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There must be at least 7x10 to the 18th. There are 2 billion earth like planets in our galaxy, Orks own most of the galactic territory, but they can live in any environment; so, they would probably be in mostly 'unearth' like planets. Even being conservative and saying Orks own 1 billion earth like planets, the Imperium would, lets say have 1 billion, attributing each of those planets with only 7 billion, which is incredibly conservative, as we all know how many people there are in hives, you'd still be looking at 7 quintillion citizens.

Lots. Many. Several. Synonym for Large Number.

Trying to work out the population like that is a futile effort because the error bars result in a number from 0 ala Hichhikers Guide to a bajillion.

We don't have even a rough estimation for the number of worlds the Imperium controls, has some semblance of control or even claims. Furthermore of the human populated planets they can range from less than half a million to several trillion.

Just down the page...

https://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/756197.page

The Imperium is said to have roughly 1 million planets, it’s established in the fluff.

How many people are on each planet on average is anyone’s guess. Sure, there are hive worlds, but there are also lots of agri worlds and feral worlds. I like to think it’s about 1 billion people per planet on average.

 BaconCatBug wrote:
Lots. Many. Several. Synonym for Large Number.

Trying to work out the population like that is a futile effort because the error bars result in a number from 0 ala Hichhikers Guide to a bajillion.

We don't have even a rough estimation for the number of worlds the Imperium controls, has some semblance of control or even claims. Furthermore of the human populated planets they can range from less than half a million to several trillion.

"Several. Synonym for Large Number." eh?

"Trying to work out the population like that is a futile effort because the error bars result in a number from 0 ala Hichhikers Guide to a bajillion." eh?

You can only work out the population by speculating using factors we know. Physicists didn't count the stars and planets in our galaxy, they calculated it by looking at a representative sample from a small part of our galaxy and calculated it with factors that we know.








Automatically Appended Next Post:

El Torro wrote:
The Imperium is said to have roughly 1 million planets, it’s established in the fluff.

How many people are on each planet on average is anyone’s guess. Sure, there are hive worlds, but there are also lots of agri worlds and feral worlds. I like to think it’s about 1 billion people per planet on average.

No way is it 1 billion per planet, that would mean a total population of 1 trillion and we know hive worlds can number a 100 billion and there is at least 30,000 hive worlds.

The imperium has been stated on several occasions as 'an empire of a million worlds'.

This is largely going to be for the sake of poetic license:
~ No-one knows exactly how many worlds the Imperium has
~ The number changes (up and down) constantly
~ It is probably only talking about "main worlds" with an imperial commander, not moons with auspex stations, minor mining colonies,etc.

However, it is a 'million' not "billion". Just because there are billions of worlds in the galaxy, doesn't mean the Imperium has found a warp route to them or settled them. The Imperium is spread out across the galaxy, but its sectors aren't continuous with one another.


Any meaningful estimate has to start with 'what proportion of those are hive worlds or forge world?'.

Agriworlds might have a few hundred million. Shrine worlds a few billion. The entire population of the rest of a subsector can vanish into the hundreds of billions on a major hive world.

The 'average' imperial world is not necessarily a hive world, but a randomly selected imperial citizen will almost inevitably be hive-born.

The 5th edition rulebook stated that there were ~ 32,380 catalogued hive worlds.

For the sake of simple maths, lets say that 100 billion is not an unreasonable average - most hive worlds mention either a tens of billions or hundreds of billions, so 100 billion is probably within a power of ten of the true average value.

Also note that GW is a UK company, and the imperium tends towards using older-than-contemporary language concepts, so probably considers a billion to be a million million (1 x 10^12) rather than the smaller 'US billion' of a thousand million (1 x 10^9) - note that Earth's population today would therefore be a fraction of a billion on this scale.

That means ~ 32,380 x 100 x 1,000,000,000,000 or something like 3.238 x 10 ^18 hive worlders.

Since the galaxy is dominated by the orks, I think that it would be the best to use their estimates for the imperial population.
"LOTS!!"

By the way, there are a lot of estimates on how many planets there are in our galaxy which vary from 800 billion to 3.2 trillion planets, but there are some experts who believe the number could be as high as eight trillion. Estimates for Earth-like planets are anywhere from 11 billion to 100 billion.

Grimdarking it up with the existential horror of the meekness of humanity.

 Flinty wrote:
Just down the page...

https://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/756197.page

Can I just point out again that this very subject has been discussed in great detail still on the front page

 Flinty wrote:

 Flinty wrote:
Just down the page...

https://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/756197.page

Can I just point out again that this very subject has been discussed in great detail still on the front page

Does that make you proud knowing that?