132 réponses à ce sujet

[Arkitekt]

Not only that, but the OP is assuming that aliens would breed to the billions of specimens.

He hasn't even considered the hypothesis that aliens in fact have breeded to lesser numbers, and that Earth is like a "super china" to the galaxy.

He then follows it up by calling Bioware writers unimaginative.

Oh the Irony! lol

[Aimi]

Bleachrude wrote...

That said, the population figures have to be off given how quickly humanity is able to become an important player... 

Yeah, this is what I would say. I mean, Anhur's population is up past 200 million, of which anywhere from fifty to a hundred million are probably humans and most of the rest batarians. A hundred million? In the Terminus? In the last thirty years? What. Eden Prime, Model Colony World and Chief Focus of Organized Alliance Colonization, has a population of less than four million in 2183. That's probably one of the worse cases, although Trident (7,000,000, surface area dominated by water, in the Terminus) is high, Noveria (360,000, extremely inhospitable, privately owned, colonization highly restricted) is weird too, and Horizon (650,000, also in the freaking Terminus) is probably too high as well.

So yeah, I'd have to completely disagree with the OP that colony numbers are too low. If anything, it's just the opposite.

[Heraxion]

ReveurIngenu wrote...

I can understand that with space technology, the aliens spread out.  But you should still see very populous mega cities.  It's just like our planet.  I remember reading that populations are getting more and more concentrated as migrants from the countryside move to the cities (phenomenon happining in Asia, especially China).

You can't really compare this since the move from the countryside to the cities that happens all over the world is fueled by farming becoming more manpower efficient so there are less jobs avaliable in the countryside. It's not that cities are especially attractive, its just that people have no other choice.

In a futuristic setting like ME this process would already have happened.

Modifié par Heraxion, 08 février 2012 - 05:32 .

[Wulfram]

Anhur is clearly silly. Terra Nova was said to be the largest alliance colony at 4.4 million in ME1, and anything above that for human colonies should probably be ignored.

Modifié par Wulfram, 08 février 2012 - 05:32 .

[essarr71]

Really, guys? No one is going to make a pre-order cancelled joke here? This topic is ripe for it.

Im disappointed BSN. You guys are slipping.

[Heraxion]

daqs wrote...

Bleachrude wrote...

That said, the population figures have to be off given how quickly humanity is able to become an important player... 

Yeah, this is what I would say. I mean, Anhur's population is up past 200 million, of which anywhere from fifty to a hundred million are probably humans and most of the rest batarians. A hundred million? In the Terminus? In the last thirty years? What. Eden Prime, Model Colony World and Chief Focus of Organized Alliance Colonization, has a population of less than four million in 2183. That's probably one of the worse cases, although Trident (7,000,000, surface area dominated by water, in the Terminus) is high, Noveria (360,000, extremely inhospitable, privately owned, colonization highly restricted) is weird too, and Horizon (650,000, also in the freaking Terminus) is probably too high as well.

So yeah, I'd have to completely disagree with the OP that colony numbers are too low. If anything, it's just the opposite.

Oh god yes, Anhur. When i read that 200 million i just automatically retconned in my head that it was 99% batarians and 1% humans.

The other colonization numbers aren't so insane. Travelling doesn't seem to be very expensive in ME, so it might be that the people who can afford it join colony efforts to get away from the overpopulation on Earth. Or to get to a place where there is almost no government ( no taxes). It could also be that the Alliance gives subsidies to colonies in order to increase humanitys influence.

Most of humanity's colonies also have a large influx of aliens. Elysium is one of the oldest and the it's only 50% humans there.

Modifié par Heraxion, 08 février 2012 - 05:37 .

[ReveurIngenu]

Bleachrude wrote...

Um, did you totally ignore my post where I pointed out that by the numbers, the citadel has a pop density 4 times as high as Manila, the densest city on Earth?

No, I didn't ignore what you said.  And ok, maybe the density is greater on the Citadel than in cities in modern day Earth.  But that doesn't change the fact that I find it is not reasonable to believe only the humans would have gotten so populous or stayed so concentrated or that no where else in the galaxy is there a place with a large population.

