Questions tagged [population]
For questions on population sizes, maximums and minimums, how they are affected by different events, etc.
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My Medieval kingdom has birth control, why is the population so high?
My world is roughly the same as the middle ages but has a natural form of birth control in the form of a root that can be grown and consumed to prevent pregnancy.
Because of this root, opportunities ...
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How many members of a species would be required to prevent inbreeding? [duplicate]
I’m writing for my Safespace series and I’ve hit a snag: I want Homo sapiens to have been abducted from Earth about 10,000 years ago so that when humans expand to the wider galaxy, they find “...
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How large of an initial population would it take for these new traits to average out into the standard population of the world?
Let's say, many years ago, hybrids between humans and other mammalians were created and introduced into the world for various purposes. They have the same cognitive abilities as the other humans, and ...
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What are some reasons for the population of a small, relatively unremarkable area to suddenly boom?
In the semi-democratic Empire known as the Aurean Dominate, the small peninsula of Sparteia has seen a population explosion over the past two centuries or so. Located in Argentolia, the most populous (...
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How would a country or kingdom instill loyalty and patriotism in its citizens and military? [closed]
How would a country or kingdom instill loyalty and patriotism in its citizens and military? With technology around 1930-1940
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Calculating population sizes through time?
My initial google session resulted with no luck. Does anyone know of any papers that discuss how historians attempt to calculate population sizes? That way I can better work out population sizes of my ...
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How much would a population be able to recover after half of them being killed? [closed]
In a medieval setting, a kingdom had about 50% percent of its population killed (this includes all ages). About 50% of infrastructure was in need of repair, and a separate 25% of infrastructure needed ...
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How long would it take for Mesoamerica to recover, if at all, had colonization never happened? [closed]
So, to give of context, the setting I am writing is very out-there. But I still wanna take a realistic approach to demographics and similar issues. In the setting, a very fantastical apocalyptic event ...
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Could all of human population fit in China, India, and Mongolia?
I have a scenario where Aliens must escape their Star system because a star 5 light years away from them is going nova soon. They find humanity and learn all about them in a few years - our whole ...
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How does proximity to a large city affect the growth of nearby towns?
Imagine a town that is on the road between two large cities. However, it is within one day's worth of travel of one of those cities. How would this affect the overall growth of the town? I can imagine ...
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Stranded mining colony using its own resources to build an interplanetary spacecraft: how long to completion can I credibly make it? (More = better)
Setting
In the not-too-far future, Mars hosts a few mining complexes that extract, refine and send materials back to our planetary system, as well as some scientific research bases. Commutes between ...
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What problems would a truly gigantic fantasy city encounter?
Supposing a world that falls somewhere between low and high magic, what would stop a city of truly epic size from existing?
The city is a city-state that has existed for millennia.
It is pretty much ...
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Indian Ocean continent - which humans get there first?
Trying to develop an ATL in which several 'lost' continents in the Indian Ocean - namely Kerguelen, Broken Ridge and the Mascarene Plateau (just east of Madagascar) - never end up being submerged and ...
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What level of phenotypic change is plausible over 10-15,000 years?
I'm developing a story with 4 distinct group of humans who inhabit 4 geographically separated and ecologically distinct islands (Iceland to Greenland sized). These groups descend from a single diverse ...
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How much could a population of 15000 grow over the course of 50 years?
How much could a population of 13,000 grow in 50 years? They are just coming out of a 13-year war with many deaths and few births. They have no medicine or technology to extend life, many plentiful ...
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Max tech level for society of 200,000
Given a remote island colonised by modern day (2023) explorers, with a total population of about 200,000 but cut off from the outside world for political reasons, what level of technology could they ...
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How many children could a human have in one pregnancy (with safety being no concern)?
There's a nation with extreme fertility and population problems. Someone suggested the government could induce certain candidates to have a great number of children in a single pregnancy... at the ...
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What population would the Americas have if the natives were as advanced as Europeans?
If you check a list of the most densely populated nations, a lot of New World countries are near the bottom and almost no Western Hemisphere nation (excluding small islands) are near the top. The ...
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Starting population to reach 1 billion people in a post apocalyptic scenario
Let's assume a post apocalyptic scenario, specifically a world which's sentient population was critically reduced due to a series of calamities, such as a sudden climate change chain reaction caused ...
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How much could a population of 100 million rise in 30 years? [closed]
How high could a population of 100 million people rise in 30 years, living on a terraformed planet with more or less limitless resources and advanced life-prolonging nanotech?
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If the current population of humanity along with necessities could fit on a spaceship, how large would that ship need to be?
Here's the picture. Earth is beyond saving and is too polluted to be habitable anymore. My plan is to have this ship built on the moon, using materials from our asteroid belt. A bit of a problem is, I'...
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How would a secretive vestigial population grow alongside humans, given that they live different lifestyles? [closed]
This is a heavily revised version of a post I made earlier, along with some edits from my friend Enthalpy.
This new post is strictly about population growth, and contains no extant references to third ...
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A subtle war between the sexes
In this question, I detail a world with a third human sex, lilim, who have bat-like wings and taloned feet like a bird's. The TL;DR is that lilim give birth to equal numbers of men, women and lilim (...
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How would the UK be affected if 90% of the world’s population died from a virus? How long would it take before it would impact climate change? [closed]
The idea I'm currently working with would be the world overpopulated, things a bit further in the future in terms of the effects of climate change than now, being hit with a global virus that kills ...
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How would populations work out in a society with people of vastly different sizes?
Let's say we have a society with people (living creatures with human-like intelligence) of vastly different sizes, from mouse-sized to elephants. People have jobs like us humans do: some physically ...
