On 15 November 2022, the United Nations declared that the world population reached 8 billion. To be fair, no one’s out there counting every human being on the planet. You’d have to count more than 250/second to finish the job in a year. Even if you distribute the counting and ignore the birth/death problem, the lines would likely rival your local DMV.
To put that into more perspective, New York City has 26,403 people per square mile (10,194 per square Km). If you packed all 8 billion humans into a city as dense as NYC, that city would be slightly larger than Turkey. For my US-centered readers, that same city would be ~13% bigger than Texas. (My apologies to Texans and New Yorkers who find any mixture of their homes abhorrent).
Other interesting (at least to me) population facts. Sometime during the summer of 2023 India will surpass China as the world’s most populous country. Combined the two countries’ 2.8 billion people represent roughly 35% of the world population. In spite of a relaxation of family size limitations, China’s birth rate has continued to decline. As a result, the UN forecasts that its population will drop from its current 1.4B to 767M in 2100.
While I used NYC as the model, it doesn’t even make the Wikipedia list of the most densely populated cities. That title goes to Malé in the Maldives. The island nation’s capital supports 153K people in less than one square mile. That’s roughly 8 times the density of NYC. If we packed the world’s population into a single city as dense as Malé, it would be slightly smaller than Switzerland or Kentucky. If you ignore cities with fewer than 1M people, Manila is the most densely populated city in the world. FWIW, Bogota and Paris are the density leaders in the Western Hemisphere and Europe.
So how did we get to a world population of 8 billion? As this is a family-safe blog, I’ll leave the biology part to you and get on to our featured map. This combination map was created by Office Timeline and is free for anyone to share. Darker shades indicate higher populations.
As always thanks for reading.
Armen
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