I just would have expected to see some mega planets with a higher population that Earth (whether more dense or not doesn't matter), like I have seen in other science fiction movies/books, like the planet Coruscant in Star Wars with more than 1 trillion permanent ground residents.
http://starwars.wiki.../wiki/Coruscant

[Wulfram]

essarr71 wrote...

Really, guys? No one is going to make a pre-order cancelled joke here? This topic is ripe for it.

Im disappointed BSN. You guys are slipping.

Maybe people are developing something closer to an actual sense of humour.

[somecthemes]

You have identified several of what is commonly called a "suspension of reality", a premise that, upon reflection, doesn't equate to reality. It's a standard of fiction allowed to ease the creation of good fiction. Thinking on them overmuch tends to kill my enthusiasm, as long as they're discreet.

I think the totals were all taken in relation to the current population of worlds versus our own current levels and their likely course given cheap and easy travel to colony worlds and 30 years of development.
That and having all the habitable worlds be given large life counts might make it seem like the population problems of Earth were just as easily solved as FTL travel, but thus far unmentioned in the story.

[WizenSlinky0]

We have *not* seen the population counts of other races home worlds. Only their colonies.

[Heraxion]

ReveurIngenu wrote...


I just would have expected to see some mega planets with a higher population that Earth (whether more dense or not doesn't matter), like I have seen in other science fiction movies/books, like the planet Coruscant in Star Wars with more than 1 trillion permanent ground residents.
http://starwars.wiki.../wiki/Coruscant

This might be a nice idea to imagine, but for the most part ME is a setting built on the basis that it should be logical and belivable.

A planet with 1 trillion citizens wouldn't make sense no matter how you look at it.

- All the food and water would need to be imported, so it would be very expensive to live there.
- A planet with so many people would be stripped of all natural resources.
- The whole planet would be crippled by pollution.
- If there are no natural resources there, there is no industry, so there is nothing for the people on the planet to live
of.
- So you have a heavily polluted planet, where everything is expensive, and there is nothing for the people there to make a living of. How you are going to persuade 1 trillion people to stay there?

Modifié par Heraxion, 08 février 2012 - 05:46 .

[essarr71]

Wulfram wrote...

essarr71 wrote...

Really, guys? No one is going to make a pre-order cancelled joke here? This topic is ripe for it.

Im disappointed BSN. You guys are slipping.

Maybe people are developing something closer to an actual sense of humour.

Would be better if people didnt make giant assumptions over tweets. 

[Bleachrude]

Wulfram wrote...

Anhur is clearly silly. Terra Nova was said to be the largest alliance colony at 4.4 million in ME1, and anything above that for human colonies should probably be ignored.

Only way to make Anhur make sense is to assume when they say "human-dominated" they mean like colonial Africa/Asia/the Americas where Europeans ran the country but were outnumbered at least 20 to 1 by the native population.

Of ocurse, there's STILL the problem that a colony founded only 20 years BEFORE ME2 has a population of 208 million (half humans)....1-5 million people moved per year? Not a freaking chance

[Arkitekt]

ReveurIngenu wrote...


I just would have expected to see some mega planets with a higher population that Earth (whether more dense or not doesn't matter), like I have seen in other science fiction movies/books, like the planet Coruscant in Star Wars with more than 1 trillion permanent ground residents.
http://starwars.wiki.../wiki/Coruscant

Have you already played ME3?

Thought so.

Go Smugboy route after you have done so, not before. Mkay?

[Bleachrude]

ReveurIngenu wrote...


I just would have expected to see some mega planets with a higher population that Earth (whether more dense or not doesn't matter), like I have seen in other science fiction movies/books, like the planet Coruscant in Star Wars with more than 1 trillion permanent ground residents.
http://starwars.wiki.../wiki/Coruscant

No..Coruscant is the one that makes no sense..Trek population figures (most non-homeworld planets in the Federation dont crack 1 billion) are much more likely in a FTL setting where travel is cheap. (note, you don't actually need eezo in your ship to use the mass relays).

The amount of food, waste, pollution and maintenance that a world like coruscant would produce/require is astronomical. And Wars doesn't have the handy-dandy replicator like Trek to make those problems a non-issue. 

[ReveurIngenu]

Heraxion wrote...

This might be a nice idea to imagine, but for the most part ME is a setting built on the basis that it should be logical and belivable.

