How did my point that people might finally be getting tired about the endless cycles of war caused by rival Force users, turn into a debate about whether Alderaan was a large enough event to matter? Obviously it was, hence Tarkin's line about Dantooine being too remote for an effective demonstration. Obviously he wanted to choose a mid/core world that would be large enough for citizens to feel the impact. Alderaan fit the bill, ergo it did actually matter to the galaxy. Tarkin would have never chosen it for his first target if it wouldn't have made enough of a splash to matter. He was after all creating a military doctrine of rule by fear, it doesn't much work if no one cares about your initial target.
This is something of a problem with maximalist interpretations of the story, that they begin to distort the value of anything and cause any single action to feel completely irrelevant in the bigger picture. It's why most Star Wars authors go towards minmialism, and I have a feeling that the new movies are going to trend towards it. Blowing up a Star Destroyer should feel important, but in a galaxy with 25,000, it's almost completely irrelevant. This is especially notable if you compare Star Wars to other popular science fiction in the same category, like Star Trek, Babylon 5 or Mass Effect, they are much smaller settings in which the actions of an individual are more likely to have a greater impact.
Though as to the population issue, the Star Wars galaxy seems massive underpopulated compared to what it could be given the industrial potential. The population of Coruscant was frequently listed as only 1 trillion which gives it a population density of 500 per square kilometer, which puts it in the same range as the nation of South Korea. For comparison sake, New York City is 10,000 and Macau is 20,000. Numbers like that would push it into the range of 1E14. Though AOTC shows an industrial area sufficiently deserted that Dooku can land a ship that had just flown out of Geonosis in the middle of a war without anyone noticing. As a further point of comparison, the first Death Star was as large as 80 million ISDs and yet only had a crew that was 70 times the size, one millionth the requirements for an equivalent fleet of ISDs. This is not to mention the fact that the Clone Wars required massive expendable armies from both sides, which also backs up the idea that there were extensive manpower restrictions in some fashion.
With numbers that low for major worlds, despite the fact that with tech levels shown in SW they should be able to easily go bigger, it is presumably the case that like the modern first world SW heavily uses birth control and thus likely as a population that is stagnant. If that were the case, despite their large numbers, life would actually have a great deal of value. Given the timescales of the Republic, growth or decline is unlikely.
The Romulan Republic wrote:Do you have any evidence for the implication that peoples' lives are less valued now than when the population was lower?
At least in the first world, it is the opposite of true. For a straightforward approach, look at military campaigns. In the American Civil War the Union alone lost well over 300,000 soldiers(against a total national population of only 31 million, a third of which made up the Confederacy). America pulled out of Vietnam after less than 60,000 deaths and Iraq after less than 5,000. While obviously it wasn't a simple calculus of body count, the simple fact is that in modern times death is not a linear result and wartime deaths are generally considered far worse. This is not to mention something like 9/11, in which less than 3,000 deaths caused America to launch an unending series of wars on anyone connected, while in the same year over 50,000 died in car accidents. The manner of death matters a great deal to how the populace responds to an event.
Interestingly, 9/11 is almost the perfect analogy in terms of scale, assuming each of the million worlds of the Galactic Empire has a population equivalent to Earth, which seems somewhat reasonable given that Alderaan is considered significant with only a population of 2 billion*. As the 2 billion that died on Alderaan is roughly a million the number of deaths from 9/11 and there are a million worlds in the Empire, the scale comes out quite nicely. While this is probably quite minimalist, only giving a total population in the quadrillions, it does fit my theory for a population that is stagnant. Either way it is unlikely to be growing, as long as they have been colonizing space.
* When I looked through the Essential Atlas, it was surprising how few worlds listed outnumbered Earth in terms of population the overwhelming majority were far less. Kashyyk for example had only 45 million, though the Wookies did have other colony worlds.
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And I'm still jealous.