Grandmaster Jogurt wrote:Hardy wrote:If the population is in the quadrillions or hundred-trillions, why would Palpatine state a figure orders of magnitude less that the actual figure?
It could be rationalized in-universe that after you start getting into numbers that high, people start paying a lot less attention to how close they are.
And "trillion" seems, to me, to roll off the tongue a lot more easily than "hundred-trillion" or "quadrillion".
Actually it could be alot simpler to rationalize than that. Coruscant is virtually the center of the whole galaxy, and as such, one could expect people to have many MANY reasons to visit the place (refugees and hitchikers/transients, businessmen, tourists and other vacationers, lobbyists, political aides, governmental officials and bureacrats.) and much of the surface of the planet could be given over to accomodating and supporting many times more than its "stable" population. Further, over the period of events just prior to AOTC, it is known that Coruscant serviced an unknown but presumably large number of refugees during the "Pre-Clone Wars" period, and its also quite possible that a large number of these people who remained on planet (meaning that there is a large but unacknowledged/uncounted population of the lower class.)
As a side note, it is worth noting that while Curtis population figures ARE perfectly valid and acceptable and are based on both conservative and reasonable assumptions, they are STILL an estimate, which also must be taken into account. (albeit an estimate that as Primey said, is accepted as a standard around here. Saying it is an estimate does not mean it is neccesarily
wrong either. For example, a case can be made for the "650 billion as 650 trillion" figure, which would not neccesarily contradict the ITW:ICS or ROTS novel figures, because that is largely an "Empire-era" figure, IIRC.)
