Worldbuilding

Questions tagged [population]

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For questions on population sizes, maximums and minimums, how they are affected by different events, etc.

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4
votes
2answers
177 views

Would the human population increase without ''natural sexual discouragement''?

I read a theory once which stated that the natural pain, sickness and general discomfort that humans can experience during sex, pregnancy, and childbirth help control the human population by ...
0
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0answers
75 views

How Large could this Optimized Preindustrial Population Get?

There are a lot of questions on this site about historical population levels and densities, and they have good answers about taking into how hard it was to survive in the past, and how inefficient ...
0
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4answers
178 views

Giving a Will/Inheritance to a goat in a medieval setting? [closed]

A lord of a manor is dying and plans to leave his manor and fortune to a goat, who is a demon in disguise. I'm wondering how can I make this idea feasible. Being a demon, the goat could influence the ...
2
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4answers
270 views

How long would it take to kill an army of 100k

The time period is similar to the crusade time instead of asia there is an entirely different island continent. The people on it are not homosapiens but some different earlier branch. they are though ...
17
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13answers
7k views

Why would a country with high population suffer from low manpower?

This country has very low mortality rates and basic medicine, it is also very well-connected with a strong government and homogeneous culture and people. The country is self-providing of all resources....
3
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2answers
145 views

200 commoners of varying gender/age from 1750 Europe are marooned in a strange land. What does population growth look like?

200 inadvertent settlers fall through a portal, and the portal closes. These 200 people were possibly the population of a small hamlet, transported against their will. They find themselves in a land ...
7
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5answers
374 views

How many people can live on planet Earth?

How many people can live comfortably on planet Earth, assuming that humanity reaches Kardashev scale Type I level? This implies: Energy is cheap, and available in an almost unlimited quantity, ...
0
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4answers
231 views

In a population of 30 million, how many people would a 3,000-year-old know?

In my universe, everyone is a few thousand years old (ranging from about 1,500 to 4,000 years) and the population is capped at around 30 million people. People live pretty spread out across a planet ...
8
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6answers
2k views

Why might a vampiric race have low birthrates?

This pure-blood vampiric race is not immortal, but their lifespans are about five times that of mortals. This race has lived in a vast city beneath a small mountain range for thousands of years (the ...
1
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4answers
251 views

Can all citizens/residents of town/city be wealthy? [closed]

Was just reading a bedtime story to the kids where there was an isolated small town and "everyone was wealthy and happy" and that got me thinking, can it actually be true? If everyone is "wealthy", ...
2
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2answers
103 views

How would an AI divide its physical sphere of inflence into a “grid” of sectors?

So, my colony mothership crawls along through sub-space at a "slow" ftl as it sends out faster probes ahead of it. Once it has located a cluster (meaning an acceptably dense grouping, not necessarily ...
4
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2answers
239 views

How to calculate medieval urbanisation

Pretty simple question, or I think so, anyway. I want to know how to determine a realistic ratio of people in my fantasy medieval province living in supercities, cities, towns, villages and farming ...
3
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2answers
126 views

How quickly do prehistoric populations grow?

I am working on a species that ressembles humans beings and that, although slightly engineered in the sense that the evolutionary leaps are aided by genetic modification, they are left to go through ...
3
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1answer
240 views

how can the city of Carthage sustain a healthy population growth?

The Carthaginian Empire was one of the greatest empires in history. After crushing the silly Roman savages in the Punic Wars, they went on to establish territory and conquer the western world. The ...
4
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1answer
115 views

Help with population figures for colonization game

I am working on a space game that allows players to participate in the human colonization of a distant star cluster. I could use some help determining what sort of numbers I should have aboard the ...
7
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3answers
176 views

How many human inhabitants could Earth host in a far future? [closed]

Assuming a technologically advanced civilization that has grown sustainably from the resources of its own planet (and maybe "a few" additional resources from its own solar system), what would be the ...
1
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2answers
187 views

Nomad tribe population

There lives in a desert a large nomad culture, composed of many tribes who wander about herding camels, goats and sheep, trading and offering services to cities and towns, and occasionally raiding ...
2
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1answer
90 views

Graphs for understanding population dynamics - where to find?

