12 years ago, the UN chose small Sarajevo Adnan Nević as its six-billionth resident. Matej Gašpar, born in Zagreb in 1987, was the five-billionth Earthling. However, this time the UN decided not to declare a "winner", which opened the way for individual countries to symbolically celebrate the birth of seven billion inhabitants.
Asia, the continent where two-thirds of the world's population lives, was the first to mark the fact that the Earth gained seven billion inhabitants on October 31.
Two minutes after midnight in the Philippines, in one of the poorest countries in the world, Danica May Camacho was born, who was chosen as the symbol of this event. At birth, she weighed 2,5 kilograms, and her parents, Florante Camača and Kamil Dalura, were congratulated by UN officials.
Camil gave birth to a baby girl at the Jose Fabela Hospital in Manila. She received a scholarship for education from the UN supporters, and her parents money to open their shop and start trading.
A little later, two Russian regions, the easternmost Kamchatka and the westernmost Kaliningrad, also announced the birth of seven billion inhabitants.
"Our country, as we know, begins with Kamchatka, and that's why we celebrate this baby, the first born in Russia on October 31, as our seven billionth resident," said the manager of that region, Vladimir Ilyushkin, after the birth of little Alexander, 19 minutes after midnight.
Kaliningrad, a Russian enclave between Poland and Lithuania, although 7400 kilometers away from Kamchatka, also declared little Piotr, born two minutes after midnight local time, its winner. Around his mother's hospital bed in the maternity ward, numerous journalist teams gathered to note that "the seven billionth inhabitant of the Earth is a Russian".
After the UN announced that the Earth will reach seven billion people on October 31st, experts have released predictions that the strong population growth will continue and exacerbate the world's already enormous challenges, from producing food for all, the "ageing" population in some countries to dangerous gender imbalances in others.
The earth is already burdened by seven billion people, and the pressure will become unbearable when there are nine billion people in 2050, say analysts and warn that only a revolution in the use of energy, water and land can prevent a catastrophe.
It is predicted that the number of inhabitants could stabilize after that at nine or ten, according to some even at 15 billion people, everything depends on the progress in the developing countries, which today have a strong demographic growth.
The growth of the planet's population has threatened the sources, whether it is drinking water, arable land, the sea or the forest. Figuratively, if growth were to continue at this rate until 2030, another planet would need to be secured to meet human needs for food, water, energy and waste storage from our planet, the environmental network "Global Footprint Network" (GFN) announced. .
"Seven billion people need food, they need energy, jobs, education, the right to freedom, the right to freedom of speech, the right to raise children in peace and security," UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said last Sunday.
Proponents of sustainable development estimate that the population should stabilize at eight billion, and poor countries should be enabled to get out of poverty, reduce the pressure on natural resources and thus make people less vulnerable to climate change.
Some experts believe that the key to such a strategy is birth control, which is strongly opposed by the Catholic Church and some other religions. Economists claim that it is important to reduce poverty and enable education, especially the education of women. Despite numerous scientific studies on ways to reduce population growth, the issue is largely avoided at political summits.
According to the estimate of the UN Population Commission, 2050 billion people will live in the world in 9,3, and by 2025, India will take first place in terms of population with almost 1,5 billion inhabitants.
Seven billion: how to imagine such a huge number?
And while some are thinking about the huge challenges related to the number of inhabitants on the planet, others are trying to visually represent what the number of seven billion actually means?
According to CNN, it is easy to underestimate that number. At first glance, there doesn't seem to be any significant difference between 6.000.000.000 and 7.000.000.000, both numbers have nine zeros, but if you tried to count every number in between, it would take over 30 years.
When was the last time you used the number seven billion in your everyday life, CNN asks, if you ever ate seven billion of something, or owned seven billion of something.
To help us understand how big that number really is, that television gave a few examples.
- Seven billion seconds ago it was 1789.
- If you took seven billion steps around the Equator, and if each step was approximately 60 cm long, you could go around the world at least 106 times.
- Let's assume that an average thimble can hold two milliliters of water. Seven billion thimbles would fill five Olympic swimming pools.
- Seven billion ants, at an average weight of three milligrams, would weigh at least 23 tons.
Television also referred to the examples of some viewers.
- Veronika Panteleon Mendoza from San Juan, Philippines tried to imagine what that number was with a grain of rice. A grain of rice makes a cup of rice, five cups of rice is a kilogram of rice, to reach seven billion grains of rice it would take 200.000 kilograms of rice.
- Bernardo Strumer from Santiago, Chile thought that if he decided to walk seven billion steps, he would go around the planet 133 times, and he would arrive home in 152 years.
- Twenty-two-year-old Luke Georgette from Chicago said that if he wanted to say the name of each of the seven billion inhabitants, he would have to say ten names per second every second since the day he was born.
Professor of mathematics at the American University of Villanova Klaus Wolpert said that this number is beyond our everyday thinking scale. "We count to ten on our fingers and that's our scale. Even counting to a million is kind of outside of everyday experience, and once you get past a million it starts to get blurry," he said.
Wolpert said that the human brain simply blocks when trying to imagine how big seven billion really is and that the same thing happens when trying to imagine very small dimensions or something as big as the universe.
Bonus video:
