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Old 09-26-2010, 06:19 AM   #1
Jasonft
 
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Default Sustainable rates of human sacrifice?

I ran into an odd problem in my latest effort at world-building, and I thought I would bring the question here because this forum seems to *love* weird questions.

The situation: One of the superpowers in my world is, for many intents and purposes, a TL 4 +1 Rome. The +1 is due to them having an unusual for the world number of mages (they have a secret that lets them find and draft *all* the potentials) and is the primary setting for what is going on - but they are not the problem.

The problem arises from an almost whimsical thing I decided to do for the developing world plotlines. Rome recently did something that really ****** off the equivalent of the Aztecs in this world and the results might or might not snowball into an all out war depending on how events develop.

The Feathered Serpent Empire also has a secret, and it is in defining this secret for my notes that I ran into the problem that I present for debate here.

The Feathered Serpents (as I refer to that empire in my notes) are solidly TL 3 but have a strange array of devices available to their elite warriors that defy analysis by the Romans - and oddly have almost no mages. They also have a voracious appetite for human sacrifice that terrifies their neighbors thoroughly. One of those neighbors contacted the Romans in a desperate bid for a protective alliance and the Roman's arrogance led them to do something that... well... isn't important at the moment but is what might start the war.

The Feathered Serpent secret revolves around a massively degenerated settlement of 'Grey' aliens that was forced to resort to a form of psychic vampirism to survive. Think of the Stargate SG-1 Goa'uld and their elite warriors and you get something like the Jaguar Guard in this setting.

But back to the reason for this posting - To protect their existence (and to assuage their rampant paranoia about secrecy) the 'Greys' inspired their servants towards human sacrifice to cover their own need for stolen psychic energies. This causes the Jaguar Guard to raid for slaves all over the Americas (pretty much all settled and TL 2 or 3) for sacrifices and where I run into the specific problem:

In a setting (the Americas other than the core of Mexico) that is more or less a standard TL 3 fantasy with humans only, having a fairly standard population density (all of the Americas are settled, the Greys manipulated this into happening) how many people could you steal from a population without risking the collapse of what passes for civilization in that area?

I want the Jaguars to raid enough that it scares the crap out of everyone, but I don't want them to be taking so many prisoners that the areas they are taken from fall apart. How many prisoners should they be taking and/or how often could they be raiding given these constraints?
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Old 09-26-2010, 07:14 AM   #2
Figleaf23
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Default Re: Sustainable rates of human sacrifice?

I don't know the answer, but I think you could develop an approximation by looking at technologically comparable historical periods of sustained low-grade warfare.

My impression is that for most of history, as distinct from pre-history, society has operated with a pretty high attrition rate for 'excess' men.
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Old 09-26-2010, 07:20 AM   #3
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Default Re: Sustainable rates of human sacrifice?

Probably not very many. If you were stealing from the modern US it would have to be around .5% per year since the population grows at slightly under 1% per year (and that's probably huge compared to a TL4+1 civilization that lacks effective cures for disease).

Lets say they're raiding imperial Rome. It has an population of 2 million and a arbitrarily selected growth rate of 1%. The raiders decide to cut the growth rate by half so we see that 2 million * .5% = 10000 (per year).
Weekly raids can take 190 people, daily raids can take 27.


If they raid a village with 20000 people and a growth rate of .5% using the same method we see that 20000 * .25% = 50 (per year).
Weekly raids can take one person.
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Old 09-26-2010, 07:51 AM   #4
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Default Re: Sustainable rates of human sacrifice?

It also depends on who is being sacrificed. Sacrificing men and allowing for a man to have multiple wives would mean that the population is not as hard hit as if both men and women were killed. Likewise sacrificing the elderly would not dent productivily or population near as much. Are there any requirements for victims?
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Old 09-26-2010, 07:58 AM   #5
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Default Re: Sustainable rates of human sacrifice?

If mortality is high, birth rates tend to pick up to help restabilize the population. Taking 1% of the American population may be sustainable, although you are unlikely to see a lot of population growth. Thus, if the Americas have 1 million people, you can take 10,000 people a year, which is around 27 people per day. It would be quite sustainable to sacrifice, say, 100 people in a weekly ceremony, and more than that on special occasions and holidays.

This site (which I don't know the accuracy of) indicates a lower bound of around 30 people per square mile during the medieval era. We'll use this value. The United States (we'll ignore Canada here - while a good portion of it is able to be settled by a TL3 society, I don't know what portion this is) has a total area of 3,537,441 square miles (source, around 100 million people. South America has a total area of 6,882,027 square miles (source), around 200 million people. Provided they are careful in their cullings (otherwise they'll be depopulating large areas, which can lead to some issues), they might be able to harvest up to 3 million people annually, enough for 8,000 or so people each day. That's a bit excessive, but 1,000 or so each week (which is still quite a few) would probably be perfectly sustainable.