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Solutions for overpopulation for an immortal race
Imagine a city full of people that are immortal; they can't die by aging and normal weapons can't hurt or kill them. So the government needs to find ways to overcome its overpopulation issues.
After a ...
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What's the largest population we could sustain indefinitely on a distant space station?
Imagine that humans put a space station in orbit around something further than 0.5 AU from Earth. So: not Earth, not the Moon, none of our Lagrange points -- none of the "easy" spots.
The ...
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Impact on genetic diversity with 6 person mating groups
Context
I know enough about genetics to know I need to ask others. I'm writing an alien humanoid species that revers the number 6 as part of their culture and religion. Their marriage equivalent forms ...
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Can the culture of 500 people last after 1000 years? [closed]
A cabal of necromantic nobles and their (human) servants and retinues fled west after their expulsion from the old empire.
They landed in a new, mostly wild realm. Probably a fifth of the colonists ...
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What is the minimum population for a civilization to advance technologically, if given knowledge of math, physics, astronomy, etc
My civilization has global free energy, understands the physics of antigravity, etc.
It was able to advance technologically through its own efforts. Six separate civilizations become a confederation ...
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Which areas of USA would have the most successful centers of growth after nuclear holocaust?
This is related to my previous question: How many survivors would grow on earth years after a worldwide nuclear holocaust?
In an earth with roughly a billion modern day survivors, and 20 million ...
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How long would it take a parasite that transmits via parent to child to spread through a population?
So here is the basic setup.
The parasite lives in the cells of it hosts and can only spread via reproduction, and will spread 100% of the time to a child regardless if the infected was the mother or ...
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What would the survival rate be for a group of people forced into an underground, bunker style community?
Suppose 1000 people were forced underground into a relatively well set up bunker style community. Assuming they have no official leadership or organization to begin with, they must rapidly learn their ...
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Only 35 random people from disappeared Earth population are alive at any one time, how long before "new" babies are born?
Based on: If everyone in the world disappeared except 35 random people, how long would it take for one of them to realize they're not alone?
Everyone suddenly disappears from Earth except 35 ...
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How can a massive walled city be viable?
I'm working on a small story, and in it I'm wanting to include a city surrounded by multiple layers of walls. The walls themselves are colossal, but were created/held up by sorcery. I would go into ...
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Population recovery time after a fantasy nuclear winter
One of the major events of my setting is an all-out war between two factions of gods (and their human subjects) using basically the magical equivalent of nukes and nuclear technology. The world was ...
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With a Fertility Rate of 2.2, all else being held equal, what is the population doubling time?
I get confused with the math here, and wasn't able to find an easy fertility rate to pop. growth to pop. doubling time online. If anyone can walk me through the answer here, that would be very useful.
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How fast would a colonizing population grow on virgin soil?
I have a story where the setup is that, ~600 years prior to the story's beginning, there was an apocalypse of a magical nature that rendered most of the world uninhabitable. A few survivors from ...
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A nation is using its citizens as a distributed computing network to solve some kind of problem. What kind of problem is it trying to solve? [closed]
Long story short, the government of The People's Representative Democratic Federated Republic of Southeast Countryistan has its citizens fill out a couple of forms per day, each with some kind of ...
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Self inflicted extinction in a modern setting - Plausibility and Duration?
Suppose there exists a species of humans which are better physically, mentally and aesthetically(in a conventional way) by at least three standard deviations(any large margin will do) when compared to ...
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What Might the Highest Plausible Fertility Rate For A Wealthy Society Be?
The world's fertility rate has fallen to about 2.4, and in the next few years may reach replacement levels (2.1) outside of Sub-Saharan Africa (where it's still 4-5, though falling quickly). Even some ...
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What is the largest population a single spaceship could sustain? [closed]
In this setting I'm brainstorming, a significant percentage of humans live not in planets or static habitats, but in massive ships that traverse the cosmos at ultrarelativistic speeds. As such, these ...
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Rebuilding humanity from forty-ish people in the middle of an alien world within 400 years [closed]
Near the beginning of my fictional worlds history (that is, when things start getting bad)the small population of around 10,000 humans is mercilessly slaughtered by the recently formed population of ...
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How many adventurers?
So,
On average, how often one could encounter an adventurer in a world the details of which are written below?
The World
Population
Roughly 13 people per square kilometer overall, with up to 55 in ...
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How could my island-country mostly populated by massive humanoids subsist its inhabitants?
In my prospective dramedy science-fantasy children's videogame Salade de Fruits (which means naturally Fruit Salad), there is an island-country comprising a total of eight islands:
The smallest has ...
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What population size is reasonable for a moving, steam powered, predatory city?
For a DnD campaign, I'm designing a setting with steampunkish tech level, as well as magic used to explain tech accomplishments not possible with real world physics. Almost all settlements in this ...
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How to ensure magic-sensitive population remain low? [duplicate]
In my world, China earns its beginning to three major clans: the Huang, the Yan, and the Chi You.
Huang and Yan are normal homo sapiens, but Chi You is a clan of sentient magical reptiles like dragons ...
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Naked mole-rat people [closed]
After dropping in childhood, the human death rate in adulthood rises exponentially, doubling every 8 years like clockwork until the number of survivors is so low that the statistics breaks down (...
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What would it take to have a 100% redhead population?
Redheaded-ness is a recessive trait. Obviously a society could just kill every baby that comes out with a different hair color, but is there any passive way for a human ethnic group to be 100% ginger?
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How Many Generations for Elves to Match All Other Races in Population?
So Elves and their long lives are well-known to be a fantasy trope but I wanted to determine how long it would take for the Elves to achieve dominance not through magic or wisdom but sheer numbers.
...
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