Population density on terraformed world
Mar. 10th, 2012 05:42 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethI had decided that my biotech world was terraformed, but not an easy place to live. Soil was a new and ongoing process, rainfall and climate temperature stopped being controlled ten thousand years ago and everything got colder than planned, people were getting by but not very numerous.
I also said it looks like Britain, because cheap.
But the UK is the second most densely populated country in the European Union, and 53rd in the world, or 12th most dense of countries with more than 10 million people. (I've been on wiki again. Lists are fun.) There are 255 people per km2 (how do you make the little 2 in hmtl?). It's kind of difficult to get from there to a sparse, empty world. Takes a lot of imagining.
Canada, which as we know is what most of the universe looks like, has a population density of 3.5 people/km2.
That's 3 and a half, compared to two hundred and fifty five.
It is probably easier to imagine in Canada.
Canada is also really big so they still have bunches of people.
Australia, also big, population density 3 per km2. Or 2.8 on the other wiki page.
And Mongolia has tiny population density, mostly nomadic aside from one big city. Theirs is 1.7 people in a square kilometer. Though obviously since that's an average there's a bunch more in the city and a bunch less riding around being nomads.
So my planet is maybe mostly like those three places, and not much like the USA or Europe.
So on maps of world population density, my difficult world would be like the empty white bits.
But their transport technology is still a bit crude, aside from the ultra tech stone circles.
Mostly they have like horses and carriages. Really fast really smart biotech horses, but still, something has to do running to get them anywhere. Or go on rivers in boats.
So probably they don't have the same pattern of cities as developed after trains and industrial revolution and all.
Mongolia is known for horses. They still had cities.
I don't know much about Mongolia.
The big places with the small population, they mostly have big empty bits surrounded by skinny populous bits. Though 'empty' doesn't mean 'nobody thinks its theirs'. It probably means people who move around a lot, or think a couple of kilometers between them and their neighbours is enough elbow room.
Looking empty on maps has been historically tempting to people who want to go move somewhere bigger.
Oh, handy: I found two maps of Australia that compare population and rainfall. Basically, if it has rain, it has people. More rain, more people. Simples.
The map of Canada is even more simples: More south, more people. Apparently the arctic isn't so much the easy place to live.
The map of Mongolia by population has the heavily populated sections marked as more than 40 people per km2.
And cities are places with more than 100,000 people. No, wait, their giant city, singular, has more than 100K. The other 4 places they put on the map have more than 20K.
The University of East Anglia has about 20K.
Adjustment of expectation scale, difficult.
The biotech planet people would be much more impressed with the Lost City though. All those people in the VR are likely up their with the highest concentrations of people on their whole world.
Areas with a lot of going up and down, like mountains, or with difficult climate, like deserts or arctic, or with sparse resources, like wood or fishing, have lower populations.
This biotech planet has mountains only like Britain does, so it is not much with the going up and down. But it has lots of areas of awkward climate.
They have not had the population explosion that Earth has had in the last century. No billions on the biotech world. Not even 1 billions. I think their reaction to the idea of that many people in a biosphere would be a shuddering horror.
Also they don't treat water the way the USA does, they don't pump it across the continent and make extra water, their water falls out of the sky mostly. It's to do with how they use their technology, they'd adjust themselves and their crops to cope with the terrain. They would also be adjusting the terrain to support more life, but that's to do with building up soil. Long and fiddly process. Or long and involving putting compost in to a different strip of land every year. Every generation? I don't know. I'd have to look up terraforming. So the terraformers built up the world, and the biotech people would try and fit in to their world, when the tech level crashed, and the kind of large scale engineering it takes to change the water consumption of the continent is just... not them.
Plus terraformers think in the very long term. A plan that's only going to work for a hundred years, like pumping extra water from aquifers has for us, is no plan at all. It just passes all the troubles to your grandchildren. Who even does that?
