Here is something interesting to think about; today Australia’s population officially passed 24 million people. That’s 24, with 000,000 after it. That’s a big number, a lot of people.

But is it really?

To put it into perspective, the population of Shanghai proper is around 24.5 million people. So imagine that; imagine all of Australia decided to meet up the Shire of Glenelg, (which has an area comparable to Shanghai), and then an extra Tasmania showed up. That’s Shanghai. All over the world there are metro areas that themselves have larger populations than Australia, and usually an inversely proportional land area.

Mind boggling.

24 million people; such a small nation compared to the rest of the world.

And that number increases by one person every 91 seconds, so just under a thousand new Australians arrive every day (whether they are born here, or choose to become Australian). When I was born there were only 15.5 million Aussies, and look at all the cool stuff we have managed to do in the preceding three decades: Hosting Olympics, giving the world polymer banknotes and Wi-Fi technology, letting loose Hugh Jackman on the world…. Amazing feats.

And to think people still languish in fear of a few thousand asylum seekers arriving by boat each year.

Anyhow, that was just something that came to my attention today. Will knowing that our population has increased past some arbitrary number affect me in any significant way? I can’t say it really will, but now when I hear that the odds of me winning a lottery are 1 in X million, I will have a new metric to measure it against.

MM
#Australia #australiapopulation #randomthoughts
P.s. while I was writing this post, another ten Australians got their wings; welcome! from Instagram: http://ift.tt/1KSTxBo