2022 by the numbers

The end of a year is an opportunity to behold new achievements, superlatives, world records. But 2022—marked by war, chaos, an unsteady return from lockdown—included a few milestones that felt even more momentous than usual. On the technology front, machines capable of conversation and image generation crept up on us, but there were also dramatic leaps in science and engineering which, in spite of some dire circumstances, promised, once again, a future of more possibility and abundance. And then there were other kinds of big numbers, mostly reflecting the kind of human hubris that could help achieve that future, or destroy it.

61 days

How long a 57-year-old man with terminal heart disease lived after he received the first-ever transplant of a genetically modified pig heart in January. Researchers have been working on this pig-to-human transplantation technique for over three decades.

192

Number of lasers Energy Department researchers used for the breakthrough shot that led to nuclear fusion ignition—the process that powers the sun and that could provide the world with clean energy. It was the first time a fusion shot yielded a net energy gain of about 50 percent over the power absorbed by the lasers.

13.6 trillion electronvolts

The record-setting collision energy reached by proton beams at the Large Hadron Collider, three years after being shut down for upgrades. (One trillion electronvolts is roughly the energy of a flying mosquito, which for a subatomic particle is like a train going at 90 miles per hour.) The hope is to produce more Higgs bosons, find new particles, and perhaps new physics, and to better understand mysteries like dark matter.

32 minutes

The change in orbit to asteroid Dimorphous after it was struck by NASA’s DART spacecraft at about 4 miles per hour—possibly enough to knock a future earth-bound asteroid off course.

8.8 million pounds

Launch thrust provided by the Space Launch System during November’s launch of the Orion spacecraft, 15 percent more powerful than the Saturn V rocket, making it the most powerful rocket ever launched into orbit. The uncrewed Orion orbited the Moon before returning to Earth, as a demonstration of future human missions: a crewed lunar flyby slated for 2024, a highly anticipated human return to the Moon itself, and trips further out.

6 months

Duration of three taikonauts’ trip to space as they completed the first section of China’s space station, Tiangong (“sky palace”).

20 milliseconds

Lifespan of a quantum bit, a new record, as preserved in a crystal by researchers at the University of Geneva. Extending the life of qubits and “storing” them in these and other quantum memory devices will be essential for building quantum networks, which promise untappable communications and networked quantum computers. 

$10 million

Estimated cost per year to taxpayers to maintain the Amadea, a $325 million superyacht featuring two baby grand pianos and seized in June by U.S. authorities from a Russian oligarch. The U.S. has so far seized eight yachts from Russians who are under sanctions as part of a financial war on Russia.

345 million

The number of people globally who are suffering from or at risk of acute food insecurity in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, according to August estimates by the United Nations World Food Program. This is more than double the number from 2019.

24,000

The number of Starlink stations in operation in Ukraine, which Elon Musk’s SpaceX began providing during the early days of the war after Minister of Digital Transformation Mykhailo Fedorov tweeted a request to the billionaire. His ministry is trying to import 10,000 more Starlink stations, which are providing internet service and helping drone operators target artillery strikes on Russian positions. 

568 million

The number of posts on Mastodon on December 16, after multiple journalists were banned or suspended from Twitter by new CEO Elon Musk. It was the first time that number had surpassed half a billion for the federated network, following a November user surge after Musk laid off about half of Twitter’s workforce. He later said Twitter would ban links to alternative sites like Mastodon before reversing course. (Read about how to get started on Mastodon and how it’s working, and why some think it’s still too complicated.)

$31,000

The donations that Mastodon, a not-for-profit organization, now brings in monthly through Patreon, a figure that Eugen Rochko, Mastodon’s creator and only full-time employee, says has risen dramatically over the past month. 

$55,319

Unpaid bills owed to Margaritaville’s Bahamas resort by Alameda Research, the trading firm founded by FTX creator and alleged crypto fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried. 

$23.4 billion

Losses by SoftBank’s Vision Fund in the third quarter of 2022, driven by poor performance of its investments, China’s tech crackdown, and a weak yen. They were the biggest quarterly losses ever for its eccentric founder Masayoshi Son, whose big tech bets had exerted a gravitational force on Silicon Valley.

$232 billion

Drop in Meta’s market cap on February 3, the biggest one-day decrease in value in the history of the U.S. stock market. The plunge, based on a weaker-than-expected revenue forecast, topped the prior record set by Apple, when it lost $182 billion in market value in September 2020.

