A Modest Proposal: Get Rid of 90% of Human Beings

[Kintsugi]

The year is 2461. A mere four hundred and forty one years from now. How many Human beings do you think there are? Five times as many as there are now, maybe? 50 billion is a reasonable number, I think. Most probably still live in the Solarian heartlands.

 

How about 317 billion?

In Aurora's lore, this is actually a lowball estimate. If you do the math differently and use the maximum numbers provided for every figure, there could be at least 400 billion.

I'm of the opinion that the number of Humans is extremely excessive - There's so many Human beings that if you vanished a billion of them, nothing at all would change - Life would go on normally. I think the time frame provided in lore is too small for Humanity to get to this number, and that the number itself hurts us thematically - there's just too many people.

 

Here's the breakdown, according to the wiki:

Sol: 100 billion

Tau Ceti: 12 billion

Frontier Alliance: 100-175 billion

Elyra: 17 billion

Dominia: 13 billion

Eridani: Rounded up to 1 billion

Free Frontier: 25-50 billion

 

Now, obviously you'd need to do more than just get rid of 90% of all people. Populations would need to shift around - People would be taken from Dominia and Elyra and Tau Ceti and be given to Sol and Eridani. The Frontier Alliance especially seems to have too many people. 

 

Sorry in advance if this is the wrong place for this.

[Nantei]

You say it hurts thematically but... why? I suppose a mass slaughter would be cheapened a bit but... I don't think that is particularly relevant.

[GreenBoi]

Honestly, this is something I thought about since I first read these pages. There seems to be this belief that being space-age means there's going to be a super gigantic population, but you have to remember we've only been able to get ourselves up to seven billion people on Earth within the last couple centuries.

 

By this simple fact alone, humanity outnumbers every other species by a long shot. I find populations to be stupidly high and not thought about, people will often just think "Ok, I need a decently high number because space and future!" and shit out some random population high in the billions without considering what that means. It does lower the feeling of anything happening because of how many damn humans there are.

 

"Half a million dead!" Who cares when there's two billion in your city somehow

 

It feels oversaturated, half-assed and there's just way too many humans.

[AmoryBlaine]

A population this big is only fun if we actually do something with it thematically like focus on expansionism, overpopulation, limited employment, ect.

[Pegasus]

As the person responsible for the current population figures, I think my input may be relevant here.  With that said, I am putting the practical lore considerations of what it would mean to change these aside to say the following: that the current amounts are by most considerations of myself, my deputies, and the past human lore staff I worked with, a low figure compared to what would be possible population-wise, especially compared to those that they replaced. For my brief example: look at the world population in 1900 - 1.65 billion. In 2000, 7 billion. With a desire to avoid dragging myself back into the population growth math and statistics debate, I would like to argue that these figures are very reasonable as is and could easily be greatly increased without straining belief.

[Zundy]

We already had low figures previously and the issue was "why is any other faction but Sol relevant due to population size." Thus the populations were increased.

Edited December 12, 2019 by Zundy

[Brutishcrab51]

Something I've noticed is that there's so many fucking people, yet every single article is miniscule.

150 people stolen from Sol, this is a raid that made the galactic newspaper front-page of the Sol alliance. Except, there's probably in-system kidnappings that dwarf this by the tens of thousands. Because, you know, 20+ billion people live in the Sol system alone.

10,000 people died in the Frontier. Except like, so what? There's 100 billion people in the Frontier. Drop stolen from the lake.

A system-conquering army was 12,000 guys. Like, what? What sort of dumb-dumb stuff is this? Whose idea was it to oversaturate the population and then use 17th-century military-size formations?

[Azande]

The random numbers chosen for the populations of planets for humans will absolutely not impact and never has impacted how I have constructed or played a human character, honestly.

I don't think this is that big of an issue.

[Zundy]

Just like a mass shooting in the US of like 12 people is front page news yet 15000 people die to crime yearly anyway and all this out of a population of 327 million.

 

We don't need Warhammer 40k mega deaths for tragedy's to be relevant in lore. 

 

Whole systems being taken by three dudes and a tank is lame though. Which article was it?

