Empire VS any Solid Kardashev Scale level III civilizations

[Eternal_Freedom]

Raw materials for construction may well come from the same solar system, as may water (there is mention of the Ulabos (SP?) Ice Bands in the NJO, so those two factors, whilst being imports, may not require hyperspace travel to import them to Coruscant.

[S.L.Acker]

Raw materials for construction may well come from the same solar system, as may water (there is mention of the Ulabos (SP?) Ice Bands in the NJO, so those two factors, whilst being imports, may not require hyperspace travel to import them to Coruscant.

I doubt they have their own large scale durasteel smelters and forges though. Kilometers tall buildings take the industry that Coruscant is said to have mostly gotten rid of to build and maintain.

[Eternal_Freedom]

For smelting and forging, that is apparently included within the Construction Droids - they can take existing damaged buildings and make new ones.

EDIT: Given that these droids are apparently constantly demolishing and rebuilding the cityscape, it's possible that there are no major imports of raw construction materials.

[S.L.Acker]

For smelting and forging, that is apparently included within the Construction Droids - they can take existing damaged buildings and make new ones.

EDIT: Given that these droids are apparently constantly demolishing and rebuilding the cityscape, it's possible that there are no major imports of raw construction materials.

It's sort of possible, unless you want to build a building/buildings more massive than the ones you demolished. We also don't know what the recycling efficiency is. This also doesn't account for raw materials for any other industry, limited as it may be.

[Eternal_Freedom]

True, but being able to easily recycle old buildings into new ones is going to reduce by a substantial amount the quantaties of raw materials you need to ship in.

[S.L.Acker]

True, but being able to easily recycle old buildings into new ones is going to reduce by a substantial amount the quantaties of raw materials you need to ship in.

True, doesn't much change that we're already at 100 billion containers, packed with (64,000 lb. each) shipped just for vehicles and food. Just keeps the number from rising to approach 200 billion as rapidly as it might otherwise.

[S.L.Acker]

If we assume that all cargo arrives in something the size of an Emma Maersk class vessel it will take 6.67 million trips to deliver the cargo, even increasing capacity by ten times gives us 667 thousand shipments arriving per year. Round trip, that is 1.33 million trips per year.

[S.L.Acker]

1e6 trips / year * 1e24 J / trip = 1e30 J / year

That's 1e22 W on average. Divide by 1e12 people on coruscant and we get 1e10 W / person.


That's huge, but actually less than my first assumption!


I think we're onto a good method here though.

Yeah, that is a bit smaller than I would have expected. Though it does give us a point of estimation for the energy used in shipping in the Star Wars universe. Numbers might nudge higher if we don't assume such well packed containers, but that won't give us another order of magnitude. The military and energy used in the manufacture of goods could bump that to 1e11 W / person, but without knowing how much energy is needed to run a construction droid's molecular furnace or some similar industrial benchmark I'd be hard pressed to argue for anything much higher than that.

[S.L.Acker]

If we go with a 3e12 population for Coruscant and give the rest of the Empire 1e6 worlds with 3e10 people each we get a rough energy usage of 3e27 W as what the Empire uses per year.

EDIT: That seems really low, only an order of magnitude above the energy harnessed from a single star. Yet they have a battle station that could produce that much in a year on its own and it used so few resources that it could still be hidden...

[S.L.Acker]

I think Star Wars could likely be higher if they gave a shit, but the things they have work for the jobs they need to do so why would they bother. However I also get the feeling we're lowballing SW a bit as well. We don't know the energy required to refine hypermatter, or what a molecular furnace's power needs are, and these things, the first especially, could make a larger difference if the energy input needed to get hypermatter is along the same lines as what it takes to get antimatter.

[Grandmaster Jogurt]

The average US citizen uses about 10kW. Even with Galactic population figures in the 10^18 range from the literature you could sustain the entire population at US levels with the output of a single star. If we put everyone on the 10^10 watt level talked about here you'd still only need a hundred stars locked up to power it all.

If the entire galactic output is captured (10^38ish W) you could sustain 10^33 US citizens or 10^28 Coruscantlings, and the latter would require an average population of 10^14 per star system, making every planet an ecumenopolis in some form (or filling the systems with lots of habitats, I guess). Alternately, you could provide for ten thousand Death Stars firing full-powered shots every day.

[Simon_Jester]

I don't consider 10 billion to be all that optimistic really. We currently manage to feed 7 billion (if barely and inadequately for a lot of them) and that's with humanity doing a really shitty job of managing the resources available (if you're using the 1E12 billion I'm naturally retracting the criticism).

The real question is one of sustainability- we are effectively strip-mining topsoil, aquifers, and fisheries to feed those seven billion. Trying to feed ten billion for a sustained period (i.e. several centuries) would be a huge strain on the Earth's biosphere.

