Tag: Blogging

The speed of light is the speed of causality

Superfact 123: The speed of light is the speed of causality, which is the speed corresponding to how fast anything in the Universe can influence anything else in the Universe. That is because the universe, or space-time has a strict maximum speed limit for any action, signal, or information to travel from one place to another. Light just happens to travel at this maximum limit because photons have no mass.

A spaceship on the right is shooting out a laser beam towards the left. Alongside the laser beam are four rockets trying to catch up with the light beam. | The speed of light is the speed of causality
Four rockets, A, B, C, and D, are traveling along a light (laser) beam. No matter how fast they travel along the light beam, the light beam will always travel c = 299,792,458 meters per second faster than they do. I generated this picture with the help of ChatGPT.

I am posting about the speed of light again because there are so many aspects of it that are mind blowing. For starters, “The Speed of (Light in Vacuum) Is a Universal Constant”. It is always c = 299,792,458 meters per second for everyone no matter at what speed they are travelling. If you try to catch up to a light beam by going faster and faster the light beam will still keep moving at c = 299,792,458 meters per second faster than you. No matter how much you accelerate you can never catch up. The beam will keep moving away from you at c = 299,792,458 meters per second. This is possible because time and space are relative, at least if viewed separately, like we do.

Clocks being sucked into a hole or possibly sped up into space.
Time is going to be different for me than for you. From shutterstock Illustration ID: 1055076638 by andrey_l

Photons and other massless particles will always move exactly at the speed of light c = 299,792,458 meters per second, whilst anything with mass could never travel at the speed of light. It will always move slower. In fact, when something with mass is approaching the speed of light, its mass will grow towards infinity, and it will require infinite energy to accelerate it to the speed of light. Basically, something with mass can never accelerate to reach the speed of light.

A colorful photon wave packet showing small amplitudes on the left, larger amplitudes in the middle and then small amplitudes on the right. | The speed of light is the speed of causality
A photon wave packet. It has no mass, travel at the maximum speed, the speed of causality, and time does not exist for the photon.

Note: In my first paragraph I wrote (Light in Vacuum) in parenthesis because light always travels at c = 299,792,458 meters per second, but it appears to be going slower in transparent matter. When light moves through matter it is being absorbed and emitted as it “travels” between the atoms in the material, and this absorption and emittance process takes time.

From left to right, an atom absorbs a photon, which excites an electron that jumps into a higher orbit. Then it emits a photon and the electron falls back to the ground state again.
From ground state to excited state, absorption and emission of a photon in an atom. Shutterstock asset id: 2180385419 by rktz.

As mentioned, the speed of light is a maximum speed limit for any action, signal, or information to travel from one place to another. Einstein’s theory of relativity shows that space and time are linked. The c = 299,792,458 meters per second acts as a conversion factor that binds space and time together. So, in a sense the speed of light is not even a speed in a regular sense, it is a property of time and space.

Scientific visualization of Minkowski light cone diagram demonstrating physics of special relativity theory and spacetime intervals, 3D rendering. 3D Illustration. | The speed of light is the speed of causality
In the light cone diagram above, an observer can only affect what is confined within the future cone above it. Shutterstock asset id: 2728984295 by atdigit

The cone diagram above is a coordinate system with time being the pink arrow going from the bottom and up. The yellow arrows represent the x and y axis representing space. The center is the observer (you).  The past cone below the center represents all the past events that could have affected you (the center). The future cone represents everything that you could possibly affect in the future. All light beams travel on the surface of the future cone. What is outside these cones are parts of the Universe you cannot affect and that cannot affect you. This is the non-observable part of the Universe.

That the speed of light is also the speed of causality, or the maximum speed of cause and effect is an important fact that is mind blowing, and therefore a super fact in my opinion.

Light is Beyond the Reach of Time

Since the speed of light is a conversion factor between time and space and not a speed in a real sense there is more to say about the speed of light that may come as a surprise, for example, that time does not exist for photons. This means that from the photon’s perspective there will be no time at all. A photon, or a light beam, will travel from Earth to a distant galaxy a billion light years away in an instant.

