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I think I remember the quote where Lorgar saw the Fall and felt the quintillions of Eldar die, but isn't that too much for the little patch of Galaxy they lived in?

darkoms wrote:
I think I remember the quote where Lorgar saw the Fall and felt the quintillions of Eldar die, but isn't that too much for the little patch of Galaxy they lived in?

Pretty sure they were all over the galaxy. And under it in the webway. What is now the eye of terror was just the center of their empire.

A lot of Aeldari. Like so many. Enough souls to satiate a God for about a week and give it enough of a power boost to destroy a Pantheon of Gods while also making itself exist throughout all of time and space.

darkoms wrote:
I think I remember the quote where Lorgar saw the Fall and felt the quintillions of Eldar die, but isn't that too much for the little patch of Galaxy they lived in?

Space is big, really big. Even a "little patch of the galaxy" is truly unfathomably massive.

The Eye of Terror was just the heart of their old empire, not necessarily the full extent of it. Plus when you have a species that has an extradimensional space like the Webway space isn't really a limiting factor.

With the advanced technology that they have/had their old planets could surely have sustained quintillions of Eldar. And who needs planets when you could just grow massive moon sized cityships in space out of wraithbone? Their empire could have kept increasing in population for many millions of years before they HAD to expand into the rest of the galaxy.

Speaking of which, does anyone have this quote? I can't remember where I saw it

Well.

It depends.

We’re at least told that The Eye of Terror formed around their heartlands. And it’s not exactly Galactic Core (though I suppose in such terms it’s closer to core than fringe).

But. Big old but. The sort of But history informs us Sir Mixalot was very fond of? We know the Eldar were dab hands at terraforming. And even terraforming probably doesn’t do their level of technology justice.

Now. If we look at our own, known, solar system? And apply necessary tech-wizardry to make them habitable, and sustainable?

Then accept the Eye of Terror itself is……bloody staggeringly huge. As in our brains really cannot process anything that big.

Quadrillions are entirely possible - because their technological achievement could well have rendered planet, planetoid, moon, and asteroid habitable, and had resources abundant enough to sustain such a population.

I know. I genuinely know we can’t properly process such achievements. But to snap us all back to real world? It’s really not that long ago that Powered Flight was the dream of absolute lunatics.

Look at how far we’ve come as a collective species in just the past 100 or so years. Gone from being entirely ground based, to powered flight, to Moon landings. Then the internet.

Now imagine such a species last for hundreds of thousands of years. If not millions of years. Getting so incredibly dangerous even Orks go and find a softer target?

Quadrillions are potentially a very conservative estimate of their numbers.

Hm. Okay, so google says that "quintillion" refers to either 10 to the 18th or 10 to the 30th. Either of which is well into, "Human brain not really grasp big number," territory. That said, space is enormous, and peak aeldari tech is absurd.

Given that aeldari were supposedly able to create entire suns, I think we can reasonably assume that they could terraform every last planetoid and moon within their territory if they were so inclined. The existence of the Eye does imply that their empire was concentrated towards the galactic northwest, but the presence of aeldari ruins seemingly everywhere across the galaxy suggests that there was at least some aeldari presence basically everywhere.

There are about 10 ^ 11th planets in the Milky Way. Multiply that by the current population of Earth, and you get 7.753 to the 20th... I think? But that's assuming:
A. 40k's Milky Way has a comparable number of planets to its real-world equivalent.
B. That the aeldari were living on literally all of them. Which seems very not true even if they did have some presence in most regions of space.
C. That aeldari planets had populations similar to Earth's. Which I doubt they did. Based on what we've seen of crone worlds and post/mid Fall aeldari societies, it seems like aeldari liked having some elbow room. Lots of wealthy noble types who liked having big, open views and a relatively small number of organic servants. (Remember that they had robots for most forms of labor.)

Plus, the location of the Eye suggests a strong skew in population density in that region. Even the theoretically planet-rich regions nearer to the galactic center didn't outmatch the population that presumably caused the Eye to be where it is. So we can be pretty confident that, even if every aeldari planet had 7.5 billion space elves living on it, the vast majority of aeldari-populated worlds were in the general vicinity of the Eye.

I think we can safely take the population of the webway out of the equation given that being in the webway seems to have (mostly) saved its inhabitants from dying from the shockwaves of Slaanesh's birth.

Which is all to say that Lorgar probably did not witness one quintillion eldar dying let alone multiple quinitllions. Maybe the mon-keigh just didn't realize how much brighter eldar souls are and assumed that each one was actually thousands or something?

Is this thread for real?

