According to this reputable source, every day on Earth an estimated 371,124 people are born and 154,995 people die. The amazing mathematics website Wolfram|Alpha converts these raw numbers into a hertz frequency as follows:
As Jason Kottke writes in his excellent blog kottke.org, one of the longest continuously running blogs on the web (having been in operation for 15.9067 years):
Measurement in hertz is an unusual way to think about living and dying; hertz are typically reserved for things like human-audible sound frequencies (20 to 16,000 Hz), how fast your laptop’s CPU runs (1 to 4 Ghz), or the frequency of the power running into your house (50 to 60 Hz). But if you subtract the death rate from the birth rate, you get a net rate of 216,129 new people a day, or about 2.5 Hz. That’s the frequency of humanity. While that’s a lot slower than your computer, it’s in the same frequency ballpark as a human’s resting heart rate (1.3 Hz), steps taken while walking briskly (1.8 Hz), or moderately energetic dance music (2.25 Hz).
Pretty cool, right?
