Re: Colony Growth(Was Re: Realistic Fleet sizes)

Brian Burger wrote:
> 
> On Sun, 21 Sep 1997, Samuel Penn wrote:
> 
> > In message
<Pine.OSF.3.95.970920162345.3093C-100000@ccins.camosun.bc.ca>
> >	      Brian Burger <burger00@camosun.bc.ca> wrote:
> >
> > > Only problem is that no one colony world will have this level of
> > > population.
> >
> > Let's stick some numbers in. We'll assume the oldest colony
> > worlds have had a hundred years in which to grow up a
> > population.
> >
> >   Growth	After 100yrs	 Equivalent to...
> >   0.1%	x1.1		 Approx UK
> >   1%	x2.7		 Approx USA
> >   2%	x7		 Third world
> >   3%	x19		 Third world
> >   4%	x50		 About highest I could find.
> >
> > Colonists are going to be reasonably high tech (so low
> > death rates), but have few reasons for extensive birth
> > control, so growth rates may well be high.
> >
> > Also, Earth is probably overburdened with population
> > when the new colony worlds open up, so very possibly
> > tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of
> > people will move to colony worlds.
> >
> > Even with a initial population of one million, and a 4%
> > growth rate, there will be only fifty million people on
> > the world after a hundred years.
> >
> > Billions seem unlikely. If we wanted populations of
> > billions, we could argue for it, by either having
> > very high birth rates (10% gives x13780 after a century,
> > which takes a starting population of 100 thousand up
> > to 1.3 billion), or massive outflux of population
> > from Earth.
> >
> > I think the largest worlds will have populations
> > in the millions, rather than billions.
> >
> >
> > --
> > Be seeing you,
> > Sam.
> >
> These numbers bear out what I was thinking about colonial populations
adn
> tthe fleets they can support.
> 
> Except for one thing: a starting transported population of one million
> seems very high. Don't forget that each of those million, plus their
> household effects plus machinery etc has to find space on a transport
> vessel to take them to thier new colony. Even if a lot of those
colonist
> are peasants (which would add to the mortality rate) and have little
> stuff, that's still a load of people to ship.
> 
> The initial landing group would probably be quite small, relativly
> speaking. Say 50-100,000 or less, mostly specialist types to prepare
> infrastructure for the rest, who come in batches over the next decade
or
> more. That way, you don't have to have immensely vast transport fleets
to
> get a million people and equipment to a planet all at once...but it
slows
> down your population growth model somewhat.
> 

check out the book 

Red Mars by Kim Stanely Robinson

its a very good example of this kind of colonization

chris pratt
valen10@flash.net