Congratulations – you are one in seven billion!
According to the United Nations, the seven billionth person was born last Monday, most likely in India, which has the highest rates of births per minute in the world.
The human population has skyrocketed within the last century. At the turn of the 19th century, the population was a mere one billion people.
China and India are the highest populated countries in the world, each with a population greater than one billion. The United States follows as the third most populated country with a population of 300 million.
The increasing population is the result of longer lives and more healthy children born. Experts in demographics estimate that the population will reach eight billion in 2025 or 2026.
However, according to the US Census Bureau’s projections the world population will not reach seven billion for about another four months.
What experts do agree on is that it is impossible to know the exact number of people living on the Earth. These population estimates are not exact, and do have a margin of error of at least 1-2 percent, possibly even higher.
Not all countries have exact data on their populations. There are no official counts or estimates for 25 percent of the world.
Despite these uncertainties, Daniel Goodkind, a demographer in the Census Bureau’s Population Division, said the different estimates were still “remarkably close”.
The world’s exact population may always be unknown to us, but with recent data collected and statistics, statisticians may not be too far off in their estimates.
