by Jane Smith

Created on: December 05, 2009

I remember a time when the world seemed so much bigger. Paradoxically this was a time when the its population was about a third of what it is today. I know this because of my brother's birthday.

How strange it was to attend his sixtieth recently. (He's much older, of course.) When we were kids (well, I was hardly more than a baby really) we used to build roads together in the sandpit, with bridges and running water to create rivers and small disasters. I can find these memories as easily as what I did at work last week, and maybe that's why what now seems like a magical childhood, doesn't seem all that long ago. But the world has changed more than ever before in history, in this short lifetime of ours.

Let me tell you about my brother and the world's population. My brother is a person who studies things like populations and places, and in his typically well-prepared speech to thank us all for attending his celebration, he gave us something of a potted history of the world, including the highlights (for him) of each decade of his life. It seems that since 1949, the world's population has tripled and is growing exponentially. for non-mathematicians, that means the growth is getting faster. Just think of a typical family over a few generations, imagine them all grouped together in a family portrait, multiply it by a few hundred other families and - well, you get the picture!

But in spite of this very new phenomenon for human populations, something very odd is happening. I can now communicate with someone on the other side of the world, almost in real time. It seems the world is shrinking. All of the billions of people in the world (almost 7billion I think, although I'd had a wine or two when he gave the speech, so don't quote me) are coming closer together, through these kinds of sites, through images captured on film and mobile phones, through all the technology that is speeding us towards one another in understanding and, let us hope, compassion and humanity.The memories that we are now creating are as much virtual as they are real, it seems, and our friends are often people we have never met face-to-face.

Perhaps all of this is just a blip in time that will be supersceded in the future. Or it could be an oppotunity to do something really amazing - to bring the world together in all its diversity in a spirit of free speech, tolerance and compassion. We are, after all, all kids at heart - maybe kids that once loved to build roads in the dirt and imagine a world where our own kids would one day be able to grow and enjoy a happy, peaceful life.

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