Yesterday was the day the world population was supposed to have topped 6 billion souls. Did it? Maybe. I didn't notice anything, but I wasn't paying close attention.
The exact moment doesn't really matter. It's one of those artificial happenings invented by demographic statisticians with a talent for generating press releases.
But the 6 billion figure is probably on the level. The experts say we'll surely reach it before the end of the year. That's double what it was in 1960, triple the 1927 population and six times the 1804 total, a lonely crowd of a mere one billion of us rattling around on an empty planet.
The numbers are from the United Nations Population Fund, which keeps urging us to wake up and start worrying about the effect such population increases will have on food supplies in the developing countries and the quality of life in wealthier nations like ours.
It just happened that yesterday was also the day a reader sent me an e-mail that took these population numbers and shrunk them down to a meaningful size that tells an interesting story about that hot topic we call "diversity." Next time you find yourself engaged in one of those "globalization" or "what's the world coming to" debates, you might regurgitate some of these statistics.
If you were to shrink the earth's population down to a village (or neighborhood) of 100 people, while still maintaining the same categorical ratios as now exist in the world as a whole, you'd be living in a community quite different from the one you're in right now.
"There would be 57 Asians, 21 Europeans, just 14 from the Western Hemisphere (both north and south) and 8 Africans.
"52 would be female, 48 male. 70 would be non-white, 70 non-Christian, 30 Christian. 89 would be heterosexual, 11 homosexual.
"A mere six people would possess 59 percent of the village's wealth, and all would be from the United States.
"80 would live in substandard housing, 70 would be unable to read, 50 would be malnourished, one near death, one near birth, one would have a college education."
And finally, get this: "Only one would own a computer!"
Do you get the feeling we're outrageously lucky?
- Dick Dougherty, Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, 10/13/99
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(Last rev. 5/4/00)