Smoking cuts about 10 years from life expectancy. About 1.3 billion people smoke. The total impact of smoking is thus 13 billion life-years.

Human News aims to devote 1 character to each 40,000 life-years, or 1000 average lives. Thus, this story can have about 13 billion / 40,000 = 325,000 characters. Since this article is only about 5500 characters, there is opportunity for many future articles on this subject.