A planet with 1 trillion citizens wouldn't make sense no matter how you look at it.

- All the food and water would need to be imported, so it would be very expensive to live there.
- A planet with so many people would be stripped of all natural resources.
- The whole planet would be crippled by pollution.
- If there are no natural resources there, there is no industry, so there is nothing for the people on the planet to live of.

Well, I think you're forgetting that we're talking about a universe where interstellaire space travel is common.  Yes, I would imagine a planet with such a high population would have to import everything.  But is that really so different than us having to import things now, to our countries from other countries?  And with technological advances, who's to say we couldn't either prevent pollution or at least keep the planet relatively clean?

As for not having any industry, with space travel, I'm sure people could live on the planet but work on another planet nearby.  You're thinking in too small a scale.  Not everything needs to be available or be done in one place (in this case, on the planet Coruscant).  With interstellaire traval, whatever the planet lacks can be found elsewhere.  Just like today, people travel to other countries, work in other countries where ressources are easily found. 

The day going from one planet to another is as easy as driving across the boarder between two countries is the day you don't have to worry about what your planet lacks.  Yes, it's a bit of a simplistic view, but I don't see why such a planet couldn't exist.

[Heraxion]

ReveurIngenu wrote...

Heraxion wrote...

This might be a nice idea to imagine, but for the most part ME is a setting built on the basis that it should be logical and belivable.

A planet with 1 trillion citizens wouldn't make sense no matter how you look at it.

- All the food and water would need to be imported, so it would be very expensive to live there.
- A planet with so many people would be stripped of all natural resources.
- The whole planet would be crippled by pollution.
- If there are no natural resources there, there is no industry, so there is nothing for the people on the planet to live of.

Well, I think you're forgetting that we're talking about a universe where interstellaire space travel is common.  Yes, I would imagine a planet with such a high population would have to import everything.  But is that really so different than us having to import things now, to our countries from other countries?  And with technological advances, who's to say we couldn't either prevent pollution or at least keep the planet relatively clean?

As for not having any industry, with space travel, I'm sure people could live on the planet but work on another planet nearby.  You're thinking in too small a scale.  Not everything needs to be available or be done in one place (in this case, on the planet Coruscant).  With interstellaire traval, whatever the planet lacks can be found elsewhere.  Just like today, people travel to other countries, work in other countries where ressources are easily found. 

The day going from one planet to another is as easy as driving across the boarder between two countries is the day you don't have to worry about what your planet lacks.  Yes, it's a bit of a simplistic view, but I don't see why such a planet couldn't exist.

I can't really see every working person in the US driving across the Mexico border every day to work, because that is what you are describing right now.

[Aimi]

Heraxion wrote...

The other colonization numbers aren't so insane. Travelling doesn't seem to be very expensive in ME, so it might be that the people who can afford it join colony efforts to get away from the overpopulation on Earth. Or to get to a place where there is almost no government ( no taxes). It could also be that the Alliance gives subsidies to colonies in order to increase humanitys influence.

Most of humanity's colonies also have a large influx of aliens. Elysium is one of the oldest and the it's only 50% humans there.

I don't really think we have much of an idea as to how expensive traveling actually is. There's really only one explicit mention of civilian travel in dialogue in the game - Kalara Tomi and her companion on the Citadel - and price doesn't come up. There's no obvious indicator of their socioeconomic standing, either. Plus, the only space travel terminal you sort of see, the one in Nos Astra, isn't exactly large or well-developed; the list of flights departing throughout the day would be dwarfed by that of most modern international airports. I mean, if space travel were cheap and easy to access, you'd expect a terminal on the scale of Atlanta's or Hong Kong's, right? Of course, that whole area was probably pared down for gameplay considerations, but still. There's no real indication of how large any of these regular shuttle flights are (could be anything from Kodiak-sized to the equivalent of a cruise liner).

Plus, I think it's easy to underestimate how expensive a colonization effort actually is. Early settler colonies in North America and Australia required pretty significant funding outlays to be successful and survive, and it still took over a century in both cases (two in the case of the latter) to develop the sort of infrastructure necessary to keep a self-sustaining population. You'll see that cut down enormously because of twenty-second century tech, the magic of prefab buildings and electrical power and whatnot, but you'll still need to pay for all that stuff, and it can't be cheap. Money as much as anything else would surely limit most colonization projects, right?