It will not take a billion years. It will not take one year. It will not take one second. It will not take one microsecond. It will not take a nanosecond, or a picosecond, or a trillionth of a picosecond. It will take zero seconds. The Big Bang and the end of the Universe (if there is one) happen at the same exact moment from the perspective of a photon. Time does not exist for a photon (or a gluon, or any other mass-less particle). This is explained in greater detail in my post “Light is Beyond the Reach of Time”.

What About Quantum Entanglement?

What about quantum entanglement? You may have heard about instantaneous action across vast distances due to quantum entanglement. Quantum entanglement is when pairs or groups of particles interact in ways such that the quantum state of each particle cannot be described independently of the others, even when the particles are separated by a vast distance. Therefore, measuring the state of one particle instantly determines the state of the other. Does that not violate the speed of light being the speed of causality? It turns out that it doesn’t.

Entanglement of quantum qubits in superposition, schematic block spheres representation, two particles, one with spin up and one with spin down, measured state, visualization of concepts of quantum computing, vector illustration.
Two entangled particles, one with spin up and one with spin down. If you measure one the other one will manifest the opposite spin across any distance.

It can be understood the following way. Imagine two identical looking shoe boxes, one containing a left white shoe and the other containing a black right shoe. If you were to randomly scramble the two boxes so that you did not know in which box respective shoe was. Then you send one of the boxes to Mars. If you open the shoe box still on earth, you will instantly know the content of the box on Mars. The Martians don’t need to send a message to Earth.

The analogy is not perfect because unlike the shoe boxes the quantum case involves pure randomness. The content of the shoe boxes has been predetermined, and the randomness stem from the fact that we don’t know which box is which. But the shoes are there the whole time before you open any box. This corresponds to what you would call a hidden variable in physics. In the quantum case, the quantum state is not hidden or predetermined, there is no hidden variable, it does not even exist until you measure. It is true randomness. However, it is still similar in the sense that no signal, no message, and no information is being sent, and no message or information need to be sent.

The speed of light is the speed of causality
Two red boxes with a white left shoe and a black right shoe. I used ChatGPT to generate image.

What about Warp Drives ?

So, nothing with mass can travel at the speed of light, and nothing can exceed it. What about the warp drive in Star Trek? As I said, the speed of light is not really a speed but the conversion factor between time and space. It is a geometric fact of space-time. That is a pretty difficult reality to get around, just like it is pretty difficult to push Earth out of its orbit by pushing on the floor. However, there is a way to cheat and that is to stretch space-time itself. This is theoretically possible, but it requires colossal amounts of mass-energy and enormous amounts of negative energy. We don’t even know if negative energy exists on a macroscopic scale.

So, no one knows if a warp drive is possible, and if it isn’t, then we are stuck moving slower than the speed of light, which would make interstellar travel very difficult and inconvenient.

Other Super Facts Related to the Speed of Light

To see the Other Super Facts click here

Bad Travel Memories – Stream of Consciousness

Today is the fifth time I participate in Linda Hill’s streams of consciousness. To read about the rules and participate click here or here. To read my four previous entries (prompt was pre) click here “Prediction Failures and My Lucky Day from Hell”, or here “The Review Wars on Amazon – Stream of Consciousness”, or here, “Reindeer Hide Memories”, or here “25 Sweet Leonberger and Dog Photos”. I put this post on my Super-factful blog because it is factual, real events, and not related to Leonbergers. However, it is not a super fact.

The badge features a twig with rain drops and it says Stream of consciousness Saturday #SoCS
2019-2020 SoCS Badge by Shelley!

Today’s prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday August 8, 2026, is “Travel”. Use it way you’d like. The first rule is: there should be minimal planning and no editing except typos. I did not edit but I did add a few pictures. I like adding pictures.

The first thing that came to my mind for this prompt was that I’ve travelled a lot. I’ve visited almost 50 countries, and 46 US states. I’ve been on business trips or worked in several countries. I’ve also lived in Sweden half my life and in the US during the other half of my life, and I’ve lived in five states. Most of my travel have been fun and interesting. However, not all my travel was pleasant. Below I am describing four unpleasant travel experiences.

