{"id":1088,"date":"2012-10-23T20:23:05","date_gmt":"2012-10-23T19:23:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.andrewj.com\/blog\/2012\/are-there-more-bricks-or-photos\/"},"modified":"2012-10-23T20:31:16","modified_gmt":"2012-10-23T19:31:16","slug":"are-there-more-bricks-or-photos","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.andrewj.com\/blog\/2012\/are-there-more-bricks-or-photos\/","title":{"rendered":"Are There More Bricks or Photos?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Recently on The Online Photographer<\/a>, I saw that in 1976 a leading commentator on photography asserted that “the world now contains more photographs than bricks.”<\/em><\/p>\n

While I hate to be contrary (no I don’t! :)), I’m not convinced that the assertion about photographs and bricks is correct, even today. Regular readers will know I can’t resist an estimating challenge, so here goes…<\/p>\n

Most estimates of the number of photos taken each year comes out somewhere near (but typically a bit below) one trillion, 10^12. As this number is growing exponentially, to get a total number of all photographs ever taken we can focus on recent years, and something in the range 5-10 trillion would probably cover it. However, we don’t retain all our shots. I dump about 50%. I don’t know how typical this is, but let’s use it as an estimating basis. So this gives use a number of “existing photographs” of a few (2-5) trillion.<\/p>\n

Now bricks. This is more tricky. I estimate the number of bricks in a typical British family home at around 15-20,000. That provides shelter for an average 4-5 people, but we also spend time in other brick buildings (work, hotels, communal buildings), so let’s say 10,000 bricks per person in a “brick rich” environment like the UK.<\/p>\n

But not everyone lives in a “brick rich” environment: for all sorts of economic, environmental and cultural reasons many buildings use other materials. So let’s assume that 10% of the world’s buildings are brick.<\/p>\n

10,000 (bricks per person) x 10% & 7 x 10^9 (people) = 7 x 10^12 bricks. That’s still a couple of times greater than my estimate of the number of photos…<\/p>\n

Now obviously as the numbers are (surprisingly) so similar and the number of photos is growing exponentially, the roles will soon be reversed. But I don’t think it was true in 1976.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Recently on The Online Photographer, I saw that in 1976 a leading commentator on photography asserted that “the world now contains more photographs than bricks.” While I hate to be contrary (no I don’t! :)), I’m not convinced that the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andrewj.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1088"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andrewj.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andrewj.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andrewj.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andrewj.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1088"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.andrewj.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1088\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1089,"href":"https:\/\/www.andrewj.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1088\/revisions\/1089"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andrewj.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1088"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andrewj.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1088"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andrewj.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1088"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}