Questions tagged [population]
For questions on population sizes, maximums and minimums, how they are affected by different events, etc.
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World Creation - Demographics
I'm currently trying to create a science fiction planet and get an idea of the map in my head. Am I correct in my assumption that most countries have a firm mix of Rural and Metropolitan areas - so ...
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Let children vote! In a way
Inspired in parts by Result of a goverment where extra votes can be bought, earned, or lost? and in parts by actual political discussions:
Let's take a society similar to the current North American / ...
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How many people can live on the oxygen provided by Earth?
I want to know the how many people can live on Earth's oxygen. Is there a point when humans would use up all the oxygen? What would be the limiting factors? Given we have charts to show the rate of ...
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Economy on a technologies-poor planet?
I'm creating a planet. These are the characteristics:
GEOGRAPHY AND GEOLOGY
The planet has a greater density and a gravity acceleration of 1.5 Earth-g, or 14.81 m/s2. There are two polar oceans, ...
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Population size below which tech companies (such as Google, Oracle, Comcast, etc) could no longer operate
Let's say that there is some worldwide catastrophe (some zombie-like infection or something else) that affects working age people in such a way that technology companies do not have enough people to ...
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How would a repetitive life cycle impact civilization?
A mutation or virus (we do not know) has suddenly modified humanity by making people live indefinitely though cycles of aging (to 70 yo) and then rejuvenating (to 3 yo).
This does not make people ...
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Number of Gravediggers in a Fantasy City
I've got a large fantasy city of about 500,000. It's a trading hub and the capital of an empire. Period wise, I would say that it is close to 1500-1600 Europe.
I've got a community of primarily ...
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Everyday effects of telekinesis in a population
I'm working on a setting in which all humans have been genetically modified to have access to telekinesis ages ago, and it is now considered a normal thing. It works somewhat like a muscle in that the ...
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By how much would a human population of say 2,000 grow in 100 years?
The situation is that 2,000 odd humans are stranded on an vastly inhabited planet (In the future) without contact back to Earth for at least 100 years. A few scenarios I have considered in the growth ...
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Lego world. How do they reproduce?
It is difficult to find statistics for the ratio of Lego men and women in the general population but from a non-scientific survey, I get the impression that Lego men vastly outnumber Lego women. Yet ...
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How much life could our galaxy support?
Okay, so we are figuring out, that at least for how we are running things now, our Earth can fit about 10 billion people. We can probably raise if your economy distributed resources more efficiently, ...
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How many people would it take to repopulate the Earth? How large would the population get before degradation? [closed]
I'm wondering how many people it would take to start a new civilization. I'm thinking generally speaking in the following scenarios:
Scenario A) A group of people are exiled from their home. They are ...
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What's the highest population the Earth could possibly sustain?
Suppose that we pare down human consumption to a minimum survivable level across the Earth, and devote the entire surface of the planet (as well as the planet's interior, if needed) to support as many ...
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Aliens double the population
As a prank, aliens come to earth and double our population. This new people are integrated, with false records, and the aliens messed with our heads so we can't reliably tell old people from new ...
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Is there a minimum population mass required for scientific/technological advancement?
So I'm down with a summer cold that flu in out of the blu. Mum is fairly aged... the combination means suddenly the chores are piling up. Somehow the way my mind works I started to wonder what it ...
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What's the biggest medieval city I can make?
What's the biggest medieval city, in terms of population, that we can feasibly make? That is, take all factors that affect population, and tilt them all in favour of a large population, without ...
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What would the average tech level be for the common folk in a space empire?
In Star Gate, the Ori are notorious for keeping the tech level of their planetary subjects at or under medieval tech levels. It has been said (still looking for the exact source) that if everyone ...
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Size of a medieval/fantasy trading port
I am envisioning a trading port city/town, that occupies an island in a river mouth/estuary. Bridges link the island to the mainland.
The island is a mostly submerged, extinct volcano; and the crater ...
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What percentage of the population is required to keep the electricity functioning?
Assuming a random distribution of people suddenly vanish (or die from some form of disease, are abducted by aliens, or similarly incapacitated), how high would the % have to be to disable the power ...
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What would be life living in an underground magma bubble city?
