When you think about it, it is really quite remarkable that there are now about 7 billion humans on the planet Earth.

It is even more amazing when you think that it took us until the start of the 19^th century to reach 1 billion and then well over a century more to get to 2 billion. Since then the number of people on the planet has been rising at an ever increasing rate. So, what else is there an awful lot of to keep us company?

Ants

If you hate ants as much as I do then you probably do what I do and kill hundreds of them every single freaking day and in the most brutal way possible. Sadly, that doesn´t even make a dent in the population of these horrible little critters. In fact, it is believed that for every person alive on Earth there are – drum roll please – about a million ants crawling about and basically being a pain in the ass.

Chickens

One of the great mysteries of the world (at least to me) is the question of where all the chickens live. Go just about anywhere in the world and you will find some tasty poultry on the menu. We eat tons and tons and flipping tons of these harmless if stupid birds every year. Yet, in my entire lifetime I have probably only ever seen about a dozen live chickens. So I repeat, where do they all live? Anyway, it is hard to know how many are alive at any one time, as we tend to eat thousands of them before anyone can get to the end of their calculations. The best estimates I can see place the total world population at around 20 billion at any one time.

Lego People (Soon)

Perhaps one of the most bizarre predictions of recent times is that by 2019 there will be more Lego people in the world than actual humans. This is incredible when you think that the first one was only made in 1978. By 2006 their population had shot up to 4 billion and by 2019 it is predicted to reach 8 billion. Come on people, let´s get procreating so these little blighters don´t outnumber us.

Brown Rats (Maybe)

If there is one type of creature I hate more than ants it is rats. If Latin were still spoken today you would call this nasty guy ratus norvegicus but you know him as the stinking brown rat instead. The brown rat is the most successful mammal after the homo sapien, as they live on every continent except Antarctica. To be fair, they are probably packing their tents and organizing an expedition to the Ellsworth Mountains while you read this. We don´t know how many are alive right now, as even scientists find them too icky to sit there and count them all day long. However, it is entirely possible that they outnumber humans.

Phones (Almost)

The most recent figures collected by sad people with clipboards and empty lives suggest that there are almost as many cell phone subscriptions on Earth as there are actual living dudes. The figures from the United Nations suggest that there are 7 billion people and 6.8 billion phone subscriptions. Personally, I think that the reason for this surprising statistic is that millions of chickens and rats are getting hooked up on their smartphones.