Universal Century population?

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LtFrankie
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Universal Century population?

What was the population of Earth, Luna and the various space colonies/asteroids? Particularly during the OYW?
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MythSearcher
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Re: Universal Century population?

LtFrankie wrote:What was the population of Earth, Luna and the various space colonies/asteroids? Particularly during the OYW?
We have early numbers, but not OYW ones.

UC0001 Earth population exceeded 9 billion.
UC0050 Human population exceeded 11 billion, and 90% lives in space.

We can assume the population on Earth well exceeded 2 billion before the beginning of OYW, since the colony drop early assumed death count is 2 billion, which after the war is cut down to 200 million(the lost of communication due to M particles is to blame) I take it that at least the coastline population affected by the Tsunami and Sydney together had a population of 2 billion+.
But since the colonies had little space for extra population, the population increase should be mainly on Earth.
A total of 50%( of all human) died in OYW, but numbers raised back pretty fast after the war, 0087 and 0093 numbers seemed to be back in the 10 billion level.(to be killed again in the 0089 and 0093 drops)

I recall Mark gave an estimation with later numbers as well. Try searching the archive.
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Brave Fencer Kirby
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Re: Universal Century population?

I actually have a thread on this subject from back on Gundam Evolution (timestamps put it at 2008 -- time flies!) that covers things pretty well. I'll just quote Mark's comments from that one:
I think the easiest solution, quite frankly, is to cut out the historical population figures from the timeline. As I tried to document in my Data Evolution features, the figures we have for Earth and space population circa U.C. 0001, 0040, and 0050 come straight from the original setting notes and were incorporated unchanged into later timelines. But the opening narration in the Gundam II and Gundam III movies says that half of humanity lives in space, not 80 percent.

As for the wartime casualties, the casualty figures for the colony drop originated with Gundam Century, which said that more than 2.3 billion Earthnoids were killed. (This seems more credible if we assume that half the human race still lives on Earth.) Entertainment Bible 1 reiterates this figure and says that a total of 5.5 billion people died in the opening week of the war. This would break down into 3.0 billion spacenoids (thanks to the attacks on Sides 1, 2, and 4) and about 2.5 billion Earthnoids. No figures are given for the casualties at Side 5.

Entertainment Bible 39, on the other hand, rejiggered this so that the figure of 3 billion casualties applied to the entire first week; the terrestrial casualties were reduced to 200 million people, and the remaining 2.8 billion were due to the attacks on Sides 1, 2, and 4. Another 2 billion people are said to have died at Side 5, which seems like an awful lot given that this was a single incomplete Side.

There's another set of figures in the original setting notes - 3 billion for the opening days of the war, and another 3.5 billion for the Battle of Loum. But in this version, Loum encompasses both Sides 2 and 5, and both rounds of fighting involve multiple colony drops.

My suggestion would be to take the grand total of 6.5 billion casualties from the setting notes, and then go by the numbers from Gundam Century and EB 1 (3 billion casualties in Sides 1, 2, and 4, and another 2.5 billion on Earth). The remaining 1 billion would then be due to the Battle of Loum. Since the opening narration tells us that "half the total population" was killed in the first month of the war, this would suggest a pre-war population of 13 billion people, a natural progression from roughly 12 billion as of U.C. 0040. This population would be more or less evenly split between Earth and the space colonies, as per the movie narration.

And man, it's always pretty weird tossing around casualty figures in the billions, even in a fictional context. I can't help feeling that any psychologically realistic depiction of the Gundam world would just be a bunch of trauma cases stumbling around like in Barefoot Gen.

-- Mark
tldr, the most likely number seems to be about 13 billion total (split roughly equally between Earth and the space colonies) immediately prior to the One Year War, and after the OYW it's 6.5 billion, with about 2.5 billion remaining in space (1.5 of that being in Side 3 alone) and the remaining 4 billion on Earth.

After that, we don't have any hard numbers, but it's likely that there was another round of emigration from Earth into space, both to refill depopulated colonies and to ease the population pressure on Earth's environment after the damage done by the colony drop. Quess claims that there's 10 billion people living in space at one point in CCA, but that seems likely to be a childish exaggeration -- there probably aren't even 10 billion people alive at that point, given the numbers we're looking at as of 0080.
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MythSearcher
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Re: Universal Century population?

