M
Malenfant
Guest
OK, I'm spinning this off from the Evaluating UWP thread here.
I would like to hear some explanations as to how exactly a world with a pop digit of A can possibly be viable (the pop multiplier means that there are 10 to 100 billion people on it). Particularly tiny airless rockballs like Stoner, which have a population of 80 billion.
There are several things to consider:
1) food production and distribution. Where is it produced, how does it get to the population, how much area is available to produce it? If the bulk is imported from offworld, how much traffic do you need to bring in enough food to support that many people? Ditto for water too, particularly on airless rockballs that may not have any.
2) population density. Where are all those people living? Is there any room for arable land, park space, business/industrial zones etc?
3) Waste management. I see three big problems here - especially on non-habitable worlds - bodily waste, CO2 and heat.
3a) What do you do with the biological output (OK, I'll stop beating about the bush - "the poop") of 80 billion people? What do you do with all the garbage and sewage they produce - where do they dump that? If you dump it offworld, how much traffic do you need every day just to dump all that refuse? (and where do you put it?).
3b) What about the CO2 produced when they exhale - a back of the envelope calculation shows that assuming a lung capacity of 5000 cm3, you're going to get a total output of about 200,000,000 to 400,000,000 m3 of CO2 produced every time the population breathes (for comparison, the 6 billion population of Earth is putting out 30,000,000 cubic metres of CO2 with each breath, and that's into an open environment). Can a close environment on a non-habitable world handle all that CO2?
3c) The waste heat generated by all those bodies may also put a strain on a closed environmental system if they're on a non-habitable world.
4) if they're on a habitable world, what kind of strain does supporting all those people put on the local environment? You'd pretty much have to obliterate the existing native ecosystem (or severely alter it to get enough crops and livestock), wouldn't you?
5) Why would so many people want to live on a world anyway? How - and why - could the population growth have run so amok? What is the purpose of having that many people on a single world?
6) Where is all the industry sited?
Maybe there are solutions and numbers have already been crunched, but if there are then I'm not aware of them (or remain unconvinced about them). I don't care much for magical high TL armwaves like "oh, I'm sure they'll have a way to figure it out by then". A TL 15 society still has to face those problems, and it'll have to come up with a solution if they want to cram tens of billions of people on a planet - if it turns out not to be possible, then obviously these worlds will not have tens of billions of people. It may be that such hi-pop worlds are ONLY possible if the TL is above a certain level too.
I'm also not really interested in approaching this from a top-down perspective of "OK, we have worlds with tens of billions of people on them, how do we get that to work?", when there may not even necessarily be a viable solution. Instead, I want to look at this from the bottom up - can the population on that world even get that big given the available resources, can infrastructure be built to support all those people as the population grows, and if it is possible how it is all supported. Because that's what has to be considered when the world's population is growing.
I had a few ideas for alternative explanations for pop A worlds that may ease the population pressure a bit:
A) Change what the pop digits mean: pop 9 = multiples of 500 million people, pop A = multiples of 1 billion people - that caps the maximum possible population at 10 billion, which is much more manageable.
B) The pop digit represents how many people are in the SYSTEM, not on that one mainworld. As it stands, the population of the other worlds in the system are likely to be in the billions if the mainworld's population is in the tens of billions. Changing it to the total population in the system doesn't really ease the pressure that much, but at least you can put tens of billions of people in asteroid belts and on other worlds there rather than all on the mainworld.
Thinking about these things will either generate a better picture of how these extremely hi-pop worlds have to work, or it'll show that they're not really possible at all. Either way, thinking about it is good
. I am initially skeptical about whether Pop A worlds are viable, but if someone can show that these worlds ARE viable, then I'm open to changing my mind.
I would like to hear some explanations as to how exactly a world with a pop digit of A can possibly be viable (the pop multiplier means that there are 10 to 100 billion people on it). Particularly tiny airless rockballs like Stoner, which have a population of 80 billion.
There are several things to consider:
1) food production and distribution. Where is it produced, how does it get to the population, how much area is available to produce it? If the bulk is imported from offworld, how much traffic do you need to bring in enough food to support that many people? Ditto for water too, particularly on airless rockballs that may not have any.
2) population density. Where are all those people living? Is there any room for arable land, park space, business/industrial zones etc?
3) Waste management. I see three big problems here - especially on non-habitable worlds - bodily waste, CO2 and heat.
3a) What do you do with the biological output (OK, I'll stop beating about the bush - "the poop") of 80 billion people? What do you do with all the garbage and sewage they produce - where do they dump that? If you dump it offworld, how much traffic do you need every day just to dump all that refuse? (and where do you put it?).
3b) What about the CO2 produced when they exhale - a back of the envelope calculation shows that assuming a lung capacity of 5000 cm3, you're going to get a total output of about 200,000,000 to 400,000,000 m3 of CO2 produced every time the population breathes (for comparison, the 6 billion population of Earth is putting out 30,000,000 cubic metres of CO2 with each breath, and that's into an open environment). Can a close environment on a non-habitable world handle all that CO2?
3c) The waste heat generated by all those bodies may also put a strain on a closed environmental system if they're on a non-habitable world.
4) if they're on a habitable world, what kind of strain does supporting all those people put on the local environment? You'd pretty much have to obliterate the existing native ecosystem (or severely alter it to get enough crops and livestock), wouldn't you?
5) Why would so many people want to live on a world anyway? How - and why - could the population growth have run so amok? What is the purpose of having that many people on a single world?
6) Where is all the industry sited?
Maybe there are solutions and numbers have already been crunched, but if there are then I'm not aware of them (or remain unconvinced about them). I don't care much for magical high TL armwaves like "oh, I'm sure they'll have a way to figure it out by then". A TL 15 society still has to face those problems, and it'll have to come up with a solution if they want to cram tens of billions of people on a planet - if it turns out not to be possible, then obviously these worlds will not have tens of billions of people. It may be that such hi-pop worlds are ONLY possible if the TL is above a certain level too.
I'm also not really interested in approaching this from a top-down perspective of "OK, we have worlds with tens of billions of people on them, how do we get that to work?", when there may not even necessarily be a viable solution. Instead, I want to look at this from the bottom up - can the population on that world even get that big given the available resources, can infrastructure be built to support all those people as the population grows, and if it is possible how it is all supported. Because that's what has to be considered when the world's population is growing.
I had a few ideas for alternative explanations for pop A worlds that may ease the population pressure a bit:
A) Change what the pop digits mean: pop 9 = multiples of 500 million people, pop A = multiples of 1 billion people - that caps the maximum possible population at 10 billion, which is much more manageable.
B) The pop digit represents how many people are in the SYSTEM, not on that one mainworld. As it stands, the population of the other worlds in the system are likely to be in the billions if the mainworld's population is in the tens of billions. Changing it to the total population in the system doesn't really ease the pressure that much, but at least you can put tens of billions of people in asteroid belts and on other worlds there rather than all on the mainworld.
Thinking about these things will either generate a better picture of how these extremely hi-pop worlds have to work, or it'll show that they're not really possible at all. Either way, thinking about it is good
