Pop A Worlds: how and why?

[Malenfant]

OK, I'm spinning this off from the Evaluating UWP thread here.

I would like to hear some explanations as to how exactly a world with a pop digit of A can possibly be viable (the pop multiplier means that there are 10 to 100 billion people on it). Particularly tiny airless rockballs like Stoner, which have a population of 80 billion.

There are several things to consider:

1) food production and distribution. Where is it produced, how does it get to the population, how much area is available to produce it? If the bulk is imported from offworld, how much traffic do you need to bring in enough food to support that many people? Ditto for water too, particularly on airless rockballs that may not have any.

2) population density. Where are all those people living? Is there any room for arable land, park space, business/industrial zones etc?

3) Waste management. I see three big problems here - especially on non-habitable worlds - bodily waste, CO2 and heat.

3a) What do you do with the biological output (OK, I'll stop beating about the bush - "the poop") of 80 billion people? What do you do with all the garbage and sewage they produce - where do they dump that? If you dump it offworld, how much traffic do you need every day just to dump all that refuse? (and where do you put it?).

3b) What about the CO2 produced when they exhale - a back of the envelope calculation shows that assuming a lung capacity of 5000 cm3, you're going to get a total output of about 200,000,000 to 400,000,000 m3 of CO2 produced every time the population breathes (for comparison, the 6 billion population of Earth is putting out 30,000,000 cubic metres of CO2 with each breath, and that's into an open environment). Can a close environment on a non-habitable world handle all that CO2?

3c) The waste heat generated by all those bodies may also put a strain on a closed environmental system if they're on a non-habitable world.

4) if they're on a habitable world, what kind of strain does supporting all those people put on the local environment? You'd pretty much have to obliterate the existing native ecosystem (or severely alter it to get enough crops and livestock), wouldn't you?

5) Why would so many people want to live on a world anyway? How - and why - could the population growth have run so amok? What is the purpose of having that many people on a single world?

6) Where is all the industry sited?

Maybe there are solutions and numbers have already been crunched, but if there are then I'm not aware of them (or remain unconvinced about them). I don't care much for magical high TL armwaves like "oh, I'm sure they'll have a way to figure it out by then". A TL 15 society still has to face those problems, and it'll have to come up with a solution if they want to cram tens of billions of people on a planet - if it turns out not to be possible, then obviously these worlds will not have tens of billions of people. It may be that such hi-pop worlds are ONLY possible if the TL is above a certain level too.

I'm also not really interested in approaching this from a top-down perspective of "OK, we have worlds with tens of billions of people on them, how do we get that to work?", when there may not even necessarily be a viable solution. Instead, I want to look at this from the bottom up - can the population on that world even get that big given the available resources, can infrastructure be built to support all those people as the population grows, and if it is possible how it is all supported. Because that's what has to be considered when the world's population is growing.


I had a few ideas for alternative explanations for pop A worlds that may ease the population pressure a bit:

A) Change what the pop digits mean: pop 9 = multiples of 500 million people, pop A = multiples of 1 billion people - that caps the maximum possible population at 10 billion, which is much more manageable.

B) The pop digit represents how many people are in the SYSTEM, not on that one mainworld. As it stands, the population of the other worlds in the system are likely to be in the billions if the mainworld's population is in the tens of billions. Changing it to the total population in the system doesn't really ease the pressure that much, but at least you can put tens of billions of people in asteroid belts and on other worlds there rather than all on the mainworld.


Thinking about these things will either generate a better picture of how these extremely hi-pop worlds have to work, or it'll show that they're not really possible at all. Either way, thinking about it is good

. I am initially skeptical about whether Pop A worlds are viable, but if someone can show that these worlds ARE viable, then I'm open to changing my mind.

 

[far-trader]

Just a quick thought pulled from a JTAS Design contest entry of mine a while back. I don't remember the exact numbers I worked up but this is the general idea...

One possible way to make a huge population work with very limited resources is through time sharing. What I did was have the bulk of the population in low berth suspension on a rotational basis. This reduces the requirements for everything and also allows the huge population to be extremely stable for centuries. Everyone "lives" for centuries though they are only contributing for a single lifespan. Families would be cycled together to maintain bonds but friends and neighbors would sometimes be out of touch except by messages left while they were awake.

Just one sci-fi idea that is a little outside the norm. It creates an interesting and somewhat alien society, though it might not seem so to the PCs when they first visit. One of them could form an attachment with a citizen and on the next visit find them "sleeping" for the next 100years. Will the PC apply for citizenship and enter a low-berth to wait the 100years for the reunion?

