the core book however does state that the birth rate is at an all time low, prefall earth was probly under heavy population control which is going to lead to a generation as thinned out as that of WW1

MrWigggles wrote:

Yea, I can see that transhuman places folks nearing the first century, as getting 'immortality blues'. But that doesn't make sense to me, as it seems to suggest that this is the first generation with digitized brains, that then also exploded across the entire solar system, even into the oort cloud. That doesn't make much sense to me. Just traveling out to rimward with fusion power ships would take multiple decades.

Voyager 2 only took 12 years to get to Neptune. I get the sense that a lot of people had been undergoing longevity treatments to live into their 100s by the time the ego bridge became available, and then that technology allowed the old oligarchs to stave off death inevitably. I feel like the ego bridge has been around for less than a century, so the very oldest people are getting close to their second century.

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Nother reason why I dont buy into this being the first generation of egos and stuff, is that having the body you were gestated with, (barring bioconserative), seems unheard of, maybe even uncouth. And the ubiquity of cortical stacks and egocasting, to me, suggests that its been at least a generation of everyone growing up with them. And almost no one gets preggers now. The books never say so, but it implies that the death rate has over taken the birth rate since pregnancy has been soo rare.

It's definitely been at least a generation or two, but that's only about 50 years.

MrWigggles wrote:

. . .then also exploded across the entire solar system, even into the oort cloud. That doesn't make much sense to me. Just traveling out to rimward with fusion power ships would take multiple decades. . .

The furthest habitats in the EP universe are about 3000 AU and at the very inner age of the Oort cloud. A fusion powered ship with a specific impulse of 100,000 (we are never given specific impulse information for the engine's in EP but 100k is a reasonable estimate) could reach those destination in a bit over 23 years if they had 75% of their mass devoted to fuel (again, a pretty reasonable estimate) and accelerated/decelerated at .05G. If you increase the fuel to 90% of the ship's mass (probably a more realistic estimate, all things considered) it would only take a hair over 14 years (14 years, 25 days, 9 hours, 9 minutes, 39 seconds). At 95% it would be under 11 years. These figures are probably granting an overly high safety margin. They assume that the ships only use 90% of their available fuel (45% accelerating and 45% decelerating). The 95% ship could shave about half a year off their trip (it would still take over 10 years) if they only leave themselves a 5% cushion instead of 10%.

Meathab is in orbit around Saturn which is considerably closer than the Oort cloud. A fusion rocket with only 50% of its mass devoted to fuel would take a mere 2 months to get to Saturn. As for the time to build something like Meathab nanofabrication probably means that the largest time factor was boosting the raw materials out to orbit. The single greatest problem would probably be getting enough Carbon out there with methane from Titan and Enceladus probably being the best sources. Hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen would be available in abundance from water and methane. Phosphorus and sulfur along with many of the trace elements could be sent from the inner system without too much difficulty. Would this be a multi-year effort? Probably. Especially to get it to its current size (which is probably smaller than you think. Its population is only 500). However "Belt and Titan colonized. Stations established throughout the system" is listed as occurring between 30-50 years ago in the timeline so that's not that hard to believe.

Actually, nanofabrication only becomes prominent from BF20-0 so it may not have been used on a lot of the habs (although Meathab is much more recent and I'm sure in its case it was). Still, the basic principles remain. Rather than shipping entire habs out to their ultimate destinations in many cases they probably shipped a 'core' consisting of a power supply and some critical infrastructure components. From there robots would gather and refine materials from available resources and construct the rest of the hab in situ (even with nanofabrication it is probably more efficient to build a deckplate using more conventional methods of refining ore and forming the plates than it is to nanofabricate them).

consumerdestroyer wrote:

I think age ranges is one of those things you can find an argument for in the Fall no matter how, as a GM, you want the age range to fall. Did a lot of hip young kids with the scratch or pull to do it get off world because they knew the mind uploading score? Was it a transhumanity top-heavy with well-connected, rich old farts that were able to flee successfully from the TITANs? Both have a tale you can tell with the material in the books, and personally I think the average age of transhumanity (if you're including uplifts and AGI) is probably quite low, maybe around mid-30s? Take out the uplifts and AGI skewing everything lower and I still don't think it'd be out of the 40s. But that's just my game.

Same opinion here. We can figure out that many parents made sacrifice for their children first due to limited slots for infugee and I think many case & synth for example are run by teenager or 20s. That's the way I play : a young transhumanity. I think the "immortality blues" does not come with years (like a vampire of an elf in other rpg) but more with these new ways of life where with minimum work you can spend almost all your time in accelerated simulspace doing nothing, meshing, playing MMORPG and remembering about Earth. Many people (40s and after) couldn't find a real challenge in this new life, specially if the majority of other people around are young and barely remember how was the life on earth.

Yes : "naiveté" of transhumanity is a key point. I mean, when you read the novels/reports in all EP books, specially those from sentinel agents, the majority of transhuman seems young, even childish and naive. The way Firewall looks at the transhumanity is somewhat very condescending, IMO. The time counter was resetted, EP takes place in "10 AF", not in "AD 2130". Okay it's a convenient way for the game designers to not to be too specific about the timeline but IMO it is also a way to say : the solar system has new societies/factions/polities and new ways of life, it's a "brave new world" to conquer and I love that vision. So it implies a young and naive transhumanity with its flaws but also with its energy for thriving and its thinking "out of the box". So imagine you're a 40s or a 50s and you have lost everything (even your body), you knew Earth and now you have to live in this strange new world with new economic, new rep, new environment, you gonna get these "immortality blues". I find theses two opposing POV very interesting and challenging to play. (I hope I am enough clear in my explanations with my poor english)

"When you think about it, psychosurgical permatorture is a form of immortality." -an exhuman probably

According the pg. 276 "cloned biomorphs take at least a year and a half". While a three year timeframe isn't in absolute disagreement with the statement the impression I always had was that a year and a half was a reasonable approximation with longer cases running to two or even two and a half years, but those would be special exceptions. Is there a source you're drawing on for the three year figure? Also, sleeving infomorphs wouldn't cause a population explosion. Infomorphs are regarded as part of the population throughout most of the system. There's debate about AGIs in some places but the vast majority of the system doesn't make any difference between body and no body as to whether or not you're a 'person'.

