Well, we made it. According to UN estimates, the world now holds 7 billion human beings. 7 billion people. And what a journey it’s been. From less than a 15,000 individuals on Earth 70,000 years ago after the Toga supereruption, to 1 billion people in 1806, all the way to today. I just want to take this post to give you an idea of the amount of people we’re talking about here.
In all of human history, there has been around 106 billion people ever born. That means that of all the humans ever alive, 6.7% of them are alive right now. 4 people are born and 2 people die every second. If we took every single human on the face of the Earth and stacked them one on top of another, they’d stretch from the Earth to the moon and back to the Earth 15 times. If I decided to write out 7 billion letters without any spaces in between, I’d have to use a little over 2 million pages of paper. Indeed, what a fantastic journey it’s been.
And yet, there’s still so much of it left. Around 1 billion people worldwide go to bed with a hungry stomach. Almost 3 billion people live on under $2 dollars a day (an even more astounding figure is that to be in the top 1% of the world, in regards to income, you have to earn a measly $34,000 a year). Around 1.5 billion people are illiterate. And sadly, these numbers are only expected to rise. So while we celebrate the triumph of humanity on reaching 7 billion living, let us remember those whose lives are barely livable.
