The visualization team at the American Museum of Natural History created a video that compresses 200,000 years of the Earth’s human population down to 6 minutes.
The video is a visual teaching tool that allows one to grasp big picture concepts in a small, digestible format. It depicts the human population evolving from 1 million to 1 billion within a span of 200,000 years, and from 1 billion to 7 billion within the short period of 200 years.
As of 2017, the Earth’s human population is currently at 7.5 billion with the United Nations projecting world population to rise at 10 billion by the year 2056.
Astrophysicist and popular science communicator Neil deGrasse Tyson posted a message and short video on his Facebook page today:
The video is interspersed with quick clips of news and political debates while Tyson speaks about our state of scientific literacy. In one clip, Vice President Mike Pence argues “let us demand that educators around America teach evolution not as fact, but as theory.”
Tyson’s core message revolves around the notion that when it comes time to make decisions on science or important matters that affect us all, people have lost the ability to judge what is true and what is not. Tyson calls this a “recipe for the complete dismantling of our informed democracy.”
A timely message a few days before the upcoming March of Science. Here is the video:
