Monday January 2nd 2012    Tim Candler

      Hard to get a feel for the year 2012 after only one day, but such a small number should never be permitted to stifle imagination.  This coming year will for most creatures present the same challenges the past several million years have presented, but sometime this year the number of people living upon Earth will reach seven billion. Which, to give a monetary perspective, would be like spending almost a thousand people a day, every day since the first invasion of the British Isles by the Roman General Julius Caesar. 

     Estimates are always tricky but interesting to note that amongst the estimates there is one that suggests the human population of Earth reached two billion in the year 1927. Which means in the last eighty five years, there's been an increase of five billion people. Those who worry about these things have a theory that suggests we people emerged as we are today around seventy thousand years ago. For a great many years we remained roughly one million strong and then about ten thousand years ago we started gardening.  Which to give the human population another monetary perspective would be like spending around one hundred and ninety five people a day, every day since weeding was invented.

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