Coming soon: Human 7 Billion. (American seven billion = 7,000,000,000 ; as opposed to British seven billion = 7,000,000,000,000.) I was Human 4 Billion, 580 Million, 517 Thousand, 2 Hundred and 82 on the day I was born, which makes me Human 79 Billion, 247 Million, 101 Thousand, 8 Hundred and 82 alive since history began (aparantly that was 50,000 years ago, not 6,000 like you thought). Find out your own place at 7 Billion & Me or at the BBC website, then fall in fear at the graphs of exponential growth which show our terrifying tumble towards extension by overpopulation.
There are too many of you people. I think you all need to get together and, between the lot of you, work out a way of reducing your numbers to make more room for me to wander the earth. I'm not interested in the methodology, just work something out, otherwise I'm going to get gradually more uncomfortable. Any solutions which involve currently impossible modes of travel through space and/or time, including practical means of working them, are highly preferrential. Failing that, I guess you'll have to come up with your own ideas. I want comfort.
In case you think I have forgotten about the billions of people living in poverty, for whom comfort is the least of their concerns, you are wrong. I haven't forgotten about them, I have intentionally pushed their plight to the bottom of the pile. Things I have to think about: wedding invittions, the fictional world I am creating, what's for tea tomorrow, where the next drink is coming from, whether the toilet paper is better from Aldi or Quality Save...
Outside one of the bedroom windows there are two spider nests, full of unhatched spider babies, yeah-yeah-yeah. They have been there for at least three weeks, and mean that that one window must remain tightly shut. They appeared during that late heatwave a few weeks back, but their development seems to have been halted by the cold that now consumes us. In case they do hatch, spreading in their tens and hundreds, I want them to remain outsie of my double-glazed bubble. I just spent a minute or so peering closely at them through the glass, as though trying to spot the frogs in a vivarium at Manchester Museum, when a man walking down the street glanced up and saw me squiting down at him. I was wearing a dressing gown, my hair is unkempt; I just wish I had a dirty beard, and some blinds I could have dropped shut dramatically, to complete the picture of a curtain twitching weirdo.
These are the thoughts and concerns of one of the world's seven billion humans. The spider outside my window just thinks, if indeed it does think, about surviving long enough to see the birth of its disgusting cannibalistic spawn. The other 6 Billion, 999 Million, 999 Thousand, 9 Hundred and 99 people on earth think, if indeed they do think, about other things; god doesn't knows what, and neither do you or I. Conclusion: there's no conclusion; my thoughts arn't arranged well enough for that sort of thing.
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