It’s always nice to re-discover a pleasing site online. One very good site which is an illustration of a thought experiment is The Minature Earth. The original text was written by Donella H. Meadows in 1991 and consists of a portraying the world as a village of 1000 people while maintaining the proportions of the real world. Here are some excerpts:
If the world were a village of 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: 165 people would speak Mandarin, 86 would speak English, 83 Hindi/Urdu, 64 Spanish, 58 Russian & 37 Arabic.
If the world were a village of 1000 persons, 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.
The facts have been made into a pleasing film which can be seen on the site or on YouTube here. This is the type of thing I would like to use in a lecture but I don’t seem to have the opportunity to slip it in. Naturally it would be interesting to do some fact-checking but the general idea is easy enough to follow.