Let's say, we've surpassed all tolerances of population. But, mega-corporations found a creative way to solve the problem. They dug into the Earth to build bubble cities in magma. They have access to (...
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How long will it take human population to exceed one trillion?
Assuming that human civilization in the future will spread from earth into the galaxy, how long would it take for the human population to exceed one trillion (10¹²)? I doubt this is possible if humans ...
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What computational resources would work for a 550-year climate forecast of our earth?
Folks, I'm in a bit of a jam.
I am writing a fictional future history to support a series of post-collapse science fiction stories set ca. 2560 Gregorian. The first story, The Borax Road Affair, has ...
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What is a reasonable amount of population growth for 900 years?
Starting with about 500 humans and allowing for 900 years to pass, about how many people would there be at the end? (Just asking for a rough estimate, maybe a range.) Assuming:
People are generally ...
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Is it plausible that humanity goes extinct due to not making enough children? If not, what would make it more plausible?
With the increase in living standards, the number of children by women is decreasing in highly developed countries.
Question: Is it conceivable (with the aggravating factors proposed below) to see ...
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How can I kill every human on earth? [closed]
One day, "God" said to me:
You need to eliminate the humans race!
So, I was thinking at this problem: How can I kill every human on the planet (and then kill myself)?
Some ideas:
Nuclear Bomb - ...
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I want a big city in a tropical/subtropical climate, what conditons make it possible?
Starting condition: I know how small cities form. It is mostly a trade center that requires an access to water and food. But some cities have more than 100 000+ people.
Angkor, Cambodia had ...
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I want a big city in a temperate area, what conditons make it possible?
Starting conditions:
Climate: It is located in a temperate climate. In this classification, most C and D
climates are temperate. Mostly: Cfb, Cfc, Dfa, Dfb, Dsa, Dsb, Dwa, Dwb. And also, Csa, and ...
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I want a big city in the desert, what conditions make it possible?
Starting condition: I know how small cities form. It is mostly a trade center that requires an access to water and food. But some cities have more than 100 000+ people.
Climate: It is in the desert, ...
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How big is a big city?
According to two RPG (role-playing game) systems, Dungeons & Dragons and Pathfinder, a metropolis is the largest category for a medieval city. The population of a metropolis starts at 25,000 ...
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What is the difference of population density between the population of a nomadic and a sendentary territory?
Let's say that I have two places with the same climate and the same geography and everything. The only difference is that one civilization is nomadic and the other has settled cities on the land and ...
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Repopulating humans AND zombies
So most zombie apocalypse stories involve wiping out 99.9% of the human race and having a small minority survive to try and keep living.
But, let's say I want society as we know it to collapse, but I ...
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How can I estimate how many people are living in a specific territory?
In my own medieval fantasy setting, I have different countries that all have different populations. I admit that I have no idea of how many people should live in X or Y. Just using the numbers for the ...
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Maximum Earth population by wiping out biological life
I want to create a world set on our Earth but with humans converted entirely to machines, so the population can be larger than would be possible with biological humans.
In contrast to biologically ...
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Maximum Earth population given biological shrinking
I want to create a world set on our Earth but with humans shrunk down as much as possible to allow a huge population.
As the population increases they genetically modify their bodies to be as small ...
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How to build a self-sufficient town
Other questions have tried to address how big/small towns have to be in order to function, but I'm more interested in approaching it from a different angle: How big would a town have to be to support ...
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What is the minimum distance needed between physically distinct races?
If there are several races with very distinct appearances (e.g. Nordic-pale vs. Arabic-tan skin, red vs. black hair, etc.), how much space / natural barriers do I need between their homelands to ...
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Ethical solution to generation ship where new generation want to go home
I can easily set a story in a dystopian environment not subject to ethics, but I would rather try to create a backdrop that is as ethical as possible given the requirements. I feel that writing about ...
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What is a good reference size for a settlement?
I have been sporadically building a particular world, mainly by developing its cultures with events (often paralleling Earth history) and individuals, rather than shaping the cultures beforehand. One ...
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Population Range for a Booming/Dying Frontier Town
I'm designing a town in the Ozark mountain range circa 1871, and am unsure what population size to give it.
River Bend is an isolated town in the Ozark highlands of Arkansas founded in 1845 on the ...
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