So, I like what wilfred has done with this, breaking it up into stages.
I wonder, though, if each planet ought have its own sort of "expansionary" period, where, as early settlers, people are doing the heavy breeding/fill up the space thing, at different times in history.
I also think, at the point that we have less population than exists in the G20 today, we need to start talking about how many people you need to sustain an economy, with every specialization filled, and with enough backup that a single tragedy does not cripple society.
I would expect specialization to require at least as many roles as we work right now, and then, especially in regard to nanotechnology, and medicine, spacecraft and space-industry, many many more. So, I think aside from the question of what's a reasonable growth rate, and yall know I lean towards higher ones, is what is a reasonable amount of people necessary to sustain a freelancer economy?
(07-12-2018, 03:11 AM)Wilfred Wrote: Disclaimer: I am not a demographer, I just play one on TV.
It's fun to play around with the numbers, but one must also take into account that pregnancy and birth is very taxing on the body. So most people don't want to bear more children than they have to. By that I mean to overcome mortality rates.
Prior to the Industrial Revolution, average fertility rates were in the region of 6 children per woman -- but, on average, 4 of those 6 died before having children of their own. With the Industrial Revolution living conditions improved, leading to lower child mortality. As the mortality went down, so fertility followed -- albeit with a lag, so that in the 1960s there were 5 children born per woman, out of whom 4 survived.
Today, the average fertility rate is about 2.33 globally, and it keeps falling. (The ideal fertility rate for a stable population is of course 2.0, with zero child mortality, where two parents have two children who survive to replace them.)
Now, the Houses are all descended from high-tech, developed nations, which today have very low fertility rates. On the other hand, after the Exodus they had gone through a long period of war and were trying to establish colonies with a limited starting pop, which should drive fertility up.
Assuming that the Sleeper ships carried 30k people, as @Unseelie and @Kazinsal said, I put in these parameters:
Starting population: 30K
Immigration/year: 0
First birth given (age): 25
Human age (average): 80
Age pyramid: Flat
I chose a Total Fertility Rate of 3, which gave me a Yearly Growth Rate of 1.46%. After 800 years, the total population is 5.94 billion, and in 825 A.S. it's at 8.77 billion.
However, it is reasonable to assume that fertility would decline as the total population increased. It may be high initially, out of necessity, but it can then decline out of convenience.
So let's say that we start with a fertility rate of 4 for the first century. People are shagging like mad to build up a workforce, although they still want to be reasonably comfortable. After 100 years with a yearly growth rate of 2.42%, population has risen to 275'000 people.
For the second century, fertility drops to 3, yearly growth drops to 1.46%, and the population reaches 1 million in 201 A.S.
In the third through seventh centuries (still assuming no immigration), fertility drops to 2.5 and growth drops to 0.81%. In 701 A.S. the pop reaches 64 million.
In the final 125 years, fertility declines further to 2.1. Growth drops to 0.18%. In 800 A.S. the population is 74.35 million, and in 825/826 it'll hit 78 million.
Conclusion:
I think you can fudge the numbers any which way you want, really. You can have people have even more babies initially, and starting at a younger age. But I think it is important that fertility declines and the age of first birth increases over time. I still think the billions-upon-billions-upon-billions populations are a tad exaggerated.
This is not how it works though.
Higher birth rates at higher child mortality does not affect population growth rates, just the total fertility rate. As the net reproduction rate (children surviving) approaches the gross reproduction rate (children born), fertility rate does decrease, yes, but growth can go either way depending on whether or not the NRR drops more or less than the GRR rises. To keep things simple, let's assume that the NRR and GRR are as good as the same, which is the case in developed nations. Under those circumstances, the total fertility rate is primarily impacted by the the relative cost of raising a child to a reproductive adult. Put differently, it answers to the question: "Can we afford to raise another child?" Assuming widely available contraceptions, that's actually a very straightforward question for parents, and the prevailing trend here is that high income parents have more children than middle income parents, regardless of education. In fact, when Western parents are questioned about family sizes, most of them indicate that they would like to have more children than they actually have, if only they could afford to do so. The current plateauing of growth rates in the West (and Europe in particular) has to do with the costs of raising a child and the costs of keeping the non-productive elderly alive having grown faster than the economy while the gap between the more and the less developed countries closes, with the latter having cheaper access to resources. What this basically means is that lower growth rates in more developed countries have nothing to do with technology itself and everything with the opportunity costs of population growth rising faster than economic growth. This is the population growth rate of purchasing power parity per capita income growth, modified by inequality, modified by the rate at which primairy resources (which fuel economic growth) are extracted.
