I woke up today with a thought: How would you measure your impact of existance against others?
Well, firstly, if the term is not self-descriptive enough, let me elaborate what IOE is about. Ever heard something along the lines of "if you were to disappear, how many people would notice?" Well, this is something like that except that it's more along the lines of how many people would feel that it is a significant impact. Something similar to how many would care enough to attend your funeral.
So how would you measure it? I definitely haven't thought it through much, but I suppose a simple survey with a "can be bothered / cannot be bothered" kind of yes/no option will suffice in gathering the data. Obviously you only need to survey people who know you. The greater the number, the greater your IOE.
But let's not stop at there. Say, if you'd like to know what the numbers mean in absolute terms other than just a comparison with your friends, you should then take that number, and divide it by the world's population, which is around 6.97e9 (or 7e9 for convenience) at the moment. The number will be very small, but that will show your IOE on the world, which, honestly, I'd bet even Obama would not have very much despite being in the position that he is. A perfect 1 is impossible, since there's bound to be someone somewhere in the world who will either moderately hate you and therefore don't give a shit (I say moderate since obviously those who absolutely hate you will be bothered to attend as a celebration), or there will be those who haven't heard about you and therefore won't give a shit either.
Another thing I was considering is to divide the IOE into "temporary" and "overall". For "temporary", I have already described it. For "overall", it means how many people would be willing to say that they feel it significant, when posed with the question "what if you never existed?" This number generally reflects your life's IOE, rather than just you in the current temporal state. So it kinda makes up for the fact that if an ex-president or important figure (maybe MJ for e.g.) ceases to exist, currently it might not be impactful, but their overall IOE is still very high.
Only one problem with measuring IOE data though: how do you make everyone tell the truth during the survey?