Population of Sirius

[Sand_Spider]

Unselie: I'm sorry, but sometimes I don't have time to read 7 pages of very long posts; I have done so before, and have wasted more than an hour just reading the same topic..

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[Unseelie]

Unselie: I'm sorry, but sometimes I don't have time to read 7 pages of very long posts; I have done so before, and have wasted more than an hour just reading the same topic..

Sadly, I've outlined the logic of my numbers, gathered support from the community, taken their input, and qualified my responses to cover the same arguments you bring up multiple times. I am willing to do it again, but each one of the posts in this thread have led to this current conclusion, and not reading them will leave you missing the a great ammount of my reasoning. I might be so crass as to sugest not chiming in on a topic you have not read, but I'm glad of the input and the chance at a convert.

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[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.

[Unseelie]

Manhattan panorama:

Manhattan infocard text:


Manhattan is in fact not an island world, I think you're talking about New Tokyo. The infocard population of Manhattan is 220 million right now, which means a growth of 70 million, or about 47%, in the last 16 years since vanilla...which is actually -more- growth than the percentage growth in my estimates...care to explain the boom?

In regards to the Houses and the growth of their native countries, I will cede that currently, only the USA has much of a growth rate, but in regards to that, I am talking about liberty here..I also would like to know where you found the emigration data.

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[Unseelie]

Double post...:/
Anyway, my post in the FL nation theorys thread, where I figure out which nations join which sleeper ship, and find their current percentage growth:

The list is as follows, with states of less than one million population being considered too small (crossechecked with this population growth rate map):

Kusari:
Republic of Korea .5
Singapore 1
Japan .5

Bretonia:
Antigua and Barbuda too small
Bahamas too small
Barbados too small
Beliz too small
Canada .5
Grenada too small
Ireland 1
Jamaica .5
New Zealand .5
Papua New Guinea 2
Saint Kitts and Nevis too small
Saint Lucia too small.
Saint Vincent and the Grenadines too small
Solomon Islands too small

Liberty:
Israel 1
USA .5

Rheinland:
Germany 0
Austria .5
Liechtenstien too small

Hispania:
Afghanistan 2
Albania .5
Algeria 1
Andorra .5
Argentina .5
Bolivia 1
Brazil 1
Chile .5
Columbia 1
Costa Rica 1
Cote d'Ivoire 2
Cyprus too small
Dominican Republic 2
El Salvador 1
Equatorial Guinea too small
Greece .5
Guatamala 2
Guyana too small
Haiti 2
Honduras 2
Italy .5
Mexico 1
Nicaragua 1
Panama 1
Paraguay 2
Portugal .5
San Marino Too small
Sao Tome and Principe too small
Spain .5
Uruguay .5
Venezuela 1

The averages come to:
Kusari: 0.666%
Rhienland: 0.25%
Liberty: 0.75%
Bretonia: 0.8%
Hispania: 1.096%

Now, there are two flaws to this argument: The first, is that of course, some nations would be better represented than others, unless we assume that the sleeper ships gave each nation in their group equal status. Second, the map gives me -0, 0-1 and then only 1, 2, and 3+ for chances..I could have reasonably assumed that 2 was aproximately 2.5, and one was 1.5 since that is the sequence indicated by the -0, 0-1, and the 3+, but I did not, so my estimates, and thus my real populations, are probably a bit on the low side using this model. But I'm of the oppinion that this model is a little bit ridiculous anyhow.

And when I say a little bit ridiculous...well, I'll let the readers be the judge.

There are no multipliers on these numbers:
Sirius population, using the previous growth model, in the year 820 (because I'm unwilling to fix it for inbetween dates)

Liberty:
11,550,848
Kusari:
6,335,832
Rhienland:
308,019
Bretonia:
14,384,358
Corsairs:
46,184,418
Outcasts:
43,020,846

The spreadsheets can be seen here!

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[AdamantineFist]

That is... absurd. Why the hell haven't those damn Hispanics taken over, then? They have populations far exceeding that of all the other houses combined, by that model. Also, Rheinland. WTF. 308 thousand? That's ridiculous. Utterly preposterous.


