Daily Archives: March 31, 2010

SciFi thought of the Day

I’m having a really bad arthritis knees day so I will leave you with this one thought.

How Many people live on Coruscant? Wikipedia lists the fiction planet as having a population of 1 trillion.

From the films we can see it is a densely populated world and we are told that the entire planet is one big city. (In George Lucas’ mind all planets have one dominate feature, Desert, Ice, Forrest or City.)

So let’s assume a population density matching that of Manhattan. (That’s a low ball figure considering the height of the buildings but it gives us something to work with.)

And a surface land-area equal to the earth’s.

Manhattan Density : 27,485 per km square.

Earth Land Surface area: 148,940,ooo km square.

27,485 X 148,940,000 =4.0936159^12 people. or 40,936,159,00,000 almost 41 trillion people.

Seems to me the wikipedia entry is a bit of a low ball figure based on the fantastic nature of the planet,

Here’s an interesting thing to run, given that population density how big of an area would the Earth’s current population take up?

Current population: 6,812,000,000 / 27,485 = 247, 844 square kilometers.

That’s smaller than the state of Nevada at 286,367 square kilometers. Every man woman and child on planet earth fits into Nevada if we all live like New Yorkers. That really gives SF colony designers something to think about.

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