Exponential Population

I've been trying to work out population calculations for my future settings, because humanity moves pretty exponentially in population I wanted to see how many humans there would be for my future settings at an accurate estimate.

Does anybody have any good methods of calculation for populations?

Yes. Throw it into an exponential growth rate calculator. (Trust me, if it exists, there's an online calculator for it )

What you will have to think about however, is the rate of change. That depends entirely on your future setting and how you want your population to behave. Are they rapidly expanding in a friendly, resource-rich location, leading to a high birth rate? Or are they struggling to survive in a hostile environment and getting picked off by alien predators, leading to a situation where they have more deaths than births?

Good point. I'll use a standard rate for one setting to get a general estimate since there are thousands of worlds.

While another is much smaller at 142 worlds. Which I can probably run a more controlled estimate for.

Population growth follows an S-curve, with the bottom representing the initial stages of struggling for survival and getting things in order, the exponential curve representing expansion at maximum birthrate, and the top representing hitting the limits of available resources. There can be multiple steps to these curves as plateaus are reached then overcome.

Would terraforming technologies help make population growth easier? Reducing the need to struggle for resources.

All sorts of technologies would help. If you can plop down a Garden of Eden Creation Kit and land amid an ecological paradise with robots having already built all the housing and farming and manufacturing and infrastructure, then you'll be in a much better place to start your growth curve than if you have to do all of that the hard way.

Okay so I can probably put a more generous estimate for growth seeing as while terraforming isn't GECK powerful, a lot of it is automated with robotic assiatance.

An interesting question just occurred to me. Let's say we do get technology to the point where we can deploy the equivalent of a GECK and drop colonists onto a world already prepared as a human paradise. What would this do to our psychology?

Let's look at human history. When things are extremely rough: subsistence economics, little if any medical care, harsh environmental conditions, etc., people have lots of children so that some of them may survive. When things are extremely comfortable, birth rates decline since that pressure recedes.

If humans land on a new planet to find a paradise waiting for them, with most or all labor fully automated and all necessities provided, would they start breeding like rabbits or would they sit back and relax, freed from the need to procreate? Would their children have anything to do: work, explore, build? What would that do to people?

How much work do parents have to do for their children? I think this is a variable that is often neglected because I don't think there is much variance between societies - even Western countries require parents to watch after their children and pay for their clothes, for example.

It isnt a question of work, its a question of cost. Educating a child to pursue a productive career has become so expensive, people have fewer of them. If automation makes it super cheap, people will have more.

Not all child-raising work is in the form of spending, though...

The main thing that reduces birth rates is a highly educated populace, to my knowledge. The fact is, we don't know how population growth of highly educated colonies with advanced birth control technology would work because we haven't taken over other planets yet.

That disclaimer about why all what I'm saying is highly speculative aside, my guess is that population growth would probably start somewhere around stage 4, (the bit where the population is growing but slowly, and the rate of growth may even be going down) in this scenario. The colonist population will skew young probably, so there may be a bit of a boom in the early years, but I expect after that, growth will be fairly slow despite a low death-rate, as people won't need to throw bodies at problems as much when they can throw future-tech at problems instead.

Another problem is the presence or absence of life extension and fertility extension technology.

One thing I fiddled with in some fanfic I wrote was a tendency once human lifespan and fertility are radically extended you start to see families where there are essentially multiple generations of children as after the first generation grows up and moves on, folks can still have more kids.