Galactic Populations

With the publication of the Essential Atlas, a wealth of new material and data has come forward about a old topic, namely the various populations in the Star Wars galaxy from sprawling Empires, to sectors and regions down to systems and planets.

The first general statement of population was back in WEG's main Star Wars RPG rulebook where the Empire in the Rebellion Era was said to contain around 100 quadrillion sentients. Presumably this would include nominally independent regions like Hutt Space but not designated "Unknown Regions" that were definitely not part of the Empire at the time, like the Chiss Ascendancy. The populations would be be further reduced just prior to the Clone Wars when the Republic did not include those independent regions. Dan and Jason's calculations here posit that the Republic was down 25% of its territory even prior to the Clone Wars, and the Empire's expansion led to a further 5% expansion. By a very, very rough calculation (meaning a broad area of uncertainty), the Republic would've had approximately 64 quadrillion sentients within its boundaries during the Clone Wars. As far as population losses due to warfare is concerned, we are given one for the Yuuzhan Vong invasion - 365 trillion.

Sector populations have not been generally given in sources. One exception is the Mid Rim's Trax Sector, with a reported population of 500 billion for the sector.

Coruscant, which is probably one of the (if not the) most populated planets in the galaxy, has a fairly consistent population of about 1 trillion in the later books. Coruscant Nights mentioned that the 'unofficial' population figures shortly after the Clone Wars were 'nearly three times' that, including commuters from the skyhooks, Hesperidium and other offworld communities; the stormtroopers stationed planetside; and the uncounted homeless and other sentients 'off the grid', so to speak. Looking at the planets that we have been given population data for, the next three that I can find are Metellos (900 billion), Byblos (164 billion) and Geonosis (100 billion). Based upon the Essential Atlas map, the Axum system, Denon, and Fedalle all have populations greater than 500 billion, and Belnar, Bellassa, Rendili, Sarapin, Loronar, Trellen, Skako, Ixtlar and Alsakan all having between 100 to 500 billion (making assumptions based upon the Essential Atlas population map, which is some cases may not be those actual world's populations for regional averages). Based upon the original WEG population figures, the average population for a world that meets the 'population requirements' for Imperial representation is about 2 million (assuming that the other worlds below the requirement are neligible in comparison even when added together, which is a fair assumption). In general, looking at the populations for worlds from the Core to the Outer Rim, for worlds that are significantly populated they seem to run about 1 to 10 billion, comparable to current-day Earth.

Okay, comments, theories, other population data?

 

Interesting topic

I recently reread COPL and DJ and if I recall it correctly COPL mentions a Hapan foot soldier army in the billions and the Hapans having several full Fleets (more than 5 if I counted right) that each consist of ship numbers equal to NR fleets.

Dunno in what way this might relate to population numbers but it makes the Hapes Cluster seem to be very highly populated if for thousands of years only 63 worlds were availeable. Yet still Gallinore alone only has about 1 million inhabitants in the single city onworld. Many other worlds are similiar in featuring nature instead of overpopulated worlds, thus few worlds have most of the Hapan population logically.

 

Hmmm... I'm going through the COPL again to see what I can find (a lot of interesting Fleet Junkie info shows up there, too). Essential Atlas pegged Hapes' population at 8 million, although that seems to be a deliberate choice by the Hapans to keep the population there low. They have a number of industrial worlds, and a population of 1-10 billion for those could easily account for the troops if they are in the billions. (Considering the Hapans' weird compartmentalized worlds, they might have worlds that are just devoted to the military!). Considering that the regular Imperial Army - IIRC - was said to have trillions of sentients in its ranks in the RECG, it's still rather small compared to the galactic scale.

Edit:Leia states "You're talking about an entire cluster here, billions of people."