So: they have corridors of population where there's 50, even 100 people per km2, and they even have a few cities... where 'city' means a population about the size of Dereham, or the City by the Sea which gets as big as Norwich. There's also really large bits of their world where the climate is really unpleasant. Even the nice bits are variable enough that clothing has to account for a lot of nasty conditions, and tends towards layers and face coverings. Up where the Lost City is they're having ice age difficulties, and it's a bit like Canada only more so, with the City up in Nunavut. ... Nunavut population density 0.015/km2; not meeting the neighbours seems pretty easy. Down near the City by the Sea is more like Australia with the rainfall issues. The City can be in the big bit of coast with next to no rainfall. It treats sea water to feed itself. Neighbours wanting to visit overland have a lot of nearly empty to cross. There are stone circles linking it to half a dozen big places though, so people tend to short cut through those. But they have an upper limit on how often they can work, so it's like waiting for the ferry or something, and there's an upper limit on how many people can physically get through. But for actual coastal ships it's not so simple either. The Great Australian Bight has huge great cliffs, wiki says up to 60m high. I wanted the City by the Sea to be on a cliff edge with bits getting eroded away. Perhaps not that much cliff...
There's some lovely rich bits too, the planet isn't a failure, it has excellent living space. It's just widely separated from the next nearest bit of excellent living space. Hence the stone circles.
Their communications tech has long been better than their transport. They've got an internet, though it doesn't stretch to the Cities. They don't have satellites up. They've got so much of their own world to make good still, they haven't felt the need to blast things at other planets. But they can almost all talk to each other. It's easy to drop off the edges of the map, not so easy to drop out of contact. The exploration party that finds the Lost City has managed both though.
I was thinking on the possible effects a lower population would have on culture.
Obviously actual Canada makes a lot of TV, but actual Canada has a rest of the world to interact with and sell stuff to. Difficult to imagine what happens if there's only Canada anywhere.
But I was thinking about acting, and how many actors a population would make. Lots of people like acting, but they have day jobs and don't spend much time on it and possibly aren't very good at it. So you get plays put on in schools or in Dereham, but they're not expected to be, well, good. To get all the actors for movies and whatever we've got a lot of billions of population. Biotech world has less than one billions. Possibly quite a lot less, if they have less land mass as well.
Shakespeare's England had only a few millions of population and their London was like a quarter million people. Tiny London. But still bigger than anywhere but the City on the Sea on this biotech world.
So does it take an urban concentration that large to support a Shakespeare long enough for him to get any good at all?
Or would having an internet be sufficient?
But then even if you got brilliant writers, having the actors to make their words look good would still be tricky, because they'd be spread out all over. They could do voice acting together more easily than actual 3D plays.
So making movies would be difficult, because they'd have to bring together so many resources, people and otherwise. Making radio plays would be much simpler, and books even more simple.
So they have a thriving fanfic and podcast culture, but their films look a bit fan film.
Importing our movies would either wow them or leave them totally cold, with the cultural mismatch.
I don't know though, they could have plenty of their own TV as well, it's all plausible, it's just settings.
And if they physically couldn't travel they'd develop acting styles that worked around that, like with blue screens or standardised settings to match the backgrounds or just filming it so you'd never expect to have more than one or two people in a scene together.
I keep thinking though, if all the world doesn't get bigger than Dereham, their social life is dire.
But here there's a lot of influence from Norwich drawing all the people away. That wouldn't happen if their travel is less good.
Do they have pubs or coffee houses or some other sort of drug they hang around and use?
Well all of them, there's lots of different cultures.
Their communications tech has only been a tiny bit ahead of ours, so they've had the internet for decades, but not forever. Lots of geographically isolated populations with badlands between them. Hence all the different languages and societies.
Which would also make it harder to get actors together. They can all load languages though, the translator fish have been available for very long times. Tweak all the brains, all learn the languages.
But only if you want to stick a fish in your ear and rewire your brain.
