Yesterday I posted this awesome calculator to figure out what number we were in the world's population, and I was the 3,796,716,509th person born on the day of my birthday.
Today I'm posting an incredible video by NPR that indicates 1000 years ago there was only 1/3 of a billion people in the world. They use this by showing glasses with water "dripping in" as people are born, and water "dropping out" as people die.
With the help of better medicine and better agriculture, people are living longer, and as babies are being born, they grow up and have babies of their own. In the span of 200 years the world population grew by 6 billion people, absolutely astounding.
From YouTube description:
It was just over two centuries ago that the global population was 1 billion — in 1804. But better medicine and improved agriculture resulted in higher life expectancy for children, dramatically increasing the world population, especially in the West.
As higher standards of living and better health care are reaching more parts of the world, the rates of fertility — and population growth — have started to slow down, though the population will continue to grow for the foreseeable future.
U.N. forecasts suggest the world population could hit a peak of 10.1 billion by 2100 before beginning to decline. But exact numbers are hard to come by — just small variations in fertility rates could mean a population of 15 billion by the end of the century.
