National Geographic “Seven Billion” program identifies world’s most typical person, a Han Chinese man

U.S. National Geographics Society has launched a program, “Seven Billion,” exposing the current conditions of us humans on this planet. The video below is a segment on what the “typical” person looks like. Based on a certain set of criteria used, a right-handed, cell phone owning, 29 year-old, ethnic Han Chinese man was selected. The image of the Chinese man was created by the Chinese Academy of Sciences compositing 190,000 29 year-old’s from China.

I highly recommend a visit to the “Seven Billion” web site. The title of course is the total number of people on this planet today. It has many interesting statistics. For example, 13% of the world’s population speaks Mandarin as their first language. They are followed by 5% Spanish and 5% English. China is expected to have 50+% living in urban areas by 2015. See my prior post, “Father’s Prairie, Mother’s River – the feelings of one billion people on the move,” where I talked about this mass migration of Chinese population that is happening these few decades.

It is smart for National Geographics to have established a relationship with the Chinese Academy of Sciences in the past and now leveraging it. Likewise, I am sure they have teamed up with similar organizations in India and other countries in pulling necessary materials together.

Many people wonder why the American perspective is so pervasive. I would say, by producing this “Seven Billion” program, the American way of looking at the world gets propagated. This is so, because having capital, having a domestic market capable of giving the return on investment, National Geographics is willing and does it.

Thus, as I have always said, as China becomes richer economically, the Chinese perspectives will increasingly get heard.