Knowing that the translators that do that a lot end up with migraines and don't live as long.
Probably people would learn Trade and their own language, so there's a lot of bilingual people, but not a lot of people with three or more. Why risk it when the language guild makes Trade so available?
Different settings possible.
Different choices, different stories to walk into.
Why so few stone circles?
The Cities have one that leads to the other City (forbidden) and six others, each at the end of a spoke. Why make a spoked city and isolate the circles? Because if they're too close together they don't work. That means you have to walk around a bunch between places. About a kilometre if the circles are at different ends of the UEA. But you could still put a whole lot more gates in than actually happen.
Terraformers had more than one transport tech available. Gates are for travel between different sides of the continent, but they had something else for smaller journeys.
Also the recharge time cannot be hurried. The upper limit on number of journeys between worlds before the charge runs out cannot be fixed. Same, though more of them, across a world. A gate that is instant but you can only use once a week is going to be a lot less useful than just driving really a lot of the time. I mean Google reckons it takes a couple of days to drive right across America. Longer if you have to go around the edges but not much. Slow recharge would just make teleport a curiousity.
Until you have to use muscle power to get anywhere, detour around the badlands, and food/fuel is scarce. Then they get to be the lifeblood.
If teleport is too easy then everywhere just mushes together into a city with an odd public transport city.
But if you have to go on horses to the nearest really big city before you'll find a stone circle that could get you to another such city, people stay separate.
Okay, I know a bit what the planet is like now. Canada and Australia, but like when the world had 1/8 of the people. Then add internet.
That's not very precise, but it is a bit funny. All the stuff filmed there makes all the planets look like that. I just got there with logics.
I also said it looks like Britain, because cheap.
But the UK is the second most densely populated country in the European Union, and 53rd in the world, or 12th most dense of countries with more than 10 million people. (I've been on wiki again. Lists are fun.) There are 255 people per km2 (how do you make the little 2 in hmtl?). It's kind of difficult to get from there to a sparse, empty world. Takes a lot of imagining.
Canada, which as we know is what most of the universe looks like, has a population density of 3.5 people/km2.
That's 3 and a half, compared to two hundred and fifty five.
It is probably easier to imagine in Canada.
Canada is also really big so they still have bunches of people.
Australia, also big, population density 3 per km2. Or 2.8 on the other wiki page.
And Mongolia has tiny population density, mostly nomadic aside from one big city. Theirs is 1.7 people in a square kilometer. Though obviously since that's an average there's a bunch more in the city and a bunch less riding around being nomads.
So my planet is maybe mostly like those three places, and not much like the USA or Europe.
So on maps of world population density, my difficult world would be like the empty white bits.
But their transport technology is still a bit crude, aside from the ultra tech stone circles.
Mostly they have like horses and carriages. Really fast really smart biotech horses, but still, something has to do running to get them anywhere. Or go on rivers in boats.
So probably they don't have the same pattern of cities as developed after trains and industrial revolution and all.
Mongolia is known for horses. They still had cities.
I don't know much about Mongolia.
The big places with the small population, they mostly have big empty bits surrounded by skinny populous bits. Though 'empty' doesn't mean 'nobody thinks its theirs'. It probably means people who move around a lot, or think a couple of kilometers between them and their neighbours is enough elbow room.
Looking empty on maps has been historically tempting to people who want to go move somewhere bigger.
Oh, handy: I found two maps of Australia that compare population and rainfall. Basically, if it has rain, it has people. More rain, more people. Simples.
The map of Canada is even more simples: More south, more people. Apparently the arctic isn't so much the easy place to live.
The map of Mongolia by population has the heavily populated sections marked as more than 40 people per km2.
And cities are places with more than 100,000 people. No, wait, their giant city, singular, has more than 100K. The other 4 places they put on the map have more than 20K.
The University of East Anglia has about 20K.
Adjustment of expectation scale, difficult.