And, as Dangerious has noted, primarily taking men will let the population bounce back quite readily.
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Old 09-26-2010, 08:59 AM   #6
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Default Re: Sustainable rates of human sacrifice?

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Originally Posted by SuedodeuS View Post
And, as Dangerious has noted, primarily taking men will let the population bounce back quite readily.
...and if the psychic vampires prefer older people (more memories/life experiences/etc = better 'flavor' or whatever) the impact would be reduced even more.
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Old 09-26-2010, 09:31 AM   #7
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Default Re: Sustainable rates of human sacrifice?

I would imagine that an effective rate of human sacrifice would be 33% <per generation per family>, and that would be sustainable (IE in each family you can take 1/3 of the children, leaving the family with two, four, or six children).

Given that a generation takes ~25 years to shift that's ~1.32% per year sustainable.

Now if the Aztecs were willing to say; take children in advance and then train them for whatever there grey masters preferred tastes are they could get a much higher rate of return (Does calculus taste better then farming, teach the sacrifices calculus). Most cultures had little problem having children, they had a lot of problem keeping those children alive, and more problem keeping the adults daily, resources were often scarce. Of course this means the burden of feeding, housing, and training the sacrifices becomes the Aztecs responsibility

If on the other hand your raiders showed up once every two years and said 'gives us 1 of every 4 children born since the last raid' AND they provided preserved foodstuffs of some kind (Can they make powdered mild, or baby formula with there grey knowledge?) then the affected societies would simply have more children. Add in some religious indoctrination, statements about the great honor it is to serve in serpent gods personal guard and combined with the 'gift' of resources in a few generations the locals may even come to accept this behavior as normal, offering up there best healthiest children to 'serve the serpent god'.
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Old 09-26-2010, 09:35 AM   #8
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Default Re: Sustainable rates of human sacrifice?

Quote:
Originally Posted by SuedodeuS View Post
(which I don't know the accuracy of) indicates a lower bound of around 30 people per square mile during the medieval era. We'll use this value. The United States (we'll ignore Canada here - while a good portion of it is able to be settled by a TL3 society, I don't know what portion this is) has a total area of 3,537,441 square miles
A good deal of the Americas is not going to be inhabitted at that density - it's desert, jungle, mountains, untillable without animal drawn cutting plows.... A total American population of 100 million is probably not too unreasonable though. Neglecting infant mortality, perhaps 2% of that population dies every year, so if you add say half a percent in sacrifices (half a million per year), that's certainly quite scary (there's about a 20% chance *you* will die as a sacrifice, rather than of something else), but low enough the population won't crash (simplistically the average life expectancy falls from 50 to 40). With better culling selection (i.e. don't take the girls or young women) you can probably up that to a couple million without much trouble.

Note that raided population sustainability isn't the *only* limiting factor. No matter how good your gear is, the victims are occasionally going to get lucky enough to kill one of your raiders. If your raiding force is small enough, you have to worry about replacing your own casualties too.
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Old 09-26-2010, 10:10 AM   #9
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Default Re: Sustainable rates of human sacrifice?

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Originally Posted by Dangerious P. Cats View Post
It also depends on who is being sacrificed. Sacrificing men and allowing for a man to have multiple wives would mean that the population is not as hard hit as if both men and women were killed. Likewise sacrificing the elderly would not dent productivily or population near as much. Are there any requirements for victims?
Not just men, but taking women past safe child-bearing age, which in low tech societies can be in the mid-thirties, won't have any impact on the tribal population, as long as the village is able to raise any orphaned children.

There's also no impact if you sacrifice non-breeding tribal members, regardless of the reason they have for not breeding, they are completely expendable as far as population sustainability is concerned.
So infertile couples, celibate priests, single adults, etc., are all expendable.

In addition, if we're talking about a tribe on the edge of subsistence, regularly culling a growing population can actually maintain the tribe in a better sustainable balance with their environment, reducing starvation, etc.

Or like in Logan's Run, culling a population at a certain age also has no effect on long term sustainability, as long as someone takes care of the orphans.


As an example, in the current US about 10,000 people turn 50 every day, 0.003%, culling them would have almost no impact on births.

The US numbers aren't that useful for tribal populations, but you can do different things with population pyramid charts to figure out how many people are how old in any given low tech tribe/population.
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Old 09-26-2010, 10:55 AM   #10
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Default Re: Sustainable rates of human sacrifice?

To look at it another way, your rate of sacrifice can't exceed the rate of birth for the region you're targeting. We could presume that rate of birth would increase, by whatever means, when the population is under threat, to a particular maximum which would depend on a range of factors.

Wikipedia gives the highest modern birthrate levels at around 50 births per 1000 people per year. If we use this as a guideline, and say the region has a population of 100 million, that's 5 million per year (ignoring death from other causes), or 13,698 per day.

This is quite high, but I expect the Aztecs wouldn't be able to draw on the whole population simultaneously and would be limited to border areas. You can also fiddle with those figures based on whatever other factors you include- the ratio of sacrifices to death by other causes, infant mortality rates, etc.
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