2400AD Notes: 3
Dec. 25th, 2002 01:56 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldOne important feature of the 2300AD setting is the relative underpopulation of human space.
In Canon, there are some 11.1 billion human beings on Earth. This population forms more than 90% of the total human population. On the fertile world of Tirane in the Alpha Centauri system, there are some 1.05 billion people living in nine different colonies. The entire French Arm taken together has barely more than a quarter-billion people, with the third-largest planetary population in human space being Nibelungen's 75.65 million. Nibelungen's population, in turn, is almost twice as large as the population of the Chinese Arm, while Manchuria on the Chinese Arm has almost twice as many colonists as on the American Arm. The total human population numbers less than 12 billion people, with 95% of this population concentrated on the high-population worlds of Tirane and Earth.
This concentration is a weakness. Treating each of the three Arms as spread-out societies planetary-scale societies, in the Kafer War the third-most-populous human society suffered almost 18.5 million dead--the German colony of Hochbaden was entirely destroyed, and nine million of France's 12 million on Nous Voila perished, never mind proportionally and absolutely less severe damage on most of the Arm's other colony worlds. One Kafer scout ship managed to make it as far as Sol; by the time that the climactic Battle of Beowulf halted the Kafer advance, the Kafer battle fleets were only four systems away from Sol, and one more from Tirane. If worst had come to worst and the human fleets had failed to hold the line at Beowulf, something like 95% of the human population could have been exterminated or enslaved. This is not good. Even if, as I propose in my setting, you have a terraformed Mars, that still won't solve the problem of a human population overly concentrated in two planetary systems. Mars' carrying capacity for human settlement may also be limited.
Moreover, given that I'd be mixing this 2300AD/Traveller hybrid with my Tripartite Alliance Earth dystopia, wherein a Third World War conducted in 1982 ended up killing three billion of the total world population of five billion. Granted that the Twilight War of 2300AD's history probably killed a similar proportion of the world population, what we know now about demography suggests that recovery even to pre-War population levels would be slow and halting. You could, I suppose, make some argument to the effect that if you tie the economic recovery of the 21st century closely to relatively inexpensive space travel, you could still get substantial emigration offworld, whether voluntary or sponsored. The relatively small populations of the American and Chinese Arms are well within the capacity of Earth, I suspect; while the nationalities of the colonial populations will obviously have to shift, a combined population of 60 million people on 18 different worlds is plausible. The quarter-billion people of the French Arm form a larger population but still plausible, though you have to wonder whether a tide-locked world like Nibelungen with such a small habitable zone can really support that many people. For fun, let's establish a population of 100 million people on Mars--the terraforming program initiated before stutterwarp has probably been halting, but the efforts invested in the program and the possibilities of Mars as a colonial world for non-interstellar nations are such that a substantial Martian population is plausible. And why not a billion people on Tirane? Given how wonderfully Earthlike that world is, sustained high birth rates are plausible.
For Earth, though, a population of five billion people by 2300 might well be the maximum possible. Earth would be a tired world. There would still be frontiers in the lands depopulated during the Third World War, but I suspect that many of these lands would never be repopulated to their pre-war levels: Who would want to recolonize northern Russia when that area was only a viable economic area when it was developed by the gulags? Perhaps most of the areas left deserted will remain deserted indefinitely, as vast tracts of restored wilderness are restored in a vain effort to try to comepnsate for centuries of overexploitation. Perhaps after a certain point, once movement off-Earth became easy, population increase tapered off under the pressure of emigration. Perhaps baby booms were interspersed with baby busts, and colonial nations feared (in good mercantilistic fashion) the training of their energetic youth to the colonies. Suffice it to say that I think that a total human population of under seven billion people--five billion on Earth, one billion on Tirane, a quarter-billion in the French Arm, 100 million on Mars, and a few dozen million on the Chinese and American Arms--would be the most suitable population level.
This low population means, among other things, that it might be very difficult to adequately populate all of the different colony worlds. Frontier populations may have higher birth rates than populations on Earth--maybe Tirane, now that its population has breached the one billion mark, is beginning to consider mounting colonial efforts of their own. Perhaps the Martians are likewise interested--maybe they'd like to mount terraforming missions of their own, or try to start with more habitable worlds. Still, the off-Earth populations are still so relatively small that large emgirant populations might be difficult to find, particularly given that the second-largest colonial population (the French Arm) is likely to be concerned with reconstruction itself.
