Population Ages

According to the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), as of 2012, 50.5 percent of the world's population were people under the age of 30. Around 89.7 percent of those young people live in emerging and developing economies like the Middle East and Africa.

People 60 years and older make up 12.3 percent of the global population.

Although the majority of the human population is currently under 30 years old, there are still plenty of older folks among us. In fact, 12.3 percent of people on Earth are 60 years old and older. That number is expected to reach 22 percent by 2050.

Size Matters

I took a look at 2018 populations and land sizes in the various countries that are dominating the news. It is interesting that the news describes the economic and other influences out of proportion to the population or size of these areas. For instance the news would have us think there is not much to Mexico, but its population is the fourth largest in the world and has the sixth largest land mass in the world. Also, Iran is not just a little dot in the desert.

I threw in three states, California, Florida, and Texas for comparison.

New Year Census

The US population is at 320.09 million people as of January 1. It is an increase of 11.35 million since the last census. During January 2015, the US is expected to have one birth every eight seconds and one death every 12 seconds. Net migration is expected to add one person to the US population every 33 seconds, according to the Census Bureau.

The combination of births, deaths, and net migration will add at least one person to the US population every 16 seconds.

How Many People Can Fit on Earth

Many more people can be accommodated on our planet than headlines would have us believe. For starters, there are now six billion people on earth.

The island of Japan has about 143,000 square miles of area. One square mile has 27.9 million square feet. Japan has a total of about 4 trillion square feet, enough to give each person of the earth 670 square feet.

For comparison, if we used the American average of 8,000 square feet to four people, the entire population of the planet would fit into a space as the size of Texas and Nevada combined. That would leave the rest of the world's land for food production, entertainment, and vacations. These calculations do not include the oceans.

Populations by Country

We keep hearing about other countries and their relative size. Joe Dougherty, a freind of mine sent me the following and it sure gives a good perspective of where we fit. It is a bit out of date, as we have over 300 million now, but the others have also grown proportionately.