Have you ever felt worthless? Have you ever thought about how much your life is worth? It all depends upon perspective, I suppose.
To a government, you’re worth approximately thirty percent of your income, for your whole life. Don’t want to be valuable to the government? Don’t make any income. But that doesn’t necessarily always equate to a decent, fun quality of life. You have to pay your tax, or you’ll find yourself in some walled in concrete with some rudimentary metalworking. Not even wrought iron. Shrinkflation sucks.
To your life insurance policy, it probably depends how much you’re worth. Your income, age, and a whole bunch of other calculations by very smart people called actuaries determine your worth, or what you’d be eligible to apply for. (And how much you’d need to pay for it!)
To an organ smuggler, I’m not entirely sure how much you’d be worth. I don’t know what organs can be smuggled, or how many of them are viable, or how much they go for. How many you could extract at a time to get the most value out of a person.
Notice how I’m not mentioning any dollar signs along the way? That’s the fun part of a though exercise like this one. Just trying to figure out things by figuring out things.
To a marketer or a salesperson? You’re probably worth almost all of your disposable income.
To the car dealer? If you buy a car every five years, however much that costs over how long you intend to own a car.
To the bank? A lot more.
To the grocer, the butcher, the burger stand at the market on a Saturday evening? However many calories you want to consume.
But what about the intrinsic value of your body? By that I don’t mean whatever assets you have and whatever the other gender (or the same one!) would be willing to pay for it to engage in carnal hedonism, but instead I mean the atomic and chemical make up of your once-upon a future corpse that contains your consciousness.
I’m not a biologist, I’m not a mathematician. I think most of our bodies are made of water, calcium, and a few other bits and pieces. This is something that I’ll ask a LLM to clarify for me, because I want to know, out of curiosity.
In the spirit of click bait, the result might shock you. Or it might not, I haven’t presented the data or even begun to fathom what it might or could be. But anyway, here it is, a single prompt away:
If we were to break down the elemental composition of a human body, weighing about 70kg, how much would the elements be worth ?
| Element | % Body Mass | Mass in Body (kg) | Market Price (approx) | Value |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Oxygen | 65% | 45.5 | ~$0.20/kg (as gas) | ~$9.10 |
| Carbon | 18% | 12.6 | ~$0.10/kg (charcoal) | ~$1.26 |
| Hydrogen | 10% | 7.0 | ~$1.50/kg (gas) | ~$10.50 |
| Nitrogen | 3% | 2.1 | ~$0.10/kg (as gas) | ~$0.21 |
| Calcium | 1.5% | 1.05 | ~$0.30/kg | ~$0.32 |
| Phosphorus | 1.0% | 0.7 | ~$3.00/kg | ~$2.10 |
| Potassium | 0.25% | 0.175 | ~$20/kg | ~$3.50 |
| Sulfur | 0.25% | 0.175 | ~$0.20/kg | ~$0.04 |
| Sodium | 0.15% | 0.105 | ~$0.15/kg | ~$0.02 |
| Chlorine | 0.15% | 0.105 | ~$0.15/kg | ~$0.02 |
| Magnesium | 0.05% | 0.035 | ~$4/kg | ~$0.14 |
| Iron | 0.006% | 0.0042 | ~$0.12/kg | ~$0.00 |
| Zinc, Copper, Others | trace | <0.1 kg | Varies | ~$1.00 (combined) |
I make the assumption that these numbers are in US dollars. It comes to a smidgen under $30
If you could trade in your (some day to be) corpse, for $30, or take it down to the recycling depot and be paid for your atoms, I think the vast majority of humanity would see that as a bad deal.
But then, you have to look at the things that it took to rear the life. How much food, how many services, how much education, what other economic outputs contributed to that $30 of elemental, intrinsic value?
This is certainly not a healthy way to look at the value of a human life, and that's because we aren't looking at human life - we're looking at bodies.
And truth be told, bodies aren't really worth that much.
The people inside of them are what has a much higher value.
Me, in a body box, known as a coffin