Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson is the Director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City and the recipient of fourteen honorary doctorates and the NASA Distinguished Service Medal. An section of his latest book Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier was recently excerpted in Natural History magazine.
http://www.naturalhistorymag.com/perspectives/012148/by-the-numbers
The article presents many interesting perspectives. Here is one brief section particularly germane to the topic of this thread:
What else do we know about China? It has nearly 1.5 billion people—one-fifth of the world’s population. Do you know how big a billion is? In China it means that if you’re one in a million, there are 1,500 other people just like you.
Not only that, the upper quartile of China—the smartest 25 percent—outnumbers the entire population of the United States. Lose sleep over that one. You’ve seen the numbers: China graduates about half a million scientists and engineers a year; we graduate about 70,000—much less than the ratio of our populations would indicate. A talk-show host in Salt Lake City recently asked me about those numbers, and I said, “Well, we graduate half a million of something a year: lawyers.” So the guy asked me what that says about America, and I said, “It tells me we are going into the future fully prepared to litigate over the crumbling of our infrastructure.” That’s what the future of America will be.
I strongly recommend reading the whole article. Watch out for falling asphalt.
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