Lit Economy, Pollution, Energy, Disease, Education, & Culture in the GFFA

Ok, thanks. I now remember the school mentioned in Mindor, and I knew he's applying for the Academy in the Radio Drama - but I hadn't heard about the instructions disks. Or were they mentioned in Mindor too? I wonder how these things worked together

 

Properly a lot like in Australia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_of_the_Air
Many courses are properly available on semi interactive holo tapes, whilst more hands on demonstrations are likely held in courses which the students will attend for a certain periods when there are enough of them around to justify a teacher, whilst tests would be set up in a similar system under supervised conditions.

 

That's a good comparison. The nature of the Star Wars labor force - with a very heavy droid presence in the manual labor fields, means that on many planets with an extractive or agricultural focus the organic sentient population density is probably really, really low outside of a few major cities.

That has implications for the Urban vs. Rural population balance of the Star Wars galaxy. The populace may be astonishingly urbanized across so-called advanced planets (meaning planets that are fully modernized and integrated into the galactic economy), perhaps approaching a number veyr close too 100%.

 

Not really, right? I mean, there's places like Coruscant, in which basements are cities, and then there's Tattooine, where people herd beasts and collect water with vapor technology. Not close of 100%.

 

Coruscant has a minimum population of 1,000,000,000,000 sentient beings. Tatooine's canon population is listed as 200,000 (this is too low, 2,000,000 is more likely). So the population of 1 Coruscant is equal to 500,000 Tatooines.

There are 100 Quadrillion (10^17) sentient beings in the galaxy. They are spread across roughly 1 Billion (10^9) star systems (the number of settled planets would be somewhat larger since a number of systems have multiple settled worlds). The average population of an star system in the Star Wars galaxy is therefore 100 million. To put that in perspective that's slightly more than the population of the Phillipenes, and slightly less than the population of Mexico.

 

Why would it be? It really only has a few scattered townships like Mos Eisley (some 50000 people alone live there) which will hold the majority of the population with about 20000 Tusken and Jawas scattered in the desert.

Properly a little less as we have to consider those that live in space (be it in permanent transit or space stations)

 

It also has Mos Espa, Mos Entha, Mos Ila, Mos Osnoe, Mos Taike, and Mos Zabu and that's just towns named 'Mos.' more significantly, the 200,000 number suggests that the population is 70% human, 20% other, and only 5% Tusken and 5% Jawa. That would imply a mere 10,000 Tusken raiders on the whole planet. The Sand People obviously live at a very low density, but Tatooine has no oceans, meaning it has an immense land area (344 million km2), placing the Tusken raider population density at 1 in every 3440 km2. That's one sand person in an area the size of Rhode Island, not exactly a very threatening presence (and a single TOR player would be reducing the total Sand People population by multiple percent during his/her visit to the planet).

Ultimately, the issue is that figure comes from the old Secrets of Tatooine book which was published in 2001. Since then a positively huge amount of stuff has been set on the planet which has made it a considerably more active place that meshes better with a larger population.

 

None of which have to be of anything approaching the size of Mos Eisley; Mos Espa and the capital Bestine are even likely to be the only other big ones.

They travel in tribes which is what makes them dangerous along with their ferocity, plus since they mostly life of raiding and herding they will likely actually stay close to similar regions than the Settlers. Also TOR Tusken would not have a problem, as they respawn. Though yes the Settlers and the Tusken have a genocide war going, which the Tusken are losing.

 

The Mos Espa Grand Arena supossedly seats 100,000,a nd we see it pretty close to full. Either everyone on the planet makes it to the podrace, or Tatooine accomidates and astonishing number of off-world visitors compared to its total population to the point of utterly defying logistics, or the total population is higher.

Okay, so you break your 10,000 sand people up into 100 tribes of 100 (can't really make them much smaller before you hit inbreeding problems). Each tribe now controls an area of 344,000 km2. That's an area roughly the size of Germany. Assuming this tribe raids while moving and moves half the time, and it manages a scouting swath that's 5 km wide and 10 km in width, they cover 50 km2 per day and do this 180 days a year (this is being very generous for a tribe with only about 33 adult male hunter/raiders). So they cover 9000 km2 worth of territory each year. That means it takes each tribe of Sand People 38 years to visit their entire territory. In this scenario a Sand People raid would be a once in a lifetime event, not a regular occurance, and the idea of Sand People being any sort of constant danger rather preposterous. Keep in mind that, with the population numbers so low, even if you said the Sand People only bothered with 10% of the land area of Tatooine, it would still take 3.8 years for them to cover their entire territory.

10,000 of any species, spread across an entire planet, is just too small of a number. Planets are just too big, especially planets without oceans.

 

....Yeah, pretty sure this goes beyond minimalism/maximalism. The Tatooine we see portrayed in the movies and Expanded Universe cannot possibly have a population of merely 200,000 total, that's patently ridiculous. You don't have to agree with maximalists on everything to agree with them on this.

 

A large number likely did, as it is properly the only major event that actually happens on the planet.

Major sport events often draw huge numbers of tourists. The Boonta Eve Classic especially is apparently immensely popular in Hutt space and among podracing fans (being the biggest annually set pod racing event in the galaxy) and Wattos friends for example are none residents of Mos Espa that got invited, Graxol being from Ryloth and Weaz apprently from Mos Eisley . Hell even Xizor was there.

I doubt its even that much of the planet anyone even wants to claim or actually setteled. Tatooine is unlivable desert for the most part even for the Tusken, the tribes are likely to only even bother with certain areas where they can actually life (oases, storm shelters, good raiding sites) and the ways that connect them. Anything else would just be strange and like saying that the Tuaregs of the Sahara (which is 26 times the size of Germany for that matter and regularly crossed by camel caravans along specific roads, even to this day) actually bother claiming the whole desert.

 

But there are ~1.2 million Tuaregs! So even if the settled area of Tatooine was only the size of the Sahara (which would be only 2.7% of Tatooine's surface) your 10,000 Tusken Raiders would occupy that same area at 1/120th the density of the modern Tuareg people.

 

The properly settled area of Tatooine is not going to be even the size of the Sahara by any means, there are few scattered towns who happen to be surrounded by water farmers (who might lay potential claim to huge tracts of land but don’t really inhabit those by any means), whilst the Tusken don’t have permanent settlements (a few scared oasis might be the exception here, but those are apparently only inhabited by a few holy man). Since they are not traders (unlike the Tuaregs of which most do live in permanent settlements) but xenophobic herders and bandits they will stick rather closely to the offworld settler areas attacking anyone who happens to be unlucky enough to cross their path (and if they feel strong enough hit a settlement) whilst they stay on the move to not be easy to find for any settlers seeking revenge. The only time they will likely even bother to move deeper into the desert is for holy rituals or if they are driven off and need to recover.