Is there going to be a mechanic for overpopulation?

[XRW]

I don't think spacefaring civs will have NO way to solve over population. Allow me to make a few suggestions.

Sex ed. Actual useful education without the weird religious hangups a lot of places have. Mandate contraception, and require people to have a stable marriage partner before breeding. Remove tax incentives for breeding.

Extreme methods. Ban on natural birth, forced sterilization, and state controlled reproduction.

Anime draft. Conscript all females of breeding age into the military for no reason whatsoever. Make up some reason why women are desirable or even preferable to men. It could be some laughably impractical weapon system that only women can use. Not just any women though. Only high school age girls are able to use the weapon. Well there's this one dude that can but no one cares about him.

 

[aitaituo]

As long as we don't care about being good people, Japan has provided the ideal road map for crashing your birth rate. The short version is discriminate heavily against working mothers, make labyrinthine dating rules that make it nearly impossible to start a relationship after age 22, make labyrinthine social rules that make it nearly impossible to have a different gender friend after age 22, encourage waifus and hasubandos, and make sure uncanny valley sex toys are widely available and socially acceptable. Throw the big three on there, too, of course.

 

[XRW]

Fact. Human women can live without constant attention.
Fact. Your waifu will die if you cease to believe in her.
Conclusion. The most ethical course of action is to ditch 3d women and focus on 2d waifus.

 

[AllenY]

What kind of overpopulation is this? Overpopulation isn't like hunger, it's not "oh there's too many people around me I'll die now". Is it lack of food, water, medical care, housing, clothing, electrical amenities? Is it that there are too many people and there is no way to avoid social contact, which has an effect on health? Or is it there's not enough gas, so you have no heater and freeze? Overpopulation is the demand exceeding the supply by too much, but what is it exactly that is having its supply exceeded by demand?

I don't remember much about how resources in game will work, but I think the most sensible solution is to implement resources to represent what your people need; food and consumer goods, or maybe just consumer goods. If they don't get enough, they die; overpopulation is represented by them dying when they don't get enough.

 

[HarryB922]

What kind of overpopulation is this? Overpopulation isn't like hunger, it's not "oh there's too many people around me I'll die now". Is it lack of food, water, medical care, housing, clothing, electrical amenities? Is it that there are too many people and there is no way to avoid social contact, which has an effect on health? Or is it there's not enough gas, so you have no heater and freeze? Overpopulation is the demand exceeding the supply by too much, but what is it exactly that is having its supply exceeded by demand?

I don't remember much about how resources in game will work, but I think the most sensible solution is to implement resources to represent what your people need; food and consumer goods, or maybe just consumer goods. If they don't get enough, they die; overpopulation is represented by them dying when they don't get enough.

So when people don't get enough food, or live in poverty they will just die like good little troopers? Really the whole point of me starting this thread is that that is not realistic.

Allow me to restate what I said earlier: Population growth would not stop at the optimal population level. Let's say the planet in question could comfortably support 16 'pops'. When there are 16 pops, everything is going good so people are going to keep having children at the normal rate. When the population reaches 17 pops, things start to go bad and the standard of living on the planet starts to drop. If there are places for the population to migrate to this isn't a problem, but when the galaxy has filled up and there are no more colonizable planets, if you don't have a way to control the population size then your empire will become overpopulated and suffer penalties due to unrest, habitat destruction etc. I don't know exactly when the population would stop growing, but let's say growth would start to slow down in the case of this particular planet once the population hits 17 pops. When it hits 18 it would slow down more and let's say the growth stops at 19. This leaves you with the problem of having 3 unemployed and unhappy pops on your planet which could cause all sorts of problems.

 

[Sernista]

Demographic Transition theory would rather support the "people adjust their birth rates to suit the death rates on their own" argument - it just has a lag time. America and Europe are both hitting significant growth rate decreases after a few centuries of disequilibrium, in ways that line up with the death rates fairly well. It's as good a guess as any that the rest of the world will trend that way if / when they stably maintain 'developed' style low death rates, freedoms for women to make their own economic decisions + control their fertility, etc. It's just a matter of surviving the shocks to the system brought on by things like sudden changes in agricultural productivity, life span and so on, because cultures often change slower than their technological underpinnings.

