BILLIONS LIKE US

Here’s a thought for any of you struggling through the crowds during these holiday heavy times, or just trying to get to work or the shops to get the last remaining burger to slam on your barbecue. August the twenty-sixth this year has been provisionally designated as “7 Billion Day” or the day that the human population of this little blue ball of rock is projected to pass that milestone. Seven billion... and only five of them wanted to know about Pinky the fluffy pink rabbit... I could weep, I really could...

You can all breathe a sigh of relief that this is using the international standard billion (i.e. one thousand million) rather than the one that we understood it to be back in the days when I was a new potato (i.e. one million million) because if it was the latter we’d all be sitting here elbow to elbow and the only person getting any air would be, as that old Tony Hancock episode set in the lift went, “the tallest bloke with the biggest hooter”.

But it’s still an enormously large number. There are some who believe that there are more human beings alive on this planet at the moment than have ever lived on it in all of recorded history, although that strikes me as a bit of an odd idea, not least because it’s fundamentally wrong, but also because I don’t know quite what you would expect to pick as the cut off point. Are there more people alive now than ever lived before 1950, for example? That was feasible I suppose, but how about before last Tuesday at 5.45am GMT? Perhaps less likely. Actually, conservative estimates think that around about 6% of the people who have ever lived are alive right now, and historically the figure representing all the humans that there ever were is about 106 billion (and counting…). What you certainly can say is that there are more human beings about us right now than there have ever been before as we hurtle towards the 7 billion mark, and it can only get worse as this is obviously an exponential progression with all those extra sperms and eggs about to potentially breed with each other.

The population of the world is estimated to have reached one billion in 1804, and it only took a further 195 years for that figure to grow to 6 billion. Now that’s a hell of a steep curve in anyone’s book, and the next billion, which will be marked this August is only 12 years on from that. To me that’s a quite terrifying prospect when you consider that we’ve only got one little planet to fit us all onto and only a certain amount of surface area to grow our food on and a limited supply of fresh drinking water. Only 2.75% of all the water on Earth is considered to be fresh water, and that includes the 2.05% which is held frozen in glaciers, which is something to bear in mind the next time you leave the tap running. It’s also quite terrifying when you consider that there were not the medical breakthroughs that we have nowadays to keep more of us alive longer back then, and so there were obvious restrictions (including bloody conflicts on a massive scale) on how quickly those numbers could expand. Nowadays, we can expect a huge percentage of the children being born right now to live to be 100, and whilst that’s something to be applauded on a personal level, on a global scale it can only mean more overcrowding and ever more scarce resources.

So, where do all these people live? Well, apparently 37% of the global population live in China and India, or about 2.5 billion (and counting…). Another billion live on the continent of Africa, with the remaining half scattered across the rest of the globe, including the 733 million or so Europeans who make up about 11%. Strangely though, the most densely populated country is Monaco, which might at least explain their house prices although less so any sense of exclusivity they might try to project to the rest of the world.

You should try to enjoy those wide-open spaces whilst you still can, although it’s not something to panic about yet as we could all stand in an area of approximately 86 square miles if we all attended the same meeting and were given just under two square feet each, or 171 square miles if we all wanted to sit down, which, given the probability that it might be quite a long meeting, might be a good idea.

The television presenter Chris Packham was rather vilified in an interview he recently gave as being ‘self-loathing’ because he didn’t feel any need to have children of his own, and, although some readers did leap to his defence, it is still very difficult to get away from that label of being ‘selfish’ not to want to add to the growing population, although you could quite reasonably argue that you could consider the selfish ones to be those who are popping their children out like machine-gun bullets as we all need to eat, breathe and take up space.

I once worked for someone who absolutely (and ridiculously) stated that if you were a man who had reached thirty and was not married and had no children, then you should consider yourself a failure. Well, if anyone else does believe deep down that that’s the case, all I can say is “Here’s to failure…”