$725 million

Amount Meta agreed to pay as part of a class-action lawsuit over its sharing of Facebook user data with the campaign consultancy Cambridge Analytica, a practice that began in 2014. It was the largest settlement the company has paid to settle a private class action and the largest payment ever for a data privacy class action, the plaintiffs’ lawyers said in a court filing. Meta also agreed to a $5 billion fine as part of the Federal Trade Commission’s case, and to pay $100 million to resolve related claims by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

$391.5 million

Amount Google paid in agreeing to settle a lawsuit brought by 40 U.S. states for secretly tracking the locations of Android users who thought their location tracking was turned off—the largest privacy settlement its parent company, Alphabet, has ever agreed to pay. 

$4.13 billion

Fine issued to Google in September when a European court denied the company’s appeal of an antitrust decision about its bundling of Google Search and Chrome with its Android operating system to stymie rivals. The 2018 decision was the biggest EU fine of a tech company so far, and a victory for antitrust official Margrethe Vestager, who has become one of Big Tech’s most fearsome watchdogs.

$277 million

Amount spent on lobbying by Big Tech companies over the last two years in an all-out effort to fight antitrust efforts by Congress. That’s compared to just $45 million the companies and groups supporting the legislation spent on all federal lobbying through the same period, according to a report by Public Citizen. 

$300,000

Amount actor Seth Green paid to retrieve a Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT, which he had been building a TV series around, after it was stolen by hackers. Green’s payment of 65 Ether—one of the dumbest tech moments we noted this year—is now worth closer to $80,000.

379 million

Number of doses of fentanyl the Drug Enforcement Administration said it confiscated in 2022, more than double the number of pills laced with the potent synthetic opioid than it seized last year. More than 107,000 Americans died of drug overdoses in 2021, according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which, along with COVID-19 deaths, helped drive life expectancy in the U.S. to 76.4 years, its lowest point in two decades.

6,600

Number of guns the TSA estimated it would find in carry-on bags at security checkpoints in 2022, most of them loaded—a 10 percent increase over the previous record of 5,972, set in 2021. For decades, auto accidents have been the leading cause of death among children, but in 2020 guns became the primary cause, researchers say. 

99,000

Number of employees shed by Amazon from the first to the second quarter, to 1.52 million people, the largest drop in its history. The decline was largely due to overstaffing warehouses to handle pandemic-driven demand. Nearly 1,000 tech companies around the world have laid off over 150,000 workers this year, according to Layoffs.fyi.

4,466 square miles

Area of the Amazon cleared between August 1, 2021 and July 31, 2022—an area equivalent to the size of Qatar. That was an 11 percent drop from the previous year, but President Jair Bolsonaro’s four-year term ends with a 59.5% boom in Amazon deforestation rates, the highest in a presidential term since 1988. 

8 billion

Number of humans on Earth, as of November, according to the UN. It took over 200,000 years for the human population to reach one billion and only 219 years more to reach 8 billion. 

-10 degrees Celsius

Record high temperature at Eastern Antarctica’s Dome C, some 70 degrees above normal. During a summer that NASA said would go down as one of the hottest on record, the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and Europe suffered under record-shattering triple-digit temperatures that led to droughts and wildfires. Heat has become such a threat in the U.S. that the White House released a whole website devoted to preparing for it.

103%

Amount of California’s electricity demand met by renewable energy sources on May 8—a first. The Inflation Reduction Act, passed into law in August and promising $369 billion in clean energy investments, aims to cut emissions by 40 percent below 2005 levels by 2030; California is pursuing similarly ambitious goals. 

1 billion years

Age of a DNA fragment—a noncoding sequence of DNA that’s involved in gene regulation—discovered in sediments in Greenland by researchers at the University of Barcelona. Until now, the oldest DNA ever recovered came from a million-year-old mammoth tooth. 

300 million years after the Big Bang

Age of a galaxy seen by the James Webb Space Telescope, which is 100 million years older than the previous oldest documented galaxy. The JWST, the successor to the legendary Hubble Space Telescope, launched in 2021 and unfolded earlier this year. (A small team of writers and astronomers is helping to make these and other images accessible to the visually-impaired.)

???? JWST has potentially smashed records, spotting a galaxy which existed when the universe was a mere 300 million years old! The light from GLASS-z13 took 13.4 billion years to hit us, but the distance between us is now 33 billion light years due to the expansion of the universe! pic.twitter.com/5AcOBwHuO1

— Dr James O’Donoghue (@physicsJ) July 20, 2022

465 days

Record lifespan of a so-called gas marble, a bubble made from glycerol, water, and plastic particles, as reported by researchers at University of Lille, France in January. It was a record lifetime for such a bubble.