[dkstories] Dreams: Population Explosion

[dkstories]

I noticed in a discussion on another site (and thanks to the five people who have now sent me links), a post mentioning the population levels as being somewhat unbelievable. In deciding what population to use for the story, given the relative time frame of the story, I went to Wikipedia and did some very basic math.

 

Wiki gives us this base figure of population changes (in millions).

 

Region 1750 1800 1850 1900 1950 1999 2050 2150

World 791 978 1,262 1,650 2,521 5,978 8,909 9,746

 

Now look at the population changes from 1850 to 1900 alone. That's a 72% increase in world population. World Population slowed it's increase during the next 50 years (which saw millions die in TWO World Wars). That time period saw a 65% increase. The population slowed to an increas of only 42% over the next 50 years.

 

So, for my story I looked at the trends we are seeing in population growth on our own planet and added some environmental factors as well as a few other factors. If you look at the story you're also going to see a few more differences between the three different governments. There are a few other differences as well.

 

The Kingdom obviously has the largest population for a variety of reasons. First of all they have the mother of all colonial resources on Earth. Our home planet always has a lot of people, more than enough to send a few hundred million off to a new colony anytime they want. They also do NOT have any form of birth control. Thus, we see larger families on average.

 

The Republic started with a few hundred million. I know in the story I've usually only referenced a single colony ship for each planet, but one thing I've left unspoken is that there were actually more colony ships. Not the big ones carrying a million or more people at a time, but smaller ones carrying a few hundred thousand that made the run back to Earth to pick up more people until they were stopped.

 

Figure by the time Peladon got fully established, they had a population closer to 300 million than 3 million. When they were told they could not go back to Earth for more people, they turned their ship into a space station and set about getting themselves all established on their new home planet. They may have been settling a new planet, but they did so with the full benefit of modern healthcare, and without the detraction of costly wars.

 

It took Earth 750 years to go from 300 million to almost 800 million. That time included ALL of the Middle Ages where plagues and wars reguarly wiped out as much as 25% of the population at any time. Now, also remember that each of the original Republic worlds all began with populations over 100 million.

 

In the first century or so of colonization, nearly every family had four or more children. Birth Control wasn't outlawed, but it was highly discouraged. If the new worlds that eventually formed into the Republic had kept low populations, they would have been in deep trouble when Earth finally returned its attention to them. Plus these were times of explosive growth, similar to that of the 1800's, only with modern healthcare available to everyone.

 

Tired of working for the man? Go out and claim your own land. Farm it and have a half-dozen kids so they can grow up and help you tend the farm. Unlike the wild American west of the 1800's though, you don't have to worry about half of them dying before they reach adulthood. Accident on the farm? Even the remotest areas are reachable in a few hours by hovercraft, and most farms have some town with a clinic far closer than that. Further, genetic engineering which is no longer in its infancy ensures healthy children stronger and more able to adapt to the wilds of the new world.

 

Even in Garret's time, the Republic worlds still have a great deal of open space. In fact there is NO need for colonization of new worlds if you look at it from the perspective of an Earth still dealing with overpopulation despite hundreds of millions migrating every year. (do a little math, a hundred years fits in 3 to 4 generations depending on a number of factors. Each generation of families generating +2 to +4 (2 as replacements for parents, with an addition 2-4 children increasing the population). Do the exponential math...and pretty soon you see the population exploding with modern medicine keeping the death rate low.

 

By the time of the War with Earth beginning, the Republic worlds had not seen any real major wars. Their early problems were resolved by the creation of the Great Houses, and the population took off again. Now, by the time of the Great War, a few things had become trends. The more affluent families had begun having fewer children (hence only Billy for the Lars). Most of them kept at a replacement level, or slightly above. The Lars family is a little more unusual in their low number of children (look at the Tremere family with more grandchildren).

 

That trend would also be followed in the Minor Houses of the Republic, and in the 'elite' classes that had emerged over the last few centuries. The businessmen, the artists, etc. all tend to have smaller families. The 'regular' people tend to have larger. City folks might still have only 2-4, but it would not be uncommon to find 4-6 in the rural areas (which I have not shown a lot of so far in the story).

 

Here's some food for thought. In North America, before this land was colonized by Europeans, the population is estimated somewhere between 8 and 12 million (for all of North America, not just what we call the United States today). During the first few hundred years, nearly 80% of these were wiped out by war and disease. The first few colonists here counted only in the hundreds, and then the thousands. At the time of the Revolutionary War, America's population had increased to a few million from those few handfuls. Now, just over two hundred and twenty years later, we are pushing 300 million.

 

Figure what American would be like now if we STARTED with 300 million.

 

Also, when you look at our world population, think about how our most populated country has extremely strict birth controls in place. Having more than once child is often a crime in china. What if they had no birth controls in place? What would that do to world population?

[The Pecman]

Hi, Dan. Naaaaa, those guys are crazy. The population numbers are fine to me. 10 billion plus on earth barely puts a dent in the livable space of the planet, provided we can get a handle on controlling the temperature, the weather, the food supply, pollution, and the polar ice caps.

 

My two biggest beefs are with the year of the story (I seem to recall roughly 300 years from now), and the existence of deliberately-engineered gay clones.