So does this go in your list of possibles? Or do we need to crack a little harder on your skull to open your mind

 

[Malenfant]

Well, I'd have to ask why they'd do that in the first place. It'd also mean that only about a tenth of the population would be active at any given time, with the other 90% being in low berths (which use energy, take up space, etc etc). And isn't the revival success rate from a low berths rather poor? You could end up killing billions or hundreds of millions when they were revived

.

The problem is that what you suggest is a way to explain a world that currently has tens of billions of people on it. But it doesn't do anything to explain how the world reached that situation in the first place. All these worlds have to grow from a population of 0 (unless they have native population on them, but they still grow from a base of millions). What would drive the population to grow to tens of billions? What would the government do when faced with population pressures when the population reached the billions?

 

[veltyen]

It also depends entirely on citizenship. If active imprints of people count then suddenly you can store thousands of people in a couple of computer systems.

Currently planetary population of sol(3) is 6.5 billion (according to estimates collected elsewhere) size 7, hydrography 7, breathable atmosphere, specific TL 9 with a general TL of 8 (or so). At a pinch we could be considered to have a B class starport, though C or D is more appropriate. In 30 years Earth is likely to have a A+ population, if toe to toe nuclear combat or designed plague don't slow population growth. There is still a lot of area underutilised (not used for living space or food production) a population in the 10's of billions is almost inevitible.

The only problem is energy. With enough power feeding people becomes compact (vat fungus, hydroponics) and suddenly nearly all the space is available for living room.

As for how you deal with so much poop... A billion kilos of poop is easy to treat. You just treat a kilo of poop a billion times. We already know how to deal with a kilogram of poop.

 

[far-trader]

Well in the case of the example they emigrated as a colony to a garden world that turned out to be not so much a garden world but for a brief summer every thousand years or so.

They had the low berths as part of the colony equipment that got them there (90% plus in low berths for the trip). So when it started to get dark and cold they used them to manage on the reduced resources available. Every "summer" everyone gets to be out alive and awake together to renew old friendships and make new ones, and go at it like bunnies. Summer Children are especially blessed.

As to revival rates that depends on the version of Traveller used but generally I see it as a very safe method when proper procedures are employed. Say as safe or safer than modern air-travel, far safer than crossing a busy street or taking a shower on a slippery floor.

The scenario I developed didn't reach those levels but achieving that population is likely to happen in the normal way. The US has been about doubling its population every 16 years over the last couple hundred iirc. Apply that to a small world, population starting with a modest 1 million and in less than 300 years you have your 80 billion or more.

Now somewhere along the way they should be thinking about population control, or colonizing other systems, or something. But maybe these avenues aren't open to them for whatever reasons.

No ships to get off-world. Governmental or Religious laws forbidding interference with procreation. Allowing recreational sex but not allowing unnatural methods of preventing fertilization. Whatever. So at some point they will have to change they way they manage the resources they have. Changing to a low/no meat diet does buy some time. As does intensive application of the three R's in the proper order (reduce, reuse, recycle).

But maybe the day comes when some of the population buys into a plan where they can time share, probably as part of club at first. While 90% of the members are in low berths 10% get to enjoy the added space and resources saved, albeit only for 10% of the time but the other 90% of the time is effectively a nights rest for them. Seems like an attractive prospect, even with some danger of not waking up.

Eventually this becomes fashionable and then the norm so you have the whole planet involved. Yes the low berths take up volume and require resources but both will be a small fraction of that required for a living person.

And if the low berths are incredibly less than perfect and hundreds of millions die each cycle upon being revived well you've solved a big part of your population problem and gained a bounty of Soylent Green in the bargain

 

[Psion]

Originally posted by Malenfant:
I would like to hear some explanations as to how exactly a world with a pop digit of A can possibly be viable (the pop multiplier means that there are 10 to 100 billion people on it). Particularly tiny airless rockballs like Stoner, which have a population of 80 billion.

There are several things to consider:

I'll give my answers based pretty much directly on stoner.

1) food production and distribution. Where is it produced, how does it get to the population, how much area is available to produce it? If the bulk is imported from offworld, how much traffic do you need to bring in enough food to support that many people? Ditto for water too, particularly on airless rockballs that may not have any.

Thinking about how big the world is, I sort of think it might not be too viable to assume that most of it comes from outsystem. That would be a lot of shipping.

Hydroponics and domed or orbital farms seems most likely. With TL 14 gravitics and material technology, it doesn't seem too unlikely you could move that much quickly.

2) population density. Where are all those people living? Is there any room for arable land, park space, business/industrial zones etc?

