Hard for me to imagine there's only 7 billion people on Eart

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I know 7 billion is a HUGE number, but to me it doesn't feel enough to estimate the population of the world today. To me it feels like there's about 100 trillion people in the world today.

I mean, all the countries are so enormous. Even being on a small Island like Britain it feels like there's about a billion people living here. So there must be like a hundred times that amount in even bigger countries like Russia, China, Australia and the USA.

Sorry to sound worryingly dim at math.

Well, much of Russia consists of areas like Siberia, which isn't very habitable, and the same probably goes for much of inland Australia. Britain is a pretty densely populated place - even in my part of it, on the semi-rural edge of Greater Manchester, the main roads always seem busy with traffic, the supermarket is always full of people (do none of them go to work?) and so on.

The population of the world was about 2.5 billion in 1950, and around 6 billion in 2000, so it's still increasing at quite a pace....

Interesting. Most folks (like you said) think of seven billion as too many to conceive of. But you're the opposite.
But in a way you may be accurately sensing something: not only are the numbers of the human species rising but each person is becoming progressively more interconnected with everyone else on the planet via globalization of the economy, via internet, and via more travel, and more use of traditional media, and more emmigration/immigration. And that amplifies the effects of our increasing numbers.

Am a geography geek.

Funny that you mention "large countries": Canada, Australia, and the contiguous USA (USA without Alaska and Hawaii), are all about the same physical size. But during most of my lifetime Canada only had ten percent (its a little more now) of the US's population, and Australia about five percent of the US populaton size. Canada is about equal to California in population. Two Californias (or two Canadas) would roughly equal one UK in population. Two UK's would equal one Japan (which is only about the same physical size of California). And two Japans equal about one U.S.A.

Some physically small countries have quite large population sizes (Britain, Japan, Bangladesh), and some large countries have quite small population sizes (Canada, Australia) because they are sparsely populated frontier places. Antarctica is a continent Big as China and India put together -whose combined population is over two billion. But Antarctica only has about 2500 temporary residents (guys at weather stations), and no permanent residents! Population zero. So the size of a place doesnt always correlate to its population size.

^ I can vouch for Australia being a large country with vast areas of nothing.
Much of the population lives on the coast because inland is mostly inhospitable scrub and desert.
No man's land.

Interesting that you mention Japan, naturalplastic - at present a very densely populated place, but also with a population which is now shrinking pretty significantly. I read fairly recently that at the present rate of population loss, Japan would have no-one at all living there by the year 2500...

Hard for me to believe too.

I also find it hard to believe.

You all find it hard to imagine only seven billion?

Interesting.

Last edited by naturalplastic on 21 Jun 2016, 3:02 pm, edited 1 time in total.

7 billion is a HUGE number.


actually it's it hard for me to believe youtube's billion views is real.
imagine 2 billion watched a video of an annoying american kid like justin biber saying baby baby

but , india is big and they love the english language. i guess they like watching pple like justing bieber and mily cyrus
i don't think Chinese people care much about the american bull****

And the world's population did not reach even 1 billion until about 1800!

I find it hard to believe because I think lots of people aren't in the counts. Even with a "fair" estimation, we don't live in a civilization that thinks about the missing ones. I don't think either they bother to have a count that's just, they don't even bother here. Yeah I believe we're more. Then the margin may not be of 20 billion...

I find it pretty easy to believe because I live in a pretty barren desert with large stretches of nothing. Areas like the UK are unusually densely populated and most places like Utah have a small population density. Apart from the large capital city we have just a few small cities dotted about separated by a whole lot of nothing. If you look at Earth's night lights you can clearly see how much of the globe is yet to be populated:

Fascinating picture you got there. ^ ^ ^

Most statistics are viewed subjectively. So 7 billion might be too huge a number to believe on some things, but when it comes to how many humans are walking the Earth today, 7 billion seems not a big enough number. It feels like there are around 2 billion people in England alone. Every time I'm on a very long-winded stretch of motorway in a car there are always tens of thousands of cars that pass by. A lot of Essex highway roads have an eternity of traffic, streaming along like a river, day and night. Who are all these people? Where are all these cars coming from? How many cars must there be on this entire planet?

It feels like all 7 billion live in my city.

It is an interesting picture. And very informative.

You get a sense of how population is distributed: the American west is sparse (but has some population) compare to the American East. The Amazon basin is dark. Africa is literally still "a dark continent" at night, though that has more to do with poverty than lack of population (Africa below the Sahara doesnt lack poeple but it does lack nigh lights).

And check out North Korea! The small hermit kingdom is hard to find, but you probably can find the islands of Japan. Look above and to the left of Japan and you see South Korea. Then look whats between South Korea and China: Nuthin' but darkness! Lol!

A mile of road, when its traffic jammed bumper to bumper, contains all of about 300 cars. So A ten mile long four lane highway bumper to bumper only contains 12000 cars. Most cars only contain one person at rush hour. So it takes FAR smaller a population of motorists to grid lock traffic than you think.