Hello and welcome to More or Less on the BBC World Service. We're the good cop bad cop

interrogators of dodgy statistics and I'm Tim Halford. This week, the future of the

human race. There are more than 7.7 billion people on the planet today. Is that a big number?

Well, it has more than tripled since 1950, but population growth has slowed down a lot.

The experts think it will stabilize somewhere around 11 billion people. But just because

global population is stabilising, doesn't mean each country is following the global trend.

Low listener Roger Young spotted a surprising looking stat in the British newspaper The Times.

I read that in 60 years time, the population of Nigeria will be greater than the population

of the whole of Europe. Is this likely?

To put this into context, there are currently just over 200 million people in Nigeria and

over 740 million in Europe, which for the purposes of this claim includes Russia and

Turkey. Could Nigeria really accommodate so many people? It is a big country, but not

nearly as big as India or China or for that matter Europe. So it could get pretty cozy

with 3-4 billion people living there.

Let's start with the forecast. It comes from the Department of Economic and Social Affairs

at the United Nations. I spoke to the director of the Population Division, John Wilmuth.

Well, our projections are each somewhat more than 600 million for each of those two populations

in around 20, 18, about 60 years, as you say. There is uncertainty around that and the

point at which the Nigerian population may surpass the European, there is a great deal of

uncertainty. We say that there's about a 50% chance that this will happen before 20,

85, but that also means there's a 50% chance that it would happen after that point. So

it's headed in that direction, but when exactly it will happen, we're unable to say.

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