Some notes on Population Growth

Population Growth Factors

How many sapient beings are there at the end of the tenth millennium? Here are the factors we need to consider:

First, advanced societies may have fairly low birthrates - there is no strong need for children to ensure pensions or act as cannon fodder. Automation can to a large extent deal with that. So people get children for emotional reasons.

Second, the emotional reasons may of course change. There are some religions that claim having many children is a good thing, and members of a young clade might think that increasing its number is necessary.

Third, crowded planets and habs will likely feel constrained - governed as they are by environmental laws, that everything is something's or someone's property, that personal space gets circumscribed and so on - this will lead to at least some people wanting to move outwards, first to nearby orbital habitats and second to colonies.

Fourth, there exists more or less radical life extension. This may increase the population increase somewhat (although the effect is not as drastic as one may think). This will likely enforce the third factor, as many youths will regard their home societies as too ossified and gerontocratic, setting out on their own or together with similar minded discontents. Of course, the life extended may not really be old conservatives (thanks to mental rejuvenation), but they will have entrenched their positions anyway due to long-term investments, proven skills and social networks.

Five, during dark ages and on primitive colonies factor one may not be as strong. The first dark ages did not see any population increase since the habitats were too small and resources too scarce, but other dark ages such as the Perseus arm after the Geteche disaster or many worlds in the wake of the Version War may have seen rises in nativity to counter the collapse of high tech society.

Six, there are advanced reproduction technologies allowing high birthrates. Cloning and in vitro gestation comes to mind; if someone wanted, they could reproduce humans at an industrial scale. This will be especially relevant for young splices and tweak clades.

Seven, AIs and virtuals are both effectively immortal and can copy themselves nearly instantly if there is computing power around (hence the ridiculous population of Aleph Absolute - over 90% of the population is likely copies of the 10 most xeroxophilic individuals). Vecs have to be manufactured, but using replicating factories like Metasoft immense populations can be constructed.

Eight, we have 8000 years to work with. A 1% average human growth rate for 8000 years gives us a population of 2.2343e+44 people. Assuming a 0.1% growth rate, we get 1.7814e+13 people (17 trillion).

A Scenario for human Population Growth up until the 10th millennium

One could model things like this:

Information Age (21st Century):

Humanity reaches around 10 billion people during the Information Age (mid to late 21st century). This indicates a slowdown in population growth from the 20th century. There are several factors that would indicate this. First, as social and economic conditions improve in former 3rd world countries, people will have less need to have children as a social security device to care for them in their old age. Giving women education and power over their own fertility (birth control) is another factor. Also, in terms of capitalist economy, pristine ecologies and wilderness regions will be a very in-demand commodity (tourism, recreation, Gaianist cults, back-to-nature lifestyles) and it will be in everyone's corporate interests to maintain the few sorry remaining remnants, especially as humanity begins to move into space, and to restore as much of the Earth as possible. Additionally, there are also boring but quite robust economic reasons for a slowing of the population rate. Recently some economists were actually surprised the birth rates decreased faster than economical explanations would imply, even in hopeless places like Afghanistan where there were neither any progress nor any education of women. Ten billion is not utopian, but quite likely. It is even a bit on the high side, but we want a somewhat dystopian Information Age here.

Interplanetary Age (22nd to 25th century)

The rate of total population would then slowly increase to perhaps 15 billion in the Interplanetary Era. The number here depends on how easy it is to colonise space and the only half-terraformed world - Mars. On Earth population growth having levelled off at about 10 billion will perhaps decline to 6 or 7 billion. Mars may end up with a few billion (including breeders wanting to get away from Earth's strict population and ecology laws), and a few billion more would be scattered through the Belt and in orbital habitats and the innumerable biospheres and habitats out to the Oort cloud (very few of these latter are likely to have more than about 10,000 - they are essentially towns in space).

