Sometime today, the 7 billionth person will be born, so expect:
Somewhere. Look for the media and the usual worn-out handwringers to strike up the usual dirge. I'm sure Paul Ehrlich has a full dance card for the day. The “Tom Friedman Random Column Generator” app can retire early for the day, after disgorging “Hot, Flat, and Even More Crowded, Oh, And By The Way, Did I Mention That China. Is. Awesome.?”
In other words, the whole “population bomb” shtick, the summa of Malthusianism, is going to have another short-lived revival on Monday, though it is likely to be staged so far off-Broadway that Frank Rich's intern won't even give it much coverage after the opening night footlights are switched off. In other words, this milestone is going to be a one-day story, at best.
Actually, the hand-wringing started last week, and I heard the "Oh, God, the Earth is filling up" stuff several times on TV over the weekend. I found this chart today.
Kind of mind-blowing stuff there. It took all of human history until about 1800 to achieve the first billion. Then it took only 130 years for the second and then 30 more for the third, finally settling down to about another billion every 11 years. But look what starts happening with the ninth billion -- it goes back up. Global fertility rates have fallen so fast that we're going to start seeing dramatic drops in world population, and some say falling populations may present more problems than rising populations. Something else for us to obsess over.
BONUS: Found this cool worldometers continuous count site, which has realtime updates on everything from population growth to public education expenditures today to emails sent this hour and oil pumped and oil left today.
