I measured 157 per minute by stopwatch, so that means ~180 days until this thing hits 8 billion assuming a sustained rate.
World Population Clock: 7.96B People (2022)
101–110 of 191 posts
Re: World Population Clock: 7.96B People (2022)
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
It doesn't matter when Africa is exploding. All the low birthrate in the West does is weaken the countries trying to protect the environment. As this continues corporations will bring in the people from these undeveloped countries who will bring their unsustainable cultures with them. This whole "stop having children to save the environment" bullshit is dumber than the anti-nuclear crap and even more obviously wrong.
> As this continues corporations will bring in the people from these undeveloped countries who will bring their unsustainable cultures with them Cut this xenophobic crap right now. Have a look at the facts. For example, the per capita CO2 emission in Ethiopia is 0.13 tonnes, whereas it's 14.24 tonnes in the US. That's over a factor of 100 more. Here's a good source: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per…
It doesn't matter when they're brought to the West to replace the children we didn't have they'll live with the infrastructure that's already here which means having a similar carbon footprint.
They're also relying on us for a lot of aid, I'm not sure if your calculation takes that into account.
Re: World Population Clock: 7.96B People (2022)
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
But we're reaching a point where we're hitting the limits of Physics in many areas. Like it's hard to imagine an even faster passenger aircraft than the Concorde for example.
Aircraft in general were famously predicted to be impossible by multiple credible sources. https://bigthink.com/pessimists-archive/air-space-flight-imp... Does any science claim or even attempt to estimate its own comprehensiveness? It's all the same bias. We're living in the stone age.
I love your optimism. Fusion is only 10-20 years out, after all.
Re: World Population Clock: 7.96B People (2022)
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
We don't even have a Concorde though. It's genuinely frustrating to me honestly. I feel like the level of advancement during that time was truly fascinating and it impacted people's life. Today, what do we have? Another iPhone? More faster computers? It's all incremental. Why can't we fly on a Concorde? (I know why obviously). I guess I am sad to see that tech that truly changed people's lives doesn't happen as much…
We didn't actually regress in terms of supersonic flight though, it just got relegated to specialist uses such as military. The actual advantage of the Concorde specifically was less than imagined - basically: would you prefer 7 hours in business or first class on a slower but vastly more spacious jet, or 3.5 hours on a much more cramped one? The Concorde was very fast but ordinary passenger jets are also quite fast,…
No, jets are slow and they getting slower to be even more economic. 800 km/h is just a fraction of 3500 km/h that planes can do. Bureaucrats are the ones who restricting progress to the point there will be no Wrights, or Jacques-Yves Cousteau or any other inventors. Everything restricted and regulated, controlled.
Re: World Population Clock: 7.96B People (2022)
#105My great-grandma was born in 1920 and died in 2020. She was lucid to her final breath. I spent a lot of time talking to her about the ‘before times’. She was a sucker for this new world. She loved it. Much more than her world from the 20s. However, she always reminisced about how empty of people and how natural everything was. We were 1.6 billion when she was born, almost 8 when she died. This is the lifespan of a si…
My grandad was born in 1925 - he remembers them installing the electric streetlights in Birmingham. The main difference seemed to be car traffic and tourism. It's just unrecognisable nowadays (and even from the 1980s tbh). Such a revolutionary time though - to go from biplanes to jet aircraft, radar, computers, mobile phones, etc. - I can't imagine we'll see a similar rate of change.
> Such a revolutionary time though - to go from biplanes to jet aircraft, radar, computers, mobile phones, etc. - I can't imagine we'll see a similar rate of change.
I think about this, perhaps more than I should. My great-grandmother was born under monarchy, in a mud hut, somewhere along the Danube. When she was 14, she got stolen on a horse by the son of a band of real highwaymen. She and the son built a house by hand (that still exists, modernized). They had no electricity, no cars anywhere around. Her husband traveled for maybe some tens of miles out of town to the nearest towns. Herself, not even that.
The first time she saw a car, it was passing by, and all the children were running after it smelling the fumes; they had no idea what it was or that there was a human inside. It belonged to an industrialist from the nearest city who made a chicken farm in the area.
World wars came and went, biplanes, radar, the transistor... the village was bombarded, and the state became a popular republic, then a socialist one. Industrialization started. The beginning of globalization, cinematography, and mass media. They still had lights only on the main street. She became a sort of accountant for the collectivized farm and raised her sons and granddaughters.
The Berlin wall fell, and the regime changed again. Democracy. She discovered capitalism, global mass production, and consumerism. Post-communist corruption tore down the town and sold it for scraps. By this time, yours truly came, and she went to the city to help my parents while they were studying and working.
