Line #52 Main/AbsurdlyHugePopulation


1	->''The individual human being is unpredictable, but the reactions of human mobs, Seldon found, could be treated statistically. The larger the mob, the greater the accuracy that could be achieved. And the size of the human masses that Seldon worked with was no less than the population of the Galaxy which in his time was numbered in the quintillions.''
2	-->-- '''Narration''', "Prelude" ''Literature/SecondFoundation''
3
4	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', like society itself has deeply changed. How?
5
6	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 decades (and centuries and millennia) go on. These populations will often be so mind-bogglingly huge that they are unfathomable to our current worldview.
7
8	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 {{galactic superpower}}s.
9
10	This trope can easily collide with ScienceMarchesOn, since figures which match this trope in older fiction might have already been achieved in real life. ''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]].
11
12	Often overlaps with OverpopulationCrisis when the enormous population size causes problems, but settings can have huge populations without suffering negative consequences as well. Contrast DepopulationBomb.
13	----
14	!!Examples:
15
16	[[foldercontrol]]
17
18	[[folder:Asian Animation]]
19	* ''Franchise/DragonBall'': {{Inverted\|Trope}}. According to Dragon Ball Minus, the [[Characters/DragonBallSaiyans 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.
20	* Planet Xing, the primary setting of ''Animation/HappyHeroes'', has 60 billion inhabitants according to what Little M. tells Big M. in the first episode.
21	[[/folder]]
22
23	[[folder:Fan Works]]
24	* Parodied in ''Fanfic/Plan7Of9FromOuterSpace''.
25	-->"The outlook was grim, with {{doomsayer}}s predicting the [[InTheFutureHumansWillBeOneRace extinction of blondes]], and a world populated by six and a half billion people where we'd all be forced to eat rice."
26	[[/folder]]
27
28	[[folder:Film -- Live-Action]]
29	* In ''Film/TheFifthElement'', the President of Earth mentions "some 100 billion of my fellow citizens", although these might not all be on Earth.
30	* ''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. According to the original movie novelization, a million worlds is a ''tiny fraction'' of the galaxy, but it may be including the uninhabited planets as well.
31	* ''Film/SoylentGreen'' (and the Creator/HarryHarrison novel that inspired it, ''Make Room! Make Room!'') have a 21st-century New York City populated by 35-40 million people (actual 2017 population estimate: 8.6 million). If that growth is representative of the rest of the planet, that means around 35 billion people live on Earth.
32	[[/folder]]
33
34	[[folder:Literature]]
35	* ''[[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Millennial_Project:_Colonizing_the_Galaxy_in_Eight_Easy_Steps The Millennial Project: Colonizing The Galaxy in Eight Easy Steps]]'' considers the intellectual consequences of living in a society where there are "5 billion billion people". While there would be many problems, such a society could invest vast intellectual resources solving those problems.
36	* Creator/IsaacAsimov
37	** ''Literature/FoundationSeries'':
38	*** A basic premise in this series is that only the actions of large populations can be predicted because individual reactions are far too random to accurately [[PrescienceByAnalysis model with mathematics]]. The setting describes twenty-five million inhabited planets in the galaxy, with a total population extending from quadrillions to the quintillions. While the series as a whole qualifies, the lower bound would mean the average inhabited planet doesn't: "100 quadrillions" gives each planet a population of 4 billion.[[note]]This is roughly double the Earth's population circa 1950s. It didn't reach the four billion population mark until two decades later. This shows that even when trying to demonstrate an obscenely huge population, at the galactic scale you end up at a fairly reasonable number.[[/note]]
39	*** "Literature/ThePsychohistorians": Based on the ''[[EncyclopediaExposita Encyclopedia Galactica]]'' entry on Trantor, the planet is the capital of the Galactic Empire and the population is in excess of 40 billion. It is also fed by the daily combined output of 20 [[AgriWorld farm planets]].
40	*** "[[Literature/TheGeneralFoundation The General]]": The planet Trantor, capital of the Galactic Empire, is populated entirely of government administrators, and their population is said to be 40 billions, requiring the combined output of twenty [[AgriWorld farm planets]]. This is Trantor ''after'' [[VestigialEmpire decaying to only the core galactic worlds]], though citizens believe themselves to represent the Empire's peak because they have grown so large.
41	*** ''Literature/FoundationsEdge'': The [[InfoDump exposition]] given at the start of chapter 5, "Speaker", says that the planet Trantor's population was capped, by law, at forty-five billions of people. [[WritersCannotDoMath However]], this means that if Trantor had a surface area equivalent to Earth, then the vast CityPlanet had a population density comparable to half that of Alaska's largest city.
42	** "Literature/TheLastQuestion": Just before [[TheStarsAreGoingOut the end of the universe]], it is populated by "a trillion, trillion, trillion" people, spread all over the universe.
43	** "[[Literature/TwentyFourHundredThirtyAD 2430 A.D.]]": The last zoo is being shut down to provide Earth with a perfect, stable society... no animals, no plants except for edible plankton, and as many humans as the planet can support - fifteen trillion.
44	* ''Literature/{{Aeon 14}}'': The colony ship GSS ''Intrepid'' around which the story revolves has a population/crew of millions all on its own, and individual {{space station}}s with populations in the hundreds of billions are described: a [[spoiler:9th millennium]] 1600-kilometer space station with 150 billion residents is seen as only mildly impressive by protagonist Tanis Richards, who is from 42nd century Earth when the Sol system had probably tens of trillions of people and had stripped Uranus and Neptune of their atmospheres and mined or combined almost every rock in the system for living space and resources.