 

The esteemed SF writer David Gerrold -- who I consider a friend, albeit not a close one, just a couple of miles away from me in Northridge -- has a great theory about language and different eras in that 150 years is about the limit as far as changes in language can be tolerated. In other words, 300 years from now (or 300 years ago), the type of English spoken would be so convoluted as to be almost unintelligible. I know you toss in a few futuristic words once in awhile, but I think the reality is, it'd be a lot harder to understand. I think the story would be easier for me to accept if it were set only 100 years from now, which I think is feasible. (But I have the exact same problem with Star Trek.)

 

The gay clones thing is harder to cover logically. I'm perfectly comfortable as a gay man, and can totally accept the existence of gay people in the future. But I'm not convinced that scientists and corporations would condone creating clones from scratch that were deliberately engineered to be gay, unless their main duties were sexual. To me, it's a little bit contrived (albeit entertaining).

 

I mention these only as minor asides. So far, I'm enjoying the story very much, and we're recommending it highly to our readers over on Awesomedude.com. I was a huge SF fan in the 1970s, and you brought back some memories of The Mote in God's Eye and a few other classics; reading Dreams has inspired me to go and dust off some of my old collection and re-read some of them. Congrats on doing a terrific job!

[NaperVic]

The gay clones thing is harder to cover logically. I'm perfectly comfortable as a gay man, and can totally accept the existence of gay people in the future. But I'm not convinced that scientists and corporations would condone creating clones from scratch that were deliberately engineered to be gay, unless their main duties were sexual. To me, it's a little bit contrived (albeit entertaining).

 

Scientists today are trying to find the 'gay gene' (albeit to allow parents to eliminate that characteristic from potential offspring instead of promoting it). So it's not too much of a stretch to assume a scientist (or two) in the future would want to create a clone with gay tendencies.

 

Laura Atrix's true born son was gay, so she made the Garrett Atrix replacement clones (and possibly all the Model 10 clones) gay. If true born Garrett Atrix was straight, we'd have a boring story .

 

While the government probably wasn't happy with what Laura had done, they were probably more concerned with just getting bodies to fight the war with Kingdom.

 

My impression was that all the clones were mostly bi. Add in the fact that clones only made up 2% of the republic's entire population and that all clones were sterile, it probably didn't matter one way or another whether what they were.

[dkstories]

The sexuality of the military clones was actually mostly a twist on the current American policy of Don't Ask/Don't Tell and more of a tribute to the Spartan military than anything else.

 

Besides, no one has to worry about the clones going and raping the girls on planets (boys being better able to defend themselves, and what need does a clone have to go outside the ranks of his unit for sex? Who is a better sexual partner than a duplicate of yourself?)

 

Non-military clones (and the general population of the Republic) are mostly bi-sexual. Religious and social mores however tend to sway them more one way or the other. Hence, Billy really IS bi-sexual, and his relationships with women are a little more genuine than Garret's marriage.

[medeii]

The esteemed SF writer David Gerrold -- who I consider a friend, albeit not a close one, just a couple of miles away from me in Northridge -- has a great theory about language and different eras in that 150 years is about the limit as far as changes in language can be tolerated. In other words, 300 years from now (or 300 years ago), the type of English spoken would be so convoluted as to be almost unintelligible. I know you toss in a few futuristic words once in awhile, but I think the reality is, it'd be a lot harder to understand. I think the story would be easier for me to accept if it were set only 100 years from now, which I think is feasible. (But I have the exact same problem with Star Trek.)

 

While that author's conclusions might hold true for past centuries, the advent of widespread, even global media distribution can be said to have slowed—or even stopped entirely—the phenomenon of language drift. Having to rely on memory turned communication of separated communities into a sort of decades-long telephone game, but now, most children are educated in their native tongue by someone other than their parents. That education is facilitated primarily through the use of products that use standardized language: school textbooks, toys from global corporations, and most importantly, broadcast television. As such, it is entirely plausible that humans a thousand years in our future could understand us today.

 

Consider English, for example. While Shakespeare's writing seems stilted and avails itself often of circumlocution, it is still understandable with a small bit of education. That's over six hundred years' difference, and though there have been changes, they are a far cry from "unintelligible." The changes to grammar, syntax, letter forms, and vocabulary that English has experienced are largely due to its widespread use in the majority of scientific fields, as well as its decentralized nature, but most of those changes have been small.

 

- Grammar and syntax: A slow movement away from strict (some might say blind) adherence to Latin rules.

- Letter forms/typography: Gradual standardization and the trend toward simplified typefaces (gothic > serif > sans.)

- Vocabulary: Lots of changes, but primarily the addition of words to satisfy new concepts and inventions, with the occasional word migrating from one meaning to another: intercourse, for example.

 

As such, I find it entirely possible that English could survive in an intelligible form several hundred, or even thousand, years into the future. My personal views are that we'll start mixing Chinese with English over the next hundred years, but that's another discussion.

 

Above all, though, the writer has the responsibility to make sure his or her dialogue is understandable to the reader. Even when you're breaking the rules of language, you have to do it properly, else no one in your real world will understand what you're trying to say.

Edited September 19, 2008 by medeii