I hate crowds. I always have – – even as a kid. I’m not sure why, but I definitely know that about myself. I thus have found it distressing that I was born into a world of 4 billion people and now there are about 8 billion of the goddamned things running around. The good folks at Visual Capitalist put together some graphics I found fascinating. (As always, click on any image for a bigger version, depending on your screen size).
The first shows where on the planet humans have been located. Even without looking at the full-sized graphic, you can see an absolutely grotesque compression of humans in India and Southeast Asia. My idea of hell would be to live in a place like Bombay. Put me in Wyoming, baby! I don’t wanna see NO-body!
For thousands and thousands of years, humans had the good sense to die early, which kept the population nice and flat. “Thanks” to medicine and hygiene, however, human reproduction went absolutely ape-shit, peaking in the 1960s. This is why you can’t get a parking spot anymore, people.
As illustrated below, it took hundreds of thousands of years to reach the first billion. In more recent times, it has taken only a dozen years to crank out another billion people, complete with all the diapers, sewage, and waste that comes with them. Yuck.
Mercifully, thanks to birth control, we are not going to find ourselves on a planet with 50 billion people .Instead, the growth rate is in a steady downtrend.
Because of this, the insane ascent of the population is steadily leveling off, and we should peter out at about (ugh) 10 billion humans. Good Lord. Oh, well. It’s better than 50 billion, right?