Interplanetary Dark Age (26th to 29th century)

Then come the nanoswarms and their aftermath which kill off 90% of people [note: in a later re-write this is toned down to a less catastrophic 35 or 40%), leaving a roughly constant population in space (the larger part, say one billion) and a smaller but increasing population on Earth that is later mostly expelled by Gaia. It may also be that whether a space habitat is attacked by nanoswarms or not may often be luck - like in the Eurpean Middle Ages when the great plague would sometimes jump entire villages to infect some place further on. So the swarms never get to saturate the solar system. This explains the odd rare case where an unprotected habitat somehow makes it through the Dark Age.

First Federation and after (4th millennium)

At the start of the First Federation we have perhaps 2 billion people, who vigorously expand in the solar system, perhaps with a growth rate of 0.5%. Over the next millennium the total population reaches 290 billion people, spreading outwards to colonies and habitats everywhere.

Population growth is likely to have been often regionally higher on new terraformed worlds, where it may reach, say, several percent (again, hyperpopulationists escaping the restrictions of the Solar System - but this also requires terraformable worlds!). Also as nanofacture becomes more efficient it becomes progressively easier to convert asteroids into self-contained habitable cities and biospheres (to convert a decent-sized (say 5 to 10 km) asteroid to a habitat from scratch may be equivalent perhaps in terms of time, skills, and cost to erecting a skyscraper or a high-rise apartment block today), colonisation and population growth may be quite high in some places. Elsewhere it may be low, maybe at less than 0.1 %, especially in resource poor areas. I can also envisage religious groups, impoverished anthropist colonies etc, as the ones with the highest population growth - like 3rd World Catholics today!

Age of expansion and empires, 2nd Federation (5th to 7th millennia)

During the ages of Expansion and Empires the growth rate may have been locally higher, although many of the inner sphere worlds by now have reached stable populations. I guess the average growth rate remained around 0.1%, with a few disasters like the Taurus Nexus and the Conver Ambi collapse causing local die-offs. So if we assume that 10 and 100 billion people died in these wars, after the first consolidation war there were 1,015 billion people and after the second 1,711 billion people - even the total atrocities of these wars were small compared to the total population. At the verge of the Version war in 6400 there were 3,000 billion people.

The Version War, the ComEmp, the Age of Fragmentation, and the Current Era (8th to 11th millennia)

I don't know how many died in the Version War; given what we have written about Alexandria, Bourgatov and other world I guess several hundred billion people may have died but there is also the claim in the encyclopaedia entry that the second consolidation war was bloodier. So if we assume that 100 billion people died and that the growth rate during this era continued at 0.1% (much of the frontier, where by now the vast majority lives, was unaffected, and even isolated systems could prosper), the population at the height of the ComEmp in 6900 would be 4,780 billion people. If we assume that the growth remains roughly similar up until the year 10,000, we get a total population of 128,110 billion people. Certainly there will be hiccups as well - e.g. Verifex, the Amalgamation, the Daharran Advance, squabbling among regional warlords, and other disasters and local wars are likely to be very bloody. But at the same time the sheer vastness of the periphery means oodles of resources and heaps of space to grow.

The vast majority will be living in the sparsely populated frontier, likely forming a patchy distribution of population centers (clusters), from which secondary waves of colonisation expand. Most of the frontier is still unexplored and uninhabited, despite trillions of people.

AIs and Vecs

AIs and vecs have to be counted separately. The number of AIs and virtuals that can exist is a function of the infrastructure, and outside directly AI-promoting societies like Keter, that will likely be proportional to the total population. If we assume each human has at least one AI (in the Inner sphere there are more per capita, in the frontier less), then there are at least a few hundred trillion AIs. Then there are the big Aleph Absolute complexes with even larger numbers. Virtuals are likely proportional to the number of well-off people who have lived, so I guess there are at least a few trillions of them - not counting extra copies.

Vecs are the same. If we assume Metasoft and maybe Cog form the vast majority and expanded at 1% from 4100 to the version war in 6400, starting from a vec population of 1000 (a big underestimate, likely), then we get 23,512 billion Metasoft vecs. By now they are likely even more. If we assume 0.1% since that time, we get 858,950 billion vecs.