Now, we can quibble that, it's kind of beside the point- which is that Coruscant can grow a mind-boggling amount of food on its own hydroponics, many times what you could ever grow by conventional dirt farming on Earth, and still supply only a small fraction of its own needs.

[Iosef Cross]

I don't consider 10 billion to be all that optimistic really. We currently manage to feed 7 billion (if barely and inadequately for a lot of them) and that's with humanity doing a really shitty job of managing the resources available (if you're using the 1E12 billion I'm naturally retracting the criticism).

The real question is one of sustainability- we are effectively strip-mining topsoil, aquifers, and fisheries to feed those seven billion. Trying to feed ten billion for a sustained period (i.e. several centuries) would be a huge strain on the Earth's biosphere.

Now, we can quibble that, it's kind of beside the point- which is that Coruscant can grow a mind-boggling amount of food on its own hydroponics, many times what you could ever grow by conventional dirt farming on Earth, and still supply only a small fraction of its own needs.

While the coruscant point of importing huge quantities of food is a valid point.

To use the argument argument that producing food for 7 billion is not sustainable for earth's biosphere is not valid. In fact, while global population increased by over 20 times, even today some parts of the world have lower population densities than they had 2 thousand years ago: Boeotia in Central Greece had an estimated 165,000 to 200,000 inhabitants in the 4th century BC (Mogens Herman Hansen, The Demography of the Greek City State Culture) while today (2005 greek census) is has 132,000 inhabitants. In Classical times the Boeotians supported this massive level of population density by the intensive use of manure (archaeologists have found a layer of manure in the earth dating from the Classical Period) and rational agricultural methods. Today, with chemical fertilizers and all modern technology we are certainly able to extract much more food from the same region.

Coruscant imported huge quantities of food not because it couldn't produce food but because it was cheaper to import than to use precious real state in the planet. That shows that hypertravel transportation of food is cheaper than producing food locally. Which shows how cheap is energy in the Galatic Empire.

Ecumenopolis show that interestelar travel is really cheap for the galatic empire. As it implies in a interestelar division of labor.

[Batman]

Whether or not Earth can or can not feed 7 billion is completely irrelevant and I only ever brought that up because I had issues with S_J's claim that Earth couldn't feed 10 billion, not because it has any relevance pertaining to the issue at hand, which it doesn't. This is commonly called a nitpick.
Not that I quite understand why you think your statistics have any relevancy towards whether a planet that is essentially all city can feed itself.

[Simon_Jester]

It's also deeply stupid. He's arguing that because there's a valley or two in Greece that is less populated now than it was during the classical era of city-states, the entire planet must still have drastically more room. This ignores all the vast swathes of land that were fertile 2500 years ago and are barren now (much of the Middle East and Central Asia, for instance). And all the vast swathes of land that have huge populations now, but were howling wilderness populated by barbarian tribes 2500 years ago (Europe)

But, yes. I'm saying ten billion is an optimistic long term figure for Earth because I've seen very few figures coming out from anyone with ecologist credentials that go much over that. Economists might go "well, assuming free everything and effortless blah blah blah and assuming we find a marketable substitute for drinking water, we could support 100 billion people on Earth." But that's sheer nonsense; as far as doing rational calculation goes, it's about as authoritative as an eight year old scribbling that in 2020 we'll all have jetpacks and pet Moon monsters.

So I stick to that ten billion figure, as a reasonable estimate for the carrying capacity of a typical Earthlike planet. You might increase on that a bit by very sophisticated methods of planetary environmental control, especially if you don't feel bad about exterminating all the native ecosystems (as I would feel, but Iosef Cross or a terraformer from another world might not). And then again, some planets will have less exploitable biomass, others more, variables vary- but there are limits, limits I'd expect to see within an order of magnitude or less. Possibly a lot less.

So if there's several hundred billion people sitting on a planet somewhere, then either they're eating nothing but their own recycled shit after processing in some big chemical works, or there are a lot of agriworlds sitting around out there running their own biospheres at an overclocked rate to feed them.

[Batman]

And for Earth as is I'd have to agree. Warstech planets may or may not have the means to improve on that but that wasn't the point of contention. Besides, we know Coruscant has to import food so it's not like them being incapable of feeding themselves is up for debate to begin with.

[Vejut]

How much would adding droids add to the energy figures included, or do we not have any way to estimate that? It does seem like SW people do use a good deal of them...

[Simon_Jester]

True.

Something like a protocol droid isn't necessarily all that energy-intensive; C3PO doesn't seem to weigh much more than a human being and probably doesn't consume much more energy than a human being wandering around. His brain might use drastically more energy than the human brain does to achieve intelligence and keep up that huge library of languages, but I doubt it's hundreds and hundreds of times more.

But robots that have built-in repulsors for window washing, things like that- those would be incredible energy hogs, or could be. Still, their consumption isn't out of line with the estimates on hyperdrive energy consumption; a civilization that's importing food over interstellar distances can run a lot of droids out of the petty cash fund, so to speak.