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How many Biomorphs are there on Mars?

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Thu, 2015-04-23 01:13

Justin In Oz Justin In Oz's picture

How many Biomorphs are there on Mars?

I know that the setting many times takes a literary path rather than be restricted to a hard core science realist path. For example I would say without doubt that Eclipse Phase is much more rooted in science realism than Traveller. One of the things which gets me is the incredible explosion of population and attendant infrastructure that Mars represents. Before the Fall, there were 4 million transhumans in/around Mars. I imagine that some died during the Fall. Now, 10 years on, there are 200 million. If this increase was linear, which I reject, there has been an increase of 20 million per year each year since. If it had an explosion which has now tailed off, it might have been 50 million a year for 4 years and then the fire hose was turned off. This is a possibility but would require someone(s) who wanted this and had the power to make it happen. More likely/natural is a production capacity with an increasing additional capacity added each year. I saw somewhere someone saying a biomorph takes three years to grow in a vat. So we have 2 things to model, the creation of morph generating infrastructure and the shaking and baking of morphs. I have tried to model this in the spreaddy attached to the post. I have taken the point of view that this is a monopoly at work. They are going to want to extract maximum wealth from the morph buying populace. They are going to make a morph for every price point. They will make them in quantities that the market can afford to buy up. They will also offer discounting to make sure they move. The thing I really like about this is that at year ten there are lots of clanking masses. I noticed that if the additional capacity simply increased year on year, the final state had very lumpy morph to market rates. They had a very uneven income stream. So I adjusted the capacity addition so that the morphs to market would be even when they stopped. This monopolist stranglehold, opens the door to black market morphs as a thing. Yay! I am asking this because I want to get a feel of where it has been and what direction the momentum is heading in. I do not want the setting to have sprung like Athena, fully grown and armoured, from inside the skull of Zeus. What happened 5 years ago, 2 years ago, and last year? All that being given, what is likely to happen next year? I know that the numbers I have come up with are much smaller than in the books but I find the output interesting and more in keeping with the unpleasantness of the company town.

Attachment	Size
Morph Prod Cap.xls	29.5 KB

Thu, 2015-04-23 02:23

UnitOmega

Well, I'm not a math or

Well, I'm not a math or economics guy, so there's a lot of points I can't comment on directly. But, for one thing, not all of Mars is biomorphs. Almost every major population center has something between a 10th and a 5th of its pop in Synths and Pods, sometimes separately, and these are much quicker to build. There's also a decent chunk of people per major pop center who are entirely disembodied. The other thing to consider is that Mars was not entirely settled by Re-Instantiated. Sure, there's a decent block of indentures on and off rotation (though many of them probably started as Synths/Pods or Infomorphs), but remember, population of Earth something like 120 years from now would be much much larger than Mars' paltry 200 mil. Let's say it was 10 billion. If 90% of those people died, you'd still have about a billion people left in fall evacuees, and the Hypercorps have gone to a lot of effort to resettle Mars as new Cradle of Man. And if all those people were in Rusters or Alpiners and could handle walking around on Mars, the massive cities constructed post-Fall wouldn't need giant pressure dome setups (not that the corps aren't pushing Rusters and the like on all the people coming out of indentures or who previously settled on Mars) Food for thought of people with better math brains.

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Thu, 2015-04-23 02:40

Pyrite

I agree that a big portion of

I agree that a big portion of the increase would be accounted for by earth refugees who made it out in their own bodies.

—

'No language is justly studied merely as an aid to other purposes. It will in fact better serve other purposes, philological or historical, when it is studied for love, for itself.' --J.R.R. Tolkien

Thu, 2015-04-23 02:48

jKaiser

Population figures in Eclipse

Population figures in Eclipse phase reflects egos, whether or not their sleeved physically (but not those in dead storage), so a significant portion of that population is made up of infugees. I believe a good portion of that population cited is also in Mars Orbit, not on the surface. Cases can be produced in a matter of hours, with modern manufacturing/nanofab access, so a tremendous number of those sleeved physically are in cheap synthetic morphs, both on and off world. If anything, the population on Mars/Mars Orbit is LESS than it was in the first few years after the Fall, since the rest of the system has been so much more developed to counteract the loss of Earth and after the opening of the Pandora Gates. 200 million after the 1X billion we had just ten years ago is a tiny, tiny amount of egocast and physically transported refugees. If anything, the numbers immediately post-Fall were probably "how many egos can we stuff in these servers without crashing the system?" and "how fast can we rig up bubbles on the ground or modular habs in orbit?" All said, I'd not be surprised if the final total post-Fall was closer to half a billion on the planet and in orbit similar to Unit Omega's estimate, with the remainder spreading throughout the system-as-was. Though it's late and I don't have the energy to do a lore crawl, so someone correct me on that if the books counteracted that somewhere. As for the numbers...well, aside from "as many as you need for your game," I'd say it's hard to say. Pre-Fall populations probably skewed toward Rusters and Alpiners, since Mars is very, very much still a hostile environment for baseline humanity and even transhumanity. A splicer's going to die quickly without protection on Mars. Which meant all those displaced bodies and egos that could be were put to work as fast as possible. With nanofabrication, you can build things fast (though not fast enough for those numbers, I admit). With a sizable portion of the population sleeved in synthmorphs, infrastructure costs go down in the short term anyway. Right now, I imagine that something like a little less than half the biomorph-sleeved population on the surface is in some variation of Ruster or Alpiner, reflecting the original population pre-Fall, almost as many are in cheap synthmorphs, and the remainder are mostly common splicers, pods, and other civil-model morphs of all sorts. Hard numbers are going to be very hard to come by since we have very few of those (and that's by design, I imagine, to facilitate flexible game possibilties)

Sun, 2015-04-26 05:40

macd21

jKaiser wrote:

jKaiser wrote:
If anything, the population on Mars/Mars Orbit is LESS than it was in the first few years after the Fall, since the rest of the system has been so much more developed to counteract the loss of Earth and after the opening of the Pandora Gates. 200 million after the 1X billion we had just ten years ago is a tiny, tiny amount of egocast and physically transported refugees. If anything, the numbers immediately post-Fall were probably "how many egos can we stuff in these servers without crashing the system?" and "how fast can we rig up bubbles on the ground or modular habs in orbit?" All said, I'd not be surprised if the final total post-Fall was closer to half a billion on the planet and in orbit similar to Unit Omega's estimate, with the remainder spreading throughout the system-as-was. Though it's late and I don't have the energy to do a lore crawl, so someone correct me on that if the books counteracted that somewhere.

I don't think this would be the case. Mars would have been filled to max capacity immediately after the fall, it's true, but that max is a very important limiter in this instance. Mars just wouldn't have the ability to take on endless streams of refugees, so many would be forced to go somewhere else (such as a the Jovian Republic). I think the Martian population would then have exploded over the next ten years as they rapidly expanded their capacity to house more egos.