The Salmonella Ferry

I grew up in a small town in northern Sweden in a working class family. We could not afford a lot of travel, but what we could afford was taking a trip on the ferries going from Sweden to Finland. These ferries had a car deck. You drove your car onto the car deck and then you went upstairs. The ferry between northern Sweden (Umeå or Örnsköldsvik) and Vaasa in Finland took four hours and you just stayed on the upper deck. However, the overnight ferry between Stockholm and Helsinki (or Tallin) took 15-20 hours and you stayed in small rooms underneath the upper deck. This time we took the ferry from Stockholm to Helsinki.

For dinner they had buffet with all kinds of Scandinavian dishes including dishes with eggs. Unfortunately, the eggs had a special feature and that was Salmonella. During the night more and more people started getting sick. People were vomiting and people got diarrhea. There were nearly a thousand people on the ferry and not enough bathrooms to accommodate everyone who had Salmonella. I did not get Salmonella, but I still needed to use the bathroom a couple of times. I remember people vomiting in toilets and people not able to go on time. It was an unpleasant disaster.

A large white ferry with the inscription ESTLINE. | Bad Travel Memories – Stream of Consciousness
MS Estonia in 1993/1994. Blahaaaaaaaa69420, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

However, in September 1994 something much worse happened to one of the ferries. I remember because I had just started working for a Robotics company after getting my PhD in Physics and Electrical Engineering, specialty Robotics, and two people at my workplace died. It was a ferry called MS Estonia going between Tallin and Stockholm. The ramp / door for the car deck, the so called bow visor, was leaking during a storm, letting in water and flooding the car deck making the ferry unstable. It finally tipped over very quickly. Nearly a thousand people died and not many survived.

Interrogated and Held at Gun Point in the Soviet Union

When I was a high school student, I joined a group of travelers to the Soviet Union from the church I was part of at the time. The year was 1980, before Glasnost, and the Soviet authorities had temporarily hardened their authority. We tried to smuggle unwanted literature such as Russian Bibles and other books, as well as printing machine equipment and supplies for the underground movement. We planned to travel with the Stockholm-Tallin ferry, but a strike forced us to take the train all around the Baltic Sea and back down to Helsinki and then East to Leningrad, now called St. Petersburg.

KGB Soviet Officer entering a train couple carrying an automatic gun.
I asked ChatGPT to draw me this. The tea cup in the picture happen to by chance look exactly like what we drank from.

Long story short, we were caught, at the Finland Station, and lined up at gun point, searched and interrogated in isolation one by one. While we were lined up, I said, in Swedish, “they are the cattle of dictatorship”, quoting a Swedish prime minister, who had said that about the Soviet Army. My friend Michael hit me in the stomach and said, “shut up Thomas, I am standing next to you”. I can add that a Sandinista who came there to learn guerrilla warfare was sitting with us and accidentally got caught up in our business.

After maybe 4-5 hours they let us go and they even let us into the Soviet Union. However, they gave us a guide from the KGB. She was watching us and making sure we did not misbehave but also giving us guided tours. She was nice and we got along with her. A note about history: The Finland Station was where Vladimir Lenin arrived in February 2017 setting the stage for the Russian Revolution.

Amnesia in Garmisch-Partenkirchen

When I was about 22 years old, I travelled with a group of friends from Sweden to Garmisch-Partenkirchen in Bavaria, southern Germany, to ski. We were travelling by bus. As it turned out I had a pretty bad accident in a black diamond slope that was closed because of too icy conditions. Yes, I know, I ignored the sign and the rules. Long story short, I fell badly, hit my head, had a concussion, and a badly dislocated shoulder. As a bonus I lost my memory.

My memory was gone for about three days. It was caused by shock and not by brain injury and that kind of amnesia resolves itself within hours up to a few weeks. Amnesia caused by brain injury is much more difficult to recover from. There were other weird things happening on this trip. You can read more about this trip here.

Mountains in the background. The town of Garmisch-Partenkirchen in the foreground. | Bad Travel Memories – Stream of Consciousness
The town of Garmisch-Partenkirchen. Photo by op23 on Pexels.com

Our Hardest Goodbye (Don’t Read if you are Sensitive)

I’ve had ski accidents at other places as well, for example, Breckridge. One time I broke my finger and got some bruises in the Horseshoe Bowl in Breckenridge. However, the by far worst ski vacation I’ve ever had was not because of an accident. My oldest son and I went to Beaver Creek, Colorado, to ski, because that is what he wanted to do. My wife took the other two kids to Ohio because that is what they wanted to do.