Together, we discovered the contemporary world. Quickly traveling to other countries, computers, internet, QR codes, VoIP, HD media, WiFi, social media, mobile devices, global media streaming, mRNA vaccines, and probably so much more that I can't remember now.
God, this post got long, and it teared me up. I've considered not posting, but I will. I'm unsure if I'm terrified or comforted by the thought that I might not live through so much change, though it feels like the world is changing even faster.
Re: World Population Clock: 7.96B People (2022)
#106My great-grandma was born in 1920 and died in 2020. She was lucid to her final breath. I spent a lot of time talking to her about the ‘before times’. She was a sucker for this new world. She loved it. Much more than her world from the 20s. However, she always reminisced about how empty of people and how natural everything was. We were 1.6 billion when she was born, almost 8 when she died. This is the lifespan of a si…
Depends on the region where your grandma lived, the two villages where my parents grew up (and where my grandparents used to live their entire lives) are almost empty now, especially when it comes to young people. You’d think that everyone fled to the towns/cities, and you’d be correct, but that happened starting with the 1960s and continued for about twenty years. But when we (I’m from Romania) joined the European Union back in 2007 even those cities and towns started to empty out.
Re: World Population Clock: 7.96B People (2022)
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-of-history_illusion There's an even better cognitive bias than this describing your «optimism» about the future, but I fail to find its name.
I guess you're right. In 1700, I don't think instant worldwide communication was in anyone's wildest predictions of the future. Or even weapons capable of leveling a city in seconds. I'll be happy if I get to see a scramble for the solar system thanks to some sort of anti-gravitational device or full dive VR tech (or isekai-as-a-service by Mitsubishi).
> isekai
I didn't know what Isekai was, so I looked it up: [0]
Isekai (Japanese: 異世界, transl. "different world" or "otherworld") is a Japanese genre of portal fantasy and science fiction.
Re: World Population Clock: 7.96B People (2022)
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
We don't even have a Concorde though. It's genuinely frustrating to me honestly. I feel like the level of advancement during that time was truly fascinating and it impacted people's life. Today, what do we have? Another iPhone? More faster computers? It's all incremental. Why can't we fly on a Concorde? (I know why obviously). I guess I am sad to see that tech that truly changed people's lives doesn't happen as much…
We didn't actually regress in terms of supersonic flight though, it just got relegated to specialist uses such as military. The actual advantage of the Concorde specifically was less than imagined - basically: would you prefer 7 hours in business or first class on a slower but vastly more spacious jet, or 3.5 hours on a much more cramped one? The Concorde was very fast but ordinary passenger jets are also quite fast,…
It's a problem across any number of areas that an incremental improvement of the same percentage becomes less valuable to most of your potential market as the starting point improves, even as the cost of the improvements often goes up.
Re: World Population Clock: 7.96B People (2022)
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why? I don't genuinely understand this pessimism. More people means more brains, more intelligence, more energy to achieve things. More people means more Einstiens, Newtons, Da Vincis etc. I do think our systems need changing. Our society currently incentivizes the smart people into something that's not entirely productive but wishing for less people, hmm, I don't know. I feel like this is the start of history, not t…
> More people means more brains, more intelligence, more energy to achieve things. More people means less energy and resources per person though, and people with little resources wont be using their brains to solve problems. Likely more people would have the opportunity to become Einstein's or similar if the population stayed at 1 billion than at 10 billion simply because we would have so much more raw resources to i…
> I don't see the benefit of adding another billion people who have to live a life in poverty. If we could give them a good life, sure add more people, but we can't even give the population of earth a good life today so why add more?
One of the most stunning and under appreciated facts about the last two centuries is that, no matter how you measure it, the absolute number of people living in poverty has decreased even as population increased. Innovation is amazing.
Re: World Population Clock: 7.96B People (2022)
#110Might as well say it: 8 billion is too many, and it’s a good thing that population growth is levelling off. A decline down to ~1 billion would be fine. If we have to change retirement planning, so be it. No other species can grow its population exponentially indefinitely. Population growth in every other species is kept in check by conflict and starvation. We have an opportunity to voluntarily limit our footprint to…
This makes no sense whatsoever. 8 billion is too many, for what, for whom? Next to 8 billion of us, we also take the luxury of keeping and feeding billions of animals, which is enormously expensive and horrible for the environment. Let's start first by making sure we only keep and feed animals that we actually need, and then discuss if we are too many. I wonder how many humans this planet can sustain for every cow th…
8 billion is too many to also take the luxury of keeping and feeding billions of animals. If we had 10x fewer people and kept 10x fewer cattle (and more generally, consumed 10x fewer resources), the environment would be doing just fine. But it’s not doing fine, and that’s why 8 billion is too many.