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    What's this?
Halloween fright: 7 billion humans
Earth has never hosted 7 billion people all at once before, but according to the U.N., it may reach that spooky milestone by the end of this month.
Mon, Oct 24 2011 at 5:23 PM
 60

Related Topics:

Sustainable Communities, UN, Ecology, Halloween, Population Growth
city lights from space

YOU ARE THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD: City lights are seen from space in this composite satellite image, which shows the Earth shortly after its human population hit 6 billion in 1999. (Image: NASA GSFC)

Next Monday will be a big day for humanity, and not just because it's Halloween. The U.N. predicts Earth's human population will reach 7 billion on Oct. 31, a historic milestone for our species — yet one that also feels hauntingly familiar.
 
It took about 200,000 years for modern humans to reach the 1 billion mark in 1805, but then suddenly there were 2 billion of us in 1927, 3 billion in 1960, 4 billion in 1974 and 5 billion in 1987. The 6 billion mark came in 1999, and 8 billion is due around 2025. We're widely expected to hit 10 billion before the end of this century.
 
Since Earth has a limited supply of important things like freshwater, phosphorus and farmland, it seems unlikely this trend can go on forever. But there's little agreement on how many people is too many, and even less agreement on what — if anything — should be done.
 
This is a delicate subject, and one that will be further examined here and elsewhere during the next week. For now, though, as the U.N. kicks off its "7 Days to 7 Billion People" countdown, let's just take a moment to reflect on how explosive our rise to 7 billion has been.
 
(Quick side note: The U.N. admits the Oct. 31 estimate should be taken "with a grain of salt," since no one knows exactly when we'll hit 7 billion. The U.S. Census Bureau says it will happen next spring, but the exact date doesn't really matter. Seven billion is an arbitrary point on a line; the line itself is what's important.)
 
Homo sapiens grew relatively slowly for the first 95 percent of its existence, not even hitting 1 million until about 10,000 years ago. The pace sped up as we adopted farming and city life, and then the Industrial Revolution put us in overdrive. After finally breaking 1 billion in the early 1800s, we grew by 270 percent in the 1900s — compared with an average of 22 percent during each of the previous nine centuries. Someone born in 1850 would likely have seen just two "X billion people" milestones in his or her lifetime, but baby boomers from the 1950s are about to see their fifth.
 
Words can only go so far in conveying the scale of humanity's population growth, especially over the last 200 years. The story needs visual aids, so I made the following bar graphs in Google Charts, using two data sets (here and here) that include population records and forecasts from 10,000 BC to 2050 AD:
 
Global human population (in billions), 1 AD - 2011 AD
 
In this first graph, notice how the time intervals change. Most of the bars skip 200-year gaps, but after 1800 the gaps shrink to 100, 50, 30, 20 and finally 11 years (I used 11 for the last one just so it would end on 2011). If humans were reproducing at a more linear rate, messing with the time intervals could distort the data, making our growth seem slow or stagnant. But that doesn't happen. Compare the gaps between 1800-1900 and 2000-2011, for example: It took 100 years for us to grow by 736 million people in the 1800s, but now we've added 906 million in just 11 years.
 
For the same data with equal time intervals, see the alternate version below:
 
Global human population (in billions), 1 AD - 2000 AD
 
This is what the last two centuries' growth looks like in a head-to-head comparison. But there is one key detail that gets lost in the graph above: Even though we're reaching unprecedented overall numbers, the rate of population growth is already slowing down. The annual growth rate always jumps around a bit, but after passing 1.5 percent in the 1950s and peaking at 2.23 percent in 1963, it has been generally declining ever since. It stayed above 2 percent until 1972, then dropped to 1.86 percent in 1980, 1.57 percent in 1990 and 1.27 percent in 2000. The U.S. Census Bureau predicts it will fall below 1 percent by 2020, and down to 0.5 percent by 2050.
 
It's hard to link specific causes to this trend, or to be sure how long it will continue, but it does hint at a shift from the population dynamics of recent centuries. Still, with such huge numbers of people already on the planet, even dropping below 1 percent annual growth means adding tens of millions of people every year. To illustrate how big humanity is becoming even as its growth rate slows, here's a graph combining data from 1900 to 2010 with Census Bureau projections for the next 40 years:
 
Global human population (in billions), 1900 AD - 2050 AD
 
Update: For ideas on how the global population can better sustain itself, check out this post on how to make overpopulation OK.
 