 

[AllenY]

So when people don't get enough food, or live in poverty they will just die like good little troopers? Really the whole point of me starting this thread is that that is not realistic.

Allow me to restate what I said earlier: Population growth would not stop at the optimal population level. Let's say the planet in question could comfortably support 16 'pops'. When there are 16 pops, everything is going good so people are going to keep having children at the normal rate. When the population reaches 17 pops, things start to go bad and the standard of living on the planet starts to drop. If there are places for the population to migrate to this isn't a problem, but when the galaxy has filled up and there are no more colonizable planets, if you don't have a way to control the population size then your empire will become overpopulated and suffer penalties due to unrest, habitat destruction etc. I don't know exactly when the population would stop growing, but let's say growth would start to slow down in the case of this particular planet once the population hits 17 pops. When it hits 18 it would slow down more and let's say the growth stops at 19. This leaves you with the problem of having 3 unemployed and unhappy pops on your planet which could cause all sorts of problems.

Yes, I see what you mean, but that wasn't my point; my point was, what are we modelling with overpopulation? Is it food, housing, or something else? I would imagine that for most people, an image of an overcrowded city appears when overpopulation is mentioned, but in reality, trying to put a few hundred people in the middle of the Sahara is also overpopulation. Overpopulation is population to a point where the population cannot be sustained, how do we decide what this point is, while also modelling the fact that export and import are going to have major impacts?

For the actual mechanic of pops not getting what they need, I would suggest a system something like this; 6 people, 5 food, then 1/6 unrest in all the pops, however that would work.

As for population growth, I think that isn't quite relevant to how to deal with overpopulation (other than preventing population growth). Maybe on some other planet, the species has to breed once a year and can't breed more than once a year, otherwise they die. Demographic transition doesn't apply there. On some other planet, hivemindy insect things live, and the queen keeps up a constant production, and lifespans are virtually inextensible beyond their short life (except for the queen). Maybe on some other planet, they don't even die of old age, and only stuff like famine and war keeps population down. Human population growth is uniquely human, so dealing with population growth is going to work differently for every race, and thus only stuff like simply expanding the economy to be able to provide for the population, or killing them off, is going to be universally relevant to overpopulation.

 

[Ivashanko]

China's one child policy is a real example of state population control that isn't horrific, though criminals trying to get around it have done horrifying things. Licenses for having children have been explored in numerous novels, with the downsides usually similar to the OCP.

China's one child policy has been pretty horrific.

Anyways, if this game is past the point of post-scarcity overpopulation because a much different problem- one of space rather than resources. And you can build a tiered-city, space stations, artificial planets, virtual reality zones, etc., to cordon off excess population. It is a very different issues to over population today.

 

[AKicebear]

China's one child policy has been pretty horrific.

There are examples of it being pretty horiffic when implemented locally, although that doesn't mean it was horrific overall. In country with over a billion people tens or hundreds of examples of abuse are hardly a definitive smoking gun.

 

[Teleros]

I would love to see some sort of mechanic where the population can exceed what the planet can support, which would lead to issues with unrest, excess resource usage, environmental damage etc.

I can't see this working well given the timescale of the game. Stellaris, like most Paradox games, has "turns" of one day, so I really don't think we're going to see more than maybe a thousand years in-game. Think about the population growth rate of advanced Western countries (those that are still growing, that is) - the USA for example is growing at less than 1% a year. 1% over a thousand years from a starting population of 10 billion nets you fewer than 210 trillion people.

Which is only a lot when compared to modern day Earth.

Now, Manhattan has a population density of 26,400 people per square kilometre, and Earth has a land surface area of about 150 million square kilometres. So all you need are 53 planets like Earth to house that population. If you find Earth-sized planets that are all land though, you need about 16 of them.

Of course, we've done this without considering any of the following:

• Wars
• Disease
• Natural disasters

And all the other habitats that are possible in space. Asteroid habitats, underground cities, denser cities, O'Neill cylinders, nomadic fleets, digital rather than physical people, not to mention sci-fi stuff like Iain M Banks' orbitals, Niven's ringworld*, and so on.

Finally, let's not forget than IRL when population pressures arise, people move. Unless the game is Sid Meier's Civilisation level of retarded (which I doubt), overpopulation will only be an issue if all the available worlds have max population.



