RE: Thinking out loud. . .

G'day,
 
> Anyone got any good population estimates for the major
> powers?  

The following a the (VERY rough) figures I doodled up one day in
response to
someone else's (TomB? Laserlight?) ponderings on the same topic. These
numbers were done by continent/planet rather than individual nations
(i.e. I
did the entire NSL at once rather than splitting into
Germany/Austria/etc
and then summing over the end result, which would be more "accurate"). I
haven't included any epidemics/disasters and have only made simple
assumptions about war losses rather than get into too many details there
either. End message these are rough, but nonetheless here they are....

Populations for 2188 (projecting from populations/growth rates in 1995
and
assuming efficient mass transport for immigrants into space and high
growth
rates on colony worlds)

Power	   On Earth	In Space     Total
NAC	   8.5 billion	2 billion    10.5 billion [1]
ESU	   5 billion	2 billion    7 billion
FSE	   375 million	600 million  975 million
NSL	   400 million	700 million  1.1 billion
Superpowers 14 billion	5 billion    20 billion
Humanity    17 billion	    ????      > 20 billion [2]		      

[1] The reason this gets so big is because the Americas as a whole
aren't as
taxed as Europe and so the NAC has more of its carrying capacity left to
fill (especially as I also assumed a fair % of the South American
population
was left on Earth) whereas the FSE/NSL (and to a lesser extent the ESU)
have
less resources to build from starting now (and its the early growth
potential that really matters in these things).
[2] Probably about 21 or 22 billion, MAYBE as high as 25 billion at an
extreme push. I assumed about 2 billion for the IF and about a billion
in
total for everybody else.

Like I said earlier, when I first got into this, this would've fitted OK
with the medium/highish growth area of the UN projections and it was way
smaller than their largest projections (so not too way out there,
especially
given its sci-fi and we want to encourage wargames etc). It is larger
than
any of the crash scenarios though. Besides all that there is heaps of
leeway
as its fiction and thus up to the imagination anyway ;)

Cheers

Beth