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World Population Clock: 7.96B People (2022)
- ftyhbhyjnjk 4y ago6 months to go for 8 billion
- OscarCunningham 4y agoAbout January 8th according to this site.
- neals 4y agoWhen 8B?
- aleksklarksr 4y agoWe will never know, this site is just a fake js counter, actual population data is very much hidden and obscured by statistics. For example, Russia claim they have 144 millions but in fact according to all data it is close to 120 millions. Same for china, where villages increase their reported population just to get subsidized. Africa? Middle east? Help me god India? Are you sure anyone know how many people died from hunger and anticovid measures recently? It must be a 100 millions deaths at least last two years due to shut down of medicine around the world.
- neals 4y agoInteresting take, I believe you. What is your background on this?
- aleksklarksr 4y ago>The new Soviet Census (1939) showed a population figure of 170.6 million people, manipulated so as to match exactly the numbers stated by Stalin in his report to the 18th Congress of the All-Union Communist Party. https://www.reuters.com/world/china/researcher-questions-chinas-population-data-says-it-may-be-lower-2021-12-03/ https://www.reuters.com/world/china/researcher-questions-chi... Lots of sources question population data as well as all other officials statistics. Nobody care. It is not just numbers, it is political statements.
- phasersout 4y agofun fact: if the Habsburgers - during the Thirty Years' War - would have known that the Swedish Kingdom only had around a million citizens at this time they could have marched on straight to Stockholm and called it a day. But population numbers were highly confidential in those days and since Sweden was vast to the north they wrongly assumed it was populated much more densely.
- xcom86 4y agoHappy to see the world population growing. Unlike many here I don't believe the world is overpopulated and that we need more people to grow and expand beyond the planet. Located in the U.S. where we could double the population without starting to feel cramped. We can and we should.
- CogitoCogito 4y agoPersonally I'd be okay with the population being 10% its current value (though I don't see any non-apocalyptic way of that coming to be). In any case, I think we should decrease our population to whatever extent possible. But I guess that's just my opinion. edit: I'm not really sure why you're being down-voted. You're just expressing your opinion here.
- Glavnokoman 4y agoyeah... and it would be great if decrease in quantity would come with increase of quality. People themselves, their life conditions, human life appreciation all that stuff you know. (Cause I do not understand why would somebody want 2x of fat dolts).
- PestoDiRucola 4y agoPhysical space is not the only issue. Your average US adult consumes more than 100 times than an adult from a developing country. Doubling that number would have disastrous consequences for the planet.
- mytailorisrich 4y agoThe US produce 14% of global emissions and consume a disproportionate amount of resources in general. As things stand, doubling of US population would be a global disaster.
- rowanseymour 4y agoI'm sure the US could feed all those people but can the planet survive doubling US greenhouse gas emissions?
- gonzo41 4y agoThis is fine, it's a small blip. Millenials and Zoomers and some Gen Xers will do the environment a huge favor and keep the birth rate trending down.
- croes 4y agoHow's the birth rate in India or the african countries?
- cloutchaser 4y agoMaybe google it. Trending down also. World population will max at around 10bn
- b112 4y agoLast I heard though, in Africa, population decline was due to endemic aids/hiv, and no real inexpensive treatment. And some refusal to use condoms. If this changes, the trend will sharply reverse.
- vidarh 4y agoThat makes little sense - what we're seeing in Africa like everywhere else is that increased living standards, education and healthcare including family planning consistently leads to dropping birth rates. At most improved treatment of HIV will lead to a short-term bump if life expectancy increases faster than birth rates drop.
- Tchakra 4y agoIn the grand scheme, HIV/Aids has not had a large effect on population growth in Africa (and unlikely to have for the future as it is a mostly localised to southern parts of Africa and has been coming down rapidly). Most forecast say population will peak at 10bn to 11bn - https://ourworldindata.org/future-population-growth https://ourworldindata.org/future-population-growth - A big part of this increase in indeed from Africa which is expected to increase by 3bn - from 1.3bn in 2020 to 4.3bn in 2100 - The largest uncertainty is also about Africa where faster economic growth is expected to bring down population growth (counter-intuitively).
- ThalesX 4y agoMy great-grandma was born in 1920 and died in 2020. She was lucid to her final breath. I spent a lot of time talking to her about the ‘before times’. She was a sucker for this new world. She loved it. Much more than her world from the 20s. However, she always reminisced about how empty of people and how natural everything was. We were 1.6 billion when she was born, almost 8 when she died. This is the lifespan of a single (long lived) individual.
- nivenkos 4y agoMy grandad was born in 1925 - he remembers them installing the electric streetlights in Birmingham. The main difference seemed to be car traffic and tourism. It's just unrecognisable nowadays (and even from the 1980s tbh). Such a revolutionary time though - to go from biplanes to jet aircraft, radar, computers, mobile phones, etc. - I can't imagine we'll see a similar rate of change.
- infofarmer 4y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-of-history_illusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-of-history_illusion There's an even better cognitive bias than this describing your «optimism» about the future, but I fail to find its name.
- nivenkos 4y agoBut we're reaching a point where we're hitting the limits of Physics in many areas. Like it's hard to imagine an even faster passenger aircraft than the Concorde for example.
- randomsearch 4y agoDon’t think this is the problem. I think it’s an allocation of resources problem. Pre 80s a lot of the best and brightest worked in engineering. Post 80s they went into finance and then tech. The latter a mixed bag - brought us Google maps etc but sadly mostly focused on selling ads. That’s the risk I see. We either need to change incentives or change culture to get back to a focus on progress / exploration rather than exploitation.