*3 million times the surface area of the Earth: build just one of these and you're set for the entire game .

 

[SolarGuy]

I can't see this working well given the timescale of the game. Stellaris, like most Paradox games, has "turns" of one day, so I really don't think we're going to see more than maybe a thousand years in-game. Think about the population growth rate of advanced Western countries (those that are still growing, that is) - the USA for example is growing at less than 1% a year. 1% over a thousand years from a starting population of 10 billion nets you fewer than 210 trillion people.

Which is only a lot when compared to modern day Earth.

Now, Manhattan has a population density of 26,400 people per square kilometre, and Earth has a land surface area of about 150 million square kilometres. So all you need are 53 planets like Earth to house that population. If you find Earth-sized planets that are all land though, you need about 16 of them.

Of course, we've done this without considering any of the following:

• Wars
• Disease
• Natural disasters

And all the other habitats that are possible in space. Asteroid habitats, underground cities, denser cities, O'Neill cylinders, nomadic fleets, digital rather than physical people, not to mention sci-fi stuff like Iain M Banks' orbitals, Niven's ringworld*, and so on.

Finally, let's not forget than IRL when population pressures arise, people move. Unless the game is Sid Meier's Civilisation level of retarded (which I doubt), overpopulation will only be an issue if all the available worlds have max population.



*3 million times the surface area of the Earth: build just one of these and you're set for the entire game .

But the game is all in real time, and we can change manually how fast the time goes on.
And what about, instead of the heavily discussed ringworld, a ringsystem? Like, you build a sphere around the whole solar system, the outside would have extreme amounts of defenses on it while on the inside there would be habitats and facilities, which would obviously be huge ^^ I just suddenly had this in mind, although it may not be a fast-to-apply solution
Such a ringsystem would probably have enough place to "store" samples of almost every species in the galaxy, so it may be more like a Universal Library than anything else. There is a relatively recent thread about this idea: When your empire dies, you can choose a new civilization and restart the same game (in the same galaxy) just a few thousand years later. That would somehow fit together with that Universal Library...

 

[Teleros]

But the game is all in real time, and we can change manually how fast the time goes on.

Kind of - 1 day is still the minimum unit of time you have to deal with though, which was my point about it using turns.

And what about, instead of the heavily discussed ringworld, a ringsystem? Like, you build a sphere around the whole solar system, the outside would have extreme amounts of defenses on it while on the inside there would be habitats and facilities, which would obviously be huge ^^ I just suddenly had this in mind, although it may not be a fast-to-apply solution

As noted in the other thread where you mentioned building a solid Dyson sphere (trivia note: the original Dyson sphere was not a solid construction but a swarm of tiny structures) on the same scale... assuming you have sufficient amounts of sufficiently strong building materials (hint: nothing we can even theorise about today will do it), then yes you can. However, what about the sunlight? If you build such a thing around our own sun, and a distance of, say, 100 AU, then you will get only a minuscule fraction of the sunlight that Earth gets - in fact you'll get less than Pluto (!). So you either need to be a species that likes that sort of climate, or be around a much hotter star, or resort to artificial lighting for the whole thing.

All seems a bit of a hassle if you want it for living space. If you want it to store things on then... well in that case there are frankly more serious concerns, like avoiding the degradation of your specimens and data over millions of years (asteroid impacts, gamma ray bursts, the half-life of various elements...).

 

[SolarGuy]

or resort to artificial lighting for the whole thing.

When you have such a thing built around a star, it will not be much of a problem to install light sources everywhere where it's necessary

All seems a bit of a hassle if you want it for living space. If you want it to store things on then... well in that case there are frankly more serious concerns, like avoiding the degradation of your specimens and data over millions of years (asteroid impacts, gamma ray bursts, the half-life of various elements...).

What about having living places only in the outer shells, while the inner ones are used as storage, energy generation, controls, and everything else? After all such a dyson sphere would still need a minimum amount of "organic" people in it that can react more effective than an AI in certain situations. But the whole rest could very well also be done by an AI, such as maintenance, cleaning the floors, scanning the surroundings for possibly hostile or otherwise dangerous objects, and such things.
The AI could even be programmed to do research and collect new data for the library on its own. It would be interesting to send a dyson sphere out into space, and a few thousand years later it returns and always outputs "Memory is full, return to origin is necessary."