Brave Fencer Kirby wrote:
After that, we don't have any hard numbers, but it's likely that there was another round of emigration from Earth into space, both to refill depopulated colonies and to ease the population pressure on Earth's environment after the damage done by the colony drop. Quess claims that there's 10 billion people living in space at one point in CCA, but that seems likely to be a childish exaggeration -- there probably aren't even 10 billion people alive at that point, given the numbers we're looking at as of 0080.

Baby booms and more baby booms?
Man, these spacenoids are hard working! ;9

Well, around 0083 EF launched operations to restore and relocate the damaged colonies from OYW, and move people into them.

Assuming a sudden freeing of living space and resources, people might be more willing to give birth to new generations.(Much more so than the baby booms we ever saw)
A 6.5 billion population with around 3 billion fertile adults within 0083-0093 giving birth to an average of 2.5 off-springs per couple will yield 3.75 billion of newborns, and giving a death of 1 billion, you still get 9.25 billion. Close enough to be called 10 billion by a teenager.
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Brave Fencer Kirby
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Re: Universal Century population?

Well, let's do some back-of-the-napkin math on that.

Out of 6.5 billion people, half of them will be men, so they can't give birth and we can ignore them. That leaves 3.25 billion. Some of those will be either too young or too old to have kids; let's take a wild guess and say that the ages of populations are evenly distributed between the ages of 0 and 100, and that women are only having kids between the ages of 20 and 50. (Neither of those are accurate, but it's good enough for a ballpark figure.) That means that only 30% of the 3.25 billion women are of childbearing age -- or 975 million potential mothers. To boost the population from 6.5 billion to 10 billion, you need 3.5 billion additional people. That means that in every single woman who is able needs to have about 3.6 children between 0080 and 0093 even if not a single person alive in 0080 dies before 0093. The higher the death rate is, the higher the birth rate needs to be.

Suffice to say, I find "every woman of childbearing age is having like four kids each" less likely than "Quess is an idiot".
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MythSearcher
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Re: Universal Century population?

Brave Fencer Kirby wrote:Well, let's do some back-of-the-napkin math on that.

Out of 6.5 billion people, half of them will be men, so they can't give birth and we can ignore them. That leaves 3.25 billion. Some of those will be either too young or too old to have kids; let's take a wild guess and say that the ages of populations are evenly distributed between the ages of 0 and 100, and that women are only having kids between the ages of 20 and 50. (Neither of those are accurate, but it's good enough for a ballpark figure.) That means that only 30% of the 3.25 billion women are of childbearing age -- or 975 million potential mothers. To boost the population from 6.5 billion to 10 billion, you need 3.5 billion additional people. That means that in every single woman who is able needs to have about 3.6 children between 0080 and 0093 even if not a single person alive in 0080 dies before 0093. The higher the death rate is, the higher the birth rate needs to be.

Suffice to say, I find "every woman of childbearing age is having like four kids each" less likely than "Quess is an idiot".
Usually the population distribution is a bell shaped curve, with more in the middle, especially there's plenty of space for expansion, meaning people tend to have more children and the distribution is less likely to shift to the older side like China or Japan.

A 20 to 50 age range should be more like 50% of the population.
Also considering the younger ones (age 8~10) in 0080 would have became old enough to give birth in 0093. Which should be taking up a higher percentage in the population since those are the ones not having to go into war in OYW and likely Gryps conflict and 1st Neon Zeon war.

I'd give the fetile female rate up to around 1~1.5 billion within 10 years after OYW, and each only need to give birth to about 2.5 kids on average to get the number to something like 9 billion.
3~4 kids family is not really that rare nowadays even in the US, and usually it is the crowded cities like HK and Tokyo are the ones with a low birth rate(since raising a child is expensive) or places with birth control(like China)
Poorer areas might even have a higher birth rate since man power is a pretty cheap power from the view points of the less educated.(just like real life)

The natural death rate should be less due to more advanced medical technologies.
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Brave Fencer Kirby
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Re: Universal Century population?

MythSearcher wrote:Usually the population distribution is a bell shaped curve, with more in the middle
...no, that's not how population distribution works. Everyone who is middle aged was young before that, so you can't have fewer young people than middle aged people unless your population is in the process of crashing. If your population is holding steady, you'll have more young people than middle aged people, and more middle aged than elderly.

Still, let's double my numbers, just for the sake of argument. In that case, you end up with every single woman of childbearing age needing to have two (actually 1.8, but close enough) kids between 0080 and 0093 even if no one dies in that time period. This includes people who have already had kids -- they need to have two more. For every woman who doesn't do this, some other woman has to pick up the slack by having more kids. For every person that dies, add more kids being born. Also keep in mind what this would do in terms of demographics. If it's true, then in 0093, more than a third of the population would be under the age of 13. A baby boom of that magnitude is unprecedented in human history.

