Yeah, I got an O instead of an A, didn't I? lol. Just saw that. Oh dear, spell check has failed me again. lol. Yeah, if you wanna correct that, I'd appreciate it.
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Originally Posted by Elfwreck
2:1 over what timespan? Per lifetime? (Which is what it sounds like.) Any idea how that would translate to, for example, a 10-year period? How fast does a population need to grow in order to be stable-and-growing?
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The time frame typically referenced is 1 generation. So for every 33 years you need to have 2 births for every 1 person. IE, you need communities where families consistently have a minimum of 4 children to be considered as growing, because disease and other ailments can very quickly take out a large slice of the population. Just look at our ancestors. It was not unheard of to have families with 6-7 children. In fact, that was somewhat expected of you. There's even Amish and Mormons today who have 10-13 children or more (as in the case of the duggers), and a family with just 4 children is considered small.
Another example is America. Right now we have a birth rate of 1:1, so we're not experiencing any population growth, and haven't since about the 60's when the baby boom tapered off. Well, at least nationally anyways. Around here they're still breading like rabbits. But either way, the official growth rate is 1:1. In Europe it's something like 1:1.5 if I remember correctly, and the only population growth they're seeing is from immigrants. But anyways, large families are needed in order to rebuild the population and get them up to the minimum number required to restart previous endeavors that would currently be impossible due to low population numbers.
Another benefit of higher population is that you can get away with controlling greater swaths of land, as the more people you have, the more land you can control, and thus the more food you can grow. Once you have that consistent surplus, and a bank against future disasters, you're now free to begin engaging in enterprises and activities above and beyond simple survival or subsistence farming. Another good example of this comes from Stargate Universe where a copy of the Destiny's crew gets sent back in time to a planet and they're left with essentially just the cloths on their backs. They then spend the next 1000 years (via various generations) getting to an advanced modern form of technology. The first 100 years is all lived pioneer style, but as the population improves and grows you see the technology improve with it.
Yeah, sure, they cheated a little because they had a whole crew of super smart people, and a bag full of Ancient technology (compliments of Eli) to study once they'd advanced far enough and recovered their lost technology, but even so it took them 1000 years of uninterrupted growth and development before they reached the technological level you see them using when they're discovered at the beginning of the show. Heck, as one person pointed out, if it hadn't been for the dark ages, we'd probably be skipping around the stars like little kids right now.