TL:DR – The world population is now well over eight billion, 8 000 000 000
At the time of writing, the human population is roughly 7,986,585,500 as of today. That’s about 13 million shy of 8 billion people. On average this year population has been growing at about 222,000 people every day.
The world’s population has doubled since 1974, the year ABBA won the Eurovision Song Contest with their song Waterloo.
It was half the 1974 number in 1927, the year of the first transatlantic phone service.
We numbered a mere billion in 1804 the year Napoleon Bonaparte was proclaimed Emperor of France.
It had taken from 1600 to Napolean’s time for the estimated world population to have doubled to a billion, that was the year England’s King Charles I was born.
The population hit just 250,000,000 between the years 900 and 1000.
It was half that last figure some time between 200 and 500 BCE.
During the fourth millennium BCE, the world population was roughly that of modern-day Belgium where we find the municipality of Waterloo.
Projections suggest that the global population will continue to grow, but at a slower rate than in the past partly because of declining fertility. The United Nations projects that the global population will reach 9.7 billion by 2050 and 10.9 billion by 2100. However, these projections are highly uncertain and depend on a variety of factors, including fertility rates and mortality rates.