Website of the Week

The global population has been estimated at over six billion. But how can any one of those six billion people have any conception of how immense that number is? This website, home of the Kill Everyone Project, attempts to put that number into some context by relating it to something familiar: mouse clicks.

The site consists of a simple Flash application: a target marked “Click here” moves slowly back and forth across the screen. Each time any user worldwide clicks on the target, a “kill” is registered. The website’s database tracks how many kills have been recorded over the course of the project and compares this total with the growing world population.

An amazing experiment in large numbers, the Kill Everyone Project helps put into better terms the immensity of the world’s population. In over a year and a half, over 25,000 registered participants have “killed” over 1.6 billion, or just about a quarter of the population. The world’s 205 countries are eliminated in ascending order of population. Only some 22 nations remain. Italy, with population over 60 million, is the current target.