human population

[sunshine220]

Any idea how big the human poppulation in ds9 era is ?
The klingon and ramulan empier seems to be atleast half the size of the fedeRation, they must have a decent population size , any idea of how many klingons there are ?

[Stofsk]

In the episode with those genetically engineered doofuses, they feel that defeat of the Federation is inevitable and they urge Bashir to try and convince Sisko to sue for peace. It was cited that 900 billion dudes would die if the war continued before the Federation would be forced to surrender. I would guess that at least a couple of trillion might be in the ballpark.

EDIT- that's the population of the Federation of course. No idea as to how many humans there are.

[Prometheus Unbound]

Makes sense. If you assume 150 (ish) member worlds (home worlds) with a population of ~6-7 billion you're approaching about a trillion - and then there's the colonies as well. We only have Earth as a basis for a populated world. Projections indicate we'll be at 7 billion by 2050, 8 billion by about 2070-75 with the curve going upward but that's following current day trends - Presumably as developing nations industrialise properly to the point where, say, most of Africa, the middle East, India, China, Brazil etc are at a level where education and health care at a level which is comfortable for the populations - say over the course of the next 100 years or so - their birth rates will decline or even go in to remission. By the 24th century, assuming no massive wars which destroy the population, assuming by then all countries are "first world", as shown in Trek, the population wont be as high as the current curve would be (which by then would be something stupid like 200 billion).

[Eternal_Freedom]

Ummm..I think you've got a mistake in the numbers there. Aren't we nearly at 7 billion today?

[Prometheus Unbound]

Whoops, I meant 8 and 9...

[Enigma]

Well, how many died in WW3? Also if we go by First Contact, there were 9 billion on Earth.

[Eternal_Freedom]

According to Riker in First Contat, WW3 resulted in "most of the major cities have been destroyed, very few governments left. 600 million dead."

[Enigma]

That seems to be a low figure if most major cities were destroyed.

[Eternal_Freedom]

600 million is a huge death toll. Even nuking cities doesn't actually kill everyone. The WW2 atomic bomb attacks killed about 1/3 of those cities populations, including the after effects in the following months.

Pretty much this. 600 million is still 1 in 15 if it's 2050 and there are 9 billion people. 1 in 15 sounds a lot worse. Ok, it's not in the realm of Terminator where 3 billion die, but it's still a shitload.

Heck, maybe nuclear weapon design advanced in 40 years and you had nearly no fallout from the blasts. That will greatly reduce the death toll.

[Sea Skimmer]

I don't think any attempt to scale an estimate of the 24th century population of earth can work, because population growth is a product of per capita death and birth rates. Generally the more developed a country today, the lower the birth rate until its barely at replacement rate. Something like WW3 would almost certainly push rates back up, and then the uniform advancement of the 24th century might push them back down. We also do know that people can live to be very old in Star Trek, so this might inflate population numbers even with very slow growth, while of course, earth also had to shed people to provide seed populations for all those colonies. So...end result of so many variables is its anyone's guess.

We can say from observation though that we see no signs of earth being overrun by super cities; but then its possible that many new cities were founded after WW3 and that traditional cities we do see like Paris and San Francisco may have only had limited rebuilding.

[Darth Tedious]

Ummm..I think you've got a mistake in the numbers there. Aren't we nearly at 7 billion today?

Slightly off-topic, but we already hit 7 billion last Halloween.

[Eternal_Freedom]

Really? Wow. That's what I get for not reading the paper. I expected a thread in N&P about it.

Do you have a source for that?

[Prometheus Unbound]

UN? WHO?

It's true - go search on Google. I remember the news articles myself.