How Many Eyes?

My mind likes to play some weird games with itself. All my life, it has created these little puzzles for me to solve. Trying to estimate how many of something exists or whether one thing or the other came first—these are often based on very incomplete information, and it can be fun to play detective in situations like these.

One of these puzzles came up the other day. I was reminded of how a camera is, basically, a type of eye, in a manner of speaking.

Think about how light first enters a lens, where the light is then converted into a different form of information. There’s a little opening that lets the right amount of light in—an aperture on a camera, or a pupil in an eye.

In the brain or in a digital camera, the incoming light is converted into an electrical signal. In an analog camera it’s a bit different—instead of converting the information to electricity, the photons bombard a sheet of film, but either way, that signal has to be converted.

The newly converted information then heads over to the brain or over to the darkroom, where an image ultimately appears.

Now, this is a very simplified explanation and comparison, but I think it’s fair to say that cameras are like artificial eyes, and then to compare the artificial with the natural, as one does.

Meanwhile, I’ve been observing what I can only describe as the liftoff phase of technological acceleration. For all of our existence, we’ve steadily improved the human condition by building on previous technology that already exists.

By standing on the shoulders of the previous generation, each new generation has it much better than any earlier one, and (with notable bumps and bruises along the way) our rate of improvement has gotten faster over time. Today, new technology is being thrown at society way, way faster than we can get used to the changes the new tech brings.

That means that the number of artificial eyes, if you will, has been increasing at an accelerating rate.

Nearly a thousand years ago, Al-Haytham first experimented with the camera obscura. His "Book of Optics," laid the foundational principles that would eventually lead to photographic processes. Lenses came a bit later, so it wasn’t until the early 19th century that the Daguerreotype gave us our first artificial eye, at least in the way we’re describing them today.

From a base of one, artificial eyes grew throughout the 19th century into the tens of thousands. Daguerreotype machines were hand-made and required a great deal of specialized knowledge at first, so by the time of the American Civil War, there were still only a few thousand cameras worldwide.

However, better film developing techniques led to less specialization being required, and mass manufacturing was beginning to take off. The Kodak company got on board and standardized parts, allowing for thousands of similar products to be produced at the same factory per year. Here’s a very, very rough chart to give you an idea:

The 20th century was an entirely different era for photography. Kodak jumpstarted the new age by introducing the Brownie camera: You press the button, we do the rest, the saying went. The public bought in.

By 1910, there were five million Brownie cameras alone. The number of cameras had more than doubled in the last 2 decades, but things were speeding up, not slowing down. 35 mm film made cameras much smaller, and much easier to use. They were becoming more like point-and-shoot, not devices you had to master before using.

By the end of World War II and the ensuing consumer boom that was close on its heels, there were more than a hundred million artificial eyes out there. The next quarter century saw continuous improvements in design and affordability, and by the time digital cameras entered the commercial landscape, we were already measuring artificial eyes in the billions.

The first part of the 21st century was all about ditching digital cameras in exchange for cellular phones. That’s not precisely right because phone cameras really, really sucked at first, but by 2010, most smartphone cameras were better than any digital camera I had ever used.

Nowadays, smartphones don’t normally have only one eye. Instead, you need front-facing and selfie cameras (plural for each), so every smartphone triples or quadruples the number of eyes we were making before. Meanwhile, the world has steadily become a surveillance state where—as a general rule—if you’re out in public anywhere, it is safe to assume you’re being filmed.

Wearable tech, internet of things, drones, and all sorts of other technology is leading to an explosion in the number of these eyes. Here’s where things stand today:

60 billion cameras is a lot, but to say that it pales in comparison to the number of eyes nature has produced all on her own would be like saying that Mount Everest is a somewhat challenging mountain to try to climb.

While human technological invention is on an incredibly rapid path, nature has had a head start of about 500 million years. Factory Earth has been producing eyes this entire time, with its own production accelerating over time.

You can count the number of humans and just multiply that by 2 (not everyone has 2 eyes, but this is a pretty good approximation for the group as a whole) and come up with about 16 billion, but if we’re being honest, you only really need to count three categories of critters to get the idea.

If you add up the insects, arachnids, and crustaceans, you come up with about 10 quintillion eyes on the planet. If that sounds like a kajillion-jillion, let’s make a little bit of sense of it. Humans number about 8 billion, and if you multiply that by a thousand, you get 8 trillion.

A thousand times as many critters as there are humans sounds like a big number, but we’re just getting started. Multiply that enormous number by another thousand, and you get 8 quadrillion. That’s like taking all the humans on the planet and multiplying that by a thousand on one world, then having another thousand worlds just like it.

Finally, we have to multiply that crazy number by a thousand to reach 8 quintillion, close to the number of insects, crustaceans, and arachnid eyes on the planet today.

That’s just the critters alive today! Over 500 million years, countless lifespans have come and gone. 8 quintillion is but a tiny slice as compared to the four octillion eyes nature has ever produced (octillion is a one followed by 27 zeros).

60 billion artificial eyes created by humans is something in isolation, but it’s pretty much nothing as compared to the unbelievable bounty nature has given the planet. 60 billion is 0.0000000000000015% of 4 octillion.

Hang in there, gang. We are catching up.