SciFi misses the mark on population, over and over again.

(I wrote this in 2010)

The land surface area of the State of Texas, divided by the current estimated human population of Earth, equals almost 2,000 ft^2 per human. Texas, it is large.

After doing that bit of math a few years back, I've been wanting to see an author write a realistically super-populated world into a story. So here's the numbers to make it easy. :)

What would be interesting to see is a table comparing every super-pop SF story, with data on the population numbers, how high the buildings, whether or not it's total planet coverage or just the land, etc. Who came close? Who got it laughably wrong? Has any author got the numbers anywhere near right to match the descriptions in their stories? My bet is even in tales where the population is restricted to a few mega-arcologies, the buildings are still usually too large for the depicted population densities.

The total surface area of Earth could be divided into 2,745,191,623,680 – 2,000 ft^2 parcels, using this 196,940,400 I found for miles^2 for Earth's total surface area. Make that several trillion packed elbow to elbow in a multi-story building that covers an entire Earth sized planet. Even if necessary hallways, HVAC, water, sewer etc services uses half the space and cuts it down to 1,000 ft^2 per human, the 2,745,191,623,680 number is still the two-trillion pound gorilla in the room, and every individual still has plenty of space to rattle around in.

Science fiction authors have vastly undershot the mark, many times, in super-population dystopic tales. A 100 level building, and having to import *all* food and other resources, that just ain't plausible at all. With 1,000 ft^2 per person, that's 270 trillion, there's still gobs of elbow room, and the roof could all be covered in high density hydroponic farm.

More plausible, four story building, bottom floor all services, middle two floors living space, top floor food production. Cut the room size down to 200 ft^2 and again give 1/2 the space to etc and the pop per floor is 13,725,958,118,400 or 27,451,916,236,800 total. There we go! A mere 27.4 trillion beings in a world girdling building. Not quite 70,000 per mile^2. Monaco's density is over 42,000 mile^2, so I suppose the 27.4T number could be within spitting distance of "packed in elbow to elbow", as long as it's kept to only two floors – but 200 square feet per person is ridiculously generous, in really dark and dingy dystopic Sci-Fi.

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More recent musings. Ever given serious thought to a planet like Coruscant, supposed to be covered with skyscrapers with many hundreds or thousands of floors? Given the capacity of a mere TWO levels covering just the land of an Earth size planet ~70% covered by water, Coruscant is simply farcical with the population density depicted on film. There's not that much empty space amongst the buildings. Either the planet has an extremely efficient waste recycling system or there's a very large fleet of ships constantly bringing in supplies and taking garbage out. Or every resident has an entire skyscraper floor to itself and in the scenes we saw, everyone was going out for dinner and a show but hadn't reached their destinations.

Isaac Asimov really blew it on Trantor. 100 level, world covering building my @$%!@%. Not without the same (or worse) supply/waste issues as Coruscant, or Helios in Bill The Galactic Hero.

Randolph Lalonde also drops this math-ball on his toe in his Spinward Fringe series, wherein he has a station with a walkable surface area half that of Earth, yet the inhabitants live in very tiny apartments. There's no explanation for *why* when there's 98,470,200 square miles of "walkable surface". Is 90% of the station taken up by life support (which would include power generation) and other bulky things like spaceraft construction chambers? He also commits the sin (several times) of the impossibly dense asteroid belt without ever attempting to use some anomaly or relatively recent cosmic event to explain it. Aside from those and some other small stuff, pretty enjoyable series.

I'd have to re-read the three S'uthlam stories in George R.R. Martin's Tuf Voyaging to see if the population density is described well enough to tell if he came anywhere close to a plausible number.

Indeed. Hells, if you packed just the 48 states to the density of England the population would be on the verge of 3.3 billion. Expand that across the world (excluding Antarctica) and it comes to slightly under 55 billion.

As for Trantor, one troper suggested the interesting solution that Asimov was for some reason using the long-count billion (equivalent to trillion on the short-count scale), at which point Trantor starts to make a bit more sense, except that you have to wonder why the government didn't do something earlier. Anne Mc Caffrey managed to avert it, sort of, in her Doona series by not giving numbers for earth's population, although it still leaves the ever-present question of exactly why no government ever seems to try to do something about the problem before it reaches crisis level.

edited 17th May '14 3:49:34 AM by MattII

I think the real root of the issue, at the fundamental level, is just that we as human beings have trouble processing what all these huge numbers actually mean. It's hard to visualize exactly what "a mass of one million billion people" (to pick a random number) looks like without some sort of external reference, much less the infrastructure that would be required to support that sort of population

The quick answer is that you were not taking (at a minimum) government and communal recreation space into account, and assuming that the planet (or even the state of Texas) is uniformly suitable for that sort of development. I also suspect that you were not aware of how much land space modern agriculture actually takes up, let alone other necessary materials (which would justify a 100 story super-building surrounded by a 50-100 mile radius of very carefully managed farmland, at a guess, even after reducing food to soybeans and rice).

Re: Coruscant, which is unfortunately the only one in this list that I'm familiar with. A civilization with the ability to construct portable lightsabers with a compact, long-lasting power source, would move that tech into much more mundane uses, like instant waste disposal. They'd definitely need that fleet of ships, though who'd have them flying in and around the districts we see on the screen? Given the choice, would you park the Queen Elizabeth Jr. next to an petroleum supertanker, and would you demand that they continue operations through a war zone?