I'm trying to figure out a world in my story (eg. whether dialects of a language would be mutually intelligible, how often would designer babies be born compared to 'usual' babies, usual family ...
2
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2answers
286 views

In a stable medieval fantasy population, what should be the yearly birth rate per 1,000 people? [closed]

For a human or human-like stable, small settlement population, living in medieval fantasy, how many yearly births per 1,000 inhabitants are expected? Assuming: There is no major epidemic. There are ...
25
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7answers
3k views

Demographic consequences of closed loop reincarnation

My question is inspired by the Tolkienesque elven cycle of rebirth, but with a twist. Suppose "elves": Do not experience aging after reaching maturity and do not die of old age or diseases Mature ...
1
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6answers
339 views

Best way to recolonize Earth after nuclear war?

Humans of the past, I have some very bad news. In the year 2062, nuclear war broke out and destroyed much of the Earth. But luckily, in America, we were ready. We knew war was inevitable, so we built ...
20
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7answers
7k views

How large would a mega structure have to be to host 1 billion people indefinitely?

Ruins of buildings, abandoned cities and suburbs dot the coasts of Earth's landmasses, inhabited by wild animals and the pieces of a once vibrant civilization. The oceans are relatively empty, the ...
1
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1answer
291 views

How quickly could we reach 1 Trillion people? [closed]

Ok, first let me explain who I mean by "we". The human race is currently at 7 billion people, but we are plagued by war, disease and many other things that hold us back and disrupt our population ...
41
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14answers
11k views

How many people are necessary to maintain modern civilisation?

Modern Earth; a series of connected events (natural disasters, mass migration, drug-resistant pandemic, collapse in biodiversity, armed conflict) have led to a significant reduction in human ...
7
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6answers
1k views

Would the US government be able to hold control if all electronics were disabled for an indefinite amount of time? [closed]

In my story (modern fiction/ apocalyptic survival fiction) an enemy of the US sets up a EMP pulsing satellite over the continental US, and before we can respond all electronic systems are shut down. ...
4
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5answers
304 views

How might Southern Ontario becoming a tech powerhouse hurt New York? [closed]

I'm working on an alternate future setting (somewhere between 2070 and 2130) in which Southern/South Western Ontario, specifically the London, ON area, becomes a tech powerhouse on par with Silicon ...
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1answer
130 views

What is the number of square kilometers of crops necessary to feed a population of 100,000? [duplicate]

Yo. I have a city. Pop. 100,000. They need to eat. Due to pantheism as their government-enforced religion, they do not eat meat. I need to know how much space in square kilometers would be needed in ...
0
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2answers
145 views

What are the logistics of wiping out the current world to the point a “new” generation of humans would not be able to find it? [closed]

Backstory I have a race of biologically advanced aliens that develop by fighting, adapting, and growing immune to the current highest standards of technology a species has to offer. By doing this they'...
3
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5answers
483 views

What farming practices would allow the Earth to support a population as high as 200 billion

Welcome to the year 2170, the predictions of our grandparents were so wrong: The human population didn't cap at 20 billion, it went far past that. The global population is now roughly 200 billion. ...
23
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6answers
5k views

Would “lab meat” be able to feed a much larger global population

I read a prediction that if the global fertility rate stayed at the same rate as it was in 1995 by 2150 the population would be 256 billion people. That sounds crazy, but for my sci-fi I'm rolling ...
8
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1answer
292 views

What is the maximum size of a tribe living off of one whale per year?

A small village of ice miners has popped up in the Northern Territory. They are a mix of southern workers who integrated with the native tribes. The group subsists on the meat of a single humpback ...
6
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2answers
145 views

How can I determine the largest possible population that a ring world can comfortably support?

The gods have given up on the habital planet scheme and have decided to design this universe differently. They have filled it with a space structure called a banks orbital. These habitats are purpose-...
5
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1answer
77 views

Could an isolated cutoff valley sustain a diversity of animals alongside humans?

My world has an isolated valley between high mountains like the Himalayas that is practically cut off from the world by high elevation mountains and steep cliffs. The valley is about five miles in ...
24
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6answers
3k views

How many people need to be born every 8 years to sustain population?