The biotech planet people would be much more impressed with the Lost City though. All those people in the VR are likely up their with the highest concentrations of people on their whole world.
Areas with a lot of going up and down, like mountains, or with difficult climate, like deserts or arctic, or with sparse resources, like wood or fishing, have lower populations.
This biotech planet has mountains only like Britain does, so it is not much with the going up and down. But it has lots of areas of awkward climate.
They have not had the population explosion that Earth has had in the last century. No billions on the biotech world. Not even 1 billions. I think their reaction to the idea of that many people in a biosphere would be a shuddering horror.
Also they don't treat water the way the USA does, they don't pump it across the continent and make extra water, their water falls out of the sky mostly. It's to do with how they use their technology, they'd adjust themselves and their crops to cope with the terrain. They would also be adjusting the terrain to support more life, but that's to do with building up soil. Long and fiddly process. Or long and involving putting compost in to a different strip of land every year. Every generation? I don't know. I'd have to look up terraforming. So the terraformers built up the world, and the biotech people would try and fit in to their world, when the tech level crashed, and the kind of large scale engineering it takes to change the water consumption of the continent is just... not them.
Plus terraformers think in the very long term. A plan that's only going to work for a hundred years, like pumping extra water from aquifers has for us, is no plan at all. It just passes all the troubles to your grandchildren. Who even does that?
So: they have corridors of population where there's 50, even 100 people per km2, and they even have a few cities... where 'city' means a population about the size of Dereham, or the City by the Sea which gets as big as Norwich. There's also really large bits of their world where the climate is really unpleasant. Even the nice bits are variable enough that clothing has to account for a lot of nasty conditions, and tends towards layers and face coverings. Up where the Lost City is they're having ice age difficulties, and it's a bit like Canada only more so, with the City up in Nunavut. ... Nunavut population density 0.015/km2; not meeting the neighbours seems pretty easy. Down near the City by the Sea is more like Australia with the rainfall issues. The City can be in the big bit of coast with next to no rainfall. It treats sea water to feed itself. Neighbours wanting to visit overland have a lot of nearly empty to cross. There are stone circles linking it to half a dozen big places though, so people tend to short cut through those. But they have an upper limit on how often they can work, so it's like waiting for the ferry or something, and there's an upper limit on how many people can physically get through. But for actual coastal ships it's not so simple either. The Great Australian Bight has huge great cliffs, wiki says up to 60m high. I wanted the City by the Sea to be on a cliff edge with bits getting eroded away. Perhaps not that much cliff...
There's some lovely rich bits too, the planet isn't a failure, it has excellent living space. It's just widely separated from the next nearest bit of excellent living space. Hence the stone circles.
Their communications tech has long been better than their transport. They've got an internet, though it doesn't stretch to the Cities. They don't have satellites up. They've got so much of their own world to make good still, they haven't felt the need to blast things at other planets. But they can almost all talk to each other. It's easy to drop off the edges of the map, not so easy to drop out of contact. The exploration party that finds the Lost City has managed both though.
I was thinking on the possible effects a lower population would have on culture.
Obviously actual Canada makes a lot of TV, but actual Canada has a rest of the world to interact with and sell stuff to. Difficult to imagine what happens if there's only Canada anywhere.
But I was thinking about acting, and how many actors a population would make. Lots of people like acting, but they have day jobs and don't spend much time on it and possibly aren't very good at it. So you get plays put on in schools or in Dereham, but they're not expected to be, well, good. To get all the actors for movies and whatever we've got a lot of billions of population. Biotech world has less than one billions. Possibly quite a lot less, if they have less land mass as well.
Shakespeare's England had only a few millions of population and their London was like a quarter million people. Tiny London. But still bigger than anywhere but the City on the Sea on this biotech world.
So does it take an urban concentration that large to support a Shakespeare long enough for him to get any good at all?
Or would having an internet be sufficient?