And it's actually worse than that, since Quess claims in CCA that there are 10 billion people living in space. Earth still has a significant population in 0093, so however many people are living there (a billion? two billion?), you have to add that to the total population as well.

The math simply doesn't work.
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MythSearcher
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Re: Universal Century population?

Brave Fencer Kirby wrote:
MythSearcher wrote:Usually the population distribution is a bell shaped curve, with more in the middle
...no, that's not how population distribution works. Everyone who is middle aged was young before that, so you can't have fewer young people than middle aged people unless your population is in the process of crashing. If your population is holding steady, you'll have more young people than middle aged people, and more middle aged than elderly.

Still, let's double my numbers, just for the sake of argument. In that case, you end up with every single woman of childbearing age needing to have two (actually 1.8, but close enough) kids between 0080 and 0093 even if no one dies in that time period. This includes people who have already had kids -- they need to have two more. For every woman who doesn't do this, some other woman has to pick up the slack by having more kids. For every person that dies, add more kids being born. Also keep in mind what this would do in terms of demographics. If it's true, then in 0093, more than a third of the population would be under the age of 13. A baby boom of that magnitude is unprecedented in human history.

And it's actually worse than that, since Quess claims in CCA that there are 10 billion people living in space. Earth still has a significant population in 0093, so however many people are living there (a billion? two billion?), you have to add that to the total population as well.

The math simply doesn't work.

True, you really can't have much of a bell shape, my bad.

Then what about if they moved (again) a lot of people from Earth to Space?
Like if they moved the 2 billion that was supposedly dead by the colony drop but later found to be alive and kicking?

Suddenly I came to the realization that the "half of the population dead" narration in OYW is actually said "during" the war, so can we assume that narration is not of an out-universe all knowing figure but an in-universe reporting and the 2-billion-turned-out-to-be-only-200-million-deaths was still counted as 2 billion, so there is a 1.8 billion excess in the population head count?

Thus the 13 billion in the beginning of OYW, assumed death toll of half, 6.5 billion, mid war, actually is only 4.7 billion at the conclusion of the war, thus population at the end is 8.3 billion.

Let's assume that 1.8 billion was forced to move to space started at around 0083 and only about 1 billion left on Earth.

That should get the population of 10 billion (more like 9~9.5 billion) in space much more realistic in 0093?
toysdream
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Re: Universal Century population?

I think "they thought it was two billion but it was only 200 million" is just fan rationalization. Gundam Century and Entertainment Bible 1 say that 320 million people were killed in the colony drop itself, and an estimated 2 billion more in the aftermath. The Origin manga says that, including the aftereffects, about half of Earth's population was killed (which seems to match the above figure and will probably be stated in the anime as well).

The rival figure of 200 million comes from Entertainment Bible 39, which usually contradicts every other source. In fact, EB 39 says this figure is from the initial impact and doesn't offer any estimate for secondary effects, so this may just be an omission rather than a contradiction. In any case, there probably isn't a "missing two billion" who were thought to have been killed in the initial drop but then turned out to be just fine after all - no sources makes that particular claim.

-- Mark
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MythSearcher
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Re: Universal Century population?

toysdream wrote:I think "they thought it was two billion but it was only 200 million" is just fan rationalization. Gundam Century and Entertainment Bible 1 say that 320 million people were killed in the colony drop itself, and an estimated 2 billion more in the aftermath. The Origin manga says that, including the aftereffects, about half of Earth's population was killed (which seems to match the above figure and will probably be stated in the anime as well).

The rival figure of 200 million comes from Entertainment Bible 39, which usually contradicts every other source. In fact, EB 39 says this figure is from the initial impact and doesn't offer any estimate for secondary effects, so this may just be an omission rather than a contradiction. In any case, there probably isn't a "missing two billion" who were thought to have been killed in the initial drop but then turned out to be just fine after all - no sources makes that particular claim.

-- Mark
Gundam Officials took that figure though.
P.84 did said assumption was that the direct cause death toll is 320 million and the secondary causes are 2 billion, but later investigation luckily can reduce that number by a lot.
It did said the 200 million (death+missing) is not correct, but the correct number cannot be comfirmed even after the war ended 20 years.

It should still be quite accurate since population count should not be that hard due to the need of resources and the rebuild of satellite networks that can locate settlers.
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