And lastly, here are two line graphs that show growth rates for the 10 countries forecast to be the most populous in 2050, using observed and projected data from 1950 to 2050. (The first graph shows China and India, since their populations dwarf all others. The second graph shows the eight other countries in the top 10 for 2050).
 
Population by country (in billions), 1950-2050
 
Population by country (in millions), 1950-2050
 
Also on MNN:
  • How many people have ever lived on Earth?
  • Crowded Earth: How many is too many?
  • Earth Day founder: Overpopulation is overlooked
  • How to feed all 7 billion of us
 

The opinions expressed by MNN Bloggers and those providing comments are theirs alone, and do not reflect the opinions of MNN.com. While we have reviewed their content to make sure it complies with our Terms and Conditions, MNN is not responsible for the accuracy of any of their information.

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Comments: 60
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anonymous
Guest Oct 31 2011 at 12:37 PM

STOP HAVING SEX. thats the answer to stop rapid population

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anonymous
Guest Oct 28 2011 at 3:24 PM

It's already is like a bad movie. We simply need to stop paying people to breed!
7 billion people on one small planet is simply insane; Stop the Insanity!!

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anonymous
jb Oct 28 2011 at 10:28 AM
It isn't really the world whose population is increasing. In most countries of the world, population is growing only slowly, or even decreasing. According to the UN report most of the growth is coming from sub-Saharan Africa. Of course the countries there are all hellholes, and are only going to get worse, so all those high birthrate people are going to want to immigrate to the low birthrate countries and replace the people who did the "right thing" by controlling their growth. Face it folks, if
.... More
nothing changes most of the world is going to end up looking like Uganda.
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anonymous
Steven Earl Salmony Oct 28 2011 at 5:50 AM
Much more intellectual honesty, moral courage and humane action is needed. We are about to become a species of 7 billion overconsumers, overproducers and overpopulaters on a finite and frangible planet where its resources are dissipating and environs degrading rapidly. During my lifetime, when human numbers explode from less than 3 bn to 7+ bn worldwide, many experts may not have known enough about what they were talking about when they spoke of human population dynamics and all causes of the human
.... More
overpopulation of Earth. Their research appears not to be scientific, but rather issues from ideological or totalitarian thinking, or from specious group-think consensus. Their all-too-attractive thinking, as viewed by greedmongers, is willfully derived from what is politically convenient, economically expedient, socially agreeable, religiously tolerable and culturally prescribed. Widely broadcast and long-accepted thinking of a surprisingly large number of so-called experts in the field of population dynamics appears to have an unscientific foundation and is likely wrong. Their preternatural theorizing about the population dynamics of the human species appears to be both incomplete and misleading. Most disturbing of all, a widely shared and consensually validated theory about a “demographic transition” four decades from now is directly contradicted by unchallenged scientific research. As a consequence, and it is a pernicious consequence, a woefully inadequate thinking and fundamentally flawed theory was broadcast during my lifetime and continues to be broadcast everywhere by the mainstream media as if it is not only science but the best available scientific evidence. The implications of this unfortunate behavior, inasmuch as it appears to be based upon a colossal misperception of what could somehow be real regarding the human population, appear profound. This failure of nerve has slowed the momentum needed to confront a formidable, human-driven global predicament. In their elective mutism regarding an astonishing error, are first class professional researchers with expertise in population dynamics behaving badly by allowing the “ninety-nine percenters” to be misguided and led down a primrose path by the “one percenters”? The power of silence on the part of knowledgeable human beings with feet of clay is dangerous because research is being denied that appears to shed light upon a dark, non-recursive biological problem, the understanding of which appears vital to future human well being and environmental health. Too many experts appear to be ignoring science regarding the human population and instead consciously through their silence consenting to the leviathan scale and unbridled expansion of global overproduction, overconsumption and overpopulation activities that are being adamantly advocated and relentlessly pursued by greedmongering masters of the universe, the tiny minority among us who are primarily responsible for ravaging the Earth, ruining its environs and reducing its fitness for habitation by the children. If this assessment of human behavior is indeed a fair representation of what is happening on our watch, then the desire to preserve the status quo, mainly the selfish interests of ‘the powers that be’, could be at least one basis for so much intellectually dishonest and morally bereft behavior. Could it be that the outrageous per capita overconsumption, large-scale corporate overproduction and unrestricted overpopulation activities of the human species worldwide cannot continue much longer on a planet with the size, composition and ecology of a finite and frangible planet like Earth? For human beings to count human population numbers is simple, really simple. The population dynamics of human beings with feet of clay are obvious and fully comprehensible. We have allowed ourselves to be dazzled by the BS of too many demographers just the way human beings have been deceived and victimized by a multitude of economists on Wall Street. Demographers and economists are not scientists. ‘The brightest and the best’ have sold their souls to greedmongers, duped the rest of us, made it difficult to see what is real, proclaimed what is known to be knowable as unknowable, engaged in the their own brands of alchemy. In their dishonest and duplicitous efforts to please the self-proclaimed masters of the universe, also known as the keepers of the ‘golden calf’ (a symbol now easily visible as the “raging bull” on Wall Street), they perpetrate frauds at everyone else’s expense, threaten the children’s future, put life as we know it at risk, and are consciously, deliberately, actively precipitating the destruction of Earth as a fit place for human habitation. Never in the course of human events have so few taken so much from so many and left so little for others. There are many too many overly educated “wise guys” among us who see the blessed world we inhabit through the lens of their own hubris and selfishness, and see themselves somehow as Homo sapiens sapiens and masters of the universe, as corporate kings and emperor’s with clothes. They supposedly are the brightest and best, the smartest guys in the room, like the guy who used to run the global political economy without recognizing that there was an “ideological flaw” in his economic theories and models, the same guy who reported he could not name 5 guys smarter than himself. These are guys who have denied science, abjectly failed humanity, forsaken life as we know it, the Earth and God. These ideologues rule the world now and can best be characterized by their malignant narcissism, pathological arrogance, extreme foolishness, addiction to risk-taking and wanton greed.
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anonymous
Fatik Baran Mandal Oct 27 2011 at 10:51 AM