Xenos

Xenos are likely to represent only a small proportion - none of the alien races encountered so far equal terragen civilisation in vigour or aggressive ability to expand and colonise new systems (in keeping with the theme of only one big "superpower" per however many millions of years). There are rather few Muuh (they reproduce very slowly), quite a few To'ul'hs (they have been partially infected with human expansionism) and very few surviving Daharrans. Hard to say about Hildemar's knots or wormhole AIs. There are also various subclades of Ultimates scattered through the Serpens region. They may be locally numerous, although (apart from a few that have spent too much time around humans!) not expansionist the way the space-going To'ul'hs are.

Splices are also likely to be represented in fairly small number. However, some Utopia sphere worlds could support quite large numbers of splice (animant and provolve) population. Moreover, on some habitats free animants may have bred and increased their population quite rapidly.

Virtuals, Copies, and other non-bioids

The number of copies in existence will be unknown. I think most statisticians of 10,000 will also have problems - official upload statistics is complex. But whatever the number, the number of virtuals and copies is likely to be huge. Especially since they are immortal and can copy themselves. On advanced worlds it may be quite easy to back up a copy of yourself, and after a while these will all add up (like the old joke about where do all the people fit in heaven). Of course the real expense will come from system requirements. It will not be possible to keep too many copies running at once because of the amount of processing they will require, unless you have a very crude scale of simulation. So there will be "cheap" copies and highly complex copies. Perhaps many worlds will get rich renting out computer space and virchworlds for copies.

Then there are the solid-state and nanocyborg civilisations. These will have contain an unknown (but extremely high) number of virtuals, copies, aioids and other sentients. A human copy might take around 10¹⁷ bits, which would fit into a nanotech sugar cube computer dissipating a few Watts. So a normal one cubic kilometer asteroid converted to computronium might house 10¹⁵ copies - heat dissipation will lower this number, but there are few problems with having at least many billion in active form, and thousands of such asteroids in a single system. Most solid state civs will likely be concentrated in small polities, but even one of those would have a multi billion population.

Every so often a sentient or a clade or a civilisation somewhere will pass the collective Singularity boundary. So posthumans will represent another category, of unknown number. Here our calculations break down. The theoretical limits suggest that the population of femtotech entities that could live in the mass-space of a human body is around 10²⁷. There could be many, many orders of magnitude more posthumans - but how do we count those who have no individuality, the teleological threads and cluster minds? All one can say is that the exact number of advanced posthumans is likely to be large but impossible to determine precisely. In addition there will be a much smaller number of posthumans and post-singulitarians that will choose to inhabit or utilise aioid or bioid non-virtual bodies.

Virtuals will thus be of two types. There are those who are still roughly at the same level as they were when embodied, and the posthumans, who are so upgraded they are more similar to the aioids than the bioids. I think most virtuals either tire of being virtual and either return to embodiment, pause themselves for long periods or simply erase themselves. The remaining virtuals will be divided between those who simply potter along in their normal mindsets, spending their lives content in virtualities and endless net debates, and those who upgrade themselves. Of course, the upgraders might have a notable percentage going crazy.

Neumanns

It is also likely that some of the Autowars like the Mother of the Machines, the Biowars, etc, become self-reproducing and hence form a fairly sizeable population. Although the number of autowars themselves will be small, there will be countless millions vec "workers" for each "queen". A million autowars in the sparsely patrolled outer volumes and periphery regions would then translate to, say, at least 20, and maybe even 50 or a 100,000 billion "worker drones" (the intelligence of the drones will vary according to the colony type, but most will be at least basic human or turing-grade intelligence - counting sub-human level intelligence systems will quickly bring up ridiculous numbers). In general all replicating entities that become common in the outer volumes will become dominant in the statistics. The Inner Sphere is such a small, static place...

So the total sum (which can of course be disputed in many ways) is:

Mindkind seems to be largely aioid right now. Moreover, by far the largest number of sentients will not inhabit nonvirtual bodies at all.

Worlds

Although one can assume an average terraformed planet has a carrying capacity of around 10 billion people, it is very rarely the case (apart from brief periods in a few unfortunate worlds run by hyperpopulationist clades) that a planet will have this many. The big orbital bands and the asteroid belt complexes and megaplexes are probably likely to be the locus of most of the population in the Inner Sphere. The number of colonised worlds and moons would probably run to hundreds of millions, but only a tiny proportion of those (say 10 to 50,000) will be terraformed. Given a choice between living in a spacious orbital habitat and on a cramped and dirty dome on some environmentally hostile planet, most people would pick the former. There will also of course be clades that have adapted to common planet types, hence giving themselves plenty of available worlds to inhabit.

