Time and Space

Math

Missing persons reports have increased every year since the U.S. government started keeping a database in 1975. In 2005 for example, over 844,000 people were added to this list. Of course, many names are removed from the list every year, as bodies turn up or people are found. Many are young runaways or elderly people who have become disoriented and wandered off. Still, 109,531 names remain on this list that has accumulated over those 30 years. 39,582 of these are over 20 years old, and if you subtract the 4750 that are over 65, and the 20 percent who have not completed high school, you have 26,915 high school-educated people between the ages of 21 and 64 that have gone missing in the last thirty years from the United States alone. Surprisingly, 51% of these are men! That is 13,726 capable men. Four out of ten of these are white. Three of those ten are black. Australia and Canada each report thirty thousand missing persons a year and Europe and Asia add another 26,000 people to this mix.

Allow me to introduce myself; my name is Darin and I am a statistical analyst working in the private sector. I have a head for numbers and always want to know the odds of past occurrences or the probability of future events.

This may be difficult for you to hear at this point, but it is time you found out. I live in the year 2058 and my five years studying history in university was spent considering what you would call the future – for me it was history. I was never interested in the distant past, but the 21st century held extreme appeal for me. I especially like using my mathematical mind in conjunction with my history studies, as you could see in my opening of this note to you. Here is another example: suppose you had $65,000 in a savings account in 2008, and left it there until today – that is to say, 2058 – what would the interest be on this amount?

Well, you have to take in to account the fact that interest rates skyrocketed after the U.S. separation of 2012 (I can’t tell you too much about this now – remind me later). A high-interest savings account that was 3% in 2006, would be over 8% by 2055, so we average it at 6.25% for the fifty year hypothetical situation. We also have to take into account the government income pension instituted in 2027 for residents who stayed earth-bound (another long story – remind me later) of $100 per month for life.

Anyway, with all these factors a matter of historical record, the calculation is interesting to me as a mathematician and as a human. A savings account with a value of $65,000 in 2008, would have a balance of $1,725,653.74. Of course this assumes that you do not touch this money for those fifty years, and that you are still healthy enough to use this money after such a long time. There is no real reason for telling you this, just a curious math fact for you to think about. Interesting how math and history can combine, isn’t it?

It may also interest you to know that although the inflation rate in the 20th century would easily have eaten away a profit like this, the political stability following the signing of the Treaty of Blue Ridge by the UN peace council, and the combining of the middle east into the European Union, all of which happened in 2028, made inflation stop, and in some cases reverse. For example, a pound of butter that was three dollars in 2006, is $3.50 today (we pay the farmers better than ever and the middle man much less). However, manufactured items like tables and chairs, couches, and televisions are less than half the price that they were at the beginning of this century, although it is difficult to compare exactly as our materials are completely different and we don’t have the old-style plasma or LCD televisions that were so popular back then. The fact remains that anyone with close to two million dollars today is still considered a very rich man.

But I have gotten way off topic and have simply been speaking to hear myself talk. I don’t want you to be distracted from your story, just mentally prepared for what is coming – a back-stage pass to upcoming events.