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Interstellar Migration

daryen

SOC-14 1K
Take a "degenerating" setting like TNE (either) or Hard Times (or, for that matter, the Long Night or the Darrian Maghiz). In such a setting there is frequent collapse of world systems, and several worlds slowly become uninhabitable.

If you take published UWPs as printed, you find that most of the population simply survives or dies in place. No one, it would seem, is inclined to escape from their threatened (or even doomed) planet and go somewhere else. Like maybe someplace they can breath the air. Or maybe at least has air.

I fully understand that many times the populace doesn't have a choice. If Virus comes into your archology, takes over all the systems and shuts down, you're screwed. Or if one of Lucan's fleets decides you are an inconvenient hi-pop world, you're dead. Or if the starships are all gone, you have no way off. I am not asking about these.

Most of the time the collapse is (relatively) slow, with a lot of time to react. In such cases, it would seem to me that there should be frequent migration, and I don't see why any LoPop hostile world would have anyone left on it (except, of course for some too stubborn or too greedy to let go). It would seem to me that all LoPop worlds can be evacuated, if the desire and opportunity is there. Is that reasonable? Or am I missing something?

The follow on to that is, what would the human "throughput" be? Let's take the extreme example of Entrope and Winston in the Spinward Marches. Let's assume that there is an organized effort to evacuate the 10+ billion citizenry of Entrope to Winston. Could it be done? How long would it take? Could it even be attempted? Or is there just so many of them that they have a better chance at survival by trying to keep things running on Entrope than they do surviving the J1 trip and rebuilding?
 
How much ship tonnage is required to transport all of those people?
How many people can afford the ticket price or is there some Imperial contingency fund to pay for it?
Who maintains law and order for an orderly evacuation?
 
Originally posted by Sigg Oddra:
How much ship tonnage is required to transport all of those people?
Actually, that is part of my question.
How many people can afford the ticket price or is there some Imperial contingency fund to pay for it?
I am not worried about price. Yes, it should be an issue, but I am more worried about the logistical questions first.
Who maintains law and order for an orderly evacuation?
Good question. Let's just assume it is being provided, but the issue of what can be controlled is quite relevant.

For example, in the situation of evacuating a few thousand people, security is probably not a huge problem. But maintaining order over the migration of a million people is a problem. My question around that is can it even be managed at all past a certain number? And if not, what is that number?
 
Thing is, jump takes a week, no matter what. You could cram as many people as can fit standing into a ship's cargo bay (eg about 1.5 cubic metres?), but they're not travelling for a few hours, they're going to be travelling for seven days. And then they'll need food for the trip. And then the waste and air recycling systems of the ship will be vastly overtaxed. The conditions will be atrocious, and fatality will be high (and that brings its own problems).

So if you actually want anyone to be alive at the other end when the ship comes out of jumpspace, you'll probably only be able to cart a relatively small number of people per ship.

Thing is, in a refugee exodus situation, more often than not you don't have time to prepare the ship so that it can safely carry as many people as it can potentially carry. So you end up with cases like refugees in Africa who try to get from one country to another in ships that can't possibly handle them, and massive amounts of death and disease on the ship as a result. There have been one or two of those in the past few months in the news, IIRC.
 
Can we cram as many as possible into emergency low berths I wonder?
Looking at the standard Traveller merchant shipping this could be a problem - not many of them are equiped with them, and fitting them could take some time, assuming you can find a stockpile of a few thousand.
Subsidised Liners and Fat Traders could carry 76 +20 in low berth and 47 +9 in low berth respectively. That's assuming 4 to a stateroom. The Tukera 1000t Liner may accomodate more, but I've only got MT stats for it.
It would probably have to be military transports, the ones that can carry tens of thousands of troops plus their equipment.
I'll check the troop transport capacity of the ships in FFW if that will help.
 
Err... 10 billion +? To evacuate the ENTIRE population? There are 31 million seconds in a year. A hundred years or so to get to a billion seconds. Multiply by 10 to get to ten billion seconds. That's about 1000 years. How long would it take to process one citizen to be able to leave. A day? An hour? 10 minutes? How many can be processed SIMULTANEOUSLY (i.e how many ships can you have at the planet)? 100? 1000? 10000? How much traffic does just one high port see in a day?