While we were gone, we hired a dog sitter who was going to watch our four dogs, our Leonberger dog Bronco, our Labrador Baylor, our German Shepherd named Baby, and our Japanese Chin Ryu. The agreement was that she was supposed to come to our house a few times per day and then sleep over with the dogs.

However, after we had already left, she called us and told us she couldn’t do it as agreed because she was watching other dogs at her house, so she asked us if she could take our dogs to her house. Well, there was not really any choice. A few days later she called us and told us she could not find Baylor. He had been barking at night, so she put him out in the backyard. It turned out her fence was not secured and he had escaped. It was January and a cold even in Dallas, where we live. The next day he was found dead about halfway between her house and our house. He had been hit by a car, and the driver had just left him there. The kids cried and we were all traumatized. That was by far the worst vacation we’ve ever had. That was travel we will forever regret.

A labrador is walking across the rainbow bridge. The text says “You were our favorite Hello and our hardest Goodbye.”
We lost our beloved Baylor in a horrible way. Illustration by Naomi Rosenblatt.
To see the Super Facts click here

Orbital Cycles are not the Cause of the current Global Warming

Superfact 122: We know that the current global warming, or if you call it Climate Change, or Climate Disruption, is caused by us primarily because of our burning of fossil fuels. It is not “natural causes”, and it is not orbital cycles, so called Milankovitch cycles. These orbital cycles include changes in orbital eccentricity, axial tilt, and axial precession.

Three illustrated orbital cycles. On the left orbital eccentricity, in the middle is the axial tilt and on the right axial precession. | Orbital Cycles are not the Cause of the current Global Warming
Illustration of Milankovitch cycles from MIT’s Climate Primer.

The evidence that the current rapid global warming is chiefly caused by our burning of fossil fuels is extensive and for all practical purposes conclusive. One of the steps towards understanding this evidence is understanding why no known natural cause of climate change can explain the current warming, and that includes orbital cycles. Therefore, this post is just one small step towards preparing you for the evidence that the current rapid global warming is chiefly caused by us. However, there is a lot of disinformation around this specific topic.

Hockey stick curve going back 1,000 years. The recent uptick in global temperature is very sharp and very sudden.
The so-called hockey stick curve depicting the last 1,000 years. The blue line is the first hockey stick curve ever created (by Michael Mann). He used proxy measurements such as tree rings, green-dots 30-year average, red temperature measurements. Wikimedia commons <<https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en>>. This graph is taken from this page.
Again, hockey stick curve going back 1,000 years. This time human causes and natural causes are indicated with a black respective a red shape. | Orbital Cycles are not the Cause of the current Global Warming
The so-called hockey stick curve depicting the last 1,000 years. In this graph I have indicated what part of the graph is climate change caused by natural causes respective climate change caused by human causes.

Very briefly; Earth’s orbital cycles, called the Milankovitch cycles are largely responsible for the ice ages, but they are not responsible for the current warming because the current warming is too rapid for the orbital cycles to be the cause, and the way the warming is happening is incompatible with how a warming caused by Milankovitch cycles would have happened. In addition, according to the Milankovitch cycles we should be cooling, not warming.

I am considering this a super fact because a lot of people have been fooled by the disinformation on this topic, and there is also a lot of gaslighting from less than reputable organizations and from politicians. They have bamboozled a lot of people. About 15 years ago, I was bamboozled by the disinformation myself. That was before I took the time to try to understand the topic. Understanding a topic, and understanding the evidence makes all the difference, and that is why climate scientists are near unanimous the world over that climate change / global warming is both real and caused by us.

Ask yourself, why would the climate scientists and the atmospheric physicists around the world, including scientists at NASA and NOAA, not investigate orbital cycles and other natural causes for climate change as a possible cause for our current warming? They are the experts on orbital cycles and past climate after all. We know that orbital cycles are not the cause of the current global warming, and this is important to know. Therefore, I think it is a super fact.

What Are Orbital Cycles?

One type of important type of climate forcing that’s been the cause behind the multiple ice ages that we’ve had over the last two million years are earth’s orbital cycles, or the Milankovitch cycles. There are primarily three orbital cycles, orbital eccentricity, change in axial tilt, and axial precession. Could they explain the current warming? No, they can’t because they are too slow, we are currently in a cycle that should be cooling the planet, and the way orbital cycles would warm the planet if they were responsible for the warming is very different from what we are witnessing.

