World Population to Hit 6,666,666,666 in May

April 16th, 2008
Author Robert Roy Britt

» World Population to Hit 6,666,666,666 in May

To many people, this means nothing. But of course 666 refers to the Beast in the Bible. Heaven knows what ten sixes means.

I don’t know who first noticed this looming numerical curiosity, but it was mentioned today on the Drudge report. To see the projection, go to the U.S. Census Bureau’s World POPClock Projection page. There you’ll find these projections among others:

05/01/08 6,664,737,085
06/01/08 6,671,275,141

So sometime in between May 1 and June 1, the gaggle-of-sixes milestone will be passed. (I say gaggle rather than googol, which is a 1 followed by 100 zeros. I could also have used a gazillion or a jillion or a bazillion, all of which are just figures of speech meaning “a lot.” Clearly, the number of people on Earth is a lot more than umpteen.)

The Census Bureau of course never knows exactly how many people are on the planet, or even in the United States for that matter. It’s all estimates. Just fun.

The last big “six scare” was 06/06/06 (June 6, 2006). We survived that, so I imagine we’ll get through this one.

(For the record, 07/07/07 came and went last year without any documented cases of extreme luck directly attributed to the date, and coming up later this year: 08/08/08.)

[UPDATE: We apparently survived. As of mid-June, the global population is some 6.7 billion.]

2 Responses to “World Population to Hit 6,666,666,666 in May”
  1. netdragon Says:

    The number has to do with numerology and you shouldn’t take it literally to mean that anything of the sequence 666 has any significance. It was a code because most learned people of the day knew numerology, and it was considered an important science. 6 is the number of man, and 6 repeated 3 times means being too focused on the material world, and man as well. The wisdom part is why it mentions only someone with wisdom will understand, because the average person didn’t know numerology.

  2. dubephnx Says:

    Where are you going to put them all?

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