The Flow of Semen Every Sixty Seconds

Humanity pumps 53.4 billion liters of bloodper 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 not even 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, thousands of college professors simultaneously enter their classrooms, theater curtains lift and drop, floods swallow fields and houses, wars are waged, bulldozers on battlefields push uniformedcorpses into ditches; it thunders and lightnings, it is night, day, dawn, twilight; but no matter what happens that forty-three-ton impregnating stream of sperm flows without stop, and the law of large numbers guarantees that it will be as constant as the sum of solar energy striking Earth. There is something mechanical about this, inexorable, and animallike. How can one come to terms with an image of humanity copulating relentlessly through all the cataclysms that befall it, or that it has brought upon itself?

Stanislaw Lem, One Human Minute (1986-11-24)

• humanity
• science
• statistics