History Main / AbsurdlyHugePopulation

* In Creator/LarryNiven's ''Literature/KnownSpace'' setting, Earth has a population of 18 billion in the age of Beowulf Shaeffer, and societal rules have adapted accordingly. This is dwarfed by the Puppeteers who, as we find out in ''Literature/{{Ringworld}}'', have a population of ''one trillion'' -- although this is a couple of centuries after Beowulf's setting.

* ''Franchise/DragonBall'': {{Inverted|Trope}}. According to Dragon Ball Minus, the Saiyan population was only a few thousand on their home planet before Frieza destroyed them. It implied because there was a warrior race constantly at war with other races and each other, it was difficult for them to increase their numbers.

Up the number of people in the world by a couple billion, that's how! Despite Earth's population growth currently slowing down and estimated to [[http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.GROW peter out]] between the 9th to the 13th billion (barring unexpected circumstances) as developing countries go through [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition the four stages of demographic transition]], the concept of [[CaptainObvious "Of course there will be more people in the future, duh!"]] is one that seems self-evident to many readers, and thus it's an easy way to get across how far into the future you are, with populations only growing bigger as the centuries (and millennia) go on. These populations will often be so mind-bogglingly huge that they are unfathomable to our current worldview.

* Creator/RobertSilverberg's novel ''Literature/TheWorldInside'' is set on Earth in the year 2381, when the population of the planet has reached 75 billion people. Population growth has skyrocketed due to a quasi-religious belief in human reproduction as the highest possible good. Most of the action occurs in a massive three-kilometer high city-tower called Urban Monad (Urbmon) 116. Most of humanity lives in these mammoth thousand-floor skyscrapers arranged in "constellations", where the shadow of one building does not fall upon another. The population is supported by the conversion of all of the Earth's habitable land area not taken up by Urbmons to agriculture.

* In ''Literature/TheEleventhCommandment'' by ''Creator/LesterDelRey'' a secret agent of the (human ) Martian government visits Earth, which is ruled by a universal Catholic Church, already has a population of more than 11 billion, and is exhorted to have more- contraceptives are forbidden. The agent attributes this to religious prejudice, but discovers that the Church knows that an atomic war in the past can threaten the destruction of the human race through mutations unless they breed enough to swamp it out.

** The [[ColonizedSolarSystem Sol system]] has a population greater than a trillion in the 31st century, [[http://www.schlockmercenary.com/2014-07-08 Earth alone]] hosts 200 billion people, 4.62 billion of whom are concentrated in the capital megalopolis of Dom Atlantis. The footnote explains that plentiful energy, cities measures in cubic kilometers, and hyper-advanced "agriculture" mean that they can fit all these people while taking up less than ten percent of the planet's surface, including the seas.

How such a large population came to be or is sustained, is rarely addressed, though there's sometimes an in-show explanation (often involving colonizing other planets and people expanding to fill the new living space). It's popular in {{space opera}}s with their sprawling {{space-filling empire}}s.

This trope can easily collide with ScienceMarchesOn, since figures which match this trope in older fiction can these days be not just plausible, but reality. ''Literature/MakeRoomMakeRoom'' has seven billion people on Earth[[note]]Which we reached late October 2011[[/note]], while Creator/IsaacAsimov's short story "The Winnowing" has humanity starving at six[[note]]Of the 7.5 billion people of today, [[http://www.worldhunger.org/2015-world-hunger-and-poverty-facts-and-statistics/ a little less than 800 million are starving]], a number that's falling despite the increase in population; this leaves us with 6.7 billion people who have food on their plate. As of 2020 the Earth's food production is enough to feed 10 billion people -- the bigger issue according to most experts is the distribution of that food[[/note]].

It's the future- either close or distant. You have the [[RayGun ray guns]], the [[JetPack jet packs,]] and the [[CoolSpaceship spaceships]]. But you need a way of making things seem more 'real', more grounded in reality. How?

