The average life expectancy around the world, according to Our World In Data (great website btw. A lot of cool data about our world visualized in a very intuitive way), is about 70 years. To find the average age at which we properly learn to read was more difficult because there is a lot of different opinions on this, but reading and comparing several “sources”, I came up with the age of 6, which “coincidentally” gives us a total of 64 (a stack of) years to read a book. This gives us (64*365*24*60=) 33’638’400 total minutes a human has to live, from the age they can read.
The average reading speed is something beween 200-400 Words per minute according to this one study I chose (definitely not because it was the first result or that it wasn’t paywalled or that it had a nice abstract. Who do you think I am? LAZY?!), where I’ll take the average determined value of 240 words per minute, for non fiction (they also have a value for fiction, but I guess what we read in our day to day lives is mostly non fiction, but I’m a student, so I’m the most biased (worst) person to answer this), for my calculation.
The actual calculation now being:
33’638’400*240=8’073’216’000 words
Write a book with eight billion words and nobody sane will ever be able to finish reading it in their lifetimes.
Now. [breathes in] (this will be a heck of a long sentence) Using the free web version of Word that you get by signing up for Onedrive, to get the default layout and formating basically everyone uses (OpenOffice, if it weren’t for the issues with character spacing, I would have chosen you for the experiment, but, oh well!), I can fit approximately 600 words, I generated with this lorem ipsum generator (which is not a great approximation for the english language or more specifically non fiction english literature, but I don’t care), of Times New Roman (the default choice, if I can call it that since it’s so ubiquitous and overused), 12pt, with a line spacing of 1, formatted text into an A4 page, which means that we can read:
8’073’216’000/600=13’455’360 pages
before we die and turn to food for worms=]
Relevant quote from Dead Poets Society:
“[…] We are food for worms, lads […] Believe it or not, […] each and every one of us in this room is one day going to stop breathing, turn cold, and die.”