Eden Prime is explicitly stated to have been one of the main areas of development for the Alliance, and a prize settler colony. Those 3.7 million people are what you get when the Alliance makes a large investment to protection and financing on a garden world. Shouldn't that be our standard of comparison, then?

Also, I'm not sure if we can rely on Elysiumesque nonhuman populations to sustain some of these colonies. It might work for Noveria, but Noveria's population is weirdly high for the equivalent of Hoth anyway. But we never see any aliens on, say, Horizon. And isn't Elysium's high nonhuman population explicitly stated to be unusual and the cause of heightened security precautions?

ReveurIngenu wrote...

I just would have expected to see some mega planets with a higher population that Earth (whether more dense or not doesn't matter), like I have seen in other science fiction movies/books, like the planet Coruscant in Star Wars with more than 1 trillion permanent ground residents.
http://starwars.wiki.../wiki/Coruscant

Coruscant has been built up - not just "populated", but "built up" - for twenty-five thousand years. That dwarfs any world in Council space, even Thessia.

[ReveurIngenu]

Heraxion wrote...

I can't really see every working person in the US driving across the Mexico border every day to work, because that is what you are describing right now.

I think you forget that in modern countries, a lot of the work is service work, not manual work. 

[Heraxion]

 

ReveurIngenu wrote...


I think you forget that in modern countries, a lot of the work is service work, not manual work.  

This is true, but it's impossible to run an economy without some form or primary or secondary economy driving the teritary ( service) economy.

ReveurIngenu wrote...


I just would have expected to see some mega planets with a higher population that Earth (whether more dense or not doesn't matter), like I have seen in other science fiction movies/books, like the planet Coruscant in Star Wars with more than 1 trillion permanent ground residents.

 I think the main issue here is that you want Mass Effect to have the same sense of imagination as Star Wars.

The problem is that Mass Effect and Star Wars are completely different genres.

Star Wars comes up with fantastic and very imaginative stuff, but it does not even to pretend to explain how it actually works. Mass Effect is very concerned with how things work because it tries to achieve realism, something Star Wars has thrown out the window. 

And it's only natural that focusing on realism constrains you in what you can include in the setting.

Modifié par Heraxion, 08 février 2012 - 06:10 .

[somecthemes]

[/quote]

Well, I think you're forgetting that we're talking about a universe where interstellaire space travel is common.  Yes, I would imagine a planet with such a high population would have to import everything.  But is that really so different than us having to import things now, to our countries from other countries?  And with technological advances, who's to say we couldn't either prevent pollution or at least keep the planet relatively clean?

[/quote]
Standard efficiencies still apply, even when one part of the supply chain is reduced to a zero energy loss system, the packaging, the initial lift off against differing gravitations, even if from a space station, the customs relations of the future, even if also rendered optimally efficient, would still generate a bottleneck within a system designed to keep people from evading the searches. All these things would still mean that in the future, a bottle of pop from the corner will still be less expensive than one from the moon. Upon that realization, you'd find that no society would use a supply line with such a flaw without first changing the dynamics that created the system, mostly the demand side, as it seems a given in story that FTL is freely accessible and . It would only be if the entirety of demand was for off world goods that the loss in effectiveness would be seen as worthwhile.

[Bleachrude]

Well, keep in mind that there _IS_ a draw for people to become colonists...Not just the reasons people in our world went "colonizing".. Colonists get a full genetic upgrade that puts them at peak human.

I imagine the colony offices have to beat off the people with a stick any time a new colony ship is proposed..

[Aimi]

Bleachrude wrote...

Well, keep in mind that there _IS_ a draw for people to become colonists...Not just the reasons people in our world went "colonizing".. Colonists get a full genetic upgrade that puts them at peak human.

I imagine the colony offices have to beat off the people with a stick any time a new colony ship is proposed..

Sure, the raw numbers work out, and so does the motivation. But not the context. Those genetic upgrades cost money, too, just like the infrastructure investments. 

[What a Succulent Ass]

Exia001 wrote...

This is what we've taken to moaning at now?

An observation =/= moaning. There's no point in posting if you've nothing to contribute.