1 . The world’s population reached five billion on the day I was born. That was in Indonesia back in 1987, and my parents was shocked that there were so many people on the planet.     1     In October 2011, the seven billionth baby was born, and experts predict that there will be ten billion of us before the end of this century.

    2     If you said “hello to a different person every second, it would take you 222 years to greet everyone on the planet. If seven billion people made a human chain with their hands, the chain would go to the moon and back nine times.

The human population has never been bigger, but in some ways the planet seems to begetting unbelievably smaller. In the past, travellers from Europe to Indonesia spent months at sea. Now you just have to sit on a plane for a few hours. When you arrived in another country a hundred years ago, you saw unfamiliar styles of clothing and buildings and discovered a completely different culture. In many places today, clothing and new buildings are very similar, and people enjoy the same things.     3    

Even the languages that we use are becoming more global. There are around seven thousand languages in use today.     4     I grew up in a small village where everyone spoke Baras, one of Indonesia’s local languages. Today, like most of the youth from my village, I live in the capital, Jakarta, and speak Indonesian there. The only regular Baras speakers at present are the older people who have stayed in the country, so the language is threatened with extinction.