New Zealanders woke up to a bit of a surprise on Monday morning: billboards dotted around three of its cities stating that the country’s population wasn’t actually 5 million – it was 695 billion . That’s more people than exist on Earth, and we’d certainly know about it if billions of aliens had descended upon New Zealand and made it their home – so what’s actually going on? The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.

Turns out, this estimate doesn’t just include all the humans living in New Zealand, but is instead the Department of Conservation’s (DOC) “playful, back-of-the-envelope” count of all of the living creatures in the country. Well, nearly all of them.

“The 695 billion number came from playing with some data sets and ha

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