

You are the nth person alive on earth - snaveint
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-15391515

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sambeau
The world population has DOUBLED in my lifetime. That is a fact that I hadn't
realised nor ever wanted to realise.

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mhartl
It'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.

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suivix
Not to mention that the richest places are actually having less than two
children per woman.

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mhartl
Indeed. 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.

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chime
If your birthdate is 11/11/1967, then half the world is older than you and
half the world is younger.

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katovatzschyn
Not 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>

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shrikant
India 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>

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mayanksinghal
Probably 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!

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shrikant
Noticed that as well - most international maps leave out PoK when showing
India, but taking away J&K in its entirety _was_ a bit much!

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xbryanx
I 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/)

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sdfjkl
This is great, everyone should watch this.

Also the guy does fantastic chart presentations :)

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acqq
Once 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.

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S_A_P
What an amazingly effective demographic gathering tool the BBC has created :)

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alts
To 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).

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DuqE
I 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.

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mhb
That 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?

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pferde
Nothing but a clever way to collect some aggregate data on their readers.
:)</tinfoilhat>

~~~
craigmc
You are clearly mistaking the BBC for some grubby commercial organisation.

Ta, Person 4,282,072,850.

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martokus
Ok, so I'm Bulgarian, male. Life expectancy 69 years - 10+ years less than the
average for the western world. Poor me...

~~~
RyanMcGreal
In 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.

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nobody314
My 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.

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Peroni
I 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.

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statenjason
Are you sure you used European style dd/mm/yyyy? I made that mistake the first
time.

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Peroni
Indeed I did. Tried it again this morning with the same result.

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monkeypizza
This 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).

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zipdog
If you're more than 101 years old it won't let you play

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jshort
If 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."

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mixmastamyk
Hmm, says I'm the 77 billionth (and change) human who ever lived. More than I
would have guessed.

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mattmanser
Most 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>

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?

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xiaoma
I don't think it's set in stone. Some countries which previously had very low
fertility rates have seen a recent upswing, notably France and a few
Scandinavian countries.

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byrneseyeview
Is this accounting for immigration? The US has the same issue: the white
population reproduces at barely above or barely below replacement (it varies),
but immigrants have much higher fertility. And, weirdly enough, comparable
infant mortality.

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joejohnson
I can't get the "Go" button to do anything in Chrome :(

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cobrausn
I 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.

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joejohnson
Ah, right you are. I feel dumb for blaming Chrome.

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DanI-S
Can you imagine Fox News building something like this? I'll always be proud of
the BBC.

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lhpedigoni
03/10/1959

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tristanstraub
dont forget to count the fallen..

~~~
mojdril
The 76 billons ones.

