The Spirit Of Wowbagger

In Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Bowerick Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged became immortal after an accident involving a few rubber bands and a particle accelerator. The rub was that he had lived so long that he had run out of things to do so to keep himself amused he decided to insult everyone in the entire universe in alphabetical order. He is only put out of his misery in the sixth book when Thor hit him so hard that he lost his immortality.

Bowerick Wowbagger might have been grateful for a database that The Population Project, a non-profit organization, is compiling. Its seemingly impossible challenge is to  record the full name and place and date of birth of every living human on the planet. At the time of writing they have recorded 695,027,128 of us, around 8.49% of the world’s total population. Unsurprisingly, this has never been attempted before but the driving force behind the project is to give every person an identity.

The challenges are enormous with around 300,000 babies born a day, not all births are registered, and data sources needing to be checked and often erroneous. Undaunted, though, they carry on.

There is something mildly disturbing about the project, smacking a little of Big Brother, although I am sure it is done with the best of intentions. I could not resist checking to see whether I have made it on to the database and, lo and behold, I have. Curiously, I share my name with only one other person, someone considerably younger than me, from Manchester.

The spirit of Wowbagger lives on