The thing is, science fiction authors frequently have to invent new things and conditions while also making them readable. An article like this (I think it meets the criteria for a tract, but won't call it that as it does raise a good point overall) would make for uninteresting writing in a reader's eye, especially when there's enough non-detail stuff happening that Fridge Logic only kicks in years after publication.

But back to the Texas example. Even if you could do it, you could only make it work with a mono-society, which the human race most certainly is not. Where do we go for beer after work? For that matter, where's work? 200 sq ft is simply too small for people to function in as people (there's zero upward mobility, for one), and a society that rigorously compacted would strain disbelief.

Even with multi-purpose superstructures to solve this (you could effectively put the whole of current human society into Rhode Island this way), this would still require a radical alteration of society to get this to work. Put another way, the story would have to be about this radical alteration in order to work.

Looking solely at the numbers is for a story like The Cold Equations - they'll work on paper, but putting them into practice raises a number of questions about how many things (and there were a lot in that one) had to have gone spectacularly wrong for the story to end up that way. Explaining would cut down on page space for any actual story, especially if you have a word count cap.

Finally, I don't know how realistic it actually would be, but... I wonder if anyone here is familiar with a certain Sim City 3000 experiment from early 2010? (The timing makes me think you might, Galane, but I can't be sure.) If you look up 'sim city 3000 Magnasanti', you'll see an example of how to make ridiculous population density work... and why it would be difficult to convince actual people to live there.

A quick note regarding giving everyone 200 square feet: A full-sized cargo van (the kind a lot of businesses use as work trucks) is 124 square feet bumper to bumper and fender to fender. Or, if you can't immediately image the size of a cargo van, go to a parking lot and look at how big each marked stall is — unless it's a special-purpose layout, each stall is 9' by 18' — that's 1 foot narrower and 2 feet shorter than the proposed 200-square-foot living area.

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

Which is still bigger than the standard 'first apartment' in Tokyo, right after high school and before starting a career... Livable, but difficult.

Madrugada, do you have the dimensions of a shipping container on hand? That's... what, a two-person room?

The standard for a sea container is 20' x 8' — slightly smaller than the parking space overall, at 160 square feet: 2 feet longer but 1 foot narrower. A 20' Reefer (refrigerator) container is 17'8" x 7'5".

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

There's an Anne Mc Caffrey series I could never get into because I couldn't get past some very basic things that made no sense to me (and I ate up a lot of her writing so this was a surprise) one of which was the fact that apparently Earth had become so overcrowded none of the colonists in it had seen green land. Aside from small designated parks. (And also couldn't guess that maybe they hadn't seen the aliens before because the aliens were also fucking colonists.)

I mean, even if you ditch the concept of national park land you have to set aside some land for farming. And a place for colonists like this to learn HOW to farm and handle all the animals and things like that. It was weird.

Basically, I get that our population is growing. I just think we have more growing to do to overpopulate the entire planet.

Indeed, take a look at the figures I ended up with, 55 billion with just the current six continent packed as tightly as England.

You do today. The more artificial, industrial methods of producing food which are not dependent on local soil and the sun will become more efficient, and combined with development of our infrastructure and related technology, it may eventually be able to replace traditional farming. In other words, food production could move entirely from the primary sector of the economy to the secondary, and may even stop being agriculture.

In a way, this process has already begun when we started moving around refined fertilizer, or figured out how to produce artificial light that plants can use.

edited 20th May '14 12:02:26 PM by ManInGray

Uh.. regardless of how it's done, you still need space to grow food. Plus, given certain trends, I don't think we're going towards a state where we plow over literally everything anyway. People are, more and more, wanting to preserve a lot of our natural landscapes.

A super-densly populated planet is unlikely, due to the whole Demographic Transition thing, but a super-densly populated starship is not unlikely at all, in which case some of Galane's points still apply.

Of course, all of this is because Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale.

Going to the Coruscant example: I think I read on Wookiepedia that (in the expanded universe) they do have to import a lot of things. There's also an extensive network of skyscraper-like structures in the lower levels — it's gotten to the point where people have to expand down.

Also some small nit-picking about formatting: It was really hard to read those long strings of numbers. Could you edit the post and add abbreviations (like "27 trillion" or "59 billion") please?

edited 21st May '14 4:21:25 PM by AwSamWeston

Award-winning screenwriter. Directed some movies. Trying to earn a Creator page. I do feedback here.

I don't think this is limited to Sci-Fi. A lot of Fantasy books and such also completely miss the mark on population.

^ There's a trope I'm thinking of putting on YKTTW I call Cockroach Species (aka Cockroach Faction) where fantasy (and sci fi to a degree) writers don't realize the scale of populations and you end up with a seemingly infinite supply of people and characters even if the setting has said species pushing the brink of extinction.

Blizzard Entertainment is notorious for use of this in their Warcraft and Starcraft universes. Entire species like the High Elves of Quel'Thalas who were supposed to number maybe a few thousand after the events of Warcraft III seem limitless and found everywhere in World Of Warcraft. (And don't get me started on their even more numerous despite the genocide cousins the Blood Elves.) The main saving grace Blizzard has over other instances I can think of is that they seldom give hard numbers for populations. It leaves room for Retcon or expansion/exploration.

edited 21st May '14 8:52:54 PM by MajorTom

Can't find the one you're after, but Scifi Writers Have No Sense Of Units has a few already-noted examples.

edited 22nd May '14 12:09:11 AM by MattII