Isnt it cannon that the main difference between the RW and the 40K settings is that in the fictional 40k universe NOBODY understand maths?

Or is it that 40k lore writters and authors are mostly functional illiterates with regards to quantities bigger than 10?

Vatsetis wrote:
Is this thread for real?

Isnt it cannon that the main difference between the RW and the 40K settings is that in the fictional 40k universe NOBODY understand maths?

Or is it that 40k lore writters and authors are mostly functional illiterates with regards to quantities bigger than 10?

Yes, GW does just throw big numbers out there without thinking about what that means. But thanks to the absurd hugeness of space the ridiculous numbers they throw around are almost never implausible. If anything, the only numbers they throw that are implausible are the ones that are too small.

1 million being the rough canon number of space marines is a little too low for the scale of the setting, but it is what it is.


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 Wyldhunt wrote:
So we can be pretty confident that, even if every aeldari planet had 7.5 billion space elves living on it, the vast majority of aeldari-populated worlds were in the general vicinity of the Eye.

Which is why it is probably unreasonable to have Eldar population per world to be equivalent to a modern Earth as your baseline.

I think it is much better to assume the following when you have a galaxy spanning civilization,

The vast majority of their settled planets will have completely artificially crafted ecosystems. They were dead rocks before the Eldar came along. This translates to worlds being crafted in a way that maximizes their production output and overall usage of space. Earth could theoretically support many orders of magnitude more humans than 7.5 billion if it was used to maximum efficiency.

And at this stage of interplanetary society, you're not going to be above just crafting your own planets. If you can make stars, you can make planets. Just collect intersystem dust and condense it. Kardashev Scale 3 civilizations don't care about naturally occurring planets anymore. You just make your own.

Its certainly enough that there were 2 major civilisations that emerged from the Fall, with many minor settlements and a weird band of clowns to boot.

I like how you project human way of thinking on completely alien civilization. For all we know, their actual population was tiny. Who said they procreated like rabbits? For all we know, the government (or simply the fact you're really long living being with lots of stuff to do putting having children way down your list of priorities) kept the population on replacement levels and it had little to no growth. Hell, the fact they were around for 60 million years pretty much forces us to assume they had no population growth at all as even tiniest one would quickly covered all the planets in Milky Way in Eldar. Who says the entire population wasn't sterile (helps with having sex and debauchery all you want) and the procreation was done entirely in artificial wombs (pregnancy sucks, after all) outside of tiny, Amish-like groups?

 Gert wrote:
Its certainly enough that there were 2 major civilisations that emerged from the Fall, with many minor settlements and a weird band of clowns to boot.

Two 'major' civilizations aka a city and equivalent of a few cruise ships. That's like saying US base in Guam and a few cruise ships off Alaska constitute major human populations. Both Eldar groups are tiny compared to even a small stellar empire, and you don't really need big population to create those. Even if Eye of Terror was the entirety of Eldar state and it was really sparsely populated, even a small remnant of that would be more than enough for creation of 40K Eldar. People here really have no sense of scale.

Grey Templar wrote:

 Wyldhunt wrote:
So we can be pretty confident that, even if every aeldari planet had 7.5 billion space elves living on it, the vast majority of aeldari-populated worlds were in the general vicinity of the Eye.

Which is why it is probably unreasonable to have Eldar population per world to be equivalent to a modern Earth as your baseline.

I think it is much better to assume the following when you have a galaxy spanning civilization,

The vast majority of their settled planets will have completely artificially crafted ecosystems. They were dead rocks before the Eldar came along. This translates to worlds being crafted in a way that maximizes their production output and overall usage of space. Earth could theoretically support many orders of magnitude more humans than 7.5 billion if it was used to maximum efficiency.

And at this stage of interplanetary society, you're not going to be above just crafting your own planets. If you can make stars, you can make planets. Just collect intersystem dust and condense it. Kardashev Scale 3 civilizations don't care about naturally occurring planets anymore. You just make your own.

I don't doubt that the aeldari could have cranked out a ton of extra planets and filled them to the brim with new space elves; I just think there's evidence that they didn't. See: what Irbis said and what I said above about the location of the Eye of Terror and what we know about crone worlds. Basically, the aeldari population seems to have been concentrated near the eye, and there don't seem to be a ton of extra planets crammed together over there. Nor do crone worlds (even in the couple of pre-Fall scenes from the BL books) seem to be packed with people like an imperial hive city.

Irbis wrote:
Two 'major' civilizations aka a city and equivalent of a few cruise ships. That's like saying US base in Guam and a few cruise ships off Alaska constitute major human populations.