 

They have 1 world full of cyborged fullbody armor warriors... their foot soldiers Charubah or Terephon are highly industry and population centers. see my topic about rereading COPL some pages back in Litboard.

and while we are at it with the Hapans,

the Wookiees have colonies and fleets. what do we have numberwise here concerning population and fleetnumbers?
same for Zeltron Forces
same for Trandoshan military

by the way: Sector Forces we saw most often were either Imperial or standart Mon Cal NR Fleets. Why did we see not enough localized species forces? they have to be there in sector forces more often than in the defense force even.

(sorry if fleetjunkying the topic, but numbers and fleetjunkies belong together and might give an impression concerning galactic population)

ps: how are hive minds counted populationwise? per being or per hiveminded nest? that'd be good to know!

 

Bear in mind too that we've never really known whether or not the Galaxy Far, Far Away uses the long or short numbering system. That's been the basis of an argument over Coruscant's population on the Wook (where 1 trillion seems low).

short system:
1 million = 10^6
1 billion = 10^9
1 trillion = 10^12
1 quadrillion = 10^15

long system:
1 million = 10^6
1 thousand million (or milliard) = 10^9
1 billion = 10^12
1 thousand billion = 10^15
1 trillion = 10^18
1 thousand trillion = 10^21
1 quadrillion = 10^24
1 thousand quadrillion = 10^27

So that difference can mean our numbers are off by several orders of magnitude. The population of Coruscant may be 1 trillion = 1,000,000,000,000 OR 1,000,000,000,000,000,000. That's 6 extra zeros!

 

It depends if you're using the US or European names for the numbers, I tend to assume it's the US. As far as I'm concerned the population of the GFFA would quite large and I would just leave it at that.

 

1 Trillion is a very high number, when you consider our world only has 6 billion on it and the effect we are having here.

Just the CO2 exhalation from 1 trillion residents has to be daunting to deal with...I always have believed the air on Coruscant has to taste "canned" like ship air...just because of the artificial means to support it.

Now as to the "numbers."

Personally, I despise whenever they start locking things down with numbers...it draws more arguments then solves them and in the end will curtail storytelling at some point.

However,

100 Quadrillion is a number so absurdly huge and unimagineable, that it would take decades of story telling in a static universe for that number to even be approached...and these stories, while "stagnant" at times, are rarely static in such ways.

However,

The real problem with the postulation of such a number is the need by fans to rush out and populate the galaxy down to the last man...while the writers will take decades, I could see a complete fan-based demographic breakdown of the galaxy by...Christmas? Spring? get enough fanboys in one room and they won't write Shakespeare, but they will write a thesis on SSD length...at least them that survive the trial by combat.

The danger in this lies in "overpopulating" worlds to cut into the number...planets with seemingly tiny colonial populations will suddenly have a "relatively" tiny population of 5 million and one settlement will become one of 25 all over the planet. It's unnecessary, but it is inevitable.

However.

kudos to LFL for avoiding the pitfalls of "small galaxy" logic that befell the 3 million GAR. It's still a cap...but one that's so huge that a lot can happen before we ever fill it.

But again...I must warn against taking these numbers and trying to systemically distribute the population to the whole galaxy. There are wholes in the information...planets that have been part of the republic/empire/alliance for eons that have yet to get their name in print...such things must be remembered before statistical charts can bore out any "truth" about a constantly mutating universe.

 

If we're talking about a population spanning an entire galaxy then we would most certainly be talking quadrillions. You would be hard pressed to overpopulate anything on that kind of scale.

 

Actually, a quick check at the Wook shows it was slapped down pretty quick and the official numbers still stand. Unless anyone has some objections here I think we can assume a 'trillion' is the standard 'thousand billion' or 'million million'. If not, maybe asking Dan or Jason might be in order.

 

That Galactic Population map from the Atlas was one of the more fun and original sections in that book, IMO. However, I would be curious to see how Dan Wallace or Jason Fry interpet that map.

For example, my take it that those colored section provide a rough "average" for that particular region of space, rather than concrete numbers. This is probably very likely in the Core, as worlds like Recopia fall in the "red" section even though it's population is well below 500 million to a trillion.

What really caught my eye was how much of the galaxy was sparcely populated. Even after 25,000 years, wide swaths of the GFFA aren't that crowed.

