As I had Hitomi Morgenstern mention personnel strength of the UNSpacy in passing in one of my latest posts, I guess it is time I shared some thoughts on Earth's population numbers. This a bit of a stram of consciousness post, just me thinking out loud, but I guess it can't hurt to share where I am coming from.<br/><br/>1 - Cloning<br/><br/>While never really mentioned on screen (to the best of my knowledge), cloning has been mentioned a lot in various publications and around the internet as a means of how Humanity could regrow, and crew all the colonization fleets. And I don't buy it. It's nice as a handwaving device for the writers of the shows, but I see a few problems with it:<br/><br/>(i) Where does the technology come from? Sure, the Zentraedi are clones, but are they cloned on their battleships, or are there centralized clone factories that "mass produce" soldiers? My impression is it's the latter, so you would need to get your hands on a "clone sattelite" to get the technology.<br/>(ii) Are the clones just artificial, lab-grown babies, or adults? If they spring from the clone chambers as adults, how do they get memories, skills, personalities? Zentradi are fairly "basic" in their skill set and personalities (no offense to our Zentraedi characters), but for people to work in a Human society you might want a bit more, something more complex, and I don't think we are ever shown anything in Macross that could really account for such complex memory transfer technology during the rebuilding phase after Space War One. But if they are just artificial babies, who raises them in a war-torn world that is just getting back on its feet? Sure, repopulating the world may be all well and good, but shouldn't you re-build the world before you unleash countless babies on it?<br/><br/>2 - Population Figures after Space War One<br/><br/>Somewhere I read the figure of 8,000,000 Zentraedi joining Humanity after the war. Lets go with that. But how many humans are left. Something like "less than 1%" has been mentioned here and there, far as I can tell. Lets start with a population of 6 billion and that would give us 60 million or less. Personally I think that's too low. I admit that that's just me, but I would go with something like 2%, maybe 3%. Those survivors would be widely dispersed around the globe so just consolidating them in viable communities could take a few years, but something like 100 million survivors sounds like a nice, round figure to build on.<br/><br/>3 - Where that leads<br/><br/>Assuming about 100,000,000 people on Earth (Humans and Zentraedi) in 2010 and further assuming a population growth rate of 2% gives us a population of about 154,000,000 in 2032. As I am going with a slower intitial speed for space colonization that would leave about 150 million on Earth in 2032.<br/><br/>Quite a few people probably moved to Eden, given that that planet is more viable, more Earth-like than Earth in a way, so lets say 20 million have moved to Eden over the last decade or so. That still leaves us 130 million people on Earth.<br/><br/>I am not making any long-term projections how this game might eventually align with a major space coloinzation drive that could bring our setting in line with Macross Seven or Frontier, but that would still be enough to account for several dozens of fleets with a hundred thousand people (or more) each, while still leaving Earth with a large enough population to be self-sustaining at some point in the future.<br/><br/>And all without the need for cloning.<br/><br/>As I said, this is pretty much me thinking out loud and sharing my thoughts, but it is what I will use in our setting, unless someone can spot a serious flaw in my line of thinking.