Crazy statistics

Atom AntYesterday I decided to Ask Google (not Jeeves) how many people were in the world in 2012. Sure enough Google didn’t disappoint when it returned over 6 billion results, one of which was a website aptly called How Many Are There. It reported that as at the end of 2012 we were over 7 billion people. I decided to do a bit more research to see if there was a real-time counter that would tell me how many people are in the world today.

Hey Presto! Worldmeters did exactly that – It showed me just how many births and deaths were taking place around the world…by the second! I do have my doubts about the accuracy but it was rather fun to watch as the numbers kept increasing and netting off after each death. Another interesting discovery I made was when I stumbled upon a nifty calculation tool on The Guardian. Once you entered your date of birth, like so – ‘dd/mm/yy’, it calculated the number of people who were in the world at the time of your birth (There were over 4 billion people by the time I was born. Cool huh?).

But by far the most impressive image I came across was 7 billion people on one page – yes, you heard right ON ONE PAGE. 7billionworld cleverly uses gingerbread-looking men to make up the numbers and also uses colour codes to distinguish the different continents they represent. It wasn’t easy but I found MY gingerbread man at no. 4,455,160,049 in Africa, of course.

If you think 7 billion is a crazy number then can you imagine how many ants are in the world? Don’t bother I’m about to give your brain a rest. An excerpt from Google Answers stated:  “EO Wilson , a noted Harvard biologist and expert on ants, estimates that the number of ants in the world is between ten to the sixteenth and ten to the seventeen or: 100,000,000,000,000,000 ants”. If you’re terrified of creepy-crawlies I apologize for the late notice and hope your nightmares aren’t going to leave you too squeamish.

That number of ants makes you wonder…are their lives as complex as ours?  Do they have marriages? Do they divorce?  Do they have same-sex relationships? Do they have celebrity ants? Do they have presidents for each country colony? Do they have murderers? Do they have a police force? Do they sometimes cheat in relationships? Do they have any idea just how small they are compared to us? As tempted as I am, I’m not gonna ask Google, lol.

Sources: Google Images

6 thoughts on “Crazy statistics

    • Tell you what’s even more mind boggling – imagine if nobody died…ever! The earth wouldn’t be able to cope – birth control policies would cease to work after a while and then governments would probably mandate that people who reach a certain age would have to be…erm…’taken care of’ *covers eyes*

    • Yeah, the world deserves rest free of human disturbance, doesn’t it? How would you like the world to end? Armageddon, biblical flood, nuclear disaster, breakdown of the earth’s core, epidemic, etc. So much choice *insert my gravatar facial expression*

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