fascinating link on demographics

[alaskanflyboy]

I lumped modern and sci-fi together as sci-fi generally sticks close to modern considerations. Whether the food comes from Mars or Argentina, cities would likely develop in a similar manner to modern, but the support values for the various industries would be similar enough to modern that one could tweak the values to what ever degree they needed to come up with their level of development in sci-fi. I just know there are services and industries in existence today that weren't in the medieval world, such as groceries, fuel stations, and power plants. I wouldn't even know where to begin in considering a rough number of their support values. And, yes, I know that power-plants would likely increase in sci-fi, but having a modern base-line would be helpful to work with.

[Spazzle]

A pretty extreme limit, but still a limit.

True, though the only thing that pretty much makes the limits infinite is transportation - one planet could convievably produce no food, yet sustain millions if all their food was transported from another planet.

I just know there are services and industries in existence today that weren't in the medieval world, such as groceries, fuel stations, and power plants. I wouldn't even know where to begin in considering a rough number of their support values.

This is also pretty tricky. For example, if you had an automobile sales business, it could be built in a small town of 3,000. Yet it depends on someone somwhere else to actually make the autos as the town couldn't support the industry by itself.

I think that's what makes the "fantasy" element a little easier to manage, because we have hard values about how much land it takes to grow x amount of calories, which can support x population. Given x population, we could support Y numbers of industries/businesses. Since there was no global economy, and local economies were pretty much limited to their own villages, each village was a microcosm and distinct.

Of course, in any fantasy setting we could propose almost any combination of support structures (magical/natural) that would invalidate "real world" demographics. However, I think its easier to work with those numbers than modern/sci fi equivalents.

I'd still be curious to see what would be determined as a baseline - however inaccurate it may be. It can always serve as a starting point to build on.

What funny is that rarely (for understandable reasons) do fiction writers dwell on these things. About the only show I know that dealt with real-world needs was Star Trek:Voyager, and that was simply due to the fact that not being able to return to a nearby starbase to resupply had a serious effect on the ship's stores. It was only dealt with superficially, but at least they acknowledged the fact that the food had to come from somewhere.