Talking about Stoner, there is no arable land. It's a rockball. Much of the surface might be reserved for domed farms (or not. At TL 13, you could make fusion powered lighting. Or they might rely on staples that don't rely on sunlight, like fungus.)

Living space: As I stated in the previous thread, Stoner would either or both:

- Be a honeycombed world with vast, deep chambers. I do not consider this unlikely given the history of the domain. It has gateway. If they can engineer a whole artificial world (albeit small) out of an asteroid, building huge chambers in the surface of a world should be easy.

- Orbital habitats: Larry Niven had an interesting article about how hundreds of mini-ringworlds would be much more practical than a huge ringworld. WBG suggests you could put pop 8 in orbit of a TL E world. But considering the situation, I could see making a GM call and giving Stoner an environmental tech of 15 or 16, allowing pop 9 or 10 in orbit.

3) Waste management. I see three big problems here - especially on non-habitable worlds - bodily waste, CO2 and heat.

3a) What do you do with the biological output (OK, I'll stop beating about the bush - "the poop") of 80 billion people? What do you do with all the garbage and sewage they produce - where do they dump that? If you dump it offworld, how much traffic do you need every day just to dump all that refuse? (and where do you put it?).

You aren't up on your blue's clues. Recylce recycle recycle!

It's no mean feat, but it's certainly doable. Even earth is a closed system. We recycle food and water waste here and now. We just use a considerable ecosystem to do it.

Even today, scientists are experimenting with microbes to reduce waste. At TL 14, genetically engineered microbes could reduce waste and use it to feed hydroponic farms, possibly using a genetically engineered staple (perhaps a fungus if you don't want to worry about sunlight.)

If you have fusion plants you could distill water easily.

3b) What about the CO2 produced when they exhale - a back of the envelope calculation shows that assuming a lung capacity of 5000 cm3, you're going to get a total output of about 200,000,000 to 400,000,000 m3 of CO2 produced every time the population breathes (for comparison, the 6 billion population of Earth is putting out 30,000,000 cubic metres of CO2 with each breath, and that's into an open environment). Can a close environment on a non-habitable world handle all that CO2?

Submarines -- and doubtlessly starships -- scrub the air of CO2 and provide oxygen for the crew. If you can do it for a starship, you can do it for a world, if your tech is high enough. I think TL 14 power and enviro tech can handle it.

3c) The waste heat generated by all those bodies may also put a strain on a closed environmental system if they're on a non-habitable world.

Human body was heat? Eh.

All the fusion plants it would take to make the world churn? Probably. But then, being a submarine engineer type, I don't understand how starships can get rid of their heat efficiently, either.

I picture that a visitor to stoner might see quite a sight -- huge, tall spires glowing red, acting as radiating vanes.

4) if they're on a habitable world, what kind of strain does supporting all those people put on the local environment? You'd pretty much have to obliterate the existing native ecosystem (or severely alter it to get enough crops and livestock), wouldn't you?

With that many people, I think livestock is out of the question as a major food source. It'd be a delicacy.

Some worlds may not have had native life before colonized. Again, this is a random roll. (Though oxy atmosphere implies the world had at least primitive native life.) It might have been entirely a world seeded as a breadbasket.

5) Why would so many people want to live on a world anyway? How - and why - could the population growth have run so amok? What is the purpose of having that many people on a single world?

I take you back to the objection I had to this attitude in the other thread. People didn't CHOOSE to live in Bangladesh and indonesia. They were born there. Societies are rarely planned. They happen.

6) Where is all the industry sited?

Maybe there are solutions and numbers have already been crunched, but if there are then I'm not aware of them (or remain unconvinced about them). I don't care much for magical high TL armwaves like "oh, I'm sure they'll have a way to figure it out by then".

Again, this seems to be where we don't see eye to eye. Stoner is as far ahead of us as we are cavemen, in TL terms. You see it as something to prove. I see it as something fairly plauasible. Perhaps not easy, but doable.

For a quick BOTE, I know that we as humans are actually quite spoiled. Earth is huge compared to us individually. As the title of the novella "Stand on Zanzibar" implies, every human on Earth can stand on the island of Zanzibar. (At least they could then.)

Stoner could have a diameter of as much as 1499 miles. If my math serves me right, that's about 3000 people per square mile. Fairly cramped by modern standards, but it you assume deep honeycombed chambers, they don't really need to be all that deep, you should have plenty of room for industry. Their lifestyle may be very different from ours. They may sleep in chambers right out of a cyberpunk story. Forget your three floor family homes.

It may be that such hi-pop worlds are ONLY possible if the TL is above a certain level too.