Whoops :P I'm not sure where I had one year from for physical development. Replace that with "Two years" :D. As for mental development... well, no one said they had to be stable. If you wanted sane egos, you should have put that in the design brief :P More seriously, it's unclear why exactly the Lost went bonkers, and from a certain point of view it worked... they are fully developed adult egos, albeit with a couple of foibles and eccentricities. And Mind Powers.

As far as the actual ego age, it's going to be screwy and continue to be so. From the absolute metric of the human evacuation of Earth, you're going to have to think about *how* someone survived, their relative base population, and where they ended up. Original Space Colonists and their ilk are going to be comparatively low in their base population, but monstrously high in their core survival rates. With the exception of a few habitats and lunar/martian settlements, the great diaspora protected the vast majority of the settler breeds. I'm talking at least an 80% survival rate; at the same time, their base population is more likely to be measured in the m-Millions than the b-Billions. This also means you'd likely have a tendency towards the higher end of the age spectrum, based off of the age of majority plus the time difference between the Fall and the start of the space colonization push. Also, spacers adopted new tech faster, especially including backups and cortical stacks. Your bell curve is less likely to be changed based on attrition than simply "who was willing to go to space". On Earth, there were populations in the billions if not trillions. That means a whole helluva lot of people. That also means that they were bottlenecked getting out, and you are going to have a survival rate, charitably, at 30% (I would guess closer to '3' would be accurate). That means it is still likely that Terran-native egos are the majority of the absolute value of population, but with the culling OSC's are now a significant core population. Of that, you would have to break it down along a basis of cultural, economic, and escape-methodological differences. The lowest SES economies and the hardest hit initial targets will have the highest relative population loss. I expect China was among the hardest hit, but continental Africa, significant portions of South America, most of Russia, India, and anyone not evacuated from the core regions of Australia would be wiped out, and only exclude the wealthiest or most closely resident 20%. Africa has access to a space elevator, but even with the inherent advantages of physical evacuation, you're still in trouble. So by extension, we can guess that a fair portion of the population will be of European or Asian breedstock, with other phenotypes better represented by subcultures that adapted to the European metaculture. Unfortunately, I'm fairly certain that the most affected cultures would be nearly wiped out by AF-0, or at least melded to the point where there is no significant difference by town, nation or locality. Simply put, I expect "Texan" to mean something in AF10 (even if only on Luna), but "Columbian" would not - or at least it would be so jumbled with Venezuelan, Costa Rican, Guatemalan, etc to be unrecognizeable to its progenitors. So then we have evacuation methods. As far as actually getting off of Earth, there are 2 major methods - physically and egocasted. Egocasting would be the method of choice for the middle class, the poor, and anyone who is not logistically near enough to lifting stations to be able to use them. Fortunately, egocasting is also simpler, faster, and more economical. You could have en-masse migrations off-world, and barring the odd comms mishap, the only thing that can endanger an egocast expedition is the data being sent to a facility that is itself destroyed. Otherwise, you are talking hundreds of people a day until the facility is overrun. This also means there will be less preselection based on age or skill. You will have more of your standard bell-curve of population distribution, where the mean will be your new cultural "middle age" (my guess would be between 40-60); the only exceptions would be the unborn and the excessively aged with concurrent mental problems (I highly doubt a broadcasting station would waste emergency time on someone with alzheimers or dementia). While they would be more numerous, we already know that there is a vast difference between the number of infomorphs and actual morphs, and we also know a significant number of them ended up in cold storage. This would mean that, while you have your standard bell curve, a lot of them (especially the younger and egregiously older egos) would be very likely to end up in cold storage because they are less useful. This skews your population count a bit. As for physical lifts, you have 2 sub-options - ground based liftoff and orbital elevators. In either case, physical escape is obscenely risky - while egocasting could lose maybe up to 10% of the total evacuated population, physical evac was slaughtered. This means your likely subset of the human population would be given at best 50/50 odds. On the plus side, those that do make it would have a morph and therefore be least likely to go into cold storage - meaning that those who survive would age (relatively) normally. Best guess says that the very richest would evacuate physically when they could - say the top 5-10% of humanity. The upper-middle class would be next, with some of the lower classes possibly thrown in as well. As far as the middle class is concerned, age is the enemy. That means that you will have a strong bias towards either the extremely qualified (through money or merit), or the young. I would put my mean at 20 - you are going to have a lot of child liftoffs, middle aged tactical assets, scientific/industrial assets, and the oldest would either be the very richest or the very best humanity has to offer. So with those heuristics in place, in AF10 we can estimate that the vast majority of people over 70 were in space in the first place, were very very rich, or very very good (say 1% of Earth's population). You will also have a significant number of 60~90 year old egos in cold storage, never aging and skewing your distribution. The majority of your active survivors will be from the 30-50 age range as consumnate professionals who escaped the earth on a combination of their own merits and extraordinairy luck (or being valuable by rights of uniqueness, like uplifted whales). Your children of the fall will be in their teens and 20's (or in cold storage) - anyone too young to mount a cortical stack would probably not be egocasted nor survive escape velocity. Birth rate is low, so we can now see a very strong biased bell curve in favor of 30-50 with a steep falloff at around 70.