8 ms·
You are the nth person alive on earth
- pferde 15y agoNothing but a clever way to collect some aggregate data on their readers. :)</tinfoilhat>
- craigmc 15y agoYou are clearly mistaking the BBC for some grubby commercial organisation. Ta, Person 4,282,072,850.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- chime 15y agoIf your birthdate is 11/11/1967, then half the world is older than you and half the world is younger.
- tspiteri 15y agoThat assumes that the 3.5 billion people alive on 11/11/1967 are still alive today, which is not the case. The number of people born before 11/11/1967 and still alive today would be quite a bit less than 3.5 billion, and the number of people born after that date and still alive today quite a bit more.
- katovatzschyn 15y agoNot exactly. There were 3.500m people alive then, and about 7.000m now, but because many of the 3.500m died and were replaced over those 44 years, you would actually be older than more than half of the world with high probability. According to the figures provided, 77.500m humans total in 1967, 83.200m total now, so 5.700m had been born since then, but the population only increased by 3.500m, meaning 2.200m people had died since 1967. Without stronger data, it's impossible to say whether the people dying tended to be older or younger than a certain age, so it's not possible to say with any reasonable certainty what the actual fixed point is, or even the ratio of people younger or older than you. Though, Wolfram Alpha reports the median age of the Earth to be about 27,6. http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=world+%7C+median+age http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=world+%7C+median+age
- tel 15y ago(according to this model of early populations)
- martokus 15y agoOk, so I'm Bulgarian, male. Life expectancy 69 years - 10+ years less than the average for the western world. Poor me...
- joelhaasnoot 15y agoProbably will change by the time you're that old, I'm expecting.
- dhimes 15y agoLife expectancy varies with age [e(x), with x = current age]. The key question is, how long can someone who is your age now expect to live? In other words, in some places may be hard to make it to, say, 40 years old, but if you do you may have a better chance of making it to 75. I don't know about Bulgaria particularly, however.
- RyanMcGreal 15y agoIn my city (Hamilton, Ontario, Canada), there is a 20+ difference in life expectancy between the most affluent and most impoverished neighbourhoods. Even within countries, averages mask deep inequalities.
- nobody314 15y agoMy city Vancouver, has the average life expectancy in Canada - but this is due to the population mix (lots of Japanese centenarians) not due to the medical benefits of rain.
- Florin_Andrei 15y agoI was born a little while north of you. What I would tell most guys born in that general region is: "quit smoking, drink less, and watch your diet". That should raise their life expectancy by a decade, I guess.
- tristanstraub 15y agodont forget to count the fallen..
- mojdril 15y agoThe 76 billons ones.
- mattmanser 15y agoMost of the developed world has now got a lower than replacement birth rate (except, typically, the US): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sub-replacement_fertility http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sub-replacement_fertility Can't we extrapolate and say that in a few decades that's going to happen to the developing world too? In other words, that graph is nonsense?
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- pchristensen 15y agoUsually wealth, education, and women's rights lead to a drop in fertility, so if you're worried about population growth your #1 priority should be to help poor countries get richer. Ditto for pollution.
- cbr 15y ago"Ditto for pollution" I believe pollution per capita is highly correlated with per capita wealth (or income).
- byrneseyeview 15y agoBut pollution per marginal dollar of GDP per capita is lower. That could just be an artifact of the rich world relatively de-industrializing: as the US gets more Facebooks and Starbuckses, China gets more steel mills. But it also seems that one luxury rich countries pay for is lower pollution relative to GDP.
- pchristensen 15y agoPollution drops rapidly after household income (or was it GDPPC) rises above $5000, because people have more acute problems taken care of and start to care more about clean air, water, etc. Essentially poor countries use "pollution acceptance" as an asset to grow richer, until they earn enough to spend buy pollution acceptance from someone else.
- 15y ago
- sambeau 15y agoThe world population has DOUBLED in my lifetime. That is a fact that I hadn't realised nor ever wanted to realise.
- wgx 15y agoI was equally shocked to discover that over half the world population is younger than me.
- mhartl 15y agoIt's only alarming if you believe that the human population is close to the carrying capacity of the Earth. Given that the densest population centers are also the richest, this seems unlikely. Environmental and associated problems are not the result of brute numbers. All of these population graphs play the same trick on your eye by using a vertical scale set by the current population. This is an understandable choice, but as a side-effect it makes the current growth look "vertical", when in fact for an exponential the location of the "knee" in the curve is purely an artifact of the vertical scale. If you graph the world population in millions, the current situation looks terrifying; if you graph it in billions, it looks alarming; if you graph it in trillions, it looks like we've got nothing to worry about.
- suivix 15y agoNot to mention that the richest places are actually having less than two children per woman.
