The 31st of October is the “Official” 7 Billion Day

Some agency, possibly the United Nations (UN), has declared the 31st of October (next Monday) is to be the official day that the number of people alive on the planet will hit 7 billion. For those that like to see all the zeroes, and I have to admit I am one of those people, that looks like this: 7,000,000,000. Or in scientific notation that would be 7.00E+09. For fans of “The Big Bang Theory” the hexadecimal notation shown using a mono-spaced courier font would look like 1A13B8600 (according to a hexadecimal converter I found on the Web using Google).

According to one report I read it is most likely that we actually hit the 7 billion mark back around July or August.

The LunaWorldClock shows the current population as 7.159 billion already (see grab above of this clock taken at 9:55 p.m. on the 28th October when I keyed up this posting).

The problem is that is really hard to keep an accurate count of everyone alive on the planet. But, because us humans like to mark the date that things happen, “they” have decided to declare that we will officially reach the 7 billion mark on the 31st of October 2011. Just for the record. Just to keep things neat and tidy.

Even so, using this official date, as it happens we have hit the 7 billion mark about a year sooner than forecast back in 1999 when we hit the 6 billion mark. At that stage it was predicted the world would reach 7 billion by about the third quarter of 2012.

Either we are making babies faster than we thought we would, or people are not dying off as quickly as we expected—or a bit of both.

Seven billion is a huge number.

If seven billion people stood side-by-side, shoulder to shoulder, they would go around the Earth’s equator 106 times.

To try and give you another example of how many 7 billion people is there are about 36,000 grains of rice in a kilogram. Seven billion grains of rice would be about 200,000 kilograms, or 200 tonnes, of rice.

In 1960 the population of the world was 3 billion. It took the world 10,000 years to get from several thousand up to 3 billion. That’s an average of 300,000 per year. It has taken the world just 51 years to add on another 4 billion which is an additional 78,431,372 per year.