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Mnemosyne - a picture of Solar System in the 27th century
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(05-19-2020, 02:04 AM)Drashner1 Wrote: Starting from that number and ignoring emigration from Earth we are looking at 498 years for population to grow.

At a growth rate of 1.2% we end up with 380 million people.

To get to approx the population number stated for the solar system we need growth rate of somewhere between 2.37 and 2.28%. Still higher than anything humans have managed historically. Of course, we may presume that prior to the war the space based population was not only growing internally, but was receiving some number of immigrants from Earth, which could increase both the overall population and the population of breeding age at a considerable rate, probably much higher than what straightforward reproduction could manage. Whether that influx would be sufficient to justify the above population growth rate is currently unclear.

Looping back to the KH - it looks like they would either need an extraordinary starting population and the ability to support the start of extraordinary population growth almost from day one or that they more recently began engaging in a dedicated program of even more extraordinary population growth using advanced technology (artificial wombs perhaps?). Such a thing would certainly be notable and would seem to deserve being included in the information about them.

Note also that as described so far (and bearing in mind that much of the solar system has not yet been described), the KH and its 'client states' have a population greater than the entire rest of the solar system combined.

The vast majority of population growth in space in the first centuries was from people moving from Earth beforehand, and the vast majority of KH's subjects are in fact not its original refugee population, but people who are either subjudgated or assimilated. The KH basically decided to lay claim to pretty much every human colony established before. You do raise some good points but:
1. The Kuiper Belt has an incredible amount of space and resources in it and the population was meant to convey that. To be honest, I also inspired myself by the rapid growth of America's population upon colonization - it isn't a given that better living conditions = low birth rate, that might be the case in modern first world societies (which differ quite a lot from the societies I describe, with KH being perhaps the most deviant), but wasn't the case during the settling of the Americas - less overcrowding, more "free" (actually, often stolen but... let's not go into that) land available, less infectious disease led to people having upwards of 8 kids in the North American colonies which was high compared to the overcrowded European cities of the time. A lot of people today don't have kids because the standards have shifted upwards even more than the incomes, and thinking one must be wealthy to raise a child, I don't expect Kuiper Belt inhabitants to be consumerist in any case, let alone with such an ideology.

2. "Still higher than anything humans have managed historically" - not really, many third world countries managed higher than that as you can see here https://ourworldindata.org/world-populat...ts-preview maybe not humanity as a whole but in the 1950s-1960s, growth rates of 3-5 percent, now, consider that a.) KH are fascists who were incredibly pro-natalist historically, b.) A lot of KHs population and other population for that matter are AI/Virtual.

3. Unlike historical highly fecund countries, KH has a very low rate of infant mortality - the population growth rate of really poor countries would be like 10 percent if a lot of those kids didn't die. As for cloning, artificial wombs, frozen embryos... such technologies are implied and used, though I haven't yet described them explicitly but I will do so. I might reduce the population a bit, though I don't know if I will do so because while humans take the time to reproduce, AI and virtuals don't - and in my reversal of typical sci-fi tropes, KH is actually the most pro-AI, pro-virtual faction seeing as it's ruled by an AI (which makes other faction wary of AI)
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RE: Mnemosyne - a picture of Solar System in the 27th century - by MichaelPoole - 05-25-2020, 08:44 AM

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