Changes in Eccentricity

Earth’s orbit is not a perfect circle. Earth’s orbit varies from nearly circular to slightly elliptical and this change can cause climate change. This shift in Earth’s orbit takes place over periods of about 100,000 and 400,000 years. Click on the video from NASA below for an illustration of Earth’s eccentricity.

Changes in Obliquity (Tilt)

The angle Earth’s axis of rotation is tilted as it travels around the Sun is known as obliquity. Obliquity is why Earth has seasons. Over the last million years, it has varied between 22.1 and 24.5 degrees with respect to Earth’s orbital plane. The greater Earth’s axial tilt angle, the more extreme our seasons are. In addition, a larger tilt angle favor periods of deglaciation. The changes of Earth’s obliquity have a period of 41,000 years. Click on the video from NASA below for an illustration of the changes in obliquity.

Axial Precession (Wobble)

Earth wobbles slightly as it rotates, like a slightly off-center spinning top. The axis of Earth’s wobble changes slowly and is called axial precession. The corresponding cycle spans 25,771.5 years, or approximately 26,000 years. Click on the video from NASA below for an illustration of the changes in axial precession.

Video Explaining Earth’s Orbital Cycles

The video below from PBS gives an explanation and overview of earth’s three orbital cycles.

Orbital cycles are far too Slow to Cause the Rapid Global Warming Happening Today

The changes in Earth’s orbit and tilt operate over 20,000+ to 100,000-year periods, making Orbital Cycles unable to drive the sharp temperature spikes seen in a single century.

The graph shows the temperature since the last ice age. There is a maximum temperature about 6,000 years ago, then a cooling and then a sharp uptick in temperature.
Global temperature going back twenty thousand years, a hockey stick graph. Notice the stable temperature during the last 10,000 years, coinciding with the development of human civilization, and also notice the sudden sharp increase at the end. Orbital cycles can’t explain that, and it certainly does not look natural.

Orbital Cycles Predict Slow Cooling, not Rapid Heating

About 6,000 years ago Earth’s temperature was a bit warmer than it is today largely due to the climate fluctuations caused by orbital cycles. The warm period in the beginning of the Holocene epoch is referred to as the Holocene climatic optimum. Natural causes for climate change caused Earth’s temperature to slowly cool off until the recent very sudden uptick in average global temperatures.

Orbital Cycles are not the Cause of the current Global Warming
Temperature record for the last 150,000 years. Notice the sharp uptick towards the end. This picture is taken from this article.
The graph shows wild swings over the last 50,000 years and then a very sharp uptick at the end, which as indicated in the graph is caused by us.
Temperature record for the last 50,000 years. Notice the sharp uptick towards the end. I have circled natural and human caused causes for the climate change. This picture is taken from this article.

Below is a video that explains in greater detail why orbital cycles cannot explain the current warming. You can also read more about it here.

The Cooling of the Upper Atmosphere Tells Us the Current Warming is not Caused by Orbital Cycles or the Sun

Yes, the cooling of the upper atmosphere (specifically the stratosphere above the troposphere) is a key sign that current global warming is not caused by Milankovitch cycles or changes in the sun. Instead, observations show a warming lower layer (troposphere) and a cooling upper layer, which is the exact “fingerprint” of human-caused greenhouse gases. Other evidence that the warming is caused by greenhouse gases and not orbital cycles or the sun is the distribution of the warming across the globe and over time.

A Couple of Videos

The video below is a short one-minute overview of the causes behind global warming.

The video below from NASA is a bit longer, 13 minutes, but it gives a more detailed overview. Click here to see the page from where this is coming from.

Conclusion

We know that Orbital Cycles are not responsible for the current rapid global warming because Orbital Cycles operate on tens of thousands of years or hundreds of thousands of years, not a couple of centuries.

We know that Orbital Cycles are not responsible for the current rapid global warming because the effects of Orbital Cycles are slowly cooling Earth, not warming it.