--Adm. Nick

 

trillion = million million is right and was named as such in some novel source whose title I can´t recall right now, but I am sure!

though looking at my european number interpretation it is interesting. I wonder how translated books translated the numbers someone needs to check that


PS: Atlas colored the Hapes Cluster wrong populationwise... posted about that in the Atlas topic, too. Hapes has as mentioned above minimum 1 billion soldiers but Atlas gives the Cluster a population only in the millions maximum! COPL speaks against that.

 

Yub they said that the numbers are an average only and not the maximum numbers. Though some worlds numbers we know from novel or rpg sources were marked as exact and singled out from the broader colorfields.

PS: If taking the "wrong" Hapes Cluster numbers as average, they have to have very few very overpopulated worlds and the majority of worlds has to have between 1-10 million inhabitants only. Though I favor it getting another color and higher numbers.

 

rereading the Imperial Sourcebook:

>> every 207 Minutes the understaffed Imperial Scout Corps catalogues a new system for the Empire

now that is interesting... how many systems are approx. 20 years of Imperial Reign divided by 207 Minutes?

the Answer: aprox. far over 50000 systems catalogued within the Emperors reign alone!!! by an understaffed Scout Corps!!!

now take that and count the Republics years, Scout Coprs, independent Scout Services etc.

I know, another numbers debate that will possibly end in fighting over numbers, reality and sizes and populations... though... the 50000 systems include lifeless ones, as well as those with life. 50000 divided by average of 1000 worlds per sector = 50 new sectors for the Empire probably.

 

That might depend on the definition of "catalogue" too. Did they merely detect its presence and the number of planets there, but ignore detailed scans of each individual planet? Or was it an in-depth analysis of stellar phenomena, soil samples on every planet, life survey, full cartography, etc. etc. etc.

Because the latter would take a long time.

And the definition of "understaffed" might be in question too. One scout ship could not do a detailed scan of a planet in just over 3 hours. If there were two scout ships, a scan would take 414 minutes. The light scan might be possible. If there were 10 scout ships, then a scan may take 2070 minutes (34.5 hours; slightly less than a work week).

I'm operating under the assumption that a single team of Imperial scouts fly this. So if a scout team is 10 people, I'd believe they could do a detailed system scan in one work week, allowing for appropriate down-time.

Bear in mind that this doesn't include travel between systems. But w/e.

 

Searching for interesting references on the Wook, I once came across this amusing article. Apparantly, this character mixes the long and short scales, when jumping from quadrillions to quintillions. Does that mean the SW scales are jumbled?

As for populations spread out in each system, that would be a logical step if they wanted to avoid overtaxing the various ecosystems of their homeworlds etc. With the potential resource-gathering in our own system, we could reach a population of quadrillions (short scale), scattered across planets, moons, asteroids and space stations.

 

It seemed to me that the colored regions are like 'median' values - indicating the most likely value of a system in that region.

 

I was a little disappointed by the 100 quadrillion number, mainly because I'd anticipated that around 1 quadrillion was more likely, based on wild estimates of a million populated star systems (I had the feeling I'd heard that number somewhere before - WEG Imperial source book perhaps? - and an average population of 1 billion, as ecumenopolis planets like Coruscant are massively in the minority, outweighed by an awful lot of planets with populations of less than a couple of million (hence small scale engagements being sufficient to control a planet in so many stories, and that planets like Naboo - population 600 million, can be a sector capital). But I guess my estimates were way out

Science aside, the Atlas portrays the galaxy as massively dauntingly populated and depressingly impossible to govern as a democracy efficiently. I wish they'd made it a little smaller to reconcile the movies with the source material slightly better. Isn't the entire Rebel fleet present at Endor, and isn't it a grand total of, what, 4 cruisers and support fleet? It's hard to reconcile such a small Rebel navy with any kind of galaxy-wide effect if there's such an enormous galactic population.

