10 billion out of 37 trillion cells in the entire body).

There are 3 trillion trees on our planet – 400 for every human being. Not a lot of people know that! There are also 17 million flies for every human. This means there are almost 120 quadrillion of them (120,000,000,000,000,000). Don’t ask me how they discover this – or who worked it out. It must be somebody tired of doing crossword puzzles. Obviously, these are rough estimates by various institutions and in some cases estimates vary quite widely, but some of the statistics are mind-blowing, nevertheless.

The black hole is 3 million times the size of the Earth and is 54 million light years away. As the speed of light is about 300,000 kilometres per second, this means one light year is 21 trillion kilometres. On this basis, the black hole is over 1 sextillion (1,134,000,000,000,000,000,000) km from the Earth.

Somebody has managed to estimate that the number of grains of sand in the Sahara is more than 1.5 septillion (1,504,000,000,000,000,000,000,000). But is this staggering fact of any practical use?

The universe contains 6.5 billion suns. The number of stars in our galaxy (the Milky Way) is 100 billion, which is about the average number per galaxy. There are 2 trillion galaxies in the universe. This means there are 200 septillion stars in the universe (200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000). There must therefore be 133 stars for every grain of sand in the Sahara.

In the past twenty-five years, Antarctica has lost three trillion tons of ice to global warming.

Over 98 per cent of pigs and chickens in the United States are confined in factory farms.

The amount of plastic in our oceans would cover the entire area of Spain and Portugal. Unless there is action against climate change it is estimated that there will soon be more plastic in the Atlantic Ocean than fish and marine life.

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