What can be done? For starters, there's always the possibility of humanity creating its own colonists. Quite apart from the highly ethically questionable idea of mass cloning programs, Transhuman Space provides numerous possibilities if you actually want physical colonists. There is the possibility of bioroids, briefly defined biological androids; while their mass manufacture is highly likely to be banned on the ethical grounds of creating slaves, there's no reason why an artificial intelligence interested on manifesting itself in the flesh shouldn't be able to don a human-like body. (Or an android body, perhaps.) If you're interested in creating non-human Earth-derived intelligences, then you can uplift already bright Earth species (dolphins, humpback whales, any number of primate species, perhaps octopi, perhaps common household pets) to intelligence. With uplifts, true, you'll face similar constraints as apply to the human population--cetaceans and primates tend to have birth rates comparable to homo sapiens sapiens and so won't form a particularly large population in all, though uplifted species might be locally prominent on some worlds.
There's one further possibility; or rather, two further possibilities. Humanity's victory in the Kafer Wars will be achieved substantially with the help of two species: the Sung of the BD+04 123 system, with a highly industrialized homeworld home to billions abutting the thinly-populated Chinese Arm; and the Y'lii, further down the Kafer Arm on the fringes of Kafer Space, with their own ancient interstellar empire that once stretched into the American Arm. The Ylii, after the Kafer defeat, will likely be too busy reclaiming their former worlds, and adjusting to their new assertiveness, whether achieved through a new strain of assertive Alphas or through an adoption of homo sapiens sapiens as their defenders or both.
The Sung, though, are a rather different sort of species, rather new to interstellar travel yet with their own experience of other worlds (their abortive colonization of the Xiang homeworld), an indigenous technology not too far removed from human levels, and an expectation that they are apprentices of humanity, owing consideration under the principle of Soon-Atkacharr to eventually receive stutterwarp technology and entry into the wider galaxy. After Stark's industrial base and--quite possibly--Sung military units contribute to the final defeat of the Kafers, how will a weakened humanity be able to refuse?
One possibility: The Sung prefer worlds with thin atmospheres and relatively low gravity, so that they can fly and breathe more easily. A terraformed Mars would have both.
Thoughts?
In Canon, there are some 11.1 billion human beings on Earth. This population forms more than 90% of the total human population. On the fertile world of Tirane in the Alpha Centauri system, there are some 1.05 billion people living in nine different colonies. The entire French Arm taken together has barely more than a quarter-billion people, with the third-largest planetary population in human space being Nibelungen's 75.65 million. Nibelungen's population, in turn, is almost twice as large as the population of the Chinese Arm, while Manchuria on the Chinese Arm has almost twice as many colonists as on the American Arm. The total human population numbers less than 12 billion people, with 95% of this population concentrated on the high-population worlds of Tirane and Earth.
This concentration is a weakness. Treating each of the three Arms as spread-out societies planetary-scale societies, in the Kafer War the third-most-populous human society suffered almost 18.5 million dead--the German colony of Hochbaden was entirely destroyed, and nine million of France's 12 million on Nous Voila perished, never mind proportionally and absolutely less severe damage on most of the Arm's other colony worlds. One Kafer scout ship managed to make it as far as Sol; by the time that the climactic Battle of Beowulf halted the Kafer advance, the Kafer battle fleets were only four systems away from Sol, and one more from Tirane. If worst had come to worst and the human fleets had failed to hold the line at Beowulf, something like 95% of the human population could have been exterminated or enslaved. This is not good. Even if, as I propose in my setting, you have a terraformed Mars, that still won't solve the problem of a human population overly concentrated in two planetary systems. Mars' carrying capacity for human settlement may also be limited.