I think that's fair to say, unless the sophonts are significantly less of a drain on their ecosystem than we are. But there are SOCIAL changes we could make (not even technological ones) that would severely lessen our drain. Again, not relying on meat. That's horribly inefficient.

I'm also not really interested in approaching this from a top-down perspective of "OK, we have worlds with tens of billions of people on them, how do we get that to work?", when there may not even necessarily be a viable solution. Instead, I want to look at this from the bottom up - can the population on that world even get that big given the available resources, can infrastructure be built to support all those people as the population grows, and if it is possible how it is all supported. Because that's what has to be considered when the world's population is growing.

I'll have to wait and see what the stoner supplement says about the circumstances, but the situation as it stands was that a sylean noble fled and established a colony of his own.

EA1 states that Stoner started out as a mining colony "too good to pass up", but it grew from there. (It also says that it only has 800 million people; methinks someone read the UWP wrong.) It just grew from there. It's quite possible that the duke was interested in growing the industrial base at Stoner and prevented emigration to grow the colony as fast as possible, but soon, the people became acustomed to the lifestyle, and after a few generations or social change and technological adaptations ot the conditions, nobody even thought about emigrating to the "breadbasket" world anymore. It's also possible that Galastrian metals or one of its remnants (who engineered a world out of gateway) played a role in shaping the underground cities described in EA1 and establishing the industrial base there (The Galian League was in place hundreds of years before stoner, but there might have been a diaspora of some of its people and technologies during or after the sector corporate wars.)

Or you could assume tha MJD's mistake wasn't a mistake and change the pop code to 8 if it makes you feel better.

Really, while I don't agree it's impossible, I do agree that it's unlikely.

 

[mike wightman]

<re-posted from UWP discussion>
Mal,
have you seen the JTAS article on Azun, a high pop world in the Solomani Rim?
It's written by MWM and JAK.
Azun has a UPP (when did they become UWPs anyway?

) of B-476ABC-B, population 26 billion.
The population is housed in huge arcologies, 1.5million+ people in each one (that's a lot of arcologies).
If this is possible at TL B then we have to start thinking about the sci-fi reasons that a huge poulation can be supported.
There is a lot of magic tech behind Traveller's hard sci-fi facade , most of it connected with spaceships.
If the same technology is applied to an arcology setting (grav plates, heat sinks, atmosphere and waste management...) then a lot of your questions can be answered.

 

[Andrew Boulton]

Earth is due to become pop-A on December 17th, 2034 according to http://www.ibiblio.org/lunarbin/worldpop

 

[vutpakdi]

There is a funny series of Irregular Webcomic comics as to why Coruscant (the Imperial Capital from Star Wars) wouldn't work.
</font>

• On Food Requirements</font>
• On Sewage</font>
• On Energy</font>
• An Aside on Annoying the Cartoonist with Letters as to Why Coruscant Would Work</font>
• More on Heat and Energy</font>
• And a few more...</font>

Ron

 

[Flynn]

Ron,

That was hilarious! Thank you for sharing. I can't help but picture Malenfant writing them (no offense intended, Mal) based on discussions here on COTI.

Meesa thinkin' meesa gonna read dat comic muy-muy,
Flynn

 

[Psion]

Originally posted by Ron Vutpakdi:
There is a funny series of Irregular Webcomic comics as to why Coruscant (the Imperial Capital from Star Wars) wouldn't work.

LOL. How bizarre.

Well, I'd like to point out with pride that I didn't make any of the authentic mistakes he picks on. (That you may well not like the mushroom soup is a fact of life...) Having a background in nuclear engineering, I was well aware of the thermodynamic impossibility of just using refigeration units.

Of course, there's two things I'd like to point out before anyone takes the situation as analogous:

1) By his comic, coruscant has a population code of E or so, not A. You won't reach the core. (And stoner, being a rockball, won't have a molten core, anyways.)

2) The same system he uses in one strip as a subject of ridicule he ignores in the next. He picks on the (you'd have to know nothing about thermodynamics to suggest it) idea of using refrigerators in one strip. Okay, fine.

But then he ignores it in his strip picking on the idea of radiating vanes. Heat pump style arrangements can RAISE the temperature at the destination (this is how heat pumps can heat your house by pulling heat energy from the cold air from outside). So those vanes can actually be hotter than he suggests. As the vanes will have a bigger "window view" of space, you could actually radiate away a lot of heat this way. When he says "Now, the formula for working out how much energy is radiated from something depends on the temperature and the surface area of the object. So, to radiate an amount of heat sufficient to cool Coruscant appreciably, you need to have those towers have a surface area similar to the size of the planet itself", he's wrong, because you can make the temperature quite a bit higher than the planet.

