Population Distribution

Population Distribution
Since life in the galaxy does not exist aside from where humans put it, life is very much designed before The Plague. Species which were extinct are recreated, new transgenetic species are created, viruses which are deleterious to humans are eliminated, viruses are used to produce agelessness, bacteria are engineered to terraform planets, produce energy and fight cancer and the human genome is augmented to produce exceptional beauty, strength, intellect and longevity. Of course, there are a bunch of disasters which occur along the way due to this control.

But, because of this end of evolution and the age of designed life, the environments on planets are crafted to the desires of people and even a few millenia of wild growth have not erased that imprimatur. It is as if the habit on most planets exists for a purpose... even if that purpose no longer has any meaning.

The same can be true of the mechanical objects in the world, the stations and the cities. Everything that is not clearly cosmic has been placed there by humans and nearly all of it served a purpose only according to the logic of organization prior to the plague.

Fortunately, the logic of that organization is familiar to us. Aside from a few devastating events like the devastation of china and a number of disruptive technologies, the people prior to the plague are our descendants. They organize roughly the way we do today, into large corporate structures - nations, states, families, religions, businesses - and operate an economy of scale and specialization that creates astounding productivity.

The key in understanding the differences between them and us is to extrapolate the technology we develop and the implications of a hive mind that comes from increased telecommunications. But the social structures, political organization, division of wealth/power and the mindset that has emerged in which the individual has an increasing relationship with to the whole of humanity continues unabated through settlement of Orion's Arm prior to the plague.

What this means is that places will be settled based upon political motivations, but primarily based upon economic expediency. We will create far more infrastructure in our solar system than in any single other solar system simply because we need to do the former first, but also because it is easier to build out incrementally from what already exists. However, there will also be lots of experiments that are created in regions nearby Earth by people as they work out the process of settlement before people go too far away from civilization.

The people who do venture as far as they can from the center. These groups (religious, philosophical or political) are primarily the ones who wish to opt out and it will take quite a bit of time before the rest of the mass fills in the gaps in between. But, those gaps will tend to be filled by 'planned communities'. Very large development projects with very large financial backing which work along with governmental goals for settlement to populate the galaxy. They will bring the largest economy of scale and will be responsible for the terraformers I refer to. This stage is effectively where human civilization is when the plague happens.

What does that mean for the Carina Renaissance and the period we're interested in?

It means that the sun's solar system is dense with orbital stations and nearly every moon has settlement on it. There are a ton of outposts located in the asteroid belt and places that would never be settled elsewhere have human built infrastructure. The same kind of philosophy is true of nearby solar systems but to a lesser extent. Humans make settlements regardless of whether they are prime locations.

On the other hand, once you go beyond the regions near our solar system, there tend to be a lesser density of settlement but a greater percentage of those settlements are very habitable. The planets on the edge of Orion's Arm are perfect for human life on them, because the developers selected places that they think people would like to live or industries selected planets that would generate tremendous resources and mineral operations select the highest density locations to mine.

Peppered among these corporate / highly optimized locations, there are the separatists locations (typically located on planets that are suitable for habitation rather than for resources) and special purpose institutions setup by governments, academic institutions and telecommunications companies to provide the infrastructure and services required for settlement.

Of course, this is all pre-plague. So resettlement occurs in reverse, from the edges inward. Immortals and their kin are not so inclined to go to places that were never useful for settlement and the ICRCT decommissioned many locations during its first few hundred years of operation. So, the region around Earth is actually not very populated. The Order of Mercury uses a number of installations, but many have been eliminated or simply left fallow under the articles of the Treaty of Origins.

For the rest of Orion's Arm, because of the desire to settle kin groups and the incapacity to manufacture on the scale from before, the priorities governing resettlement radically altered the profile and purpose of locations. Places that were previously chosen by separatists are now more likely to be centers of population and authority and the areas created by industry for economic purposes are likely to be used by people who want to remain separate from the aristocrat structure that dominates interstellar society.

The special purpose locations (previously created by governments, telecoms and academics) and mining operations tend therefore to form the backbone of the interstellar trade network and resist the will governments. This has lead to a lot of repurposing of the physical infrastructure and a hodge podge ad hoc approach to architecture and infrastructure which only recently (prior to the Carina Renaissance) has started to reverse in small ways.

The scale of projects at the time of the Carina Renaissance are just beginning to grow again to be able to plan out an entire orbital city. That is why Duvillard is actually so proud of his orbital palace... because it has taken him many decades of planning to refurbish it and it is based upon the latest trends in architecture which have arisen from the renaissance of culture.

But, since even the new architecture is really just a remodeling of the infrastructure that already exists, it is the infrastructure at the time of the plague that determines where everything can be in Orion's Arm at the time of the Carina Renaissance. And, since some of that infrastructure has been disassembled or lost (like Erothos) , the addition of new (small scale) outposts to previously unsettled places means that the prevalence of infrastructure around Orion's Arm is roughly as dense as it was at the height of the plague.

