Population Density of Planets
Look, I know that Star Wars is Space Opera, not Science Fiction, so it's really fast-and-loose with the numbers. I'm cool with that. But the planet Koros/Empress Teta is 15,700km in diameter, has one city Cinnagar covering half of the planet's surface, and has a population of 1.3 billion. Earth is 12,740km in diameter, has innumerable cities that cover nowhere near half the planet's surface (take a plane trip sometime, or check the population density map about halfway down at Wiki: World Population for a quick overview), and has a population of around 7 billion (ibid).
Has the planet been recently and violently depopulated or something? It was around the 1870's when the earth had that low of a population. The only argument for Koros/Empress Teta having such a sparsely populated city over half its surface is that Coruscant (12,240km) has a population of 1 trillion (1,000 billion). The note about "additional transients" can't be referring to several trillion more people.
I can understand just picking numbers that seem "big," but c'mon, it only takes a few minutes to realize you'd need to seriously outstrip the earth's population in order to warrant a planet-city. Texas is 268,820 square miles in area, which translates to 7,494,271,488,000. Right away you can see that's roughly 1,000 square feet per person if everyone on earth were crammed into Texas. (Assuming 7 billion people, the estimate for 2013, the math comes out to 1070.6 square feet per person, for the curious.) If the city is 2 stories, that's 2,000 square feet to support each person. By comparison, Tokyo has 12.79 million people, with 1840.6 square feet devoted to each person... and while it is an impressive city, Cinnagar seems to dwarf the skyscrapers of Tokyo. For that matter, Coruscant's numbers are equally preposterous: The entire 1 trillion people of Coruscant could fit in the landmass of Eurasia with 581 square feet for every man, woman, child, infant... This sounds small, until you realize that Eurasia only covers 10.6% of the earth's surface. In fact, a little math... surface area of a sphere is 4*pi*(radius squared)... Coruscant's radius is 6120km, leading to... roughly 470,665,872 square kilometres of surface area, or 5,066,205,282,410,565 square feet. Divide that by 1 trillion and you get 5066 square feet, but let's be very generous and assume 1.5 trillion "additional transients" for a total of 2.5 trillion (2,500,000,000,000)... you get 2026 square feet for every single individual. Londons people have 2309 square feet to themselves, New York City's people get about half as much (1027 feet) space in the most crowded city in the US, and even the most packed city on earth, Dhaka in Bangladesh, manages 246 square feet per person. In any case, 2000-5000 square feet per person is hardly a city of the sort we see in canonical Coruscant. That's St. Louis, MO, that's Berlin... cities, yes, but nothing like what we see in Coruscant.
By traditional measures of population density (people per square kilometre), Coruscant ranks at 2,125/square kilometre (km²). Washington, DC, ranks in at 3,621/km², Dhaka is 43,797.3/km², Mumbai, the most densely populated city (in its metro area) on the planet is 21,880 /km², ten times as dense as Coruscant--without the nigh-stratospheric skyscrapers of 'Scant. Tokyo: 5,796 /km² London: 4,761/km² New York: 10,482/km² St Louis: 2,207.1/km² Berlin: 3,831 /km²
Empress Teta's city Cinnagar, which spans half the planet? 3.35 people per square kilometre, which is the equivalent to such wondrous, thickly populated sweathouses as Libya, Canada, Guyana, Iceland, North and South Dakota... Russia? Positively packed by comparison, the entire nation averaging out to 8.4/km². USA? Not even close: 31/km², ten times as dense, and Japan is an "insane" 339/km² (something like 75% of Japan is forested, though, so that's a bit misleading).
For the density of Dhaka, an RL city and among the densest populated (UN says Mumbai's more dense, but Wiki's numbers for both disagree with that), Cinnagar would need a population of 20 trillion (canon: 1.3 bil) and Coruscant would need... 23.5 trillion. And I don't suppose structures in Dhaka have 1000 stories to them as indicated by this image on Coruscant's main page.
