It's a Busy Border

My focus on this blog is on a (to us) invisible realm—the border of which is not to be discovered in three-dimensional space. Nonetheless, there is a border. And people pass from this realm to that one quite frequently—and also, possibly, the other way. Now statistics have never been cited here, but let me make an exception today. Just for a moment, let’s take the subject seriously and ask ourselves to imagine what the traffic across that border might look like. As near-death experience reports suggest, it appears to take place through one or multiple “tunnels,” so presumably these lead to border-crossing points complete with, ah, officials and such.

Well, let us first take those who are leaving here. In 2009, in the United States alone, 2.4 million people “passed on.” Our death-rate, measured in deaths per 1,000 inhabitants per annum, is respectably low: 7.92 people die (in statistics we also have fractional people, another mystery worth lengthy study).  The world death rate for the period 2005-2010 was 8.5. That translates into total death of 57.9 million in 2009. It’s quite a busy border, isn’t it?

Now if we make the assumption that new births also represent an “arrival,” in this realm, of souls that originate “over there,” and we stick to the year 2009, the following tabulation shows the traffic of arrivals and departures, down to the minute:

Birth and Deaths in 2009 in the USA and the World
	Arrivals		Departures
	USA	World	USA	World
Birth	4,131,019	139,126,082	2,437,163	57,882,029
Birth/death rate (per 1,000 population)	13.50	19.95	7.9	8.3
Per day	11,318	381,167	6,677	158,581
Per hour	472	15,882	278	6,608
Per minute	8	265	5	110

We have more coming than going, it seems—but the bottom line is that there is quite a busy traffic across the borderzone. It’s not at all as quiet, distant, and speculative as we normally assume. Hence dipping into some statistics creates a new perspective. I’ve spent about 20 minutes getting here. Around the world 2,200 people died in that span of time; 5,300 people arrived. Would you welcome an assignment as a border guard…in the borderzone?