Let's assume one citizen per ship per 5 minutes and assume 1000 ships can load people at one time. That's 1000 people every 5 minutes. 12000 per hour. 288000 in a day. 105 million in a year. You'd reach the 1 billion mark in 10 years assuming you can keep people constantly moving, no setbacks, ships keep arriving, no more births, etc... (unless my age-adled mind is deceiving me and 1000 million isn't 1 billion - if 1 billion in Traveller is 1 million million, then multiply that 1 billion mark by another 1000 - i.e 10,000 years to reach the 1 billion citizens mark - but I think 1 million million is 1 trillion, right?)

I think it would take the resources of the ENTIRE Imperium to evacuate a 10 billion+ planet in any short time period. 1 billion is an astronomical number all on it's own. Almost incomprehensible. I seriously doubt that the Imperium has 1 billion ships in its entirety.

Sorry if that doesn't help much, but I'm sure it does put things in a more understandable perspective.

Scout
 
That's a nice thought experiment, tho. My mind is still working on it.

Ok, let's assume you only have 1 year to evacuate. A star goes nova a light year or so away. The planet would be irradiated and everyone would die unless they leave. You'd have to get about 27 million people off the planet per day every day for 365 days. Let's say you have ships that can hold 1000 people. You would need 27,397 ships total (or a combination of ones that could leave and come back). If they can only hold 100 people you'd need 273,972 ships. And you would need the resources of an ENTIRE planet to feed them.

Then where would they go? If they just go to the next system over, that planet gets flooded with people. Economic devestation as well as most likely overpowering the food processing ability of the destination planet.

No, they would need to be spread out over a number of star systems. 1000 star systems accepting a million refugees EACH might be a manageable number. So you'd need to have food to feed them not only for that first jump, but until they get to their destination. I'd say it would probably take about a year for the first ship just to get to the farthest destination point.

You'd be better off holding a lottery for people that could leave. Or building a physical planetary shield in orbit in the quadrant that the radiation would be coming from.

Uggg... the mind can't process the complexity,

Scout
 
I'm sorry - that's 27,397 ships PER DAY if they hold 1000 people in each ship. Multiply 365 days. That's about 10 million ships - IF they can only hold 1000 people. If the ships can hold 10,000 people in each, that's about 1 million ships. I don't think the Imperium would have the ability to do this.

Oh, and it's only 317 years to get to 10 billion seconds.

GOOD GOD!

daryen, I'm going to be sitting up in bed at 4:37a.m. still thinking about this...

I need a drink,

Scout
 
This makes me wonder if there is any Imperial analogue to FEMA. If so, I would expect they would be administered on both the sector and subsector levels.
I would imagine such a body would keep on hand several scores of "people-movers". Massively-hulled low-jump ships (with or without maneuver drives), that are simply vast, empty container-carriers. Fitted with the proper habitation modules (say, adapted modular cutter mods...), they could fit tens of thousands of people in either cramped quarters or low berths.
I haven't done any of the math on this idea...or even given much thought to the design of such a ship. That might be a good challenge for the next ship-design competition.
 
A 50,000 person planetary evac ship loading one person every 20 minutes would be full in about 90 days - 'round the clock loading, tho. How much crew would this need? 8 hour shifts - three shifts a day. Flight and engineering crew for a ship of it's size. Medical and processing crew, and security. I'd make it jump-2 or jump-4. Can you build a STREAMLINED ship that can hold 50,000 people? If it's not streamlined, it can't land in atmosphere, right? I'd say put everyone in low berths. How long can someone stay in low berth? The Imperium would need about 200,000 of these evac-type ships to get the 10 billion population off planet. 50,000 ships on planet at any one time - lift off every three months. Now those are some better manageable numbers. It's still pretty astounding.

The FTL 2448 game had an Emergency Medicine and Rescue Corps as one of the player character types - I always thought that would work well in Traveller. I think there's a niche in Traveller that hasn't really been covered.

Hopefully not going to still be thinking about this in the middle of the night,

Scout
 
Sir Toth,

I hope it doesn't keep you up, either. I didn't mean to do that.