EDIT: Just because we have advanced tech doesn't mean our populations will be very small. One of the main reasons for low birthrates in first-world countries is the high cost of raising a family. In a colonizing scenario, governments would likely PAY families to have kids. More people = better economies, and robots can't do all the work especially seeing as if the robots did all the work in the first place, there'd be no Hessians, and no LWB, and, as was previously mentioned, no Synth. Thus, robots are merely an aid, not a replacement: they must just make us more efficient. We also still need politicians, scientists, and other things of that nature.

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[Sand_Spider]

In response to USA having a growth rate: It is only growing because of foreigners immigrating there. If the U.S. let absolutely no one come in from other countries, our population would actually decline, because the average American born couple has an average of 1.2 children (Note that 1.2 children isn't possible, but is an average)..

EDIT: It's not that first-world countries have a small birth rate, so much as third-world countries have a high birth rate. Why is this? Because in third-world countries, the more kids you have, the more likely some of them will live to adulthood, allowing parents to siphon things from their grown-up children..

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[AdamantineFist]

In response to USA having a growth rate: It is only growing because of foreigners immigrating there. If the U.S. let absolutely no one come in from other countries, our population would actually decline, because the average American born couple has an average of 1.2 children (Note that 1.2 children isn't possible, but is an average)..

EDIT: It's not that first-world countries have a small birth rate, so much as third-world countries have a high birth rate. Why is this? Because in third-world countries, the more kids you have, the more likely some of them will live to adulthood, allowing parents to siphon things from their grown-up children..

The governments of the four Houses will encourage people to have tons of kids to increase their populations. In this case, having lots of kids is a good thing as well. Also, read the earlier stuff. A lot of good points were made there. It's well worth the time.



EDIT: Uh... I think you'd better re-read Unseelie's last post. Now, do you honestly believe that Rheinland only has 308,000-ish people? Because that seems to be what you are supporting.

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[Unseelie]

In response to USA having a growth rate: It is only growing because of foreigners immigrating there. If the U.S. let absolutely no one come in from other countries, our population would actually decline, because the average American born couple has an average of 1.2 children (Note that 1.2 children isn't possible, but is an average)..

EDIT: It's not that first-world countries have a small birth rate, so much as third-world countries have a high birth rate. Why is this? Because in third-world countries, the more kids you have, the more likely some of them will live to adulthood, allowing parents to siphon things from their grown-up children..

Questions, since I'm playing along with the ridiculous assumption that we can use the current growth rates of the countries that the Houses came from: are the current generation immigrants going to have only 1.2 children? are their children? where did you get that statistic? how will the immigrants growth rates affect the overall cultural growth rate when the sleepers collect their people in 2200?

But, since I think I just prooved that using the growth of the parent nations was ridiculous (it tends to come out to something much smaller than DA's vanilla numbers, and you're suggesting a colony having NEGATIVE growth, which would mean...that it would no longer exist. Now, if we can accept that the colonies have growth, and that they have more growth than their home nations, as suggested by my numbers, Igiss's numbers, and Digital Anvil's numbers, we can get back to the heart of the discussion, that being whether Igiss's and DA's numbers make any more sense than my numbers.

My numbers are HERE!

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[Mercenary Guild]

There are a lot of factors that there is no way to evaluate accurately.

Did prolonged travel in cryopods result in diminished libidos and fertility rates or increase the chances of sterility?

Were nuclear, chemical or biological weapons used in the Alliance-Coalition that resulted in population wide gene damage?

What was the quality and quantity of the first Sirius settlers food supply?

What was the ratio of men to women to children to elderly? The median age groups?

What environmental poluttants or health factors exist in the current food chian and planetary environments?

Health effects from prolonged zero-g exposures within the populations?

What effects from exposure to different stellar types of radiation in different degrees than was earth norm?

Industrial and wealthy countries would not build "arks"that were for all--they would save their own populations first. It doesn't matter if Germany had a lower population count than Hispanics. If the Germans researched and funded a big part of the project, their people would be the "majority population" onboard when their ship launched. Hispanics would be a new minority again.

The game population figures may be a skewed representations. Some of the base populations given are very small--could it be they are only mentioned prominently because of their relevance--not population count?
Rochester isn't a huge citadel but it is a notable place in the socio-economic make up of New York system. There may be other planets that are simply frontier worlds with poor populations that had no points of interest from the game designer's standpoint.

Its really interesting to look at but there is no way to really "know".

Someone has to pull a number out of a hat and rationalize the logic of it and start from there.

Intersting discussion (for number buffs like me anyway).

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