Moreover, given that I'd be mixing this 2300AD/Traveller hybrid with my Tripartite Alliance Earth dystopia, wherein a Third World War conducted in 1982 ended up killing three billion of the total world population of five billion. Granted that the Twilight War of 2300AD's history probably killed a similar proportion of the world population, what we know now about demography suggests that recovery even to pre-War population levels would be slow and halting. You could, I suppose, make some argument to the effect that if you tie the economic recovery of the 21st century closely to relatively inexpensive space travel, you could still get substantial emigration offworld, whether voluntary or sponsored. The relatively small populations of the American and Chinese Arms are well within the capacity of Earth, I suspect; while the nationalities of the colonial populations will obviously have to shift, a combined population of 60 million people on 18 different worlds is plausible. The quarter-billion people of the French Arm form a larger population but still plausible, though you have to wonder whether a tide-locked world like Nibelungen with such a small habitable zone can really support that many people. For fun, let's establish a population of 100 million people on Mars--the terraforming program initiated before stutterwarp has probably been halting, but the efforts invested in the program and the possibilities of Mars as a colonial world for non-interstellar nations are such that a substantial Martian population is plausible. And why not a billion people on Tirane? Given how wonderfully Earthlike that world is, sustained high birth rates are plausible.
For Earth, though, a population of five billion people by 2300 might well be the maximum possible. Earth would be a tired world. There would still be frontiers in the lands depopulated during the Third World War, but I suspect that many of these lands would never be repopulated to their pre-war levels: Who would want to recolonize northern Russia when that area was only a viable economic area when it was developed by the gulags? Perhaps most of the areas left deserted will remain deserted indefinitely, as vast tracts of restored wilderness are restored in a vain effort to try to comepnsate for centuries of overexploitation. Perhaps after a certain point, once movement off-Earth became easy, population increase tapered off under the pressure of emigration. Perhaps baby booms were interspersed with baby busts, and colonial nations feared (in good mercantilistic fashion) the training of their energetic youth to the colonies. Suffice it to say that I think that a total human population of under seven billion people--five billion on Earth, one billion on Tirane, a quarter-billion in the French Arm, 100 million on Mars, and a few dozen million on the Chinese and American Arms--would be the most suitable population level.
This low population means, among other things, that it might be very difficult to adequately populate all of the different colony worlds. Frontier populations may have higher birth rates than populations on Earth--maybe Tirane, now that its population has breached the one billion mark, is beginning to consider mounting colonial efforts of their own. Perhaps the Martians are likewise interested--maybe they'd like to mount terraforming missions of their own, or try to start with more habitable worlds. Still, the off-Earth populations are still so relatively small that large emgirant populations might be difficult to find, particularly given that the second-largest colonial population (the French Arm) is likely to be concerned with reconstruction itself.
What can be done? For starters, there's always the possibility of humanity creating its own colonists. Quite apart from the highly ethically questionable idea of mass cloning programs, Transhuman Space provides numerous possibilities if you actually want physical colonists. There is the possibility of bioroids, briefly defined biological androids; while their mass manufacture is highly likely to be banned on the ethical grounds of creating slaves, there's no reason why an artificial intelligence interested on manifesting itself in the flesh shouldn't be able to don a human-like body. (Or an android body, perhaps.) If you're interested in creating non-human Earth-derived intelligences, then you can uplift already bright Earth species (dolphins, humpback whales, any number of primate species, perhaps octopi, perhaps common household pets) to intelligence. With uplifts, true, you'll face similar constraints as apply to the human population--cetaceans and primates tend to have birth rates comparable to homo sapiens sapiens and so won't form a particularly large population in all, though uplifted species might be locally prominent on some worlds.
There's one further possibility; or rather, two further possibilities. Humanity's victory in the Kafer Wars will be achieved substantially with the help of two species: the Sung of the BD+04 123 system, with a highly industrialized homeworld home to billions abutting the thinly-populated Chinese Arm; and the Y'lii, further down the Kafer Arm on the fringes of Kafer Space, with their own ancient interstellar empire that once stretched into the American Arm. The Ylii, after the Kafer defeat, will likely be too busy reclaiming their former worlds, and adjusting to their new assertiveness, whether achieved through a new strain of assertive Alphas or through an adoption of homo sapiens sapiens as their defenders or both.
The Sung, though, are a rather different sort of species, rather new to interstellar travel yet with their own experience of other worlds (their abortive colonization of the Xiang homeworld), an indigenous technology not too far removed from human levels, and an expectation that they are apprentices of humanity, owing consideration under the principle of Soon-Atkacharr to eventually receive stutterwarp technology and entry into the wider galaxy. After Stark's industrial base and--quite possibly--Sung military units contribute to the final defeat of the Kafers, how will a weakened humanity be able to refuse?
One possibility: The Sung prefer worlds with thin atmospheres and relatively low gravity, so that they can fly and breathe more easily. A terraformed Mars would have both.
Thoughts?
