Yo
It shows the global population in real time.
Pretty cool, right?
It shows the number of people that have been born
and how many have died.
But what makes the counter significant right now
is that we're about to hit eight billion people on the planet.
It might even happen during this video.
So keep watching it with me because that's a lot of people.
Let's get into it.
This is
OK, first thing's first.
How is this number calculated?
Like is there someone literally counting
everybody on the planet every day?
This count of the number of people in the world
is really an estimate.
A lot of it comes from censuses and then we use
information that we know about, like how many births people
are typically having in one country,
how many people are typically dying in one country,
and we use mathematical models to combine that and
make these estimates or projections of
the future population.
Ainara:
to reach our first billion people.
Our second billion came a lot faster in just 123 years.
Then 33 years for our third billion.
Since then, we've been tacking on a billion
about every ten years.
That's a huge spike in growth. What's the deal?
The biggest factor that we can think about is
improving health outcomes.
So the fact that people are living longer
and living healthier,
in particular, that more babies survive.
There were also improvements in agricultural techniques,
which meant there was more food for people to eat.
I guess that means it's probably going to be like
what, five years to our next billion,
maybe a billion a year after that?
And will it keep going forever and ever?
It doesn't look like it's going to
keep growing forever and ever.
We think it is going to kind of start to flatten out.
So I think the best estimate for that is something like
maybe 2090 is when we'll hit 10.4 billion people.
That has something to do with what's called fertility rate.
The fertility rate peaked in 1962,
and it's been on the decline since then.
So what is it?
It's this pretend number that we throw around
that can sort of be interpreted as the average number
of kids that women will have in a lifetime.
So why is that number declining?
Sarah:
is an increase in women's education.
So it turns out when women go to school for longer,
they have fewer children.
And also the increasing availability
of contraceptive methods.
More educated women equals less babies,
but eight billion people is still a lot.
Isn't that a problem?
So there's this day each year called Earth Overshoot Day.
It's basically a day that marks when we use up
all of the renewable resources
our planet can provide in a single year.
This year it fell on July 28th.
Sarah:
It's sort of like getting a loan like from your parents, right?
Like, oh, I really want to buy something,
but I don't have the money now.
So you can kind of look to the future and say, like,
oh, well, I'll just, I'll just take my allowance for
for the next three weeks and have that now and they'll
figure out what to do in, you know, three weeks from now.
There was a study done by researchers
at Stanford University that estimated the ideal
population size for our current consumption levels
would be around 1.5 to 1.9 billion.
Let's just round up and say two billion.
Wait, what number are we at?
[counter ticks]
That's a lot more than two billion.
So if the ideal population is two billion people
and we have eight billion people,
how the heck are we existing right now?
The short answer is kind of a combination of
borrowing from the future -
remember Earth Overshoot Day?
- and innovation.
We're working to find ways to make all the stuff we need
without using natural resources,
but it's still a lot of people for the resources we have.
So what can we do about it?
Some people believe that we can come up with even more ways
to change how and what we consume
and make it more manageable and sustainable.
Thinking smartly about why you're consuming certain things
and what you really need is the best thing for kids to do.
And to start pressuring their parents to think about it too.
You know, to think about do we really need
that new thing, or are we OK with using
this old one for longer, or
just reducing the number of things
that we need in our lives.
Sarah says it's also important to speak up.
For example, you can talk to your parents
about voting for election candidates
that are for a more sustainable, less consumption-heavy future.
All right, looks like that number is above my head again,
which means we're watching the global population grow.
[party noisemakers blow]
And wow, here we go.
It just crossed eight billion people.
Watching history happen right here.
But wait, should we be celebrating that?
Didn't we just talk about overconsumption?
Maybe we should both go back
and watch this video from the top one more time.
[ding]
That's it for
For