What was the death toll of the OYW up until Antartica?

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Citizen Costigan
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What was the death toll of the OYW up until Antartica?

Is there any way of finding out what the combined death toll of the initial fighting (January 3rd 0079-the date of the Antarctic treaty) was? Basically this would entail combining all of the One Week Battle, Loum, and Operation British causalities correct? I have always wondered, how many of the deaths during those opening weeks were military, how many colonies did the Zeon gas? Etc. This also would inform me better as to what both sides were looking at during the treaty discussions. Specific numbers if possible from any reputable sources?
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Amion
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Re: What was the death toll of the OYW up until Antartica?

Goodness this is like the third time this was asked. and once again I'm too lazy to search for the link, but it's there, in a discussion the mecha and tech section had. :mrgreen:
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Citizen Costigan
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Re: What was the death toll of the OYW up until Antartica?

Sorry for the redundancy, my mistake, used the search and found it.
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Amion
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Re: What was the death toll of the OYW up until Antartica?

Great! :D
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Brave Fencer Kirby
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Re: What was the death toll of the OYW up until Antartica?

As has been said, there have been a few threads about this already, but it might actually be worth taking a second look at.

The short version is "half of humanity" as per the narration of MSG. We've worked backwards from that, and the casualty numbers listed in other sources, and come up with ~6.5 billion.

The thing is, though, that Gundam Unicorn mentions a population of 10 billion people more than once. Even giving a few decades to boost population numbers, that seems high if there are only 6.5 billion people left in the Earth Sphere after the One Year War. Unfortunately, I don't know of any other numbers that support a higher population total circa 0079.
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Amion
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Re: What was the death toll of the OYW up until Antartica?

Could they have immigrated from Jupiter 0_o

I was under the impression there wasn't much there at Jupiter other than the Jupitris Fleet and whatever station/resupply base they had for storing the helium 3. Speaking of, how many other colonies are there out there besides Earth? I thought Jupiter only had one or two, and there is almost never anything about Mars. Guess them Mars Mystery Rays did 'em in. :roll:
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Brave Fencer Kirby
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Re: What was the death toll of the OYW up until Antartica?

The only major population centers in the solar system are Earth and the Sides. Even the moon and the various asteroids scattered around the Earth Sphere are small change; thousands of people out of a total population measured in billions.
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Amion
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Re: What was the death toll of the OYW up until Antartica?

Then it seems the canon discrepancy will remain just that.
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Brave Fencer Kirby
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Re: What was the death toll of the OYW up until Antartica?

Without getting into another conversation about the Japanese concept of "official" versus the Western concept of "canon", I don't think that there's actually been any mention of population figures in the animation before. Quess does throw out "10 billion" in CCA, but she's Quess so we felt pretty confident in ignoring her when it didn't at all jive with numbers we got from other sources and chalking it up to hyperbole. But since that figure has been repeated multiple times by different people in Unicorn, it's starting to look like a solid figure for the mid-0090s.

Going strictly by historical trends, it took about ten years for the world population to get from 6 billion to 7 billion, and it's projected to take about another ten to get from 7 billion to 8 billion (from there, opinions differ whether it will keep increasing at the same rate, slow down and level out, or actually reverse and begin to decline). Going by that, and giving it a bit of a boost for a post-war baby boom and all those empty space colonies there for the taking, I'd say that 2 billion in the ~15 years from the end of the One Year War to the CCA era isn't completely unreasonable -- and with the 10 billion number from that era, that would put it at 8 billion post-OYW.

Since we already know that half of humanity was killed as a result of the One Week Battle and the Battle of Loum, that means that 8 billion died between those two events. Of course, that raises the question of where all those people lived. We're given pretty consistent numbers of ~1 billion per Side, which means we can chalk up 4 billion deaths to Sides 1, 2, 4, and 5. I'm tempted to simply put the rest -- another 4 billion -- on Earth, but that would leave a pre-war population of 6.5 billion (1 billion each for Sides 1-6, with an extra half-billion for closed-type Side 3) in space and the remaining 9.5 billion of our 16 billion total on Earth. That would mean that even after the war, there would be 5.5 billion people on Earth.

