Perhaps in this time of worldwide rice shortage, there are worse things I can do with my time than visit freerice.com, where one is quizzed on vocabulary and “for each word you get right, [the sponsors] donate 20 grains of rice to the United Nations World Food Program.”

It took me about 8 minutes to get the sponsors to donate 1000 grains, which got me wondering how long it would take me to get a cup of rice donated.

Nominally, 1 cup of rice = 7,200 grains (I counted 10,000… well, sorta… I counted about 300 to 400 grains (say 350) in 1/2 tb.sp., i.e. ~2500 in 1/4 cup, i.e. 10,000 in a cup! and yes, that’s a typical Friday night for me.)

This means I have to “play” at freerice.com for more than an hour for the sponsors to donate one cup of rice. While I do have a lot of free time, I don’t particularly want to spend hours being quizzed on vocabulary.

I’d rather, for example, spend my time calculating how many grains of rice are produced a year: The world produces 600,000,000 tonnes of rice x 0.65 grain/paddy x 1000 kg/ton x 4 cups/kg x 10,000 grains/cup = 15,600,000,000,000,000 grains of rice produced per year worldwide. That is to say, about 2,400,000 grains of rice/capita, or 240 cups/capita/yr. Suddenly I feel bloated — maybe I should’ve had less chicken biryani for dinner.

Now, consider this: every year since 2001, the world has consistently produced more transistors than grains of rice–for example, this year we’ve produced 900,000,000 transistor/capita– even as we’re sure transistors aren’t as yummy as rice.

Oh, one more fun fact: rice has 40,000 to 50,000 genes (compared to 20,000 to 25,000 in humans.) Look it up.

Projection of Egypt’s population over the next 20 years. Numbers from CIA factbook.

What would happen if China and India consumed the same amount of oil per capita as North America … ?

This question was spurred by a recent interview with Pankaj Mishra, journalist and author of An End to Suffering: the Buddha in the World, conducted by Krista Tippett, host of NPR’s Speaking of faith:

Ms. Tippett:

All right. So I think the problem is that an American, a modern American, might look at this history you tell and might still compare someone like Alexander and Ashoka, or 21st-century America and India, and say it’s clear which version of reality, which ethos is on the winning side. Right? They would say simply this ethos of acquisition and building and progress and power is what, in fact, works in this world we inhabit. Now, how would you respond to that?

Mr. Mishra:

Well, I’d very quickly challenge the notion that it works. Where is the evidence that it works? I mean, the 21st century has not started off very well. What I do see is a whole lot of confusion, a whole lot of bewilderment and a whole lot of hatred, a whole lot of violence out there. And, you know, even people, even societies that are supposedly doing extremely well, such as China or India, when you actually start thinking about 20, even 20, 30 years in the future, you wonder about their big populations, you wonder about their great needs. What will these societies need once they come into their own as middle class consumers of the kind people in America are? The amount of oil they would need, amount of energy resources they will have to find to sustain their populations at the standard of living they will have arrived at at that point, if they do arrive at that standard of living. And where is that oil going to come from? You know, I think it’s unsustainable, and that’s why we’re heading towards, and we already have, we already live in such, sort of, violent times. So I’m completely unpersuaded by the notion that the systems we have are working. The fact of power obscures the failures, but the fact that you have to use violence all the time, you know, really points to the failure of all these systems in many ways.

So, first, I set out to find a ballpark answer to this question: If China and India consumed the same amount of oil per capita as North America (excluding Mexico), how much would they need?

Well, as it stands, the numbers are simple enough, China would need more than 13 times as much oil as it consumes today, and India would need close to 29 times its current consumption. These would add up to twice the amount consumed by the whole world today.

Fantastic! Now, I am not even going to attempt estimating the ecological impact of these numbers, for there is a simpler and scarier question that needs to be answered first: where is all that oil going to come from? Looking at the map of oil reserves, I’d say all of us middle-easterns don’t even know how many more ways we’re going to get fucked up — so maybe we better brace ourselves and start thinking about things we want to learn to say in Mandarin.