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  1. shinichi Post author

    Space invaders

    by the Economist Online

    Two ways of thinking about how much room 7 billion people take up

    (2011)

    http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2011/10/world-population-1

    The UN’s doughty demographers have declared that October 31st is the day on which the world’s population reached 7 billion. They may be wrong (the UN got the timing of the 6 billionth birth out by a couple of years) but no matter: the announcement has triggered celebrations in maternity wards around the globe and a hunt for the 7 billionth child. Yet the growth in the world’s population is actually slowing. The peak was in the late 1960s, when it was rising by almost 2% a year. Now the rate is half that. The last time it was so low was in 1950, when the death rate was much higher. The result is that the next billion people will take 14 years to arrive, the first time that a billion milestone has taken longer to reach than the one before. The billion after that will take 18 years. Where will all these people fit? The chart below, worked out on a maximum population density of six Economist staffers per square metre, gives the space needed to accommodate the world’s population at various points in history, expressed in multiples of the borough of Manhattan. Looked at another way, each of us now has the equivalent of Red Square to ourselves.

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