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Suddenly is relative. Mass Effect lists 30 human colonies (with no less than 5 of them having a almost a million or even several millions of people).
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One million isn't what I meant by "Substantial populations compared to earth". The United states alone sports 46 metropolitan areas with double that population. That's a collection of outposts. Million person outposts, but outposts none the less: the collection of them has roughly the same population as Canada (chosen because its similarly large, wealthy, and not known for friendly weather). All together they are significant, not alone.
I was referring to populations capable of significantly interacting with earth in terms of population. You can populate thousands of worlds with earth's current population, but you can only populate a few with meaningfully large populations.
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Originally Posted by vicky_molokh
Woops, my mistake. Edited: 10-50 millions of people in orbit/on other planets part- or full-time. But half of Terra's population is just a number in a setting I'm currently running, which I imagined as one of the possible starting points for such a development.
I'm hoping to achieve 6-12 garden worlds with ½-1 billion (10^9) people each by the end of the expansion phase (i.e. by about mid-TL10^, about 200 human years from the start of the expansion).
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Ok, so you want to somewhere between double and quadruple your population over the course of 200 years, meanwhile moving all this excess population to new worlds?
To hit a total of 10 billion you can use a growth rate of .5%. This is half of the current global growth rate. If you use the full current growth rate of 1% you end up with 30 billion total. In that case, you don't just have the people you need to population those worlds, you probably also want those worlds so you can put these people somewhere. And if use peak global growth from the 1960's (2% per annum), you have 200 billion people to put
somewhere. Those six colonies aren't going to cut it.
If you use the populating of the united states as an example, you probably get to move more of your population at the end of the period, not at the beginning. The UK had more people than the US until about 1860. That said, the growth rate stays steady at about 30% per decade from 1800 to 1880.
So your goal is quite doable.