Hans Rosling's 200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes - The Joy of Stats - BBC Four

[tilt]

A graphic representation of the development (age/wealth) of countries over time - very neat

link

[Aenigma]

Quite cool, but we can't ALL live with as high standards as we do in the industrialized world. Not with todays system and todays power supply and food supply and all that.
Our "modern" system can only support 1.5 billion people in reality.

[tilt]

now he doesn't really "say" anything about well... anything - he's just presenting the data. But you're right, we are running out of resources - just yesterday I read an article in WIRED about how long time it would take for different materials to "run out" ... and we've been hearing about running out of oils the last 20-30 years, and now when we are switching to electric cars they allready talk about there not being enough raw materials to even make batteries for the existing car-fleet. Gotta work harder on thinking smarter

[Steel General]

Is there supposed to be a link or something?

[tilt]

oops... and hmmm .... Aenigma found it without a link obviously *lol* but I've added one now

[Talroth]

Interesting way to present the data, but there are a handful of data points that seem to drop way down below 25 for life expectancy, (Unnamed European nations), and I'm wondering if those were bad data points they never bothered to fix.


As far as 'running out' of stuff, well there are very few resources that we'll actually 'run out of'. We can come up short on what we'll ideally like for a handful of resources and be forced to use alternatives, but the rest is usually a matter of either going for the harder to extract sources, or recycling the stuff we've already used. There is also the issue of the massive waste produced in the modern world, and the lack of quality and care put into some products. Needlessly cheap tools and furniture are some of the worst offenders. They're made cheap and expected to break quickly so you are forced to buy replacements.

Now there are some things that we can expect fairly high turn over on, such as computer equipment, which is still an area of high development. A ten year old computer isn't going to be useful to all that many people these days, but the 180 year old desk in my friend's study? Still a great piece that works perfectly.

The math for solar energy to food conversions apparently gives us an upper limit of about 500 Billion average humans on earth. With proper resource management and urban planning, there aren't really any reason why we can't have 10 billion humans living comfortably in the upper right hand corner of that chart. Does that mean we all get a muscle car that we drive 2 hours each way to and from work every day? No. But why should that stop people from a safe and healthy living environment where they can be helpful and productive persons?

[Jaxilon]

I really enjoyed the presentation. It was interesting but made me wonder about other factors. Is it possible there are countries that suffered from some toxicity resulting from the "Healthy Industrialized Countries"? How about if you lived near Chernobyl? Like when he split out China's provinces. I wonder what other information is in those bubbles?

Thanks for the cool link tilt.

[tilt]

@talroth - yes, you are of course right about the "running out" - it is a question about recycling and for some materials mining the difficult places... and as a sci-fi lover, perhaps mining in space some day ... of course the battery problem is for now a real one - but there is a good chance they find a different way to make batteries before we mine it all

@jax - yeah... those bubbles probably hide a lot of stories...

[ravells]

Oh wow, Tilt! Thanks for posting this! It chimes with me on so many levels. Great graphic design, interesting information, brilliant TV....I could go on.

Thank you, thank you, Thank you! I'll be sending this link all over the place!