Numbers

In 2011, 400 people paid for their seats to board the ‘SpaceShipTwo’ – a spacecraft designed for the groundbreaking phenomenon of ‘space tourism’ as the product of an alliance between the Federal Space Agency of the Russian Federation, Rocket and Space Corporation and Space Adventures. Each ticket costs about 200,000 US dollars, compared to 20 and 35 million dollars only a few years ago. The flights into space will start taking place at the end of 2011.

Roughly 17,000 people have died since the beginning of the arab spring on 18 December 2010, leading to the fall of two heads of state. Huge efforts and much personal sacrifice are resulting in a new ideology.

The number of years before the paradisiacal islands of the Maldives fully disappear due to global warming. The sea level is rising by up to 0.9cm a year. Since 80% of its 1,200 islands are no more than 1m above sea level, within 100 years the Maldives could become uninhabitable.

It costs just 60 pence to fill four cups with nutritious food, feeding four children in Somalia. 29,000 children under the age of five died in just 90 days during Somalia’s famine. It’s particularly tragic when we know that so little money could change so much.