"Stanislaw Lem - One Human Minute" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lem Stanislaw)

people there are -- and thus how many living human bodies -- in each minute of the 525,600
minutes of the year. How many bodies means: the amount of muscle, bone, bile, blood, saliva,
cerebrospinal fluid, excrement, and so on. Naturally, when the thing to be visualized is of a very
great order of magnitude, a popularizer readily resorts to comparative imagery. The Johnsons do
the same. So, were all humanity taken and crowded together in one place, it would occupy three
hundred billion liters, or a little less than a third of a cubic kilometer. It sounds like a lot. Yet the
world's oceans hold 1,285 million cubic kilometers of water, so if all humanity -- those five
billion bodies -- were cast into the ocean, the water level would rise less than a hundredth of a
millimeter. A single splash, and Earth would be forever unpopulated.
Games of this sort with statistics can rightly be called cheap. They may be meant as a
reminder that we -- who with the might of our industry poisoned the air, the soil, the seas, who
turned jungles into deserts, who exterminated countless species of animals and plants that had
lived for hundreds of millions of years, who reached other planets, and who altered even the
albedo of the Earth, thereby revealing our presence to cosmic observers -- could disappear so
easily and without a trace. However, I was not impressed. Nor was I impressed by the calculation
that 24.9 billion liters of blood could be poured from all mankind and it would not make a Red
Sea, not even a lake.
After this, under an epigraph from T. S. Eliot saying that existence is "birth, and
copulation, and death," come new figures. Every minute, 34.2 million men and women copulate.
Only 5.7 percent of all intercourse results in fertilization, but the combined ejaculate, at a volume
of forty-five thousand liters a minute, contains 1,990 billion (with deviations in the last decimal
place) living spermatozoa. The same number of female eggs could be fertilized sixty times an
hour with a minimal ratio of one spermatozoon to one egg, in which impossible case three million
children would be conceived per second. But this, too, is only a statistical manipulation.
Pornography and our modern life style have accustomed us to the forms of sexual life.
You would think that there was nothing left to reveal, nothing to show that would shock. But,
presented in statistics, it comes as a surprise. Never mind the game of comparisons which is put
to use again: for instance, the stream of sperm, forty-three tons of it, discharged into vaginas per
minute -- its 430,000 hectoliters is compared with the 37,850 hectoliters of boiling water
produced at each eruption of the largest geyser in the world (at Yellowstone). The geyser of
sperm is 11.3 times more abundant and shoots without intermission. The image is not obscene. A
person can be aroused sexually only within a certain range of magnitudes. Acts of copulation,
when shown in great reduction or great enlargement, do not elicit any sexual response. Arousal,
an inborn reaction, occurs as a reflex in certain centers in the brain, and does not manifest itself in
conditions that exceed visual norms. Sexual acts seen in reduced dimensions leave us cold, for
they show creatures the size of ants.
Magnification, on the other hand, arouses disgust, because the smoothest skin of the most
beautiful woman will then look like a porous, pale surface from which protrude hairs as thick as
fangs, while a sticky, glistening grease oozes from the ducts of the sebaceous glands.
The surprise I spoke of has a different cause. Humanity pumps 53.4 billion liters of blood
per minute, but that red river is not surprising; it must flow to sustain life. At the same time,
humanity's male organs eject forty-three tons of semen, and the point is that though each
ejaculation is also an ordinary physiological act, for the individual it is irregular, intimate, not
overly frequent, and even not necessary. Besides, there are millions of old people, children,
voluntary and involuntary celibates, sick people, and so forth. And yet that white stream flows
with the same constancy as the red river system. The irregularity disappears when the statistics
take in the whole Earth, and that is what surprises. People sit down to tables set for dinner, look
for refuse in garbage dumps, pray in chapels, mosques, and churches, fly in planes, ride in cars,
sit in submarines carrying nuclear missiles, debate in parliaments; billions sleep, funeral
processions walk through cemeteries, bombs explode, doctors bend over operating tables,