Zipf's law might apply here: the size of the n'th largest city is around the size of the largest divided by n (http://www.cut-the-knot.com/do_you_know/zipfLaw.html). So if the most populous system has 100 billion people, the second will be around 50 billion, then 33 billion and so on. So the number of systems with populations over 1000 would be 100 million. The number of systems with one billion inhabitants or more would be around a hundred. Sounds roughly right, although there might be some deviations here and there.

The law of course breaks down at the very small scale, but there must be a huge number of backgrounder outposts and interstellar hermits living in interstellar space, frozen Oort comet cores, and so on.

Garden Worlds

The number of people on Earth-type garden worlds will be very small. There will be a lot of pressure from ecologists to keep the planetside populations down. And they will get more income from tourism and selling genetic material then they will from overstressing the ecosystem with too many colonists. Moreover, the fewer people on each garden world the higher the real estate prices, so more money for the government or speculators or whoever in charge.

Dyson Worlds

Dyson spheres can increase the carrying capacity of any system to an almost unimaginable level. A few can be mentioned - Cog, Kiyoshi, Ain Soph Aur. The Efficiency Maximisation Paradigm builds them, but just for energy collection.

Terraformed Worlds

An extreme maximum may be 15-20 billion humans for a well-maintained Earthlike world. Then again, we can assume even the best terraformed world will not be as stable as the Earth naturally is. Especially in the beginning there will be frequent disasters and eco-collapses. But eventually terraforming will become a fine art, and these worlds will be just as good as Earth (however to do a good job terraforming will require a lot more time, effort and expense than to just drop some nanites onto the surface for a shoddy DIY job (e.g. Skiiwsnnii). Many of the old worlds like Corona and Raphael will have inherent ecosystem problems that never go away, cost a lot and require constant maintenance.

Orbital Habitats, Asteroids, etc

Orbital habitats will be large and comfortable. Although they can be moon-sized, these are fairly rare. It is probably cost-effective to make the 15-40 km cylinders. If more space is required one can build more of them. Byrdis might be a nice example. It is unlikely anybody but the MPA might consider building a moon sized space station; maybe there are a few MPA ones created just for the sheer beauty of it. Imagine a weightless airspace 1000 kilometers across...

Hollowed-out asteroids will be the cheapest and easiest - these will be common in the outer volumes and newly settled and low resource systems. In the more highly populated, industrialised, or longer settled systems there will be clusters of larger and small and every size in between orbital cylinders, spheres, toruses, and the like, with very dense traffic between them (the so-called orbital bands, although they would be separate structures rather than a huge solid ring). A cylinder is the most efficient form for the bigger orbitals as it can be made to rotate around its long axis, and you have mirrors and so on to give a day/night cycle. A torus is probably better for a smaller orbital (say 1 or 2 kilometers in diameter), because if a long cylinder is too small you get a noticeable Coriolis force if you rotate it fast enough to get an earth-type gravity (for microgravity clades this wouldn't be a problem). But it is quite likely other designs will be used as well (or even instead).

Continuous orbital bands

A solid orbital band would be a megascale project and probably found around some moons and the occasional planet in the big industrial systems. They are also unstable without active control (yes, even a flexible band), so they will be rather expensive.

Population Distribution

The following list is tentative, and pertaining only to bioids of the inner sphere and civilised and developed regions of the Outer Volumes. As one proceeds further into the outer volumes the proportions will change radically, so that along the periphery the proportion living in orbitals is very much lower (around 5 or 10%), there would be no dyson spheres, and a larger proportion will live in asteroids, domes, planetary surfaces, and on small space cities.

