Nestlé CEO Peter Brabeck suggests that 25 liters are the maximum. More nobody on earth should use. Otherwise more wars and more tensions will arise.*

The Journal wants to contribute to this challenge. The Journal wants to understand this as a challenge for our imagination. Let`s start simple: We can separate 25 liters into

IIIII IIIII IIIII IIIII IIIII. Does this make sense? Yes, it seems a lot. It gives us some hope.

But: 8000 liters for example cannot be separated intounits of one so easily.

Of course we can start:

IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII

IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIetc.

But this is exhausting. It exhausts also our imagination. Let us think of 8000 in other way:

8000 liters are needed in Europe to produce our daily food. For everybody in Europe 8000 liters are needed to produce his daily food.*We have problems to represent this in units of one. But have an idea, that this is a lot. And it is too much.
For todays training of imagination this is enough.

* See: “Es gibt kein Menschenrecht auf einen Swimmingpool”. Das Magazin 17 – 2007

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 10th, 2007 at 11:17 am and is filed under Art, English, Mathematics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.