The World Population Is About to Hit 8 Billion People

— What Does This Mean for Humanity?

Photo by Markus Spiske from Pexels.

“All our environmental problems become easier to solve with fewer people and harder — and ultimately impossible — to solve with ever more people.” — Sir David Attenborough

The world population is set to reach 8,000,000,000 people in a few hours! This number is so large that it’s hard to wrap our heads around it.

For humanity to reach 1,000,000,000 people took until around 1800. It took over 130 years to double this number to 2,000,000,000 in 1930. But the following billion people were added much faster, taking only 30 years to reach 3,000,000,000 in 1960. And since then, the world population has doubled again, reaching 7,000,000,001 people in 2011.

So what do 8,000,000,000 people mean?

It means that humanity is growing at an incredible rate. It also means that we’re putting more and more strain on our planet’s resources. We need to find ways to support this growing population sustainably, or else we will face some serious problems down the road.