Extra colonies

[Jorgen_CAB]

From a realistic point of view there should be a maximum number of population for planets. Earth will reach an equilibrium of population at around 10 billion people (according to studies made in children berths) which don't have much to do with resources or anything but more from cultural and informational reasons. When people know that children will survive to adulthood with modern medicine we simply don't crave more than around 2-3 children per family, something that soon is true all around the earth today.

In the future I guess population growth would rather not grow much unless there is reasons for doing so such as a states encouraging it through economic means or something similar.

In a world such as Aurora with more or less unlimited cheap energy population growth should practically become zero at some point, mainly because of size of a planet, it's geography and technological improvements. People will obviously prefer more space, parks and nature so population would probably reflect this when the technology and educational media exist to maintain a good balance. You would not really see over population in such societies. At least I don't believe you would. At least peoples morale should plummet when planets start to get too crowded.

[Haji]

When people know that children will survive to adulthood with modern medicine we simply don't crave more than around 2-3 children per family, something that soon is true all around the earth today.

Population growth is much more complicated issue than that. For example, the current population growth of India (which is a poor nation with poor and not widely available medical aid) is 1.25% while Norway (a very modern socialdemocratic nation) has population growth of 1.19%. Israel (of which I don't know that much, but it seems to be normal, modern society with good medical services) has population growth of 1.46%, more than many poorer nations like Iran, Mexico or Mongolia (sorry if I'm mistaken about the relative wealth of those nations, couldn't be arsked to double-check). So that's definitely oversimplification. For that matter, the fact that even modern nations like UK, France or US have healthy population growth (around 1%) despite having very good (and in Europe free) medicine seems to indicate that population growth will not reach 0%, or at least not for the reasons you outlined.

Also your arguments don't take into account possible other explanations for (relatively) large population growth in Aurora, such as longevity treatment which means that people stop dying. Or ability to store and restore consciousness electronically. Or the fact that default starting date for Aurora is 2025, well before the time we're supposed to reach that equilibrium of ten billion.

[Prince of Space]

Taking sloanjh's suggestion and returning to Rich.h's original question, a good use for mineral-free habitable worlds is to serve as farm teams for factory worlds.

If you're like me, and you keep some significant portion of your homeworld's factory capacity busy building more factories, then you'll need more population to keep up with the demand for labor. In my games, once Luna, Mars, And the Galilean moons have populations over 25 million, I set up the immigration settings on the Civilian tab to Supply colonists from those worlds and Demand them back on Earth.

That's a quicker way to get to a large population than just letting them grow naturally, although I've never gotten to a trillion.

[Jorgen_CAB]

Population growth is much more complicated issue than that. For example, the current population growth of India (which is a poor nation with poor and not widely available medical aid) is 1.25% while Norway (a very modern socialdemocratic nation) has population growth of 1.19%. Israel (of which I don't know that much, but it seems to be normal, modern society with good medical services) has population growth of 1.46%, more than many poorer nations like Iran, Mexico or Mongolia (sorry if I'm mistaken about the relative wealth of those nations, couldn't be arsked to double-check). So that's definitely oversimplification. For that matter, the fact that even modern nations like UK, France or US have healthy population growth (around 1%) despite having very good (and in Europe free) medicine seems to indicate that population growth will not reach 0%, or at least not for the reasons you outlined.

Also your arguments don't take into account possible other explanations for (relatively) large population growth in Aurora, such as longevity treatment which means that people stop dying. Or ability to store and restore consciousness electronically. Or the fact that default starting date for Aurora is 2025, well before the time we're supposed to reach that equilibrium of ten billion.

Sure... it is difficult to say exactly where and when we will reach an equilibrium but we will reach it at one point quite soon. There has been some pretty accurate studies made and are still made in particular of child births since that is what govern how many people we will be in the future. Medical breakthroughs can obviously also be a factor but I bet most studies include things like increase in average age and things like that. There are some fairly general and accurate information on Wikipedia about this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projections_of_population_growth

The only place where the rate of child birth are not declining today are Africa...

And yes... US are practically the only non third world nation that we expect to increase population as if it were a third world nation until about 2050...

Taking sloanjh's suggestion and returning to Rich.h's original question, a good use for mineral-free habitable worlds is to serve as farm teams for factory worlds.

If you're like me, and you keep some significant portion of your homeworld's factory capacity busy building more factories, then you'll need more population to keep up with the demand for labor. In my games, once Luna, Mars, And the Galilean moons have populations over 25 million, I set up the immigration settings on the Civilian tab to Supply colonists from those worlds and Demand them back on Earth.

That's a quicker way to get to a large population than just letting them grow naturally, although I've never gotten to a trillion.

Is it even possible to play the game to get a trillion people on a single world, I sincerely doubt that has happened so far.

In any way I usually let my worlds develop on their own after 25m population and once they reach 500m I allow them to send population to minor colonies. This enable me to have lot's of different worlds that increase trade and can specialize on many different functions throughout a wide spreading empire. Although I only allow gravity to be from +/- 0.4 from 1 so the numbers of worlds are very few where I don't require subterranean infrastructure, so neither Luna nor Mars is viable planets for large colonization. Venus on the other hand is the only terrestrial planet in Sol with potential for human colonization.