As we were gabbing about all sorts of things this morning, Sofie Aller and I somehow got to the world population. We both knew that right now there were about seven-billion people. We were not sure how many people there were after World War II, though. She taught it was only a billion, but I went for more than three-billion, or roughly a half of the present number. When I returned home, I checked the numbers on the World Wide Web. The most credible source says that the world population at the end of the war was just over two-billion. That is, close to five-billion have been added since. The growth was fastest during the baby-boom years following the war. All in all, the world population has nearly tripled in sixty-seven years. Staggering. And immediately obvious as the main reason for so many problems the world population faces at this juncture. Not to mention the future.

Addendum (March 5, 2018)

The source I mentioned in this piece was the Wolfram Alpha website (wolframalpha.com). To be sure of the world population in 1945, I searched the site once again. And the number I got was 2.35 billion. A year later, when I was born, there were 2.38 billion people on the planet. By 1964, the end of the baby boom following World War II, there were 3.29 billion people in the world. In the eighteen baby-boom years, the world population grew by nearly a billion people. For my sins, I trust these numbers. Stephen Wolfram, a British-American computer scientist, is behind the site in question. A maverick past compare, he has always worked for himself and no-one else. And the Wolfram Alpha site offers most credible answers to all manner of numerical questions, such as the world population at different points in time. Three cheers for mavericks of all times!