Visualizing how a population grows to 7 billion. | Hacker News Reader

Visualizing how a population grows to 7 billion.

npr.org

51 pointsbdhe14 comments

Here's another visualization focusing on the last 200 years. Doesn't focus on population growth as much as life expectancy, but a far cooler visualization in my book!

Starts about 30 seconds in: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo

And on behalf of Australia, I'd like to say a big "well screw you too" to whoever designed that glassware.

You mean on behalf of all of Australia's not quite 22 million people? I think it would have been hard to illustrate the growth with liquid, given how few Australians there are.

True; I just wish they'd refrained from saying "And here is the rest of the world" while showing five out of six inhabited continents.

Or they could have just drawn us on "Asia" and relabelled it "Asia-Pacific".

Considering just Indonesia has more than 10x the population of Australia you could also say Pacific-Australia.

And on behalf of New Zealand, I'd like to point out that you are being somewhat hypocritcal.

Man, I was hoping that they'd show interesting things in continent vs. continent population dynamics. Like how Christopher Columbus & his diseases pretty much decimated the Americas' population.

I did like the population densities at the start.

One thing for sure, We aren't filling up earth's surface at that speed. I'm agnostic about the other issues surrounding population growth, but the authors would've made more impact if they used real ratios ( like land surface used per person, a certain natural resource consumed per person, etc.)

People haven't agreed yet what ratios matter, so I think it's acceptable to focus on the concrete numbers at this point- particularly for the layman, which NPR must consider.

'Which ratios' is a very important question- odds are there are only a handful that will really matter. For example, we seem to be running out of oil, heavy metals and helium a lot faster than we are land.

Thats a great video, but now I have to pee.

I must admit, "visualizing how a population grows" gave me another mental image.

If poverty, famine, and disease is already bad in sub-Saharan Africa, and is going to get much, much, worse in the future, at what point can the rest of the world safely wash their hands of the situation and say "you're on your own". If one contry cannot feed and sustain themselves should the rest of the world really carry this burden?

Buffering...

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