So I'm doing some worldbuilding for a small, isolated village on the coast. The winters are harsh, but making sure everybody has enough food generally isn't an issue because they have good trade with ...
6
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6answers
1k views

Humanity loses the vast majority of its technology, information, and population in the year 2122. How long does it take to rebuild itself? [closed]

The year is 2122. An AI created in the year 2115 with complete, unfettered access to control of the entirety of Earth's electronic equipment has caused a mass extinction event of humanity after ...
5
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2answers
299 views

What's the minimum time that it would take for an advanced species to create an ecumenopolis?

In figuring out the rough timeline for my sci-fi, I've run into an interesting dilemma. As it stands right now, There are about 90 years in between one of my civilizations discovering space travel and ...
2
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5answers
688 views

Death from old age has stopped, but fertility window is the same. What is the new population equlibrium?

I'm imagining a near-future world where a process can be undergone that will halt all future aging of the body, but the approach causes infertility. Those undergoing it will not have (biological) ...
3
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3answers
325 views

What kind of extinction event could solve Global Warming?

The world I'm creating will be referred to as E. Current E population is growing exponentially, and the population will become completely unsustainable soon. Global Warming is also increasing ...
12
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4answers
2k views

Calculating City Size based on Population

Question: I'm trying to determine how large (geographically) my city will have to be to accommodate for 1 million people. I have a city that was basically formed by the gods to be fertile land with a ...
173
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19answers
31k views

Russian Dolls - How do they reproduce?

Warning picture showing dissected Russian Doll My theory I believe that Russian Dolls reproduce asexually. They are born pregnant. At the time of birth, the outer doll dies. What is now the outer ...
28
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25answers
10k views

Elf-like race: What could prevent overpopulation?

For an elf-like race whose people do not age beyond physical maturity (the accumulated DNA damage associated with aging does not occur), what would prevent overpopulation? This elf-like race is ...
1
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1answer
151 views

Counteracting Perverse Incentive effects in 1902 Hanoi rat population

A perverse incentive is a reward system that has the opposite effect to the one intended. In Hanoi, under French colonial rule, a program paying people a bounty for each rat tail handed in was ...
8
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6answers
489 views

How can a planet full of zombies reproduce and maintain its population?

How can we have a world that is inhabited only by zombies and yet continues to be populated? For the purposes of this question, I envisage the type of zombie that has been infected by a virus, is ...
3
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3answers
257 views

Reasonable maximum iron age/medieval population for small rural area

Question From around 400 BCE to 1000 CE, what could what would a reasonable greatest achievable population be – under the best of all circumstances – in a rural area of about $\mathrm{900 km^2}$ (In ...
31
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10answers
8k views

In theory, could all mammals be wiped out by a single pathogen?

Pathogen Note: For the purpose of this question I define a pathogen to include viruses and/or bacteria. Edit: I don't exclude other biological agents such as fungi that might have the same effect. ...
2
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2answers
171 views

Cycle of Reincarnation - Bypassing the wait

Lets say for arguments sake, that a world, with maximum population of 5 billion, the common Joe gets reincarnated a few hundred times since the creation of humankind. This type of reincarnation is ...
16
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15answers
3k views

What could cause a baby boom across the western world?

Right now the trend in the western world is declining or stagnant birthrates, but in my sci-fi universe I wanted to have a period of rapid population growth (around the 2050s). What factors could ...
4
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4answers
530 views

How to mitigate high infant mortality rates in a space colony

Judging by the majority of answers from this question: What would be a logical reason to explain space based families having more children than an earth based one the spacers are going to have lots of ...
32
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31answers
8k views

What would be a logical reason to explain space based families having more children than an earth based one

In my yet to be named sci-fi universe humanity has begun to expand into space and has established large scale space stations near Earth and on places like Eros and Luna. I wanted the stereotypical "...
3
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4answers
489 views

How fast would a post-apocalyptic population grow?

Let us assume a soft apocalypse eliminating >99% of world population without any effect on infrastructures. The 1% is irregularly spread over the world. All the drugs, weapons, resources and modern ...

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