What all of this basically comes down to is two conclusions:
1) Population growth is directly related to the amount of resources you can mine, refine and turn into consumer products, and the amount of labour you have available to do so, minus the amount of those resources that are consumed rather than used for more production.
2) On Earth, global growth rates are dropping because the percentage of non-productive pensioners and costs of keeping them alive are growing faster than the global labour supply, productivity rates and thus the economy, meaning families have less income to spend on raising children on average and in relative terms.
However, we're not done yet, because we've not added technology itself to economic equation yet. Technology isn't something that just happens at a constant rate. The growth of technology is dependant on investment, which means it's dependant on cost analysis. Technology raises productivity. However, so does population growth due to scale effects. This translates to humans having to make a very real choice: do I commit more resources to technology, or do I commit more resources to growing my population? In an environment where land and resources have extreme ratios per person, whoever invests in manpower raises their productivity faster than whoever invests in new technology. This means that, on average, larger families survive better than smaller families, and that larger families will, on average, reproduce larger families as well.
What this means for a planet in Sirius, assuming Earth-like conditions, is that the pre-existing technology to strip-mine planets and asteroids with relatively low amounts of human labour due to automatisation would fuel an absolutely explosive population with unprecedented family sizes and growth rates, which would consistently remain much higher than 2%. They'd be at growth levels currently only seen in some African countries (3~5%). Family structures would likely adapt to cope with this. The core planets would be far beyond current Earth populations long before the year 800AS, and their growth would not slow down before this happens. These are not exaggerations in the slightest. In order to arrive at the much, much lower population estimates of Vanilla and Discovery, you need to invoke special circumstances Sirius-wide, or have extremely resource-poor planets only, or start with very small populations of no more than a few hundred initial settlers .. and even then it'd be a stretch to keep population numbers down that hard.
To put some perspective on that: at current consumption levels, the mass of all asteroids in our solar system is enough to support quadrillions of humans. That's 1000 trillion humans, from asteroids alone, which are a negligible amount of the solar system's mass compared to planets.
I just used the calculator thingy to get an estimate of Crayter's population, from by the time we arrived at sirius, as the pre-sirius is pretty much unknown regarding population. Assuming 3 Million at 801 A.S. to reach 5.3 million in 24 years you have to have %4.3 growth rate and first birth age of 18, kind of crazy if you think of it... Assuming average lifespan of 75 years that is of course. Coincidally, when you look at RPed Crayterian families, all have at least 4 child. A more logical pop for CR would be around 4.3-4.5 million. Or you have to explain the "surplus" population with immigrants, freed slaves, foreign settlers etc. Thats rather complicated though…
Batavia introduces a very key point regarding production and carrying capacity.
So lets muck with that.
What techlevel, and therefore what ability to provide for persons, do the settlers of Sirius have?
Do they have easy fusion power,
Do they have nanotech/nanoassemblers?
Do they have cheap medicine, do they land with industrial machines or with groundmovers, or do they use fusion drives to burn roads into their early cities?
Do they sit in obit, most people asleep for 2 or 10 years, while Von-Neumann machines roll across the countryside, ploping down foundations and resource depots and such?
Do they walk out of their ship and cut themselves to ribbons on the grass,
Does their world have such a bad axial tilt that it's frozen everywhere but the equator, or that the winter is two years long?
