They are still finding places where people have been stored in cold storage during the fall. So much effort was put into rescuing as many as people possible, that they've lost track of all the places that they have been stored. In addition, many stations were abandoned and many people died before the fall was over. For all you know, you might have a dozen people stored on your PC on a hab you died on during the fall, and was ultimately abandoned. And because of the way you died, you wouldn't know about it.

Ten years of Lack would be a heckuva SAN check.

The answer is: we just don't know. It's not a concrete figure given in the setting. Come up with your own figure that sounds about right and serves your purposes.

Also, another question is duplicates. Potentially, you could wind up farcasting to multiple places out of desperation, meaning that you might have 2B egos, but some of them might be in a number of cold stores (some could even be reinstantiated *and* in cold storage), or, better yet, you could have 1B unique egos and 1B all of one guy trying to be clever and make sure he survived the Fall. I kid, of course, but it'd be quite a twist.

Trappedinwikipedia wrote:

It's mentioned to be about a billion by someone in Sunward. Not sure if they're right though.

They're almost certainly wrong. EP core mentions that a little under 500 million survived the Fall, of which over 400 were infugees. About 20% of these remain as infugees, with half actively employed by the PC. This leaves at most 40 million in cold storage.

You know the only place that is probably having a positive pop growth is the Jovian Republic.

Quote:

That's going to be a colossal fuck-up in short order, creating more Flats in environments which are already toxic and microgravity. You're going to see a return of SIDS and infant mortality being a thing, plus, even best-case, it's going to be 15 years before any of those precious population +1s are old enough to do anything useful.

Well, there's a reason why Jovian military conscription begins at 15. Also, while not unexpected, I find it hilarious you think the Jovians are gonna have a majority flats born in bad conditions. Not only are the Jovians stated to have some of the best conventional medicine in the system (obviously, outpaced by more efficient nanomedicine, but still) but they're clearly okay with Splicers and exowombs. There's a jovian pregen who is a priest and a splicer. With cyberlimbs. I mean, people can spin the JR that way in an effort to build their perfect Space North Korea parody, but that really misses a lot of the Jovian ethos. Those babies are future rifle carriers who will be raised entirely in the culture - they probably get treated better than plenty of adults in Jove.

The Ultimate Guide to Combat, doesn't seem to think Jovian would be totally outmatched.

MrWigggles wrote:

The Ultimate Guide to Combat, doesn't seem to think Jovian would be totally outmatched.

Keep in mind that UGC, while written to conflict as little as possible, doesn't necessarily represent canon. The reason that the Jovians succeed is because they're more advanced than people give them credit for. They may be a junta with major social issues, but Mussolini made the trains run on time. Remember that things like gene therapy (splicers) are non-controverisal. The Roman Catholic church is in favor of modifying somatic cells, and the main reason they don't approve of germ cell modification is technological limitations and the fact that it is unknown. Given that in EP's timeline, it is safe, clean, and reliable, there's no reason to really believe that there isn't genefixing going on, especially considering the practical necessities of doing so in the Republic. In any case, any significant spacefaring battle comes down to practicality; the Jovians would likely be on the "losing" end of any conventional warfare, since they don't have the ability, on average, to breathe in vacuum or enjoy more extreme modifications to the human form. However, there's no reason why they can't remain competitive in terms of population and certainly they have a very good military if for no reason other than the fact that the Jovian Republic is an incarnation of the military-industrial complex, which places priority on military pursuits. Also, every major faction (probably even Firewall) has a number of big-rock weapons, both tactical and strategic. Most factions, Jovians included, probably have planet-killer weapons, or things that come close enough to planet-killers to be practical against a "small" planet like Mars or Venus. If nothing else, any sufficiently fast ship is a heckuva guided missile, and most factions have enough people who are fanatical enough to put together a crew for the mission (or program the ship to do the mission without human hands on board).

Trappedinwikipedia wrote:

Jovian use nano medicine, just limited to secured facilities, which drives up the cost. People assume they're waay more space-luddite than they are. Jovian troops use backups/cortical stacks and specialized combat frames/morphs. No one's infantry matters at all if a real war breaks out. A single rogue destroyer can wipe out transhuman civilization in the solar system. When the belligerents have access to thousands of tons of antimatter each, not much short of M/AM bombing, unrestricted seed AI, and RKKVs (even lame, barely relativistic ones) matters. It doesn't really matter how many Reapers you have when Mars gets rocked to its core by gigaton-scale bombardment. There's a very good reason none of the antimatter powers (PC, JR, TC, LLA (probably)) have gone to war with each other, it is MAD with several more OOM of firepower if they do.

There's also the fact that nobody has access to a big, resilient biosphere like Earth anymore unless you count gateworlds. And those can quickly be put in quite a pickle if the faction supporting them loses control of said gate. Probably the most resilient habs anyone has would be underground complexes on Mars, Luna, Titan, or a similarly large body, and even then one nuke in the wrong place would give those a very bad day simply because none of those places has a conventionally breathable atmosphere. Even without putting antimatter and RKVs into the equation, EP's humanity will be much more vulnerable to MAD than we are until they get one of their big rocks terraformed. Well, biological humanity at least. Breathable atmosphere isn't such a big deal for synths, so they don't care as much if you only leave them with half a planet or something like that. Edit: Actually, thinking about it, it's really only biological humanity that's in a tough spot in general in Eclipse Phase. Synths could just use cold storage to make a type of sleeper ship, where cold storage takes the place of stasis, load those up with colonists and CMs and launch them into deep space to make themselves extinction-proof. Sure a lot of ships probably wouldn't make it, and some colonies could get wiped out in their infancy by power struggles or hitchhiking Exsurgent virus, but they'd be very unlikely to lose *all* of the colony ships even if the resulting communities are so isolated that knowing another ship survived somewhere is cold comfort to the ones that failed. Space is a big place, send out enough sleeper ships and it's exceedingly unlikely that anything will get *all* of them no matter how determined it is.

I'm more just talking about the destruction of states than full extinction MAD. The solarians would last a while without the rest of the solar system, and a lot of deep rimward stations would probably never get shot at. Mushroom or one of its sister habs is probably the single hardest to destroy hab in the solar system. That said, terraforming won't help a lot, as a single decent sized warship can execute a more effective mass extinction event than the Dinosaur asteroid. Beyond that Justin Case and the Backups clique have made it nearly impossible to drive transhumanity completely extinct. It's worth noting that most life support systems don't rely on nanotech, so the Jovians aren't missing out on much besides the ease to expanding a Hamilton cylinder, but those are already super rare. Septic habs are also not solely a Jovian problem, a lot of LLA habs were recently, and parts of the martian cities can get pretty nasty. Basically everywhere with a large breathing population. There's probably a fair amount more egos left than are on the books, if you feel like digging through TITAN built uploading centers on Earth and the TQZ.