Numbers Don't Lie: 71 Stories to Help Us Understand the Modern World

by Vaclav Smil

The world will soon have 8 billion people (8 x 109), in 2019 its economic output (in nominal terms) was about $90 trillion ($9 x 1013), and it consumed more than 500 billion billions of joules of energy (500 x 1018, or 5 x 1020).