One of the more frightening things I ever learned was that if the population of China began walking in front of you at a rate of 1 person per second, it would take approximately 31 years for the entire population to pass you.
The math, roughly:
1 billion people (there are more now, but we’ll call it an even billion) / 60 seconds ≈ 16,666,666 minutes
16,666,666 / 60 minutes in an hour ≈ 277,777 hours
277,777 hours / 24 hours in a day ≈ 11,574 days
11,574 / 365 days in a year ≈ 31 years.
That’s just China. The global population would take around 220 years, with not so much time as to say hello. A bureaucracy can of course delegate census reporting such that the groups become manageable, but it puts a lot of things into perspective when you understand the sheer scale of the human population.