[Guest Marlon Phoenix]

The populations have radically shifted throughout our entire server's tenure.

We are experiencing the Nationstates.net roleplaying phenomenon of populations corresponding with power and influence, so to make a faction more powerfuly and influencery, they get more people. And by having more people, they have more power and influence. Only recently there were really crazy plans to make all sorts of death star stuffs justified by the mindboggling revenues we'd have with minimal tax revenue or whatever.

This will probably never change unless we finally got a hard lock on our factions.

[ben10083]

Just here to add some random fax

No matter the planet/environment. Every planet has a 'carrying capacity' where only so many organisms can live in a environment at once, a "limit" if you will.

These limtis correspond to survival factors such as food, water, and housing.

Many human geographers estimate that the carrying capacity for Earth is 10 Billion, after which further population increases would be hard to maintain. 

Perhaps if we consider factors such as this for population?

[Zundy]

We can Ben but the population span multiple star systems, it's kinda too much depth imo. I dunno.

[Xelnagahunter]

I think the numbers shown in our articles play to morality and the realism of numbers in human minds. Most humans don't understand the gap between 1 million and 1 billion because mathematically it's the same step as the difference between 1 thousand and one million. You multiply the former by 1000 and you get the latter. People don't stop to think of those larger numbers as being so astronomical as they are.

Also, you don't think of population numbers quite the same. Your extended family (from your perspective) could range from 20-50 people easily. The outliers beyond that are people you don't or never will know. You have friends, maybe as many as 20-30 that you "think" you consider close. When you hear on the news that 100 people died... "Holy shit that more than the total number of people in my life that matter!" Who cares if the total population is 1 billion or 100 billion. More people than you care about just died.

Also, it's been 400 years, for total population growth I think our number are more than feasible. Population growth is not linear, it's exponential. It fucking explodes. And in a universe where we can live indefinitely on stations and grow crops in space, room and food are not limited by planet size anymore, even if only one planet in every system is habitable.

[Guest Marlon Phoenix]

Population growth declines the happier and wealthier a community is. A population explodes when healthcare drops mortality rates but birth rates dont drop due to the need for more labor (and lack of family planning) in communities

 

[Guest Marlon Phoenix]

[GreenBoi]

11 hours ago, Zundy said:

We can Ben but the population span multiple star systems, it's kinda too much depth imo. I dunno.

It's not too much depth, it just has to be reasonably thought. Obviously uninhabitable places should not have gigantic populations because "Well, we need to put all the poeple somewhere."

 

Factors like these are the basics of semi-believable worldbuilding. There's no need to get to the nitty gritty, but you can infer a hellhole like Venus would have less people than Mars. You can see a noticeable difference in design and thought for population of each faction of humans because Eridani has the lowest despite being an entire star system yet Mars alone has 4.5 billion. You can't just splat numbers around without thinking "would this actually be achievable or am I pushing it?"

 

I see no reason not to trim the populations. No IC event needs to happen to explain it. Just trim.

[Alberyk]

I also believe that human's numbers need to be lowered. Our setting is already really massive, nearly anything that happens feels like it has few consequences. It is also harder to justify the presence and important of some alien species when humanity has 300% more than their population.

[Zundy]

What does trimming them bring to the table? Eridani is obviously an oversight as it doesn't make sense. What's going to happen with the trimmed numbers that couldn't happen now? What numbers do you all propose? Let's not forget that the human factions are divided as well, with the largest (Sol and the FA) being at breaking point and loosely United respectively, where as the 24 billion+ Jargon Federation is a united behemoth. We had reduced numbers before and people complained that it made no sense for most factions to be relevent at all due to this. I'm surprised no one remembers this.

Edited December 13, 2019 by Zundy

[Gangstafary]

Just because I recognize your wink to Jonathan Swift's "A modest proposal", you got my approval.

[GreenBoi]

Bumping this because it shouldn't be forgotten and I really do believe there's a population bloot.

[Guest Marlon Phoenix]

I remember when this was a huge argument in 2014, 2015, and 2016. It jumps around a lot. It reminds me of Nationstates drama about it.

+1 for how long itll last as any new number

[GreenBoi]

Bumping this once more because I am passionate for this.