"Robert J. Bradbury" wrote:
>
> [...] how much blood based
> on the current world population and the U.S. death
> rates. [...] So it's probably
> a pretty good ballpark number.
You said 53 million per year? My own estimate, usually phrased as "6,000
lives per hour" or "150,000 lives per day" was based on UN statistics that
took a surprisingly long time to hunt down, and even then I had to do some
math to extract the number - it would seem that nobody wants to compute
the global death rate, even though estimates of the global birth rate are
common. In fact, I think I might even have gotten the number by using
estimates of the global birth rate combined with a statistic for the
global ratio of deaths to births. If I recall correctly, the source on
both was a WHO document.
Sadly I failed to write this all down at the time, but our numbers are
still the same - to a surprising degree of precision, actually,
considering the different sources. I would expect an estimate based on
the US death rate to be substantially lower than the UN estimate.
-- -- -- -- --
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Fri Oct 12 2001 - 14:40:10 MDT