Visualizing Yourself Amongst the Other 6.5 billion

Population: One claims to be in ‘beta’, though I’m not sure where they plan to go with this (could be they are merely joking about the ‘beta’). This site doesn’t really do much, in fact, you will probably spend all of a minute there and maybe never go back. You might find it as interesting and neat as I do and share it with a few friends, or you might just think I’m a bit on the loony side today by even mentioning it. All that Population: One does is use one pixel of your screen for each person in the world. It is quite stunning and helps put in perspective just how many of us there are on the planet. The first pixel is you. The rest are everybody else.

I suppose there are avenues to expand the site. I wouldn’t mind seeing it broken down where each country is color-coded. Expand on that and you could offer a variety of factors you’d like to break the numbers, er pixels, down by. Age, gender, nationality, income, and religion. I wouldn’t think it would be too hard to find some numbers to go with, not only those but, tens or hundreds of other data that has been collected.

Of course, having a larger monitor would do wonders for viewing it once you were breaking it down further than you vs. everybody else. With the present comparison, the vast amount of scrolling necessary to view it helps push the point. Trying to make sense of it when broken down into age or some other factor would likely result in a non-user friendly viewing experience.

So, the real question is can I make a claim on my pixel?