标签: population

There are some things that keep on going around the Internet. Most of the time, the reason they keep circling is because they are thought-provoking and well worth taking a few moments to pause and ponder... As an example, my good friend Alan Freedman just emailed me a self-running PowerPoint presentation that I've seen many times before, but that still makes me take a moment to sit back and contemplate just how lucky I really am. This presentation (which you can see by clicking here ) involves a mixture of music and images and text, and starts off by saying: If you could fit the entire population of the world into a village consisting of 100 people, maintaining the proportions of all of the people living on the Earth, that village would consist of: * 57 Asians * 21 Europeans * 14 Americans (North, Central, and South) * 8 Africans The next slide follows by saying: There would be: * 52 Women and 48 Men * 30 Caucasians and 70 non-Caucasians * 30 Christians and 70 non-Christians * 89 Heterosexuals and 11 Homosexuals And so it goes... Now I don't know how long ago this was created – I remember first seeing it years (and years?) ago – so I'm sure that the various proportions have changed to some extent. For example, the world's population, which was 3 billion in 1960 (three years after I was born), had grown to 4 billion by 1974, 5 billion by 1986, 6 billion by 1999, and will reach 7 billion in 2012. I'm sure that the relative magnitudes of things like Women versus Men have changed slightly over time, but the underlying messages remains valid...   If you are reading this column, you obviously have access to a computer and, of course, you can read, which already means you are doing pretty good compared to a lot of people on the planet. So, all I wanted to say was that, as we are poised to enter the holiday season, let's take a moment to pause for thought, and to give thanks to whoever it is that is in charge of the multiuniverse that we have ended up as fortunate as we have...  

Before we talk about the incredible video, I have a nugget of knowledge I'd like to share. I just ran across the following tidbit of trivia on the Astrium website at www.astrium.eads.net A molecule of water will on average spend approximately 12 days in the atmosphere, 4,000 years in the oceans, two weeks to one year in soil moisture, and two weeks to 10,000 years in ground water. I have no idea who worked this out (or how... or why...) or even how accurate it is (how would one know?), but for some reason it gave me pause for thought... ...and what I thought was... why is it that numbers hold so much sway over us? Take the fact that, according to estimates by the United Nations, this year (2011) the population of the Earth passed 7 billion. I find this to be absolutely amazing... and absolutely terrifying. When I graduated high school there were only 4 billion people. Back in 1804 there were 1 billion. It took 123 years (until 1927) to reach 2 billion; 33 years (1960) to reach 3 billion; 14 years (1974) to reach 4 billion; 13 years (1987) to reach 5 billion; 12 years (1999) to reach 6 billion; and another 12 years (2011) to reach 7 billion. Currently we are expected to reach 8 billion by 2027 and 9 billion by 2046. The mind boggles... Or how about the fact that (as reported in the November 2011 issue of Scientific American) the human brain is estimated to be able to store 3.4 quadrillion bytes of information and perform 2.2 billion megaflops, all while consuming only 20 watts. By comparison, an iPad 2 can store 64 billion bytes and perform 170 megaflops while consuming only 2.5 watts. Meanwhile, a cat's brain blows the iPad out of the water with the ability to store 98 trillion bytes and perform 41 million megaflops (in the case of dogs, I know from personal experience that the brain of a Bichon Frise stores less data, and performs less processing, than a typical peanut ... and that's on a good day!). But wait, there's more, because the world's most powerful supercomputer (as of today – who knows what tomorrow will being), the K from Fujitsu, computes around four times faster (8.2 billion megaflops) and can store ten times more data (30 quadrillion bytes) than the human brain. On the other hand, we've still got things beat in the power consumption department, because the K requires 9.9 million watts to perform its magic. How did we get onto this stuff? I have no idea how you always seem to manage to lead me off into the weeds this way. What I really wanted to talk about was a really amazing video . It involves humming birds and bees and bats and plants and flowers and is absolutely beautiful and thought-provoking (make sure you have the sound turned up on your computer and run this in full screen mode if you can). On the one hand this is incredibly gorgeous. On the other hand it makes me feel sad because it reminds me of the scene from the science fiction film Soylent Green – the part where the character Solomon "Sol" Roth (played by the late, great Edward G. Robinson) goes to a euthanasia centre to die. Sol is lying on a bed watching beautiful videos of plants and animals and landscapes on a towering screen (nothing beautiful survives in this future world) accompanied by Beethoven's Pastoral (Symphony No. 6), which comes over as being hauntingly beautiful in this instance. This is an incredible scene that always brings tears to my eyes. And, of course, now I come to think about it, Soylent Green is set in the year 2022 when the population has grown to forty million people in New York City alone. Housing is dilapidated and overcrowded; homeless people fill the streets and line fire escapes and stairways; and food is very, very scarce. This film was created back in 1973 – the year before the world's population reached 4 billion; we can only hope that it wasn't prophetic...