World Population to Hit 6,666,666,666 in May

To many people, this means nothing. But of course 666 refers to the Beast in the Bible. Heaven knows what ten sixes means.

I don’t know who first noticed this looming numerical curiosity, but it was mentioned today on the Drudge report. To see the projection, go to the U.S. Census Bureau’s World POPClock Projection page. There you’ll find these projections among others:

05/01/08 6,664,737,085
06/01/08 6,671,275,141

So sometime in between May 1 and June 1, the gaggle-of-sixes milestone will be passed. (I say gaggle rather than googol, which is a 1 followed by 100 zeros. I could also have used a gazillion or a jillion or a bazillion, all of which are just figures of speech meaning “a lot.” Clearly, the number of people on Earth is a lot more than umpteen.)

The Census Bureau of course never knows exactly how many people are on the planet, or even in the United States for that matter. It’s all estimates. Just fun.

The last big “six scare” was 06/06/06 (June 6, 2006). We survived that, so I imagine we’ll get through this one.

(For the record, 07/07/07 came and went last year without any documented cases of extreme luck directly attributed to the date, and coming up later this year: 08/08/08.)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 16th, 2008 at 9:09 am and is filed under Society, Strange News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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