 

[Malenfant]

actually, those Irregular Webcomics are partly why I'm asking about this

 

[Straybow]

Where to put everybody? I mentioned, lost in the many pages of the other thread, that NYC has large areas of freestanding single family housing yet still manages to achieve 25k/mi² (10k/km²) density.

Most of the buildings in NYC are less than 10 stories, and many of the skyscrapers are commercial or mixed use rather than residential. The same density extrapolated to a 1000 mile rock achieves the 80G almost exactly. That means the population on a terrestrial world with size² greater surface area makes increasing allowance for natural farming of luxury goods, parklands, and wilderness.

General supply problems Living in a closed environment requires a couple basic changes. Build to last, rather than build to replace. This is something that can be legislated, regulated, and enforced. Tax the heck out of anything deemed "disposable," monitor mass balance of purchases and waste, etc. The same attitude has to be adopted on any high pop world for sustainability over millennia.

Traveller assumes benign fusion tech readily available and "cold" enough for use inside the hull of a small, compact (no fins, no boom-mounted reactor) spaceship. The energy demand for population, commerce, and basic industry is far lower than that of a starship. Cheap power means better solutions are available.

I have a small 600 ft² apartment. If my roof had a hydroponic garden on it I could raise veggies. If my apartment were also equipped with a fungus-fed meat tissue grower, a bulk-fed fungus grower, and a recycler-fed bio/nano extractor to remove metal buildup from raw waste I'd be 50-75% self sufficient.

We don't have any of those things, but TL B+ should. Whatever couldn't be done at an individual level due to costs or inefficiency could be handled by credits on a wider scale. Maybe the meat tissue grower is only feasible on a larger scale, so I get credits for my fungus grower which feeds into a collection system.

Likewise the bio/nano metal extractor waste is accumulated and exchanged for credit. The investment for all these systems is a sunk cost, just as owning an automobile is a sunk cost in Western society.

Air An enclosed world needs volatiles more than anything else. This is handled in-system, moving and mining cometary bodies. No need to import food except for a small percentage of luxury goods. Maintaining O2 levels isn't a problem given that there must be an influx of new volatiles to counter systemmatic losses.

Sequestering or reprocessing of CO2 isn't a problem. Hydroponics does some of it for you automatically. In fact, large scale operations will probably use high CO2 mixes to speed growth. Reclaimed CO2 will probably also be useful for basic industry.

Heat We really aren't sure how much greenhouse effect Earth's atmosphere provides. Some say 30°C. More than likely, a barren worldlet will have to make up for a heat deficit to remain comfy.

I do know that without a thermal core the Earth would be a giant heat-sink. Living on the surface we don't notice it much, but just a few tens of meters below has an intrinsic temperature of 54°F. One must mine hundreds of meters deeper to see an increase in temperature, and that is mostly because of pockets of hot magma (ie, not in thermal equilibrium) in the crust that have welled up from below.

At 10kW/capita waste heat typical of Western society (including industry and transportation) it takes alot of heat sink, but you've got over a billion km³ of very cold rock in a size 1 planetoid. Then a significant portion of that waste heat is power plant waste gasses that are released into space rather than directed into a heat sink.

Why would so many people want to live on a world anyway? Why not? The primary factor is economics. If it were up to me I wouldn't live in a city, I moved from rural Virginia highlands because of lack of work. Millions of people like the cities. In the future, some people will look at us and wonder why anyone would want to live with weather when they can have nice, clean processed air.

 

[Psion]

Originally posted by Straybow:
Where to put everybody? I mentioned, lost in the many pages of the other thread, that NYC has large areas of freestanding single family housing yet still manages to achieve 25k/mi² (10k/km²) density.

Thanks. I was looking for a figure to compare it to. I calculated, assuming stoner was on the high side of a size 1 world, a population density of around 3k/mi^2 across the whole world, which is quite a bit less than that. So I guess their might be concentrations after all that would be worth calling "cities" on stoner, as MJD indicates in Stoner Express.

 

[Straybow]

Yeah, NYC is almost exactly 8M people in almost exactly 320 mi², for a very tidy 25k/mi². Here is an image of NYC. You can see the bluish areas in the center and tip of Manhatten, the high-rise structures. When NYers refer to "the City" they mean Manhatten, using "the Five Burroughs" to define the whole.

The Outer Burroughs show diminishing density with distance from Manhatten. Staten Island in particular has large areas of open green space (truncated at the lower left corner of the image). The New Jersey shore of the Hudson shows a similar pattern.

A tiny rock like Stoner could indeed look like one giant conurbation, but not uniform in density.