The Miniature Earth

You must have recently heard of the merger between Google and YouTube.
Being interested in developing new media, I came accross the following video on You Tube, just by chance.

It is called The Miniature Earth and in my view both awesome and a reality check.

Based on a report entitled: The Village Earth, it adapts some of work by Donella H. Meadows, a professor of environmental studies at Dartmouth College. Her research looked at viewing the Earth in the context of consisting of just 1000 citizens.

Her research shows that if the world were a village of just 1000 people:

584 would be Asians,
123 would be Africans
95 would be East and West Europeans
84 Latin Americans
55 Soviets (still including for the moment Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, etc.)
52 North Americans
6 Australians and New Zealanders

The people of the village would have considerable difficulty communicating in :

165 Mandarin
86 English
83 Hindi/Urdu
64 Spanish
58 Russian
37 Arabic

This list accounts for the mother-tongues of only half the villagers!

In the village there would be:
300 Christians (183 Catholics, 84 Protestants, 33 Orthodox)
175 Moslems
128 Hindus
55 Buddhists
47 Animists
210 all other religons (including atheists)

Sixty of the thousand villagers would be over the age of 65.

Just under half of the married women would have access to and be using modern contraceptives.
Each year 28 babies would be born.

Each year 10 people would die, three of them for lack of food and one from cancer.

One person in the village would be infected with the HIV virus; that person would most likely not yet have developed a full-blown case of AIDS.

In this thousand-person community, 200 people would receive three-fourths of the income; another 200 would receive only 2% of the income.

Only 70 people would own an automobile (some of them more than one automobile).

About one-third would not have access to clean, safe drinking water.

Of the 670 adults in the village half would be illiterate.

The woodland would be declining rapidly; the wasteland increasing; the other land categories would be roughly stable.

There would be five soldiers, seven teachers, one doctor. Of the village’s total annual expenditures of just over $3 million per year, $181,000 would go for weapons and warfare, $159,000 for education, $132,000 for health care.

An associated video has been developed that uses the ratio of 100 rather than 1000. It can be viewed at my blog site at: Alternatively, you can enter the following link into your computer to get direct access to it.

Interestingly, since the Miniature Earth project was started / published in 2001, the video has been seen by over 2million people and linked to more than 20,000 websites. It shows that there is some heart in humanity. It is now up to us to make the change happen.

When you look at the world, it is really just a small blob in the universe – we really do need to give it and each other more respect.

Categories: 2006, Anti-Poverty

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