We know that Orbital Cycles are not responsible for the current rapid global warming because if it was orbital cycles (or the sun) the upper atmosphere would not be cooling and the temperature increases would be distributed differently across Earth and distributed differently with respect to time.

Other super facts related to global warming

To see the other Super Facts click here

The Mysterious Vanishing of Bronze Age Civilizations

Superfact 121: Between the years 1200BCE and 1150BCE (3,200 years ago) major civilizations in the Mediterranean and Near Eastern civilizations vanished or collapsed completely, notably Mycenaean Greece, the Hittite Empire, the Canaanite city-states, civilizations in eastern Libya, Balkans, and Babylon suffered a severe political decline and eventual fall during the Late Bronze Age collapse. Other civilizations such as the Assyrian empire and Egypt survived the Late Bronze Age collapse but emerged severely weakened.

Green represents the Mycenaean Greece, blue the Hittite Empire, orange the New Kingdom Egypt, and purple the area of conflict between Hittites and Egypt. The various colored arrows depict the various invasions and movements. The red, blue and yellow arrows represent invasions from different Sea Peoples. | The Mysterious Vanishing of Bronze Age Civilizations
Invasions, destruction and population movements during the Late Bronze Age collapse. The red, blue and yellow arrows represent invasions from different Sea Peoples. Alexikoua, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The Mediterranean and Near Eastern civilizations were powerful, important and wealthy, and their sudden collapse is one of the most consequential and mysterious events in history that ended in a dark age that lasted several hundred years, including the Greek Dark Ages, which lasted from c. 1200 BCE to c. 800 BCE.

Colorful map of 14 century BCE Mediterranean and Near Eastern civilizations including the Mycenaean Greece, Hittite empire, Assyria, Kassite Kingdom, Babylonia, Mittani, Egypt and Elam.
Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East during the 14th century BC; Mycenaean Greece in purple. Alexikoua,, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0&gt;, via Wikimedia Commons.

The reason for the late Bronze Age collapse is being debated but climate change, droughts, and invasions by the so called Sea Peoples are considered to be major reasons. The Trojan war, which is mostly fiction occurred around 1200 BCE. If you watched the recent 2026 movie the Odyssey, you probably notice the frequent references to the Sea Peoples. One of the Sea Peoples was the Philistines. If you want to take a deep dive into the late Bronze Age collapse, click here, or here.

Most of us know about the collapse of the Roman Empire around 400-500 AD and perhaps the fall of the Byzantine Empire in 1453 AD, but the late Bronze Age collapse may come as surprise to many despite it being so consequential, at least I was very surprised when I first learned about it. It was not just civilization collapsing but many at the same time. The collapse is also mysterious and shrouded in mythology. That is why I consider it a super fact.

The Collapse of Mycenaean Greece

The collapse of Mycenaean Greece stands out. No other part of the Eastern Mediterranean suffered a civilizational setback quite as intense as in Greece. I think most of us are aware that after the Mycenaean Greece came other periods in Greece’s history, the Greek Dark Ages, the Archaic period, and classical and Hellenistic periods, Alexander the Great, Plato, Aristotle, etc.

I learned in school that there was a Dorian invasion of Greece that displaced its original population and this led to the Greek Dark Ages before a rebirth of Greek civilization. This is most likely not true. The Mycenaean Greeks were not replaced by modern Greeks; they were the ancient Greeks. What likely happened was that climate change and drought resulted in crop failures, which in turn resulted in people movements and a range of invading peoples around the Mediterranean and the Near East. This is what may be remembered in Homer’s account of the Trojan War.

Various Mycenaean states in various colors, Athens, Thebes, Orchomenos, Mycenae, Elis, Pylos, Menelaion, Dimini, Kythera, and IoLcos. | The Mysterious Vanishing of Bronze Age Civilizations
Reconstruction of the political landscape in mainland southern Greece, c. 1400–1250 BC. Alexikoua, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0&gt;, via Wikimedia Commons.
To see the Other Super Facts click here

Super Rich

Superfact 120: The amount of wealth owned by the billionaires is roughly double as much as the poorest half of the world’s population. The amount of wealth owned by the 12 richest billionaires is more than the wealth of the poorest 50% of the world’s population. The richest 1% of the global population owns approximately 38% to 45% of the world’s total wealth.

Esther’s writing prompt: July 15th : Rich

Click here or here  to join in.