45	* 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 not taken up by Urbmons to farmland.
46	* Discussed in ''Literature/StandOnZanzibar'' (written in 1968, set in 2010). With the world population reaching seven billion[[note]] one of many ''surprisingly'' accurate predictions in the book[[/note]], society is definitely beginning to feel the stress of the huge population, but, as pointed out in the comment that gave the book its name, you could still fit them all, standing shoulder to shoulder, on the island of Zanzibar.
47	* In ''Literature/TheStarchildTrilogy'' by Creator/FrederikPohl and Creator/JackWilliamson, the population of Earth has reached the thirteen billion mark.
48	* ''Literature/KrisLongknife'': The sequel series starting with ''Emissary'' reveals that the Iteeche Empire's core worlds are insanely overpopulated and has been for centuries, to the point where the Imperial planet's sea level has dropped by an amount visible from orbit due to. The Imperial Planet alone has roughly 150 billion inhabitants, which means living space is at a premium and, when combined with Iteeche HonorBeforeReason attitudes, means life is not nearly as valued as it is by humans, at least by the noble classes: they behead people for minor offenses, their current civil war is destroying fleets hundreds and thousands of ships strong on both sides, and as we learn in ''Admiral'', if the rebels gain space superiority over the Imperial Planet, they'll nerve gas the whole thing from orbit and resettle it with their own civilians to try to erase any trace of the preceding dynasty (this has happened at least four times in the past).
49	* Several of the short stories collected in "Welcome to the Monkey House" by Creator/KurtVonnegut (including the titular story) involve a future where the population of Earth has reached over 17 billion and suicide is actively encouraged by the government.
50	* While never outright stated, ''Literature/RedQueen'' implies that this is what becomes of the world in the distant future. In the third book, ''King's Cage'', Mare reads a journal mentioning the Lakelander War, which killed 500 thousand Silvers and 50 million Reds, with twice that number of the wounded (so in total more than 150 million people affected). The war involved Norta, which covers the Northeastern United States, and Lakelands, which covers the East Central States and Canada east of Lake Superior. The total population of those regions is, as of 2016, less than 130 million. And this happened after another catastrophe struck the world, which presumably submerged New York and other areas and led to the dearth of space to live on.
51	* 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... ''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]].
52	* In Creator/LarryNiven's ''Literature/KnownSpace'' setting, Earth has a population of eighteen 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. The Puppeteers' absurd population is a significant problem for them, and required them to terraform four other worlds to serve purely for food production while repeatedly moving their planet away from its sun to manage the immense amounts of waste heat that they produce.
53	* A variation set in the ''past'' occurs in ''The Deadly Mission of Phineas Snodgrass'', Creator/FrederikPohl's parody of ''Literature/LestDarknessFall'' and other GivingRadioToTheRomans stories. Phineas Snodgrass time-travels to Ancient Rome to introduce modern medicine early. This results in a population explosion that breaks 20 billion by the year 200, a quarter trillion by the year 300, and people calculate that by 1962 (the year the story was written) the whole mass of Earth would be made of people. [[spoiler:The solution to overpopulation is to invent time travel and kill Snodgrass before he can "help" the past.]]
54	* 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.
55	[[/folder]]
56
57	[[folder:Live Action TV]]
58	* In the ''Series/DoctorWho'' story "[[Recap/DoctorWhoS8E4ColonyInSpace Colony in Space]]", Earth's population in the 25th century is said to be one hundred thousand million (or one hundred billion).
59	* In the ''[[Series/TheOuterLimits1963 Outer Limits]]'' episode "[[Recap/TheOuterLimits1963S2E5DemonWithAGlassHand Demon With a Glass Hand]]", we learn that by 2964 Earth will have 70 billion people.
60	[[/folder]]
61
62	[[folder:Tabletop Games]]
63	* ''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]].
64	[[/folder]]
65
66	[[folder:Video Games]]
67	* ''VideoGame/EscapeVelocityNova'': 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.
68	* In ''VideoGame/StarCraft'', Earth's population is around 23 billion by 2301.
69	* In ''VideoGame/GalacticCivilizations'' a planet's population is limited only by the number and quality of farms can be built on it. Earth has a potential population of 50 billion. {{Colony Ship}}s and troop transports transfer population in units of a million, and the basic ships can carry 500 of those units.
70	[[/folder]]
71
72	[[folder:Web Comics]]
73	* ''Webcomic/SchlockMercenary'':
74	** 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 measured 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.
75	--->'''Footnote:''' There are other ways to fit 200+ billion people on a planet, but this is one of a very few ways to pull it off [[GreenAesop while still having it be useful as a planet]].
76	** The Espererin home system is said to be home to uncounted billions of espees. [[NotHyperbole The narrator adds that they are]] ''literally'' uncounted.
77	[[/folder]]
78
79	[[folder:Web Original]]
80	* 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 with fusion power, towers reaching all the way into 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. The only real limiting factor on a planet's population is the waste heat generated from all those people, which could ''also'' be dealt with given the right technology.
81	* Played with in ''Website/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.
82	[[/folder]]
83
84	[[folder:WesternAnimation]]
85	* In one episode of ''WesternAnimation/{{Futurama}}'', it is mentioned that the population of Earth in the year 3000 is 40 billion.
86	[[/folder]]

Context Main / AbsurdlyHugePopulation