- mhartl 15y agoIndeed. Due in part to lower birthrates in rich countries and increasing wealth across the board, demographers predict that the current population growth will flatten out around 2050, at an estimated 8-10 billion people. Humanity faces many problems, but "overpopulation" isn't one of them.
- tristanperry 15y agoNot sure if you've seen this series: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY (despite looking/sounding boring at the start, stick with it; it's really captivating and interesting), but it is amazing just how much 'small' growth (even 2-3% p/a) can cause things to double in much less time than you'd imagine. Or if you haven't got the time to watch the whole thing (is close to an hour all in all), this touches on a couple of the topics the video covers: http://www.worldpopulationbalance.org/exponential-growth-tutorial/bacteria-exponential-growth.html http://www.worldpopulationbalance.org/exponential-growth-tut... (naturally doubling every minute is on a much faster scale to the Human population!)
- xbryanx 15y agoI wish it had links to the GapMinder graphs for your country tagged with your years. http://www.gapminder.org/videos/what-stops-population-growth/ http://www.gapminder.org/videos/what-stops-population-growth...
- sdfjkl 15y agoThis is great, everyone should watch this. Also the guy does fantastic chart presentations :)
- shrikant 15y agoIndia here [1]. A couple of interesting things: 1. That's a lot of births, and a lot of deaths :-O 2. 68 people leave the country every hour?! Woah, that's some serious brain drain going on there. (assuming a net outflow against 'immigrants' would primarily be natives of the country) [1] http://i.imgur.com/Mv3zl.png http://i.imgur.com/Mv3zl.png
- mayanksinghal 15y agoProbably not the best place to mention this, but I am in a way offended that BBC doesn't consider PoK or Jammu&Kashmir to be a part of India!
- shrikant 15y agoNoticed that as well - most international maps leave out PoK when showing India, but taking away J&K in its entirety was a bit much!
- DuqE 15y agoI was very impressed with this until I realised that everyone with my birthday will get the same result as me so the count is not accurate with out a specific time of birth. Just saying.Great idea all the same.
- mhb 15y agoThat probably wouldn't help a whole lot either since it's unlikely that this is based on a huge central repository of world births and their associated times. Does most of the world even track those?
- acqq 15y agoOnce I have the time I should calculate the number of people who grew up to be older than 15 during the history times -- most of the births must have been of those who didn't grew up.
- Peroni 15y agoI spotted this earlier today. Interestingly it get's my age wrong at the end despite putting in my full date of birth in the beginning. The output is one year above my actual age. I have a December birthday and I can only assume it simply counts the years and assumes you had your birthday before October.
- statenjason 15y agoAre you sure you used European style dd/mm/yyyy? I made that mistake the first time.
- Peroni 15y agoIndeed I did. Tried it again this morning with the same result.
- joejohnson 15y agoI can't get the "Go" button to do anything in Chrome :(
- cobrausn 15y agoI had this problem originally. It's not Chrome. :-) I originally entered in my birthdate as 06/30/1980, but they are using European date style. As such, it would have to be entered as 30/06/1980 to make sense.
- joejohnson 15y agoAh, right you are. I feel dumb for blaming Chrome.
- zipdog 15y agoIf you're more than 101 years old it won't let you play
- jshort 15y agoIf you look at the the chart there is a large jump in the data. "Notes on the data: Only birth dates after 1910 can be accommodated and only countries with populations of more than 100,000 people are included. Where available, the UN's medium variant and average figures from 2005-2010 have been used. World and country population clocks are estimates based on the latest UN figures and growth rates. They may not tally precisely with other clocks because of the way this application is configured."
- swah 15y agoif you're more than 2 months from the future, also not.
- S_A_P 15y agoWhat an amazingly effective demographic gathering tool the BBC has created :)
- joblessjunkie 15y agoYes, I'm not aware of any reason why my sex and country of birth are required here.
- alts 15y agoTo those concerned, a request with your provided info appears to only be sent to their servers once you arrive at the Results step (which itself is mostly just a recap of the previous step).
- DanI-S 15y agoCan you imagine Fox News building something like this? I'll always be proud of the BBC.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- mixmastamyk 15y agoHmm, says I'm the 77 billionth (and change) human who ever lived. More than I would have guessed.
- monkeypizza 15y agoThis whole concept is really fuzzy for two reasons. first, there's no dividing line between us and our human-like ancestors. second, this depends on the precise moment life begins. Quite a few people claim to believe that human life begins at conception - if that's the case, in order to be consistent, they should count life starting from conception, which would at least double the total historical human population (due to natural miscarriages, not just abortions).
- lhpedigoni 15y ago03/10/1959