Population of Sirius

[Igiss]

Unselie, I don't have time for a lengthy reply here, will just say that the numbers I mentioned were already kept in mind for various infocard texts, and were handed over to Kuraine for further usage in other infocards. I based my counts on 150 million figure for Manhattan in vanilla Freelancer, and don't think that this number is too small or was kept in the game by mistake.

Manhattan is an island planet. Let's presume that it has about 3% land surface (10 times less than Earth) and has about one quarter of the population you estimated for Liberty. Divide 25 billion by 15 million of square KMs, and you'll get a ridiculous figure of about 1500-2000 people (I didn't count precisely) which is close to the most populated of Earth's city-states, like Vatican or Monaco. And much more than Bangladesh that I mentioned. And this count includes polar regions and all climatic zones. Can only imagine the conditions in which Liberty middle/upper class lives.

As for exponential population growth, please look at this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_growth
Most of the population growth in the last century was generated by countries not present in Sirius. In countries that are present in Sirius, growth was much less impressive. You can name US as an exception, but if you remove the immigration factor, you'll get results not much better than in Europe.