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World Population Hits 7 Billion

The seven billionth baby was also born in India, apparently. Seems an oddly popular thing to lay claim to. Especially given that, as noted in the article uk_dave linked, it probably hasn't actually happened yet.
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I'd expect the 7 billionth child and about 1000 more to be born in Central Africa, and promptly starve to death.
 
Water. Many areas are "mining" their aquefers. When these run out, they don't refill for a LONG time. Human populations are able to expand to fill available resources very quickly. But since we try to value each life, there are problems when the environment (for whatever reason) doesn't cooperate in keeping those resource levels high enough.

I recommend reading Jared Diamond's Collapse for an excellent discussion of this subject, including studies of incidents past and present.
 
Actually, given that people are dying, too (Miracle Day hasn't happened yet), one would expect that there would be several genuine "7 billionth" humans as the figure fluctuates either side of the mark.
 
My Postman informed me of this news yesterday followed by his view that the U.K. was now full up with no more room.
His solution to this is to kick out all foreigners. I asked him why he would want to kick my Dad out as he is from the Irish republic and as foreign as a Nepalese? His answer was that Irish aren't proper foreigners and he is ok to stay.
I asked him what was to be done with all the newborn now that we are full up? Chuck them off the Clifftops?
Apparently I was being silly as they are British and ok to stay.
It seems there are two types of "full up"
 
When I was born I was the 4,359,209,703rd person alive on earth, and the 78,895,474,268th person to have lived since history began.
 
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Today (Oct. 31 2011) is the honorary day at least...

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-seven-billionth-baby-20111031,0,455314.story



More articles (lots of interesting angles):

http://news.google.com/news/story?pz=1&cf=all&ned=us&hl=en&topic=h&ncl=dIqUDR7VR92ljWM0PhunseH8YKI4M

This thread will probably have some discussion about the part I bolded.

Humans need food, shelter, and water. Which one of the three would run out first if population increased rapidly?

I assume food, then water, then shelter? Unless we don't keep up on water purification and transport technology, then maybe water first...

Well, we are never going to "Run out" of food, water, or shelter. We will simply reach the limit of the sustainability of the planet. For example, if you put 30 rabbits in a cage with enough food for only 15 of them, eventually their population will dwindle down to around 15 and stay at that number give or take a few. We are not just going to eat up all of the food on the planet, drink up all the water, and use up all the shelter. The planet will one day reach it's limit, and then most likely sustain that number.

That is probably what you meant anyways though. But it's kind of like when people think we are going to run out of oil. We are never going to run out, it will just one day become so depleted that it will be too expensive to drill for it anymore.
 
as improbable and pointless as identifying and celebrating the 7 billionth drop of rain during a flood.

cheers
 
I was looking at some population density maps in a related article and am just stunned that China and India have over 2.5 of the 7 billion (over 1/3rd) living on maybe 1/30th of the worlds land.

I know the most populated areas have to be somewhere, it's not like it could be evenly dispersed over the whole world, but that seems a little extreme.

What exactly happened in those 2 countries to cause this?
 
I was looking at some population density maps in a related article and am just stunned that China and India have over 2.5 of the 7 billion (over 1/3rd) living on maybe 1/30th of the worlds land.

I know the most populated areas have to be somewhere, it's not like it could be evenly dispersed over the whole world, but that seems a little extreme.

What exactly happened in those 2 countries to cause this?

Nookie. Lots of it.
 

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