A one hundred US Dollar bill sailing through a cloudy sky. | Super Rich
US 100 dollar bills falling through the air Shutterstock Asset id: 2555911235 by Caito

There are at the moment of this writing 3,428 dollar billionaires in the world worth 20.1 trillion dollars together. For comparison the poorest 50% of the world’s population holds between $9 trillion to $12 trillion dollars of wealth (about half). According to this report the amount of wealth owned by the poorest half of the world is less than the amount owned by just the 12 richest billionaires. By the time you read this the numbers have probably changed (likely upwards). You can also read more in Wikipedia.

I am specifying that it is in dollars and not let’s say in the Iranian Rial. With respect to the Iranian Rial, I am also a billionaire, and you are probably too (if you own a phone or computer). One dollar can buy roughly 1,300,000 to 1,600,000 IRR. You just need $700 to be a billionaire in the Iranian Rial.

This is a bar graph showing the number of billionaires and combined wealth starting in 2013 and ending in 2026.
World’s billionaires. Number and total wealth by year. Trillions of dollars. The graph comes from here. <<Link-6>> Katharina Buchholz. Cropped and edited by User:Timeshifter using freeware IrfanView., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

I should say that initially I was just going to list interesting statistics about the super-rich. However, I found myself surprised by the statistics, and I am sure I am not the only one. Therefore, I picked a couple of facts I decided super facts.

The ten richest billionaires in the World

The numbers below are from Forbes Magazine. To see a list of all billionaires in the world, click here. To see a list with numbers that are updated minute by minute, click here.

  • Elon Musk – 839 billion dollars – source Tesla, SpaceX
  • Larry Page – 257 billion dollars – source Google
  • Sergey Brin – 237 billion dollars – source Google
  • Jeff Bezos – 224 billion dollars – source Amazon
  • Mark Zuckerberg – 222 billion dollars – source Facebook
  • Larry Ellison – 190 billion dollars – source Oracle
  • Bernard Arnault & family – 171 billion dollars – source LVMH
  • Jensen Huang – 154 billion dollars – semiconductors
  • Warren Buffet – 149 billion dollars – source Berkshire Hathaway
  • Amancio Ortega – 148 billion dollars – source Zara

Wealth share of the richest 1%

The richest 1% of the global population owns approximately 38% to 45% of the world’s total wealth, which is more than what 95% of humanity own according to Oxfam. The richest 1% of the global population is not about billionaires, it may very well include you and me. Our World in Data has collected and analyzed the statistics for each country in the world. The top richest 1% in the United States own 34.78% of the wealth in the United States. The top richest 1% in Russia own 48.99% of the wealth in Russia. The top richest 1% in Sweden own 27.49% of the wealth in Sweden. The top richest 1% in the Netherlands own 13.98% of the wealth in the Netherlands. See the graphs below from Our World in Data.

This is a world map showing the share of wealth owned by the richest 1% of the population in each country. The darker the color, the greater the wealth of the 1% in that country. | Super Rich
The share of wealth owned by the richest 1% of the population. Wealth is defined as the total value of non-financial and financial assets (housing, land, deposits, bonds, equities, etc.) held by households, minus their debts. Data source: World Inequality Database (WID.world) (2026) – Learn more about this data OurWorldinData.org/economic-inequality | CC BY

As you can see from the graphs below the extreme inequality is nothing new. Europe was extremely unequal in the 19th century. The 1% owned 58.01% of the wealth in 1900. The United States was relatively equal in 1978 when the 1% owned 21.79% of the wealth. Russia became very unequal since 1995. I suggest that you play around with the graphs yourself .

The graphs show the share of wealth owned by the 1% for Russia, Europe and the United States from 1820 to 2024.
The historic share of wealth owned by the 1% for different countries around the world, starting in 1820. Data source: World Inequality Database (WID.world) (2026) – Learn more about this data OurWorldinData.org/economic-inequality | CC BY

ABBA’s Money, Money, Money

Note: This post is not an implicit suggestion that we should tax billionaires more or less, and not about how or whether we should solve inequality, and it is not about politics. It is just surprising statistics regarding wealth and the reality of inequality.

My Other Responses to Esther’s Prompts

To see the Other Super Facts click here