I'm not sure that really jives with the whole "Earth is an economic backwater" thesis proposed by Full Frontal in Unicorn, given that Earthnoids would outnumber Spacenoids by about a billion even if we're generous and allow for all the post-war population growth to take place in Space (which would put it at 5.5 billion on Earth and 4.5 billion in space). But that does seem to be the best distribution of people we can manage without tossing out even more figures (like the Side population numbers) and inventing things whole cloth.
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Amion
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Re: What was the death toll of the OYW up until Antartica?

so it's still up for debate. I think the Japanese like this ambiguity, so people can form solutions in their own minds. At least this is how it seems with this set of figures. Well, it's no biggie. People died. Lots of them. :shock:

and then repopulated very, very quickly. I do have to wonder how big families were. It could be that they beget larger numbers per couple after what was basically the Apocalypse, as a sort of instinctual impulse. I remember this happening with Holocaust victims, some at least, who had a passably similar situation. Those I've had the opportunity of talking to did not do this, but that doesn't discredit it.
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Ceiling_Squid
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Re: What was the death toll of the OYW up until Antartica?

Heck, given the truly apocalyptic scale of the OYW's death toll, I wouldn't doubt that the Federation probably can't keep a completely accurate census anymore. Perhaps the inconsistencies come from the fact that there would be in-universe problems with keeping track of that many casualties? The "half of humanity" statement might not even be trustworthy, if it was an initial estimate of casualties that was made during the war.

Then again, I have absolutely no clue about the logistics of global population estimates. I could be completely wrong in making that assumption.

And how does Luna factor into this? Have their ever been any figures on the Lunarian population? They're the other big neutral party aside from Jupiter. And even if Jupiter's population is negligible in relation to the overall human population, we still have to make sure theirs is big enough to account for the rise of the Jupiter Empire in the second century.
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Brave Fencer Kirby
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Re: What was the death toll of the OYW up until Antartica?

The moon's population is pretty tiny -- there might be a few million across the whole moon, if that. This actually makes a fair amount of sense; the moon is a pretty crappy place to live, compared to a colony, because it has much less than Earth-standard gravity, which does ungood things to the human body over long periods.
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Tangerine
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Re: What was the death toll of the OYW up until Antartica?

Well, judging from real world history. We never really get solid numbers of victims from past events, especially the notorious one that covered deep in international politics. Probably OYW is the same thing.

The numbers probably being generated by lost colonies and emptied cities. But people migrate here and there, so probably the numbers isn't complete since it hasn't include survivors that migrate back to Earth or made it out safely somewhere else. or probably the Principality isn't that bad with a portion of them took some survivor even accept refugee instead of gassing them outright. Probably they saved a good number of say.. newly convinced Zeonist, on the spot and migrate them somewhere before blasting the colony?

Or probably it's a Titan propaganda in the history school book someone forgot to fix, making it the general reliable number everyone knew about. :lol:
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Amion
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Re: What was the death toll of the OYW up until Antartica?

Tangerine wrote:Well, judging from real world history. We never really get solid numbers of victims from past events, especially the notorious one that covered deep in international politics. Probably OYW is the same thing.

The numbers probably being generated by lost colonies and emptied cities. But people migrate here and there, so probably the numbers isn't complete since it hasn't include survivors that migrate back to Earth or made it out safely somewhere else. or probably the Principality isn't that bad with a portion of them took some survivor even accept refugee instead of gassing them outright. Probably they saved a good number of say.. newly convinced Zeonist, on the spot and migrate them somewhere before blasting the colony?

Or probably it's a Titan propaganda in the history school book someone forgot to fix, making it the general reliable number everyone knew about. :lol:
That's not a bad take on it all. I loved the part about the schoolbooks, if only because it could really happen. Still, disregarding hard numbers, the intro to MSG specifically said half of the total population, meaning everybody from what I believe is the current consensus. The question is exactly how much was that half. That is, unless the narrator was actually the lecturer at Industrial 7's academy, and everything until now was Banager's (boring) history lessons.
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Citizen Costigan
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Re: What was the death toll of the OYW up until Antartica?

Thanks for all of the replies. Interesting I had always assumed that the statement about 82% (or something like that) of humanity living in space was true because of something I read on Gundam official years ago. This is apparently based off of nothing and is inaccurate. I go with what the movie compliation opening says about 50%. Interesting plausible numbers worked out.
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