I'm just trying to get a handle on what type of migration is feasible.

It would seem that pop 1-4 can pretty much be done in short order, as long as the population and the movers are motivated.

It would seem that pop 5 is possible, but would require dedicated effort.

Pop 6 might be doable, but it would take time, planning, and possibly specialized ships.

Pop 7 and higher just isn't even conceivable. It is better (from the interstellar government's perspective) to just let the populace try and survive in place than to try and relocate them.
 
Oh, I'm ok. My mind was reeling for a while there, tho. I think it was after I realized that Earth has 6 billion people on it, and I tried to comprehend what it would be like to evacuate the planet Earth. It was very sobering. The sheer number of people to be processed is staggering. The time and resources needed to evac that many people just wouldn't be possible in any kind of immediate emergency. Now if a colony is in long-term danger of a natural occurance destroying the populace...

No! I have to stop thinking about it!

But, you did help me with an idea I've been working on for a Star Wars game where the Jedi have to help evacuate a planet. Interesting mental visuals with ground quakes and now giant ships lifting off in the background. I never thought about HOW to do it before.

Later,

Scout
 
This is an interesting question, and I'm keeping tabs on this thread. It's come up a few times in some of the things I've got on the backburner...

As for big ships... they'd land on water, I'd bet. The ground couldn't take them (unless they used grav to hover or something).
 
The outer hull would be lined with processing stations, and medical robots to lead the people to their low berths, probably. I think you are right, Malenfant, just finding a flat spot to land one of these monsters would be hard.

Later,

Scout
 
How much power would all those Low Berths require? I forget how powerhungry those things are.

Plus, aren't the chances of waking up in one piece from those a little bit on the low side? If you're talking about shipping millions of people in them, won't you have a huge mortality rate (not as bad as everyone dying in the disaster admittedly, but still...)?
 
Originally posted by Sir Dameon Toth:
Ok, let's assume you only have 1 year to evacuate. A star goes nova a light year or so away. The planet would be irradiated and everyone would die unless they leave...
Just as an aside, there can be no surprise novas that close - unless some really powerful bad guys find a way to induce novas artificially.

Hmmm...
 
Originally posted by Malenfant:
How much power would all those Low Berths require? I forget how powerhungry those things are.
The agent of choice for keeping people alive while stacked like cordwood is Fast Drug. It's expensive, but on the same order of magnitude as a low passage (and far cheaper than refitting a ship with low berths). And it makes it possible to stack people at 7-10 (depending on your assumptions) to the dT.


Hans
 
Originally posted by Sir Dameon Toth:
You'd be better off holding a lottery for people that could leave.Scout
Murray Leinster's The Grandfathers' War ( http://www.webscription.net/10.1125/Baen/0743435559/0743435559.htm (see chapter 32+)) features a society that detected instabilities in their sun. It was impossible to predict just when it would blow. It could blow up any minute or it could last for some years. The story tells of how they decided who to evacuate first.


Hans
 
Originally posted by rancke:
The agent of choice for keeping people alive while stacked like cordwood is Fast Drug. It's expensive, but on the same order of magnitude as a low passage (and far cheaper than refitting a ship with low berths). And it makes it possible to stack people at 7-10 (depending on your assumptions) to the dT.
[/QB]
Might work... they'd still need some life support though wouldn't they? And would you really just toss piles of people on top of eachother even if they're effectively hibernating?
 
Originally posted by Malenfant:
</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by rancke:
The agent of choice for keeping people alive while stacked like cordwood is Fast Drug.
Might work... they'd still need some life support though wouldn't they? And would you really just toss piles of people on top of each other even if they're effectively hibernating? [/QB]</font>[/QUOTE]They'd need 1/30th of normal life support. You might have to install some additional equipment into freighters (large holds and few crewmembers), but passenger ships should be all right. And in any case you'd need to install much less than you would otherwise have to.

I wouldn't really stack them like cordwood (I think you'd be able to get more than 10 into a dT if you did). I'd install some utterly primitive bunks. An 8 day trip under fast drug would be the equivalent of a 6.4 hour sleep, so you wouldn't have to worry about bed sores and the like.


Hans
 
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