' Wrote:I like the part of Earth's population growth of 1 billion every 50 yrs is used.
Lets say that the "small" group consists of an army of people totaling 50 000.
Doing the math, how many babies do you think every single person would need to produce in order to achieve a population growth of 1 billion in 50yrs?
well, I'm a growth nerd. So I'mma do some math on..oh, I have already... Population Growth Charts
That's using some numbers, based on 30k starting populations, gets us to about a billion after about 360 years...which is likely simmilar to the calcualtions used to generate the numbers.
Personally, if I had to create a boom population, I'd do it Cyteen style, with armies of clones and creche colonies. Assume a 14 year old can take care of 6 infants...then have 200 adults raise 1200 infants to be such 14 year olds...passing on the requisite skills, etc, to raise a person, then every 14 years you grow exponentially.
If each 14 year old only raises one batch of children to 14...then you have 7200 for the second batch in year 28, then 43,200 in year 42, then 259,200 in year 56..boom. That's starting from 200 people, remember, with most of 50 thousand left over to set up the support structures for the first 1200, 7200. by the 7200 batch, the 1200 are experienced in the workforce, tada, they start training crews. Exponential growth is easy if you can keep feeding them. (you also need to handwave away the problems we've had with cloning, but...this is scifi)
