Lots of fascinating facts in this article:

Lots of population numbers are pretty made-up. In many countries, there just isn’t really the infrastructure to do a good census. In Papua New Guinea, they’re not sure if the number of people is ~9 million or ~17 million. Similar things are true in other countries like Nigeria, which may have tens of millions more or fewer people than is standardly reported. In lots of countries, the way they get their official census numbers is “do napkin math on population growth from the corrupt census they did 30 years ago, which wasn’t trustworthy then.” Our estimates of the number of people in the world might be off by tens of millions.

Similarly, GDP statistics in lots of poor countries are largely fake. Many nations’ economies are mostly informal and thus hard to estimate. For this reason, GDP statistics are often loose guesses from surrounding countries. Sometimes they update the metrics a bit, and this leads to GDP estimates growing by like 50%. In one case, all of Zambia’s economic statistics were being calculated by one guy. Often there’s no agreement about whether a country’s GDP grew by like 30% or declined 20%, which isn’t exactly a small error

It took between 100 and 200 million years for animals to evolve movement. Seems like evolution is surprisingly contingent and chancy in a way I wouldn’t have expected.

The common ancestor we share with octopi is a super simple worm. Octopi are almost certainly conscious. So either consciousness is present even in amazingly simple organisms or it evolved multiple times, independently.