7 Billion People Are Awake Right Now

At the moment (as I write), 6.962 billion people are awake, while another 2.1 billion are fast asleep. Awake Globe visualizes this constantly shifting global rhythm of sleep and wakefulness, revealing where people around the world are currently awake, asleep, or somewhere in between.

The map presents the Earth as a glowing, rotating globe. Daylight sweeps across its surface at around 1,000 miles per hour (at the equator), while millions of tiny coloured points show where people are currently awake or asleep. Blue represents people who are tucked up in bed, while green indicates those who are awake, with a spectrum of colours in between showing the gradual transition from sleep to wakefulness.

The actual sleeping and wide-awake populations shown on the map have been derived from a number of different sources using a modelled sleep window. Population data comes from GeoNames, covering 135,233 settlements and around 3.13 billion people. The remaining 4.97 billion people are estimated as rural populations, distributed across each country's land according to local settlement density. The sleep model then estimates when these populations are likely to be awake or asleep, taking into account factors such as age, night-shift work, time zones and different working weeks.

Awake Globe is not meant to be a precise census of humanity's sleeping habits. It is more of a modelled visualisation of one of our planet's daily rhythms. As day and night sweep around this virtual globe, the colours constantly change, revealing the shifting boundary between the billions of people who are awake and those who are sleeping.