 

[Safehold]

What I see problematic there is, there would be a point where even the whole galaxy couldn't support its own citizens (and slaves ) anymore. How would you deal with that situation?
Otherwise, I like that idea, it makes the whole thing more realistic and give you a reason to expand. Maybe it could be dampened by policies such as "secretly holding the population number down by so called "natural disasters"" or "Let's pretend to be nice but secretly sterilize everyone!" (https://www.gateworld.net/wiki/Aschen) xD

Turn the excess into food, minerals, and influence. Problem solved.

As long as we don't care about being good people, Japan has provided the ideal road map for crashing your birth rate. The short version is discriminate heavily against working mothers, make labyrinthine dating rules that make it nearly impossible to start a relationship after age 22, make labyrinthine social rules that make it nearly impossible to have a different gender friend after age 22, encourage waifus and hasubandos, and make sure uncanny valley sex toys are widely available and socially acceptable. Throw the big three on there, too, of course.

That doesn't explain why America and Europe would have the same birth rates if they ignored immigration and migrant population births. Japan doesn't have a sub culture of migrants they use to increase their own population and worker growth rates.

 

[Verenti]

What I see problematic there is, there would be a point where even the whole galaxy couldn't support its own citizens (and slaves ) anymore. How would you deal with that situation?
Otherwise, I like that idea, it makes the whole thing more realistic and give you a reason to expand. Maybe it could be dampened by policies such as "secretly holding the population number down by so called "natural disasters"" or "Let's pretend to be nice but secretly sterilize everyone!" (https://www.gateworld.net/wiki/Aschen) xD

Thomas Malthus called and he said "Yes."

 

[SolarGuy]

I wonder if we could actually change our society over time, until it accepts ritual cannibalism? That would be mean against those that are eaten, but when used in big amount it may stop overpopulation. Of course, not every civilization will accept such a change, not even within hundreds of years, but when it works it may be useful. Although it won't be accepted by the majority of other empires I think. What about implementing cannibalism only on certain planets, those which are far away from the major civilization anyway?

 

[Daltesh]

I think AllenY is the only person who brought it up, but just what do people think overpopulation is? On Earth overpopulation is defined as exceeding carrying capacity, which is the amount of individuals the environment can carry indefinitely. Humanity is very far from overpopulating Earth in terms of food or water (although we're already past the carrying capacity for other non-vital resources), but certain regions are overpopulated due to the population exceeding the capacity of the infrastructure there. When you have space transport making logistics and infrastructure a moot point, and agri-worlds with advanced technology making food production a nearly moot point, overpopulation its self becomes essentially a non sequitur unless you put blockades or natural disasters into effect, at which point it just becomes food vs population.

Honestly what's wrong with densely populated planets? It's a very popular trope in scifi and leads to some worlds being more important than just their resources and buildings, since losing them would lose you manpower and taxation as well.

 

[Teleros]

When you have such a thing built around a star, it will not be much of a problem to install light sources everywhere where it's necessary

You'd be surprised. Out at Pluto you get sod all in the way of sunlight because of the inverse-square rule, whereas (for the same reason) Mercury gets cooked all day every day. Getting your megastructure built at the right distance from the star is important if you want to use natural lighting, hence my original point.

After all such a dyson sphere would still need a minimum amount of "organic" people in it that can react more effective than an AI in certain situations.

Depends entirely on the quality of the AI compared to the quality of the squishy organic meatbags . If we assume there is no soul or similar, then in principle our brains are just computers and we can build new ones and even improve on the design, which means AIs as smart as (if not smarter than) us.

 

[SolarGuy]

Depends entirely on the quality of the AI compared to the quality of the squishy organic meatbags . If we assume there is no soul or similar, then in principle our brains are just computers and we can build new ones and even improve on the design, which means AIs as smart as (if not smarter than) us.

Okay, then I just need an AI that actually has things like instincts and reflexes. Or... I don't research how to make AIs!
Instead, I take slightly improved brains out of their bodies and inside the sphere, to control it. That's by faaarrr easier than doing robotic... scientific... things... and stuff... technological stuff... with metal...

 

[SIEGE-109]

It's a question of how much you can improve AI vs how much you can improve genetically engineered transhumans.