Maybe 99 of those 100 quadrillion are insectoid and don't leave their planets much

 

Yeah I'm going to elaborate on this: The Essential Atlas talks about "a billion inhabited star systems" of which seventy million were sufficiently populated "for representation of some sort in the galactic Empire".

Contrast this with the WEG Imperial Sourcebook first chapter: "The galaxy was once a great Republic of stars. The thousand-thousand member worlds were governed fairly and efficiently by the Senate...."

Note that isn't even systems, but (member) worlds. WEG and the Essential Atlas disagree by a factor of more than seventy! Even assuming the WEG sourcebook is referring to some point in the past.

That puts the average system population at a fairly reasonable 1.4 billion inhabitants, but the difference of scale is still immense and irreconcilable!

I don't see what was wrong with the WEG estimation that they decided to increase it by such a magnitude.

 

In terms of systems, there's planets, moons, asteroids, habitats etc. that are either direct members of either Republic or Empire and those that are colonies, protectorates, governorships etc. and not full members. They're not all full members. In AOTC:ICS for instance, the Chommell sector (where Naboo is located) had thirty-six star systems that were members of the Galactic Republic, 40,000 settled dependencies and 300,000,000 barren stars and was considered a sparsely populated sector in the Republic.

 

"...about 69 million of those systems meet the population requirements for Imperial representation and just 1.75 million planets are full member worlds." - p. x, Essential Atlas.
Read the endnotes at Dan Wallace's blog. The figures were derived directly from WEG, there is no contradiction.

 

The Rebel Fleet was larger than we see in the movie. Furthermore, the Rebel fleet actually seen in the movie is far larger than the one you list. Years ago when OT DVD's came out, we Fleet Junkies poured over the movie. One interesting thing we discovered was that in the last scence where the Rebel Fleet is fleeing toward Endor (Falcon in pursuit), you can count at least thirteen Mon Cal cruisers (zoom in an notice the engine configurations).

Besides, the ROTJ novelization does a much better job of fleshing out the Rebel Fleet. In that novel the Rebel fleet has dozens of cruisers and can stretch for "as far as the eye can see".

--Adm. Nick

 

And it's not even the whole fleet, the DESB says it's mainly the Rebel Command Fleet augmented by the Sullustan Home Guard.

 

Thanks, I totally stand corrected.

So the 100 quadrillion number is based on Shatterpoint. What would be a reasonable concentration of the population of the galaxy living on those 1.32m full member worlds? Presumably at least 16% (which would assume the average member world is 10x as populated as a non-member world) and maybe as much as 90%?
10% would put the average population of those member world at 12.1bn, 90% would be 68bn. Given that planets like Naboo (0.6bn), Corellia (3bn), Alderaan (2bn), Kuat (3.6bn), Bothawui (2.5bn), Rodia (1.9bn), and Fondor (5 bn) are not only full member worlds, but major players on a galactic scale, doesn't the number still appear unrealistically high, even taking into account the number ecumenopolis planets that one has to include in that number?

If the average population of a full member world was, say, 2bn, it would be unrealistic to estimate a galactic population of more than 8.25 quadrillion. Even if it was 20 billion a maximum estiamte would be 82.5 quadrillion, and there are only a handful of planets in the EU with larger populations than that (Dac, for example, is 27.5bn).

 

You also have to remember, their waste management is extremely evolved. With all that population, the core worlds have the best of almost everything, as far as innovations go. (Except medical, you'd have to go to Kamino for that.)

On Coruscant, they acid washed large garbage, sent metal to scrap refineries to be remade, and the non industrial waste (soft waste like what the average person makes in a week) that wasn't recyclable was eaten by giant worms in a very maintained environment.

 

I think there might be some slight confusion still - the 1.32 million member world figure derives from Shatterpoint (1.2 million members of the Republic + 10% for the Confederacy). The 100 quadrillion population figure comes from WEG's main Star Wars rulebook. With the number of worlds that qualify for Imperial representation exceeding 50 million (also originating from the WEG rulebook), the average population would be actually be below 2 million.