That's a little too in-depth for Space Opera, maybe, but it didn't take that for me to know the numbers don't work. As soon as you note Koros/Teta is roughly earth-sized, has a city over half of its surface, and yet doesn't even have a population to match earth's in 1900AD much less its current population... yeah. WTFBBQ.
DON'T Feel free to post right on the user talk page here. Algebra is far too theoretical for a Talk page of any sort. This is just an illustration of a canon point that is preposterous on its very face. It certainly isn't worthy of any discussion, illumination, explanation, or anything else you may be able to provide. I used to think it was, but see below.
Again: WOOKIPEDIA IS NOT A DISCUSSION BOARD! The section above is purely for exposition only, not discussion. --Sctn2labor 04:06, 19 October 2008 (UTC)
Warning
Wookieepedia's talk pages are not forums for your personally designed theories. They are for discussion of the article itself, not the topic in question. Please refrain from turning talk pages into forums. Thank you for your cooperation. Toprawa and Ralltiir 04:28, 18 October 2008 (UTC)
It's not a theory, it's simple arithmetic... in other words, fact. But, fine, you can make the concept of a "talk page" far more restrictive and far less conducive to discussion on your boards. --Sctn2labor 13:49, 18 October 2008 (UTC)
- Wookieepedia is not discussion boards. Go somewhere else for that. Graestan(Talk) 01:56, 19 October 2008 (UTC)
- Wow, twice. So the problem is with trying to come up with any illumination on glaring inaccuracies. Thank you for the clarification, oh exalted one. I shall refrain from trying to provide any further requests for logical analysis, discussion, illumination, explanation, etc. of even the most incomprehensible errors. A thousand apologies for trying to improve things via community. --Sctn2labor 04:06, 19 October 2008 (UTC)
Coruscant
Where the hell do you get all that maths from you nerd. A few problems though.
- The total estimated population for Coruscant is actually 3t.
- Coruscant is not 100% city. There are the polar ice caps, plus the Western Sea and Manarai Mountains.
- Even the parts that are city are not necessarily highly populated. Look at places like the Works and who knows how many more. A complete industrial area with very little population.
You have some interesting theories and statistics, but since not all the information we would like to have has been presented to us, they're are many other factors that could lead to a higher density. You're ideas will most likely remain an educated guess for a long amount of time. And an educated guess is, as it's name implies, still a guess. SoresuMakashi(Everything I tell you is a lie) 04:55, 19 October 2008 (UTC)
The tubes of the intarweb! It's straight Jr High algebra, really... and as that was over a decade ago, I had to dig some of the formulae up. Well, both of them. Used online calculators to get square footage and some of the harder conversions.
The Coruscant article says outright in several areas that the entire surface of the planet is urban; that probably needs to be stated better. Earth cities have "abandoned," industrial, and infrastructure areas. Maybe not to the same ratio, but certainly comparable. Even as an "educated guess" (as you put it; "painfully obvious simple math" as I put it), it's still far better than the "pulled out of my ass while stoned" canonical fudging of 3 trillion. Unless Coruscant is almost entirely uninhabited (75% uninhabited, with 3 trillion people) leads to a density of about 24,000/km², which is hitting Mumbai's density with a greater 3-dimensional cityspace than Mumbai has... but that's pretty sketchy too. It's possible though. Maybe most of the population is concentrated on the "outside" edges of the megalithic skyscrapers? That could illuminate the issue (and the planet, the way we see in pictures). --Sctn2labor 05:26, 19 October 2008 (UTC)
Blocked
You have been blocked from editing for one year because you are obviously bent on being disruptive, and my discretion tells me it's not worth keeping you around when I'd have to follow your every move. To contest this block, please contact the blocking administrator with the reason you believe the block is unjustified. Graestan(Talk) 12:29, 19 October 2008 (UTC)
- Yep, so not worth actually discussing things with. I would have been so disruptive during that year, considering I had nothing more to add for 6 months after the expiration. I've learned my lesson, yessiree. Sadly the lesson is that wiki admins have an inflated sense of the worth of their spare time, and that it's not worth challenging said preconceptions. Doubly so for Wookiepedia admins. --Sctn2labor 00:01, April 16, 2010 (UTC)