RE: Thinking out loud. . .

G'day,

> Slightly more seriously: How come the NAC is that much bigger than the
> ESU ? The present population of the (former) Soviet Union, China and
> India is rather bigger than that of North and South America combined.
> And I don't think Britain adds that much ;-)

Under the rough calculations I was allowing the south american part of
the
NAC to come up to the US rates of growth and production rather than the
north american half dropping, as a result you get the high estimates. By
the
same token if you assume a communist regime would not lead to very good
environmental states (which it didn't in our reality) then you end up
with
an ESU that hasn't had too big a population explosion because it doesn't
have the stretch in the resources to do it. 

If you take a different view of the GZGverse, with the NAC not raising
everyone up (or if they parcelled off great swathes of the South
American
continent as parks) then you end up with NAC earth population of about 6
-
6.5 million. If you also assume that the ESU get eco-savy and use better
agricultural practices, terraforming of deserts and polar areas then you
can
see them get to 8 billion.

Like I said the numbers were rough, with lots of leeway based on
assumptions
about how tech will/won't keep up and how much you can increase the
Earth's
carrying capacity.

Another possibility is that enclaves remain on each continent that end
up
being under UN auspices rather than belonging to the big powers and that
could be where they get some of their people power from. So you could
have
(say) 

Power	   On Earth	In Space     Total
NAC	   6 billion	1.5 billion  7.5 billion
ESU	   6.5 billion	2.5 billion  9 billion
FSE	   375 million	600 million  975 million
NSL	   400 million	700 million  1.1 billion
UN	   500 million	500 million  1 billion
Superpowers 14 billion	6 billion    20 billion
Humanity    17 billion	  ????	     > 20 billion   

This seems to fit with the stuff Oerjan posted the other day.

Just a thought

Beth