With moving personal stories from India, Japan, Kenya and China, this two-hour special provides an up-to-date global snapshot of today's human family, now numbering 6.3 billion and likely to increase to nearly 9 billion by 2050. 

It took all of history until the year 1804 for human population to reach its first billion. Now a billion new people are added every dozen years. In the industrialized world - Japan, Europe and the United States - birth rates are falling steeply, while the senior citizen population is booming. NOVA explores these and other trends in the relationship between people and the planet. With moving personal stories from India, Japan, Kenya and China, the program provides an up-to-date global snapshot of today's human family, now numbering 6.3 billion and likely to increase to nearly nine billion by 2050.