On November 15, 2022, according to the demographers at the United Nations Population Division, the 8 billionth person on the planet was born.
That 8 billion mark is an estimate — there is no real-time census of everyone alive on Earth at every given moment, which means there’s a margin of error. But someone is or will be Baby 8 Billion.
He or she is most likely to be born in India, which had more than 23 million births in 2021, and which is projected to pass China as the world’s most populous country by mid-2023, according to data released by the UN on Wednesday. And he stands a better than even chance of being a he, since boys naturally outnumber girls at birth by a rate of about 105 to 100; in India, due to a mix of cultural preference for boys and access to sex-selective abortion, that rate is closer to 108 to 100. With an average life expectancy in India of just under 70 years today and rising, our hypothetical Baby 8 Billion stands a decent chance of being alive to witness the dawn of the 22nd century.
How many other human beings will be there with him to see the calendar turn to 2100? If you think it’s tricky to count the number of people alive today, accurately projecting global population nearly 80 years into the future is near impossible, requiring countless estimates about birth rates, death rates, and movement — “sex, death, and migration,” in the words of the demographer Jennifer Sciubba. Estimated global population in 2000 stood at 6.09 billion, which would have been a surprise to the UN demographers of 1973, who projected that it would be almost 410 million larger by the turn of the millennium — an overestimate bigger than the current population of the United States.
The best guess we have — the medium scenario, according to UN demographers — is that by 2100, global population will have leveled off at around 10.4 billion. What that number means — and whether you even believe it — says a lot about what you think about…
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