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World population to reach 8B on 15 November 2022
- Markoff 4y agoThat would not be problem, if those new billions added were people/children from responsible countries/parents, which can take care of own people and enviroment (they can't do neither of those). The problem ain't number, but iresponsible people.
- NKosmatos 4y agoA nice current world population counter: https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/ https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- neets 4y agoAre we still counting the 10,000,000+ people china says exist but likely don't?
- sedeki 4y agoWhat is this a reference to?
- burnte 4y agoI'd like to know too!
- r2_pilot 4y agoIt's referring to (unsubstantiated?) rumors from early in the covid-19 pandemic where cell phone records indicated that the service of tens of millions of accounts ceased, thus providing a supposed glimpse into the casualties not being reported by the state media.
- toomuchtodo 4y agohttps://www.scmp.com/comment/opinion/article/3018829/chinas-population-numbers-are-almost-certainly-inflated-hide https://www.scmp.com/comment/opinion/article/3018829/chinas-... 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... https://thediplomat.com/2022/03/how-reliable-are-chinas-statistics/ https://thediplomat.com/2022/03/how-reliable-are-chinas-stat... High level, the CCP is playing with stats to hide various factors (COVID, rapidly declining total fertility rate, etc). Population is power, and their total fertility rate is near 1.15 with the CCP having no ability to juice it (common prosperity, nuking the tutoring industry from orbit, etc). The longer it stays low or further declines, the more rapidly the country ages and declines in power (economically, militarily, anything that requires a low median citizen age) and the go forward population momentum is locked in.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- legitster 4y agoCCP apparently overcounted their birthrate for decades.
- chungy 4y agoI don't know if you're talking about the Uyghurs or what, but even in China, 10M is barely a blip compared to its 1.4B population.
- poulpy123 4y agoWow I was still thinking we were 7 billions
- gilleain 4y agoThat was in 2011/2012, according to wikipedia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population_milestones https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population_milestones
- beardyw 4y agoWell we are rounded down. Seriously this is nonsense. No one knows the world population, let alone when it will tick over. It's a catchy headline.
- mcculley 4y agoIt is a mesofact: http://archive.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/02/28/warning_your_reality_is_out_of_date/ http://archive.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/02...
- mythhouse 4y ago:(
- raziel2701 4y agoThat's crazy considering we just had a pandemic.
- goldenchrome 4y agoA disease with a 99%+ survival rate for anyone under 70?
- psychphysic 4y agoAnd people stuck indoors with little to do for months on end :)
- izzydata 4y agoI hope we call this generation of people the covid boomers in the future.
- AnimalMuppet 4y agoWas there a covid boom? I would have expected one, but my impression is that there wasn't. Does anyone have data?
- marcus0x62 4y agohttps://www.cnn.com/2022/10/19/economy/pandemic-baby-bump-economic-trends https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/19/economy/pandemic-baby-bump-ec...
- AnimalMuppet 4y agoUp 6.2% from pre-pandemic, for those who don't want to bother clicking. They're calling it a "bump" rather than a "boom".
- izzydata 4y ago
- andsoitis 4y agoAnd “India is projected to surpass China as the world’s most populous country in 2023”
- paxys 4y agoDemographic breakdown is a lot more important than a single number. China has screwed up theirs beyond measure with their attempts at population control, so this isn't really a reason to celebrate for them.
- GartzenDeHaes 4y agoWhat exactly does China need to do that takes more than 1.4 billion people?
- andsoitis 4y agoI could say the same of almost every single country.
- jhylands 4y agoPay the pensions of half a billion people
- Jensson 4y agoChina is an authoritarian state so that will mostly be a problem for the pensioners, probably wont hurt the rest of the country a lot.
- paxys 4y agoAuthoritarian regimes come down pretty quick once people start to get hungry. So yes keeping their aging population content is going to be a big challenge for the government.
- Victerius 4y agoGood. A less populated China is a weaker China. And a weaker China is a good thing for the global prospects of liberal democracy. I don't want to see China becoming the most powerful country in the world, ever.
- aero-glide2 4y ago:)
- mensetmanusman 4y agoStill has a ways to catch up to reaching parity with the number of mobile phones (~ 15B)
- TylerLives 4y agoHow many people does HN think should live on Earth?
- fimdomeio 4y agoA lot less. I think humanity overestimates it's ability not to destroy ecossystems to a point where it will make life awful also for most humans. Also I think we constantly underestimate how much was already destroyed.
- RC_ITR 4y agoAs many as it can comfortably sustain? Which RN looks like a lot less than 8bn (given climate change and all). Open to your ideas of how we fix that though! I think a resource-light society of many billions would be amazing
- twelve40 4y ago> With less than 5% of the world's population, the U.S. consumes almost 17% of the world's energy > looks like a lot less than 8bn seems like looking at the single total population count for sustainability is ridiculously simplistic since some subsets of this total count consume a helluva lot more than others.
- RC_ITR 4y agoYou don't think that most of those 8bn people strive to live like Americans do? Or do you just think they won't get there?
- twelve40 4y agoit's a great question. At the very least, if they do, they have a chance to avoid some mistakes of the past on the way up, like heavy coal usage, tons of unnecessary plastic, etc. But who knows, right? who knows how it all turns out for them.
- tartoran 4y agoWow, it doubled in less than 50 years. World population was 4 billion in 1974, thats nearly 49 years ago…
- bryanrasmussen 4y agoHuh, Thanos wasn't that smart it seems.
- maxbond 4y agoWorth noting this same criticism applies to other silver bullets. If we were to snap Thanos' glove and instantly terraform Mars and move half of the population there, and carried on in the same way, we'd exhaust the resources of both Earth and Mars in short order.
- NeoTar 4y agoAnd that's slightly longer (buy not by much) than the time it took to double from 2 to 4 billion (1927-1974), and quite a bit longer than the time taken from 3 to 6 billion (1960-1999).