Zero the Hero

My fifth grade teacher, Mr. Tucker, was convinced that the world was going to suffer from a shortage of zeros. That's one of the reasons we now use scientific notation...to limit the amount of zeros you have to write out (conservation). And now imagine a future world without them, because our forefathers mismanaged their use. What would our world be like without the zero?

I suppose we would eventually find a way to get along just fine with one through nine, but it might be a rough transition. We use zero today much more often than, say, eight, because it's much more useful and takes the least amount of effort to draw -- it's just a freakin' circle for Christ's sakes. So it's very energy dense -- a lot of use for a small drawing effort (extraction cost). It's useful because you can instantly change any number by a factor of ten simply by adding a zero, without all the mathematical baggage that a seven or a nine comes with.

So if a zero shortage is looming, and we can't easily substitute any other number for it, we had better try to find more. And we do. But soon, the discoveries of new zeros can't keep up with volume we're using. At one point, we discover only three zeros for every four we write. And all those new zeros are coming from harder and harder sources. The first zeros flowed easily from that new ball-point pen; zeros almost came out under their own pressure. But now, sometimes you have to write a whole bunch of circles just to get that first inked zero out; and more critically, sometimes the pen runs dry.

While the zero can be found everywhere in the world, it is first and foremost an Arabic numeral -- so clearly, Arabia holds more zeros in reserve than anyone else. Large consumers of zeros, such as those in the financial and services sectors, ask them to produce more zeros. But they are already producing at full capacity, and with rising demand, and the price of zeros increases. Shit, even the price of zeros now has more zeros! This only further compounds the shortage!

The problem is, we built our economies on the zero. Imagine the Dewey Decimal System as the Dewey Dodecahedral System! No kid would be able to find a book! Biblio-chaos! Our money -- between the one, five, ten, twenty, fifty and one hundred dollar bills, the zero is used seventy percent more than the next most frequent number.

In my personal life I've taken great efforts to reduce my own consumption of zeros -- I didn't use a single one in this whole post. And it's good for my bottom line-- a bank account with nothing but zeros is not a good thing...