Tag Archives: World Population

As We Approach a Population of 8 Billion

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It’s estimated that there were between 10,000 and 20,000 of us homo sapiens 50,000 years ago.

By year 1 (either C.E. or B.C.E, there was no year zero), we were around 10 million. That’s roughly the population of Nanjing, China’s 8th largest city.

Now we are a bit shy of 8 billion (7,970,000,000 and counting).

20220825_142436

We’ve clearly been an extremely successful species, especially during the past few hundred years.

What might be called “success”, however, could also be called an “infestation”. That’s definitely how many other species would see it.

The numbers and chart above are from A Natural History of the Future: What the Laws of Biology Tell Us About the Destiny of the Human Species by ecologist Rob Dunn. The author, as you might expect, sees problems ahead, including the climate crisis and antibiotic resistance. Life will flourish. Us, not so much.

Where the Girls and Boys Are

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The Washington Post has an article called “40 Maps That Explain the World”. They don’t explain the whole world, but this one is interesting:

population-map

There are about 7 billion people in the world, and more than 3 billion of them live in 5 countries in that circle: China, India, Indonesia, Bangladesh and Japan. If you throw in the other countries in the circle, like the Philippines and Vietnam, you get another 600 million people. That means 51% of the world’s population lives in that relatively small part of the world.

The map above is number 24 in the list, which is here:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/08/12/40-maps-that-explain-the-world/