The world at seven billion: What's your number?

With the world population approaching seven billion people - the U.N. says we'll reach that milestone this Monday - it's easy to feel lost in the (literal) crowd. But you can at least get a sense of how you fit into the chronological story, courtesy of this wonderful widget from the BBC.

The program calculates how many people were alive when you were born, as well as how many lived before you since history began. By that latter measure, your humble correspondent is old, indeed.

Sigh.

On a related topic, check out this piece from CBS News correspondent Mark Strassmann on the Earth's most typical person.

[Saturn66]

Fortunately, we have enough wars, tsunamis, murders, and other mahem to slow population growth! What would we do if peace and serenity were to descend upon us? Worst case scenario? Actually, I'm optimistic that with increased enlightenment about birth control and plummeting sperm counts, we can solve this problem. War and murder, maybe not.

[EmaChop]

Watch out, this BBC app has some issues. If you know the "number" of someone (at calculated by BBC), there's now a site that will reverse-engineer it and give you the date of birth. The address is whatsyourdob dot com (www.whatsyourdob.com). It's a big privacy problem!

[tsigili]

Precisely why humans are killing the planet. Simply too many humans, doing too much destruction.