Is their first planet 95% ocean, with only the tallest mountains above water?
Are the storms so severe they have to build everything like a bunker,
Is the native ecology so hostile that you might need to nuke it?
Is their colony handicapped by sabotage, and just settlers with the shirts on their backs, and whatever else they could fit in the escape pods?
What about atmospheres. Is the planet breathable, does the winter freeze the oxygen out of the air?
Is the water drinkable?
After industry sets in, is the planet livable, and is that true in the cities, which have atmosphere scrubbing, or wherever?
(07-12-2018, 12:18 AM)Felipe Wrote: Hmmm, whats the inR explanation for Rhein being so behind then? Too much krieg no time for luv?
Don't actually put too much stock in that- I'm almost certain I missed a Rheinland population center somewhere, so if you'd look at the spreadsheet and tell me where I cocked up, that'd be great.
Kaz's point about the tidally locked world is a good one though: A full year spent in total darkness doesn't do a lot of good to the human physique or psyche. As it turns out: Humans actually need sunlight, so depression and other psychological problems would probably be more common on NB than many other places. Add to that the effects that a year-long day-night cycle would have on the weather of a planet, I'd have to imagine the initial colonists had a bit of a harder time surviving than any of the other capital worlds. Gimped numbers out of the gate would certainly not do kind things to Rheinland's long-term population growth.
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(07-12-2018, 12:18 AM)Felipe Wrote: Hmmm, whats the inR explanation for Rhein being so behind then? Too much krieg no time for luv?
Don't actually put too much stock in that- I'm almost certain I missed a Rheinland population center somewhere, so if you'd look at the spreadsheet and tell me where I cocked up, that'd be great.
Kaz's point about the tidally locked world is a good one though: A full year spent in total darkness doesn't do a lot of good to the human physique or psyche. As it turns out: Humans actually need sunlight, so depression and other psychological problems would probably be more common on NB than many other places. Add to that the effects that a year-long day-night cycle would have on the weather of a planet, I'd have to imagine the initial colonists had a bit of a harder time surviving than any of the other capital worlds. Gimped numbers out of the gate would certainly not do kind things to Rheinland's long-term population growth.
(07-12-2018, 12:18 AM)Felipe Wrote: Hmmm, whats the inR explanation for Rhein being so behind then? Too much krieg no time for luv?
Don't actually put too much stock in that- I'm almost certain I missed a Rheinland population center somewhere, so if you'd look at the spreadsheet and tell me where I cocked up, that'd be great.
Kaz's point about the tidally locked world is a good one though: A full year spent in total darkness doesn't do a lot of good to the human physique or psyche. As it turns out: Humans actually need sunlight, so depression and other psychological problems would probably be more common on NB than many other places. Add to that the effects that a year-long day-night cycle would have on the weather of a planet, I'd have to imagine the initial colonists had a bit of a harder time surviving than any of the other capital worlds. Gimped numbers out of the gate would certainly not do kind things to Rheinland's long-term population growth.
That is not a skylight. That is a lamp. There's a floor on top of it.
Considering Rheinland has a considerable divide between rich and poor with a lot of people in the latter category (source: NB infocard), it's not a safe assumption that resources such as these are widely available to everyone.
(07-12-2018, 02:57 PM)A.B. Wrote:
(07-11-2018, 11:01 PM)Exo the Plier Guy Wrote: I came here thinking this to be another "the server is dying" thread. (...)
Query to OP: Change the thread's name into "Sirius Sector Population". It could spare some people confusion at the first glance.
Fair point. Fix'd to avoid further confusion <3
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/sīˈamək/
A simple, angry man casually working his way through life on a personal quest to acquire copious amounts of street cred.
(07-12-2018, 03:24 PM)Sciamach Wrote: Considering Rheinland has a considerable divide between rich and poor with a lot of people in the latter category (source: NB infocard), it's not a safe assumption that resources such as these are widely available to everyone.
.. It's a lamp. Hardly an amazing technology a thousand years of technological development from now.