- kingofclams 4y agois this website accurate? https://www.census.gov/popclock/world https://www.census.gov/popclock/world says we're notably farther away, and im inclined to trust a government over a site run by an unknown group
- moffkalast 4y ago> Population Growth today: 110,589 Ok that's way more than I would've thought, and it's only 11 AM. Not sure if it converts to the local time zone though.
- neogodless 4y ago> Population Growth today: 58,667 That's at 6:16 AM EST / EDT (America/New York) Looks like roughly 10,000 / hour.
- supz_k 4y agoAre those changes real? I don't see any network requests/WebSocket connections.
- npteljes 4y agoThey aren't. It's an estimation, made by their proprietary algorithm, which they claim to feed from these sources: https://www.worldometers.info/sources/ https://www.worldometers.info/sources/
- jl6 4y agoMight as well say it: 8 billion is too many, and it’s a good thing that population growth is levelling off. A decline down to ~1 billion would be fine. If we have to change retirement planning, so be it. No other species can grow its population exponentially indefinitely. Population growth in every other species is kept in check by conflict and starvation. We have an opportunity to voluntarily limit our footprint to avoid that check.
- erklik 4y agoWhy? I don't genuinely understand this pessimism. More people means more brains, more intelligence, more energy to achieve things. More people means more Einstiens, Newtons, Da Vincis etc. I do think our systems need changing. Our society currently incentivizes the smart people into something that's not entirely productive but wishing for less people, hmm, I don't know. I feel like this is the start of history, not the end. No other species can grow it's population exponentially. True. However, we aren't any other species (that we know of at least). The planet can support far more people, it truly can, and more so, the rest of space awaits. We can spread further and further. Is it really good to wish for a reduction of our species? of the only life we know that can truly observe and appreciate the beauty of creation?
- Jensson 4y ago> More people means more brains, more intelligence, more energy to achieve things. More people means less energy and resources per person though, and people with little resources wont be using their brains to solve problems. Likely more people would have the opportunity to become Einstein's or similar if the population stayed at 1 billion than at 10 billion simply because we would have so much more raw resources to invest in every person and their ideas. I don't see the benefit of adding another billion people who have to live a life in poverty. If we could give them a good life, sure add more people, but we can't even give the population of earth a good life today so why add more?
- joshuahedlund 4y ago> I don't see the benefit of adding another billion people who have to live a life in poverty. If we could give them a good life, sure add more people, but we can't even give the population of earth a good life today so why add more? One of the most stunning and under appreciated facts about the last two centuries is that, no matter how you measure it, the absolute number of people living in poverty has decreased even as population increased. Innovation is amazing.
- hilbert42 4y agoThese stats are frightening. In the past I recall seeing several different sets of figures for the amount of food the average human consumes in a lifetime. One estimate was about 70 tons and the other was 100 tons. (If anyone has better or more definite figures then let's hear about them.) Now, if we consider the other resources every new human will also consume during his or her lifetime - houses, vehicles, white goods, electronic tech etc., etc. - then that extra demand on the planet's resources will be enormous. What's worried me for a long time - ever since I read Anne and Paul Ehrlich's 1968 book The Population Bomb is that the population will outstrip our ability to find extra resources to support this population growth. Whilst the Ehrlichs overestimated the exponential growth rate I evertheless reckon the evidence supports the fact that they'd gotten the growth trend correct. It seems to me that unless we quickly take drastic action to either limit population growth or vastly increase food resources or both - not to mention simultaneously keeping environment in a state of sustainability (climate change, etc.) - then the future is likely to be very rocky. Yes, it's a pessimistic outlook but it looks as if the stats are pretty much against us unless there's a collective realization that something must be done urgently. I can only hope I'm wrong.
- siva7 4y agoWho says that everyone has to eat meat? And who are you to command that millions or billions of people shouldn’t be born in the future?
- hilbert42 4y agoI made no moral judgment whatsoever. I only stated what many who are much more knowledgeable than I am have said about the subject over the past 50 or more years. Moreover, it's just a fact that people have been controlling population growth since before recorded history both at a family and state level - take China's one child policy for instance. I never even mentioned this let alone take a moral stand on the matter. Presumably, you would be much more critical of those who've actually acted to control population numbers rather than those who've just mentioned the subject. What's more, the comment I made was a logical OR statement - that is either the world has the resources OR it doesn't, if it doesn't then the world has to do something about it, especially when exponential growth is involved. What are your objections to that? And why are you so indignant and afraid of the subject that you want discussion about it shut down?
- bruce343434 4y agoI measured 157 per minute by stopwatch, so that means ~180 days until this thing hits 8 billion assuming a sustained rate.
- raws 4y ago8B on 2023 if rate of 221k per day is held (little less than 190 days from today if my bad calculation is correct!)
- marttt 4y agoMy grandfather (1931) has 7 grades of education and a lifetime history of building and repairing radios and television sets. He worked for the army and spent some time on submarines, instructing navy officers on how to use radio equipment -- with his 7 grades of formal schooling. Once, during a autumn storm (we're in Estonia), I remember him stating on a business-as-usual tone: "I was 15, when I first got to know electricity." Man, I thought. Here, in front of me, is a living person who spent the first 14 years (!) of his life completely off-grid. No electricity, period. That was also the moment I realized that this same person -- my grandpa -- has accumulated all of his knowledge by first-hand, hit-and-miss experiments. The contemporary model of "theory first" was and is almost completely alien to him, along with book-knowledge of any kind. The result of this? Even at age 90, you can be 99% sure that everything my grandpa states is true -- simply because he only speaks or proposes things that he has tested out himself. As a person with lots of "book knowledge", I find this absolutely fascinating. Obviously, all the technological solutions he has in his household are 1) rock solid and 2) dead simple. It almost appears that if you somehow manage to maintain decent work ethic (and the ethic of being human), a modest amount of formal schooling may have its benefits. Greetings to the grandparents of all HNers!