Our community has certainly become very polarized regarding Steamboat Spring’s growth over the past year. Some feel like the town is on the wrong track with excessive real estate development. Others embrace growth as a natural part of a community’s development. Sometimes it makes sense to take a step back and try to get a broader perspective. I recently had the opportunity to attend a presentation on global growth and thought I’d share some of the interesting points:

If you’re one in a million in China…
…there are 1,300 people just like you

The 25% of the population in China with the highest IQ’s…
…is greater than the total population of North America.

China has more honors kids than we have kids

China will soon become the number one English speaking country in the world

During the next 10 minutes…
60 babies will be born in the U.S.
244 babies will be born in China
351 babies will be born in India

The U.S. Department of Labor estimates that today’s college student will have 10-14 jobs…
…by the age of 38

The top 10 in-demand jobs in 2010 did not exist in 2004.

1 out of 8 couples married in the U.S. last year met online.

There were over 106 million registered users of MySpace as of September 2006.
If MySpace were a country, in would be the 11th-largest in the world (between Japan and Mexico)
The average MySpace page is visited 30 times per day

There are over 2.7 billion searches performed on Google each month.
To whom were these questions addressed before Google?

The number of text messages sent and received every day exceeds the total population of the planet.

More than 3,000 new books are published every day

It is estimated that a week’s worth of New York Times…
…contains more information than a person was likely to come across in a lifetime in the 18th century.

It is estimated that 40 exabytes (4.0 x 10 to the 19th) of unique new information will be generated worldwide this year.
That is more than all the information produced in the previous 5,000 years.

Third generation fiber optics have recently been separately tested by NEC and Alcatel…
…that carry 10 trillion bits per second down a single strand of fiber.That is 1,900 CDs or 150 million phone calls every second.

So yeah, we do have a lot going on for Steamboat. But in a broader perspective there’s a global boom going on that is nothing like anything this world has ever seen. We’ll have some new buildings and some new people will move here but I’d much rather be here than out there any day.