But then even if you got brilliant writers, having the actors to make their words look good would still be tricky, because they'd be spread out all over. They could do voice acting together more easily than actual 3D plays.
So making movies would be difficult, because they'd have to bring together so many resources, people and otherwise. Making radio plays would be much simpler, and books even more simple.
So they have a thriving fanfic and podcast culture, but their films look a bit fan film.
Importing our movies would either wow them or leave them totally cold, with the cultural mismatch.
I don't know though, they could have plenty of their own TV as well, it's all plausible, it's just settings.
And if they physically couldn't travel they'd develop acting styles that worked around that, like with blue screens or standardised settings to match the backgrounds or just filming it so you'd never expect to have more than one or two people in a scene together.
I keep thinking though, if all the world doesn't get bigger than Dereham, their social life is dire.
But here there's a lot of influence from Norwich drawing all the people away. That wouldn't happen if their travel is less good.
Do they have pubs or coffee houses or some other sort of drug they hang around and use?
Well all of them, there's lots of different cultures.
Their communications tech has only been a tiny bit ahead of ours, so they've had the internet for decades, but not forever. Lots of geographically isolated populations with badlands between them. Hence all the different languages and societies.
Which would also make it harder to get actors together. They can all load languages though, the translator fish have been available for very long times. Tweak all the brains, all learn the languages.
But only if you want to stick a fish in your ear and rewire your brain.
Knowing that the translators that do that a lot end up with migraines and don't live as long.
Probably people would learn Trade and their own language, so there's a lot of bilingual people, but not a lot of people with three or more. Why risk it when the language guild makes Trade so available?
Different settings possible.
Different choices, different stories to walk into.
Why so few stone circles?
The Cities have one that leads to the other City (forbidden) and six others, each at the end of a spoke. Why make a spoked city and isolate the circles? Because if they're too close together they don't work. That means you have to walk around a bunch between places. About a kilometre if the circles are at different ends of the UEA. But you could still put a whole lot more gates in than actually happen.
Terraformers had more than one transport tech available. Gates are for travel between different sides of the continent, but they had something else for smaller journeys.
Also the recharge time cannot be hurried. The upper limit on number of journeys between worlds before the charge runs out cannot be fixed. Same, though more of them, across a world. A gate that is instant but you can only use once a week is going to be a lot less useful than just driving really a lot of the time. I mean Google reckons it takes a couple of days to drive right across America. Longer if you have to go around the edges but not much. Slow recharge would just make teleport a curiousity.
Until you have to use muscle power to get anywhere, detour around the badlands, and food/fuel is scarce. Then they get to be the lifeblood.
If teleport is too easy then everywhere just mushes together into a city with an odd public transport city.
But if you have to go on horses to the nearest really big city before you'll find a stone circle that could get you to another such city, people stay separate.
Okay, I know a bit what the planet is like now. Canada and Australia, but like when the world had 1/8 of the people. Then add internet.
That's not very precise, but it is a bit funny. All the stuff filmed there makes all the planets look like that. I just got there with logics.
no subject
Date: 2012-03-10 08:08 am (UTC)Of course now whatever interrupted civilisation crashed the climate control, planetary scale, and the terraforming has been in exclusive control of the locals for ten thousand years, but the original plan was something else.
Also, culture: There are individuals who do not forget. Anything. The capertillers are backup brains, long term storage. They're the same people, for at least ten thousand years. And the City by the Sea has substantial reserves of data storage. So whatever stories have been written, they're still around.
And the language of the ancients is still around too. City speaks it, in formal mode. Informally they speak Trade, which is how it got spread all everywhere. It's the Latin of their era. Or English, come to think, everyone's second language. The persistence of City-formal is due to the persistence of people who grew up speaking it, thousands of years ago. Immortals put a drag on language drift. As does written language and computer control systems that need your accent to stay within certain parameters. Or in other words, the City would tell you to talk proper before it would do anything you asked.