65% live on orbitals
12% on terraformed worlds (i.e. on any worlds where you don't need a dome or a space suit)
10% in the asteroid megaplexes and Belt Cities
5% further out on Oort cloud comets, etc.
about 3% on dyson spheres (the percentage is small because dyson spheres are expensive and not that common)
another 1% in ecohabitats on non-terraformed and still to be terraformed worlds, on moons, and on unterraformable worlds
say 2% in great worldships, nomadic space cities, small colonies floating in interstellar space and so on.
1% on garden worlds and on tweak-habitable worlds
the remaining 1% on "other" (whatever that may be)

The list of some of the more populous systems may include the following:

Aleph Absolute
Ain Soph Aur
New Mars
Orinoco
Corona
Sol
New Root
Fons Luminis
Ken Ferjik
Merrion

Other runners-up: Ararat, Cocac, Daffy, Djed, Eden, Enremdea, Fata Morgana, Frog's Head, Heartland, Kiyoshi, Nova, Pardes, Shamash etc

Due to the huge number of uncertainties the total population of the various empires and major clades is hard to calculate. The following are rough percentage estimates of total sapient population for the core worlds or clades, based in part on claims by the empires themselves, and in part on independent simulations and surveys. Note that these proportions do not include the colonialist possessions and local administrations, or the large number of worlds nominally within empire deep space but not part of the actual empires:

Amalgamation           ?0.01%
Caretaker Gods         0.005%
Communion              0.1%
Cyberian Foundation    0.4%
Cygexba                0.15%
Emple-dok-cetic        0.05%
Genen                  0.02%
Keter                  1.2%
Laughter Hegemony      0.2%
Metasoft               1.0%
MPA                    0.4%
Negentropy Alliance    0.7%
New Daffy Panoparchy   0.15%
NoCoZo                 0.8%
Orion                  0.2%
Paradigm               0.4%
Puppis Democracy       0.01%
Refugium Federation    ?0.1%
Sagittarius            0.2%
Silicon Generation     0.25%
Solar Dominion         0.8%
Sophic League          0.4%
Stella Umma (core)     <0.005% 
Stella Umma (shell)    0.015%
To'ul'h                0.05%
Utopia Sphere          0.5%
Other regional empires ~20%

Hiders                 ~10%

Others                 ~65%

"Others" includes a huge number of small non-aligned systems, petty empires, outer volume, periphery, and so on. Almost all of these are small politically and militarily irrelevant systems and minor federations and alliances.

The Shadow Federation/Hiders/etc are likely to be very big (and very incoherent). Originally thought to have been restricted to the vicinity of Sol and other near stars region, it has become increasingly evident that they have expanded nomad fashion (and generally at sub-relativistic velocity) throughout much of known space, colonising outer oort clouds, harvesting interstellar dust, and in general avoiding contact with the major powers.

The Emple-dok-cetic figure is deceptive. Although the overall percentage is small, this does not include the huge number of non-aligned and semi-aligned worlds using Emple-dok-cetic technology and influenced by their culture and ideology. Were they to be included, the number would rise to perhaps 0.8%.

Naturally the empires themselves would give rather inflated figures. e.g. if we include total Dominion space it may be 8%, but most of those worlds really don't even consider themselves Dominion, so they would fit in the category of "other", with only a tenth of the worlds really Dominion.

In any case this also gives us a rough idea of the population of each empire. If we have, say 130 trillion bioids (ignoring the aioids, copies etc for now) then the big empires would have around 100 billion to a trillion bioids each. Actually the Utopia Sphere and Communion would have more bioids and less aioids, while the Keterist domain would be the opposite. So say an average of half a trillion bioids per empire - which sounds roughly right.

Compared to the 6 billion humans on Earth now this is only about 100 times more - distributed over a great many planets and solar systems, so the OA universe will certainly not be the overcrowded nightmare of the conventional dystopian future (Bladeunner, Solyent Green etc). In fact there will be oodles of space to spare - a single space habitat 20 km across might only have a thousand bioids (and an equal number of aioids perhaps). Most of it would be garden, with trees and forest groves, waterfalls and ponds and lakes, Zen rock gardens and a temperate rainforest, a trilobite pond and an aviary for liberated madverts ... whatever takes your fancy! The future is actually likely to be a very pleasant and comfortable and stimulating place (at least in the Civilised Galaxy).

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