Colony Growth(Was Re: Realistic Fleet sizes)

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.

I'd say that the 'average' colony would be a million or so after 100
years, at best - trade/transport interruptions (eg wars), disasters, etc
could lower this number drastically.

To get back to FT: an entire sector, filled with successful colonies as
above, could have a population of, say, 20 million only. About 20+
worlds
with one mill. pop. would also be a vast 'geographic' area to cover. The
Lafayette sector, in FT, with 4-5 older colonies plus a bunch of younger
colonies and stations of various sorts, could have a total pop. of less
than 10 million.

My $0.02...

Brian (burger00@camosun.bc.ca)