Numbers of the year 2026

BBC Sounds Music Radio Podcasts Thanks for downloading the More or Less Podcast. I'm your captain, Tim Harford. We're now calling all passengers to buckle up and look forward to what 2026 might have in store for us. Numerically, of course. I'm Simon Calder, travel correspondent of The Independent and, as it happens, a mathematics graduate. And my number for 2026 is 100 million. And it represents what I predict to be the number of international passengers passing through Dubai International Airport on the Gulf in the United Arab Emirates. It will be the first time that any airport anywhere in the world has hit that number. 100 million. That is a lot of people at the world's busiest airport in one year to get through security, passport control, to try all the perfumes in duty free. But Simon picked the number not to shock us, but to show how global travel patterns are changing. Because it just shows how the 21st century has turned into, well, a race between the airlines of the Middle East and those of Asia. In the 20th century, it was pretty much America and Europe who ran the show for aviation. But now, the global super connectors are based in the Gulf and therefore the centre of gravity for aviation has shifted thousands of miles or kilometres to the east. And of course, unlike visitors to a shopping mall or a public park, every passenger travelling through an airport is carefully counted. We're still waiting for the passenger numbers in 2025 for Dubai. I'm expecting them to be just over 96 million. That would indicate a 5% rise in passenger numbers since 2024. And that really matches the pace of growth that we are seeing. So it's certainly going to be at least 99 million, subject of course to the pandemic. But I'm reckoning that by the end of December 2026, the 100 millionth passenger will have stepped through security at Dubai Airport. Thank you, Simon Calder. Thank you and many happy new numbers to everybody in 2026. Now, speaking about counting people. I'm Hannah Richie and my predicted number for 2026 is the number 2082. So that's the year that I think the UN will project the global population to peak. So this is Hannah's prediction about a prediction. Every couple of years, the UN publishes global population estimates and using historical estimates of population and fertility rates, the age structure of the population and indicators such as life expectancy, the UN makes forecasts as to when the world's population will peak. If we start with its 2019 publication, it was basically saying the global population in its medium scenario would reach 10.9 billion people by 2100. But actually that wouldn't be the peak yet. So the population would continue growing past 2100. If we take that forward to its 2022 publication, so at this point it was saying that the peak would be in 2086. Two years later in its 2024 publication, it brought this forward two years again to 2084 as its predicted peak. So Hannah has looked at this trend and is making her own personal prediction that in 2026, the UN will revise its forecast again to 2082. Some countries supply patchy data about births and deaths and this compounds the uncertainty of the population peak and why it shifted over time. But it's people's behaviour that can be hardest to predict. Let's look at fertility rates. When statisticians make predictions, they produce an estimate with a range low, medium and high. Looking back at previous forecasts. Often the actual estimated fertility rates have actually been more closely following what we call the low scenario in the projections historically. So basically fertility rates have been falling faster than they might have expected. I think another key uncertainty is around the fall in fertility rates across sub-Saharan Africa. Over the next few decades, that's where we expect most population growth to come from. But of course how much growth will be very, very sensitive to what you assume for how quickly fertility rates will fall. Thanks to Hannah Ritchie. Who's next? My name is Bill Edgar and I write about football for the Times newspaper. Well, where do you think we're going with this one? My number for 2026 is 48, which is the number of competing nations at the Men's Football World Cup in the United States, Canada and Mexico in June and July. That's up from 32 teams that contested the previous tournament in Qatar in 2022. But if you go back to 1978, there were only 16 teams taking part in Argentina. So now we have three times as many teams at the event. You didn't think we'd look at 2026 without mentioning the World Cup? Being across three host countries, you won't be surprised to know that the distances between stadiums are quite far. There will be a great deal more travelling for fans and players than four years ago because the combined area of the three host nations is nearly 1900 times greater than that of Qatar. So the greatest distance between any two stadiums at the 2026 World Cup is 2,791 miles, which is around 4,500 kilometres. And that's between Vancouver and Miami. In fact, it's the largest distance between any two host cities to have held a World Cup. Now cast your eyes from the beautiful game to the beauty of the skies. Hello, I'm Catherine Hamons. I'm a professor at the University of Edinburgh and I am the astronomer Royal for Scotland. And my number for 2026 is nine in the hope that at some point during 2026, the Vera Rubin Observatory will discover Planet Nine. The newly opened Vera Rubin Observatory has one of the biggest telescopes in the world. Those of us who were brought up in the 80s will have been taught that the ninth planet in our solar system is called Pluto. But in 2006, astronomers changed their definition of what it means to be a planet. And Pluto has now been relegated to being a dwarf planet. But when we look out to the very far reaches of our solar system and the motion of small objects out there, it looks like there's something else there. We've called this Planet Nine. We just think that it is between five to 10 times as massive as the Earth. And it is at least 300 times further away from the Sun than we are. And to put that into context, Neptune is 30 times further away from the Sun than we are. So it's very far away. In a true international collaboration, over 4,000 astronomers from all over the world will be involved in interpreting what will be petabytes of data. We are taking a movie of the night sky. We're looking at everything that goes whizz flashbang in the night sky. And we are building the deepest, widest image of the universe that's ever been taken. So over the course of 10 years, we're going to use this data to discover 20 billion galaxies that have never been seen before. We're also going to discover about four million new objects inside our own solar system. And if Planet Nine exists, it will be one of those newly discovered objects. I strongly suspect if Planet Nine is discovered anywhere, it will be down the back of a sofa somewhere. You mark my words. One final prediction for you is that we'll be back next week with our regular show. So if you have a number you'd like us to check out, please email us at more or less at bbc.co.uk. Until next week, goodbye.