• Question: how many people are in the world?

    Asked by anon-19384 to James, Marcus, Martin, Rob, Suzanne on 14 Mar 2012. This question was also asked by xoxcorkyxox, harryw123, charlottexo.
    • Photo: James Boone

      James Boone answered on 13 Mar 2012:

      There are about 7 Billion people on our planet. That’s 7,000,000,000, which can be read as “seven thousand million”. A lot of that population is in China and India, which, combined have about 2,500,000,000 (almost a third) of the toal population. That’s a lot of people.
      If you won the Euro Millions lottery of £40,000,000 you still wouldn’t be able to give everyone in the world a penny each.

    • Photo: Marcus Gallagher-Jones

      Marcus Gallagher-Jones answered on 14 Mar 2012:

      Over 7 billion. pretty incredible right? The BBC published a series of excellent article about the worlds population fairly recently. Here is the face of Number 7billion http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-15517259.

    • Photo: Martin Zaltz Austwick

      Martin Zaltz Austwick answered on 14 Mar 2012:

      In the 20th century it went up and up and up and people really worried about it. Now people think that it will slow down a bit, but there are still problems about making sure everyone has food, clean water and other basic needs. It’s been said that of *all the people who have ever lived*, over 5% (one in 20) are alive now.

    • Photo: Suzanne McEndoo

      Suzanne McEndoo answered on 14 Mar 2012:

      It recently hit 7 billion, but I remember when I was in school and it hit 6 billion, so in the last 20 years, we’ve added a whole billion people to the planet.

      There are estimates of the world population over history here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population_estimates
      According to this, 100 years ago, we only had about 1.7 billion people, 200 years ago it was about 1 billion, so not only are we growing, but we’re growing faster with time, which is not good at all. We need to start being a lot smarter about how we use our resources and planet.

    • Photo: Robert Thompson

      Robert Thompson answered on 14 Mar 2012:

      There are a lot of people. We all need to learn to get along a bit better, and maybe learn how to look after where we live. I have no idea how many people but the other scientists seem to have given you some good answers.

      It won’t be long until we outgrow earth I think, where then ?

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