Stofsk wrote:It is the ridiculousness of having 10 billion people on Earth and a mere 2 million on Mars, who we are often told is the EA's biggest colony.
You know, a big problem with moving around large numbers of people between planets is transportation. Unless you have huge fleets of spacecraft moving millions of people to different planets in a short period of time is extremely challenging, if not impossible. So having "large" colonies in the 22nd/23rd centuries having populations in the millions is really not unrealistic at all.
Fine if Earths population leveled off. (I would like to know how, but whatever)
Why wouldn't it level off? Today it's mostly the third world countries that have the booming population growth. The US is growing slowly and parts of western Europe are having population
declines. Population growth seems to disappear as affluence levels go up, hence things like contraception become more available and the pressure to have many children to support the family is lessened.
Nevermind the fact that B5, a space station that was constructed in a few years, can support 250K population.
How many such colonies does the EA maintain? If they've got a lot of these big outposts that could be where all their colonial effort is going, and they haven't invested much in massively populating their older colonies.
If B5 the space station can have such a high population for being ~8KM long, and be constructed in so short a time, then why can't Mars have a population in the tens, or hundreds of millions? It is meant to be the second-biggest EA planet.
That's true.
Not quite like Coruscant, but the Centauri Republic has been around for hundreds of years. Again, like with Earth, I would like to know what happened to all that population.
Either it was never there in the first place or the Centauri like to keep their homeworld fairly open, and probably give incentives to have small families.
Or if Centauri Prime is the noble's capital and all the plebes live on the colonies (kind of a small section of a modern city being the 'rich suburbs' while everywhere else is poor or middle-class, or if Centauri Prime is the 'Forbidden City' of the Republic).
Given the 40 billion Centauri quote somebody trotted out that seems very likely. Centauri Prime could be like Washington DC: an administrative capital but not a particularly big or important population center.
It still strikes me as too little.
To my mind any planet with a population measured in the billions is at least moderately heavily populated. What really galled me was in a Trek fanfic I read once where the population of Karemma, a major Dominion conquest, was six million people. A homeworld, six million people, now
that is what I call absurd minimalism.
Sheridan had to choose where to deploy his fleet, and he chose some unknown planet called 'Coriana 6' because it had 6 billion population, while Centauri Prime had 3 billion. Coriana 6 is never seen, never heard from again, and no Coriana-ian is ever introduced to the show. So how does Sheridan know about them?
Maybe it's one of those heavily populated Centauri colonies you mentioned earlier.
