In the lingo spoken by those who work in the financial world, the “wizards” who are currently running the global economy, a yard is another way to say a “billion”. If you speak Romanian (or Russian or a dozen other languages), you know that the word for a billion sounds like “mill-yard” in English and so hence the word “yard”.

If you’re from the Indian subcontinent you probably think of a billion as 100 crore.

However you want to put it, I’m sure by now you’ve heard that the United Nations has “officially” declared that the global population of human beings has now surpassed 7 billion individuals.

Every single one of you reading this remembers when the global population of humans was “only” 6 billion because it happened in 1998. That is a simply astonishing fact and yet in all the news coverage I’ve seen or heard about (admittedly not that much) the focus seems to be on “well let’s work together to make this a better place” and that’s about it.

There are no “official” numbers of global population anywhere but nonetheless a look at this chart from the World Bank is amazing. If you were born in 1968 then you have seen the population of the world double in your lifetime. A billion (or yard or 100 crore) of people were added to the planet in the last 13 years and the population has doubled in in 43 years. That is not just interesting, it is absolutely mind boggling. Clearly if these rates do not change, nearly every single one of you reading this is going to live to see a staggering number of human beings occupying this planet.

It is really hard to understand what a billion of anything is since the only time we see numbers like in concrete examples are when dealing with very tiny things, like grains of sand on the beach. However estimating that Romania has a population of about 20 million, and 1 billion being 50 times that amount, if all of those newly added 1 billion people (in the last 13 years) moved to Romania, it would mean there were 50 new people added to every single person you know, every single person you see on the street and every single person you live with.

Just imagine 50 people moving into your house (if you live alone) or 150 people moving in if you live with just your parents. Just take a second and imagine that many people jam packed into the place you call home and that is what adding a billion people feels like. Of course they haven’t moved into your home but since we all live on the same planet, they have moved into our collective home.

I mention all of this because I find complex systems quite fascinating, whether that’s the global population of humans or understanding the weather. Non-linear dynamics and the the emergence of patterns is something that keeps me up late at night, quite frankly, because my brain seems to be hooked on the topic, almost like a drug.

I live in a world where I am surrounded by people mouthing off expert opinions (or else repeating the expert opinions of others) where the underlying principle is “because it was like this in the past, we can predict the future”. You can see it everywhere from economics (currently dickering over what to do about Greece) to religion to politics to even include what kind of big-budget Hollywood movies to produce (let’s make a sequel of a movie that previously made money!).

If you go back in history, you see case after case of what seems to be astoundingly little change. The dominion of the Catholic Church over Europe during the “Middle Ages” or medieval period is an excellent example. For hundreds of years, the vast majority of the population simply was Catholic, as were the rulers and the heads of state, and that’s just all there was to say about it. But when you consider that the global population in the year 1350 was just (approximately, of course) 370 million, suddenly it all makes a lot more sense. The population of Europe in that time was roughly 70 million. Today it is roughly half a billion people in the EU alone.

There are more people living in Germany today than in the entire Roman Empire at its maximum expansion. And yet Germany today is just a drop in the ocean of the global population.

Why? Why does this matter? Well on its face value, clearly this matters on a daily level because all those 7 billion people have to eat, have to drink water, need shelter and all of the other things that you and I want for ourselves. They all need a place to live and transportation to get around and heating/cooling and probably want a nice mobile phone and a television and good clothes and all the rest of it.

But what I find most interesting is simply that the more complex a system is, the less predictable it becomes. Guessing (or predicting/modeling) that the weather tomorrow is going to be roughly like today is fairly easy and you’re probably right. Today is quite cold and I imagine tomorrow will be as well. But the weather, while complex, still deals with a planet that is the same size today as it will be tomorrow. The human population, on the other hand, is growing at a fantastical rate.

We live today in a world that has never existed before. All of the history books, all of the stories and lessons from the past, are largely useless because they deal with a planet that would seem virtually empty to us. All you have to do is look at this chart to see what I’m talking about. The societies and cultures that existed in the past were based on numbers so low that they would be little more than neighborhoods in one of our modern metropolises today.

So what will happen in the future? That I cannot say. But what I can say is that as the population increases at this fantastical rate, things will also continue to change at an equally frenetic pace. More and more things which seem enduring or long-lasting will be cast aside. That which seems fundamental and ordinary to all of us today will be swept away. And more and more governments, religions and organized social structures of all kinds will become increasingly less stable and begin to break apart and to assemble into completely new forms.

Some of this is going to be quite bad I’m afraid, from riots to civil war to pollution to wars. But one of the interesting byproducts of having 7 billion people walking around and breathing is that they will also add the collective input of their 7 billion brains to the knowledge, awareness and consciousness of the planet. You can already see the effects of this on such things as wikipedia itself, which is a result not so much of the internet but the fact that there are millions of people out there who have the time and energy to collaborate on it.

Compare wikipedia to the Codex Gigas, a book written in about 1229, wherein a handful of monks assembled “all” of what was known to (European) humanity in a single, massive book. Eight hundred years later the population is so large that volunteers are churning out a new Codex Gigas every single day. Fascinating stuff.

Whatever happens today, tomorrow and in the future, it’s going to be an interesting ride :)