So, to boil it down to numbers, the density of infrastructure (meaning where you can find something made by humans that supports human habitation like a terraformed planet or moon, or a station or orbital city around it, or an installation in an asteroid or in orbit around a star) can be calculated by estimating the number of planets or moons suitable to human habitation in each solar system (multiplied by 2 to account for the terraformer). Then multiplying that by the number of stars in the milky way and the percentage of the galaxy that Orion's Arm constitutes. Then multiplying that by 1.5 to account for the special purpose infrastructure that spans through the civilization.

On top of that, we'd need to add the number of asteroids or moons which contain a large amount of elements easy to access in each solar system multiplied by the same factors. But, in truth, most of these waypoints haven't been resettled because they are either too far from a habitable planet or they have been lost. And, those which form the backbone of the trade system and/or operate outside of the authority of the aristocratic governance system tend to attract a disproportionate amount of the settlement. Hence why Terra Nova is a hotbed of activity.

So, leaving aside a few notable places like Terra Nova, we can estimate the number of waypoints as a multiple of the number of habitable planets since they now tend to act as the local resource and trade support structure around them. A number which is close to 50 to one. But, for the purposes of a political map, we can ignore them altogether based upon the fact that they are tied to the habitable planet/moon. And, instead, we can simply rely upon the original 1.5 multiple to account for the interplanetary infrastructure provided by the occasional trade hub, mercurian outpost or independent settlement.

So, we come to the calculation of [1 (planet/moon) + 1 (orbital city)] x 1.5 (outpost/trade center) x 100 billion (solar systems) x 1/200 (fraction of galaxy contained by the region of orion's arm) x Frequency of Earth Like Planets per solar system.

So, the number of planets in the Registry of Estate ultimately comes down to how common we think (or want) Earth is (or to be). Even if Earth is 1 in a thousand, that would mean there would be 1.5 million entries in the Registry. I personally prefer a number more like 30,000 entries, which means that conditions suitable for habitation are very rare (1/50,000)... so rare that it would nearly never happen in the same system more than once. And, the distances between these places would be very large. Even with 3 dimensions to space, based upon the spacing that exists between most stars, on average the distances between habitable bodies would be about 50-60ly.

Fortunately, most ships measure their speeds in multiple lyph, making movement between habitable bodies equivalent to a day's travel. Plus, the actual chance of habitability is random so the distribution of distances is more normal... so there are many bodies which are even closer neighbors than that. Also, these numbers will change as the Carina Renaissance moves towards Empires. Ships will travel faster and the exploitation of previously abandoned outposts for resources will increase as will the places used for trade.

But, for the time being, it means that transit is a non-trivial undertaking and communities are isolated except insofar as the class of merchants, well-born and immortals undertake activities that connect them for their own motivations. Pilgrimages have a much more significant meaning given the difficulty of find passage from place to place and would be pirates have a lot of opportunities.

There are approximately 1.5 trillion humans spread out among the 30k habitable locations, with about 20% of those locations accounting for about 80% of the population. Population levels vary by planetary conditions as well as the form of rule over them and degree of economic activity. Whereas, there are a number of planets which support more than a billion people, the majority of planetary bodies hover have less than 25 million people and there are some with only hundreds of thousands.

The total immortal population numbers around 58,000, which is approximately 2/5th of the number who actually survived the Plague. The period of interstellar feudal warfare led to the extinction of numerous kin groups and the death of many immortals before it finally stabilized into the divisions of authority and allegiance that is found in the Carina Renaissance.

About two thirds of the immortal population is tied to one of the 31 republics throughout Orion's Arm and the remaining 1/3 compose the barons, counts, earls, marquis, dukes and princes. These aristocrats have claimed 95% of the habitable bodies based upon the right of conquest over other contestants during the interstellar feudal period. However, of that 95%, nearly a third is controlled by the 289 sovereign immortals (Dukes, Princes and Kings). The remaining 2/3rds of the bodies are held by the other aristocrats who owe them allegiance. Sovereign immortals thus typically personally claim title to anywhere between a dozen and five dozen planetary bodies each and usually have about twice that number of immortals which owe them allegiance.

Since the interstellar feudal period subsided, the populations on most aristocratic planets have risen faster than those in the republics. So, at this point, the mass of human population has moved back more towards the center of Orion's Arm or outward through the Persean Arm, with significant variance from principality to principality based upon how it has been governed.

Whereas most of the republics were able to remain out of the fray two millenia ago, demographic shift has made them much more vulnerable at the point of the Carina Renaissance. As a result, most engage in shrewd diplomacy in order to guard their independence and rely upon civic virtue to enlist a larger portion of their commoner populations into their military defense. However, they have also been the leading participants in the renaissance not only because it inspires civic pride and because of their greater commercial wealth but also because it has led to the reintroduction of technologies that allow them to maintain an edge in warfare.