by That’s the current world population, more of less, written in Romanian. Pretty much the whole of continental Europe uses some version of “milliard” to mean what we (in the English-speaking world) call a billion, and honestly it makes more sense. A billion used to mean a million million, but then the Americans repurposed billion to mean a thousand million, because no-one would ever need to talk about a million million, and eventually Britain, Australia and New Zealand followed suit as they so often do. A million million (which, it turns out, we do need to talk about) is a trillion. This rescaling which means you get a new word every thousand (instead of every million) is kind of messy. A quintillion, for instance, isn’t the fifth power of a million, but it isn’t the fifth power of a thousand either. It’s the sixth power of a thousand, or 1 with 18 zeros after it, which under the old system would just be a trillion. By the way, in the “grains of rice on a chessboard” problem there are just over nine quintillion grains, under the rebased system, on the last square. And even further by the way, Indians don’t use millions and billions in their everyday lives at all as far as I know; they use the lakh (100,000) and crore (10 million), so they’d call the world population “800 crore”.
Whatever you call it, it’s too many bloody people. If you’re 48, the world’s population has doubled in your lifetime. If you’re 69 it has tripled. If you’re 95 it has quadrupled. Britain now has miserably many people; it’s an island coming apart at the seams. I spoke to Mum this morning – she Skyped me from the library so had to be quiet – and she called the UK grim. Dad said I have a better quality of life in Romania – a country doing its bit to combat the world population explosion – than I would in the UK and I agree. (They’re keen for me to go back to New Zealand at some point, though.)
I was already blogging when we hit seven billion. At six billion I was at university. I was seven when we crashed through the five billion barrier and a newborn boy was christened the five billionth baby. But, but, how do they know? What’s my number?