Up the population by a couple of billions, that's how! Despite Earth's current population growth slowing down and estimated to [[http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.GROW peter out]] around between the 9th to the 13th billion barring outside influence as third-world developing countries go through [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition the four stages of demographic transition]], the concept of [[CaptainObvious "Of course there will be more people in the future, duh!"]] is one that seems self-evident to many readers, and thus it is an easy way to get across how far into the future you are, with populations only growing bigger as you get further and further into the future. These populations will often be so mind-bogglingly huge that they are unfathomable to our current worldview.

How such a large population came to be or is sustained, is rarely addressed, though there's sometimes an in-show justification (often involving colonizing other planets and simply needing more people to populate them so a modern society could function). It's popular in {{space opera}}s with their sprawling {{space filling empire}}s.

Often overlaps with OverpopulationCrisis when the enormous population size begins to cause problems, but settings can have massive populations without suffering negative consequences as well. Contrast DepopulationBomb.

* In ''Literature/TheEleventhCommandment'' by ''Creator/LesterDelRey'' a secret agent of the (human ) Martian government visits Earth, which is ruled by a universal Catholic Church, already has a popilation of more than 11 billion, and is exhorted to have more- contraceptives are forbidden. The agent attributes this to religious prejudice, but discovers that the Church knows that an atomic war in the past can threaten the destruction of the human race through mutations unless they breed enough to swamp it out. [[/folder]]

* ''TabletopGame/Warhammer40000'': Hive cities often reach the tens of billions in population, the vast majority of which are impoverished scavengers feeding on the refuse of the upper atmospheric spires where the nobility lives. The Imperium of Man even outright states in regards to its ForeverWar with the rest of the galaxy: "We count the lives of planets, not men." - implying the Imperium has grown so vast the population changes so rapidly that when you finished counting, you'd have to restart again - [[WeHaveReserves and a callous disregard for the individual humans they send into the meatgrinder]].

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* Played with in ''WebOriginal/OrionsArm''. The population of "baseline" (not substantially genetically modified) humans falls from 15 billion to 2 billion between 2400 and 2900 A.D., and are considered an EndangeredSpecies in the very far future (c. 10,000 - 20,000 A.D.). However, in that same far future, our genetically modified descendants number in the hundreds of thousands of billions.

Often overlaps with OverpopulationCrisis when the enormous population size begins to cause problems, but settings can have massive populations without suffering negative consequences as well.

* Discussed by ''WebVideo/IsaacArthur'', who points out that most settings actually ''invert'' this, having populations that are far too low in comparison to the total amount of potential living space, some examples being Trantor and Coruscant. Mathematically, if Earth's land area were completely covered in one city and each person had a generous 10,000 square feet/929 square meters, you could fit 546 billion people on Earth without stretching resources. Scale that up to towers reaching all the way to space and subterranean settlements, and you can actually fit a ''quadrillion'' people on Earth, and do so without causing GaiasLament, since you can also have plenty of room for country-sized nature preserves. Indeed, the only limiting factor on a planet's population is the waste heat generated from all those people.

* ''VideoGame/EVNova'': All the [[ProudWarriorRaceGuy Auroran]] capital worlds have populations in the high tens of billions (Heraan approaches 90 billion residents) stuck in large {{Arcolog|y}}ies due to industrial pollution making the surface uninhabitable.

* In ''Literature/TheEleventhCommandment'' by ''Creator/LesterDelRey'' a secret agent of the (human ) Martian government visits Earth, which is ruled by a universal Catholic Church, already has a popilation of more than 11 billion, and is exhorted to have more- contraceptives are forbidden. The agent attributes this to religious prejudice, but discovers that the Church knows that an atomic was in the past can threaten the destruction of the human race through mutations unless they breed enough to swamp it out. [[/folder]]

