7 billion of us by Monday!

[mumsisdaughter]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-15391515

Just been on this BBC page (apologies to those who can't access it) and entered my date of birth, country and gender and got this:

You are 58, female and living in the United Kingdom

You were the 2,672,230,763rd person alive on Earth when you were born.
(So the world's population has grown by over 4 billion in my lifetime! I only had one, honest!)

You were the 75,976,087,095th person to be born on Earth.

United Kingdom
Your country's population is 62,035,570

Based on your country and gender:

Average life expectancy is 81.7 years

What's next? The global population will continue to increase during your lifetime and beyond, reaching 10 billion by 2083. However, the rate of growth is expected to slow. Little of the current growth is happening in developed countries like yours.

Longer lives: In your area, women can expect to have one or two children. People are also living longer. This means people of working age like you will be supporting increasing numbers of older people. By 2050, there will be just 2.2 working-age people supporting every person 65 or older. In Europe, this will drop to two.

Battle for resources: It is estimated that your group of the richest countries consumes double the resources used by the rest of the world. The UN estimates that if current population and consumption trends continue, by the 2030s we will need the equivalent of two Earths to support us.

Did you know? By mid-century, the world's urban population is likely to be the same size as the global population was in 2004.

The population of the United Kingdom has grown by
611 while you've been on this site.

Comments

[lalalatentacles.livejournal.com]

Stats like this make me want to kill myself and never have a kid, just because it seems like the only thing I can do to help. :(

[hw-campbell-jnr.livejournal.com]

Oh good! So I'm not the only one now sitting here and chewing my lip in terror. Oh oh! Oh oh oh! Can't even...

[mumsisdaughter]

It's the exponential growth that's so startling: good medicine is the root of our survival, rather than large families in the Third World. First and many Second World countries have lower infant mortality rates and higher life expectancy now, which counteracts smaller family size. India is the most densely populated country with 1.4 billion people but the rate of increase is predicted to slow down as the female population becomes literate.

My family tree has a family of 12 live births in the mid19th century but 5 of them did not reach puberty. Of the 7 that did, one died in the influenza outbreak at the end of WW1, one did not marry and one did marry but had no children. This means 4 of the 12 actually lived long enough to procreate and their families, born at the end of the 19th century were much smaller, being 2 or 3 children. Genealogy is fascinating.

[mumsisdaughter]

One of the oddest facts that came out of this flurry of interest in Monday's 7 billion prediction is that if everyone in the world lived in one huge megacity at the density of the present population of Paris, then that huge city would occupy the area of France with room to spare.

[lalalatentacles.livejournal.com]

Yeah but I mean, look at how well cities work in terms of actual sustainability. For example, LA is actually using water that is piped in from Utah, at this point.

[mumsisdaughter]

True. I don't mean a city of that size is sustainable just that 7 billion people could occupy that area.

[lalalatentacles.livejournal.com]

I'm sure there's a way to sustain a lot of people with the resources we have--water recycles and all--but it's the massive amounts of waste we create unnecessarily that terrifies me. I've seen Soylent Green. We all know how that ends.

[sparkly-69.livejournal.com]

It's creepy :/