Thought provoking article.

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anonymous
margretmills Oct 27 2011 at 5:31 AM

These numbers show that globally there are more people at the same time “younger and older than ever before.”

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anonymous
Steven Earl Salmony Oct 26 2011 at 10:21 AM
Much more intellectual honesty, moral courage and humane action is needed. We are about to become a species of 7 billion overconsumers, overproducers and overpopulaters on a finite and frangible planet where its resources are dissipating and environs degrading rapidly. During my lifetime, when human numbers explode from less than 3 bn to 7+ bn worldwide, many experts may not have known enough about what they were talking about when they spoke of human population dynamics and all causes of the human
.... More
overpopulation of Earth. Their research appears not to be scientific, but rather issues from ideological or totalitarian thinking, or from specious group-think consensus. Their all-too-attractive thinking, as viewed by greedmongers, is willfully derived from what is politically convenient, economically expedient, socially agreeable, religiously tolerable and culturally prescribed. Widely broadcast and long-accepted thinking of a surprisingly large number of so-called experts in the field of population dynamics appears to have an unscientific foundation and is likely wrong. Their preternatural theorizing about the population dynamics of the human species appears to be both incomplete and misleading. Most disturbing of all, a widely shared and consensually validated theory about a "demographic transition" four decades from now is directly contradicted by unchallenged scientific research. As a consequence, and it is a pernicious consequence, a woefully inadequate thinking and fundamentally flawed theory was broadcast during my lifetime and continues to be broadcast everywhere by the mainstream media as if it is not only science but the best available scientific evidence. The implications of this unfortunate behavior, inasmuch as it appears to be based upon a colossal misperception of what could somehow be real regarding the human population, appear profound. This failure of nerve has slowed the momentum needed to confront a formidable, human-driven global predicament.
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anonymous
AnonEeeMouse Oct 26 2011 at 1:24 AM

"May" reach 7 Billion? It WILL, that's the scary part.
By the way the people lost in Turkey are replaced by newly born babies within just hours. Human population is growing that quickly.

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anonymous
Sady Ramirez Oct 24 2011 at 7:20 PM

No to ofend any one. But, with the recent earthquake in Turkey the count down for the 7 billion population should be update.

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anonymous
Guest Oct 28 2011 at 4:54 PM

Average day 493,150.658 are born. 156,164.384 die

336,986.274 gained population a day. Several hundred dying in turkey doesn't upset the global population at all.

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