* In ''Literature/TheEleventhCommandment'' by ''Creator/LesterdelRey'' a secret agent of the (human ) Martian government visits Earth, which is ruled by a universal Catholic Church, already has a popilation of more than 11 billion, and is exhorted to have more- contraceptives are forbidden. The agent attributes this to religious prejudice, but discovers that the Church knows that an atomic was in the past can threaten the destruction of the human race through mutations unless they breed enough to swamp it out. [[/folder]]

[[/folder]]

* Italian sci-fi novel ''Le meraviglie del Duemila'' ("The marvels of 2000"), written in 1907, predicted that by the early 21st century population increase would need a revolution in food production (e.g., most food coming from the sea) to feed everybody. The world population predicted for the year 2000 was a whopping... wait for it... ''[[SocietyMarchesOn 2.2 billion]]'' people, or about 1/3 of what the actual population would be. To be fair to the author, the prediction was consistent with the growth rate observed in the 19th century[[note]]Human population grew 50% between 1800 and 1900, from one billion to 1.5 billion people; a population of 2.2 billion is very close to a further 50% growth[[/note]]... it's just that RealLife [[FreakierThanFiction was bolder than his imagination]].

This trope can easily collide with ScienceMarchesOn and SocietyMarchesOn, since figures which match this trope in older fiction can these days be not just plausible, but reality. ''Literature/MakeRoomMakeRoom'' has seven billion people on Earth[[note]]Which we reached late October 2011[[/note]], while Creator/IsaacAsimov's short story "The Winnowing" has humanity starving at six[[note]]Of the 7.5 billion people of today, [[http://www.worldhunger.org/2015-world-hunger-and-poverty-facts-and-statistics/ a little less than 800 million are starving]], a number that's falling despite the increase in population; this leaves us with 6.7 billion people who have food on their plate. As of 2020 the Earth's food production is enough to feed 10 billion people -- the bigger issue according to most experts is the distribution of that food[[/note]].

* ''Franchise/StarWars'': Plays with the usual connotations of the trope in that the Star Wars setting as a whole takes place "A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away." Yet this is easy to mistake for taking place in the future with sci-fi tech and {{City Planet}}s. One such is Coruscant, the capital of the Galactic Republic and later the Galactic Empire, has a population topping a ''trillion'' all by itself according to a reference book published prior to ''Film/TheForceAwakens'''s release. The entire galaxy has a ''million'' inhabited planets, according to some sources, so the galactic population could be a quadrillion.

* Parodied in ''Plan 7 of 9 from Outer Space''.

Up the population by a couple of billions, that's how! Despite Earth's current population growth slowing down and estimated to [[http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.GROW peter out]] around between the 9th to the 13th billion barring outside influence as third-world developing countries go through [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition the four stages of demographic transition]], the concept of [[CaptainObvious of course there will be more people in the future, duh!']] is one that seems self-evident to many readers, and thus it is an easy way to get across how far into the future you are, with populations only growing bigger as you get further and further into the future. These populations will often be so mind-bogglingly huge that they are unfathomable to our current worldview.

Up the population by a couple of billions, that's how! Despite Earth's current population growth slowing down and estimated to [[http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.GROW peter out]] around between the 9th to the 13th billion barring outside influence as third-world developing countries go through [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition the four stages of demographic transition]], the concept of [[CaptainObvious'of course there will be more people in the future, duh!']] is one that seems self-evident to many readers, and thus it is an easy way to get across how far into the future you are, with populations only growing bigger as you get further and further into the future. These populations will often be so mind-bogglingly huge that they are unfathomable to our current worldview.

Up the population by a couple of billions, that's how! Despite Earth's current population growth slowing down and estimated to [[http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.GROW peter out]] around between the 9th to the 13th billion barring outside influence as third-world developing countries go through [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition the four stages of demographic transition]], the concept of 'of course there will be more people in the future, duh!' is one that seems self-evident to many readers, and thus it is an easy way to get across how far into the future you are, with populations only growing bigger as you get further and further into the future. These populations will often be so mind-bogglingly huge that they are unfathomable to our current worldview.