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
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2answers
56 views

How large could a population of supernatural beings be and still be plausibly hidden?

I am trying to figure out how large the population of supernatural beings can be in a stereotypical urban fantasy setting before their numbers stretch the suspension of disbelief. I.e., your standard ...
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5answers
1k views

How many people within a given population could reasonably be “noble” without inbreeding becoming an issue?

I have searched around the site and seen several population-related questions, but not one that is getting at what I'm specifically wondering (or that is at least explaining it in a way that my ...
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2answers
165 views

How can an immortal emperor's descendants affect the rate of population growth?

In the ancient nation of R'lyeth, a carpenter named Yeshuah Targeryean walked into a desert to prepare for his ministry. During this time, he was visited by a tentacled monstrosity who promised him ...
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4answers
92 views

How would dozens of humanoid species affect early migrations?

In our world, humans evolved and spread to pretty much every place in the world they could reach. Would that still be the case if there were, say, a dozen different humanoid species? Would they all ...
4
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3answers
96 views

What would the population and financial requirements be to create a self-sustaining country based on UBI that could be apart of the global economy [closed]

If a mega rich individual wanted to test the validity of UBI (Universal Basic Income) in the most efficient way possible and how it integrates into a global modern economy, what would the population ...
-1
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2answers
106 views

What conditions would allow for a medieval England type population to have only red or blond hair? [closed]

Only fair haired, with no occurrences of black or brown hair. I am seeking a reason that this type of genetic occurrence is plausible?
6
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1answer
125 views

Is it at all possible to have a populous, formerly colonial nation in the Indian Ocean?

The temperate latitudes of the Indian Ocean and adjacent regions are essentially empty- only the extreme Southwest of Australia and extreme South of Africa dip into the temperate belt. What if there ...
7
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1answer
110 views

What would be the an avarage and/or realistic population density be for an medieval based city?

I'm currently building a world for a medieval based D&D campaign (i know super original) and I'm trying to make my cities as realistic as i can. Right now I'm planning on making a city in the ...
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3answers
133 views

what percentage of the world’s population is religious? [closed]

I recall asking a question that applies to Hell, but I have since realized that said story idea didn’t make a lot of sense. I have been thinking and thinking and thinking, and I think I’ve finally ...
0
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3answers
186 views

How long could a city that is completely cut off sustain itself? [duplicate]

I have a city, and let's say this city gets cut off, Berlin '45 style. Nothing in, nothing out. Classic siege. I want to be more specific than that though: Suburbs won't be in it, it will be all the ...
7
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5answers
2k views

What is the maximum population density in a settled land where farming and homesteading is impossible?

Let’s say that early middle ages humans discovered and expanded into a newly discovered land. Those humans made a concentrated effort to populate this new territory; they shipped several ships of ...
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1answer
124 views

What would the job market look like if half the population suddenly disappeared? [closed]

Half of all humans on planet earth one day suddenly disappear, leaving no trace. My question is, how would this affect the job market? First I assume there would be a lot of grieving over lost loved ...
3
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2answers
223 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 ...
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0answers
91 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 ...
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4answers
190 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
297 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 ...
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13answers
8k 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
154 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
391 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
252 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 ...
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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 ...
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4answers
263 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", ...
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2answers
112 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 ...
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2answers
273 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 ...
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2answers
138 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
261 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 ...
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1answer
123 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
181 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 ...
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2answers
247 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
97 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 ...
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2answers
340 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 ...
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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 ...
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6answers
349 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 ...
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7answers
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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 ...
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1answer
337 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 ...
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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 ...
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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
305 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
164 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
148 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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6answers
558 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. ...
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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
323 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
167 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
365 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
698 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
330 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 ...

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