This week, the world’s human #population is expected to reach 8B. About 109B people have lived and died. Each grain of sand represents 10M.
Spectacular #data visualization of human life on Earth by Max Roser #science #SharedPlanet
@Sheril how's the quality of life look throughout time though
@Sheril Spectacular is the word
You are here:
@Sheril It also requires humility before past generations and time. After all, the picture visualizes 300,000 years of history, of which only a fraction is known to us.
@Sheril so satisfying when mind blowing data is visualised in widely understandable way. Thanks for sharing. Great graphic!
@Sheril hard to know what they consider human here...
@Sheril were we to consider the data generated by each side, the hourglass would probably stand inverted.
@Sheril Alt text: Image of hourglass:
Each grain of sand in this visualization
represents 10 million people.
[Top of hourglass] 140 million children are born every year. 14 grains of sand enter the hourglass.
You are here. These 795 grains represent the 7.95 billion people who are alive today.
[Bottom of hourglass] 60 million people die every year. 6 grains of sand pass through the hourglass.
About 109 billion people have lived and died. 10.900 grains of sand.
1/2
@Sheril (Alt text, cont.)
[Bottom of hourglass] About half the people who ever lived
lived in the last 2000 years.
- [Arrow, about half-way to the bottom] Socrates, who was killed in
399 BCE. lies about here.
- [Arrow, about one third from the bottom] Half of the dead bodies here
- [Arrow, almost at the bottom] The first agriculturalists lie here.
Only about 9 billion people lived before
the Agricultural Revolution.
2/2
@Sheril that's amazing—I was wondering about this distribution just the other day. Like, assuming life's better now than before people could talk and reliably harvest food, are we lucky to born at this time instead of in the time before agriculture or language? Looking at this, people before agriculture were just super unlucky: the chance to be born today (or in a wealthier, more comfortable future) seems to be much higher.
@Sheril curious about the origins of this visual model!
A similar one is used in this animation: http://www.fallen.io/shadow-peace/1/
which I wrote about here: https://jonathangray.org/2020/05/06/the-data-epic/
@Sheril I'm just trying to work out whereabouts in the lower glass you'd find that jerk, Ea-Nasir and his crappy copper.
@Sheril It doesn't feel like that long since it passed 7bn. It was 2011. Maybe 9bn by 2031?
@grahamcarden @Sheril Medium estimate is 2037. Population growth is slowing, not just in relative terms, but in absolute as well. So the time to reach 9, 10, 11 gigapersons slow, we might not reach 12.
World population is plateauing. World life expectancy has also gone up from 53 years in 1960, to 65 years in 1990, to 73 years in 2020.
@Sheril Huge post!
@Sheril Fascinating! Thank you for sharing!
@Sheril And > 70B land animals and 2-3 trillion sea animals are killed for food per year. It’s overwhelming to see this relation.
@Sheril
Now that's a neat job. Thanks for sharing it!
@Sheril this is a beautiful illustration, but something oversimplified, if not exactly misleading. The number of people born and especially, as fixed nature of an hourglass suggests, the number of people dying are not constant.
@Sheril
Wow - that’s pretty mind blowing.
@Sheril what happens if we turn the hourglass upside down?
@Sheril That's an excellent visualization. I was aware of many of these numbers but it's hard to visualize it.
This is the page with the hourglass garphics and further info text
@Sheril Impressive!
@Sheril Not sure why this is so spectacular.
What happens when the top of the time glass runs out? What happens when the bottom is full?
We don't have any proof of reincarnation, so the metahor just doesn't fit.
@Sheril to a first approximation, there are the same number of neurons in a human brain as stars in a galaxy. And the same number of galaxies in the universe as humans who have ever lived. So every human neuron has a matching star.
@Sheril Thank you the world data, very informative indeed!
@Sheril To be fair, none of us know if we're at the top or bottom of the pile in the top part of the hourglass
@Sheril great info, I've always wanted to know the extent of human existance on the planet.
@Sheril@mastodon.social there appears to be an inconsistency...109/10
is 10.9
not 10,900
#
@Sheril@mastodon.social wait nvm my tired as brain is fucking up again. #
@Sheril@mastodon.social inconsistency is in my morning cup, it hasn't been drank yet XD. #
@Sheril
I would not have guessed that so many had already lived and died.
@Sheril Interesting stats, do have year for when the population starts to decrease?
This hurts my brain.
@Sheril sensational
@Sheril i wonder if the current population strength is on a verge of decline.
@Sheril this is fascinating
@Sheril
“There’s too many of us. It’s a planet of finite resources – and we’re using them up. And that’s going to mean so much suffering in the future.”
-- Jane Goodall
@Sheril if a human soul is recycled every time someone dies, then I wonder what percentage of people living are old (human) souls.
@Sheril Only 93% of the people have died. p<0.05 not reached yet. Need more data to conclude.
@Sheril Thank you for sharing Max Roser's great graphics. I initially thought that "109 billion people have lived" must be a typo, given that the exponential population explosion was only a recent phenomenon. But apparently this is an official estimate. I guess the flaw in my thinking comes down to this: there may not have been that many people alive at any given time in the past, but the past stretches out for a very long time...
@Sheril I wonder if Philip José Farmer's vision of Riverworld expanded to a number that big.
The majority are buried down !
@Sheril wow! What am incredible visual