I agree with most of your post, but I'll nitpick this part a bit. The "city" of Commorragh (which granted has since absorbed a lot of other satellite realms) is absolutely enormous. Don't think hive world population; think D&D style alternate planes of existence. And similarly, craftworlds seem to be roughly comparable in size to like, continents? Or moons maybe? Maybe even actual planets? Which, yeah, is still tiny on a galactic scale, but I don't want to downplay their size too much.

Yeah, while Commorragh is small compared to what once was, it is still a pretty massive place. Calling it a city is misleading. The pocket contains multiple whole STARS that provide light and power.

Its size is never fully stated, but it has to be the size of several solar systems.


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 Wyldhunt wrote:

I don't doubt that the aeldari could have cranked out a ton of extra planets and filled them to the brim with new space elves; I just think there's evidence that they didn't. See: what Irbis said and what I said above about the location of the Eye of Terror and what we know about crone worlds. Basically, the aeldari population seems to have been concentrated near the eye, and there don't seem to be a ton of extra planets crammed together over there. Nor do crone worlds (even in the couple of pre-Fall scenes from the BL books) seem to be packed with people like an imperial hive city.

I haven't seen accurate astrological surveys of the Eye of Terror, so we can't say that there aren't tons of extra planets. Yes, that isn't proof, but you can't say there is a lot of evidence that there aren't lots of planets there. Remember, most of what was there is now firmly in the warp so its long gone.

And "extra" is relative. You wouldn't need to massively increase the number of planets such that space was choked with them. A few thousand extra wouldn't be very noticeable in the modern galaxy. Especially if most of them would have been flung into the warp.

 Grey Templar wrote:

Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Wyldhunt wrote:

I don't doubt that the aeldari could have cranked out a ton of extra planets and filled them to the brim with new space elves; I just think there's evidence that they didn't. See: what Irbis said and what I said above about the location of the Eye of Terror and what we know about crone worlds. Basically, the aeldari population seems to have been concentrated near the eye, and there don't seem to be a ton of extra planets crammed together over there. Nor do crone worlds (even in the couple of pre-Fall scenes from the BL books) seem to be packed with people like an imperial hive city.

I haven't seen accurate astrological surveys of the Eye of Terror, so we can't say that there aren't tons of extra planets.

Fair enough. But also, we've had a fair few stories set in and around the Eye at this point, and afaik, no one has felt the need to call out what an unusually high density of planets there are in that region of space. So with no strong evidence for an especially high or low density of planets, I'm inclined to assume it's a "normal" amount.

Yes, that isn't proof, but you can't say there is a lot of evidence that there aren't lots of planets there. Remember, most of what was there is now firmly in the warp so its long gone.

It's in the warp, but as far as I'm aware, most of those planets aren't "gone". You can still travel to crone worlds. Daemon primarchs and princes seem to like setting up shop on those planets because they're in that goldylocks zone of being real enough to not dissolve in shoggoth nonsense while also being so firmly drenched in unreality that the planet's owner can shape it to their liking. Is there lore suggesting that planets in the Eye got destroyed or something? I was under the impression that they (at least generally) had simply been drowned in warp juice.

And "extra" is relative. You wouldn't need to massively increase the number of planets such that space was choked with them. A few thousand extra wouldn't be very noticeable in the modern galaxy. Especially if most of them would have been flung into the warp.

Well, 5,000 planets with a population comparable to Earth's (which I feel is probably on the high side for aeldari for the reasons stated earlier) would be 37,500,000,000,000 extra space elves. Which Google tells me is 0.00375% of a quintillion. If you added 1,500,000 planets instead of 5,000, you'd be adding about 1/100th of a quintillion to the death count.

So I'm still pretty sure Lorgar probably wasn't watching multiple quintillions of eldar die.

Well, again, assuming an average of 7.5 billion is I think the mistake. I'd be much more inclined to go with hundreds of billions per world on average.

Even if Eldar want more "space" than a human would accept, the Eldar have spatial distortion technology. A house that only covers a few hundred square feet of real space could have thousands of square feet on the inside. Every Eldar could live in a mansion with the physical footprint of a tiny apartment. Other than actual outdoor spaces everything could be contained in spatial distortion fields.

Even humanity developed such things in the DAoT, and the Eldar surely had much more advanced versions.

Back in 1987 one million was a big number

Gav Thorpe of the small number camp, which I disagree with, had in one of his blog posts a far too low estimate of Eldar population for even one of the largest craftworlds:

My interpretation is that the largest craftworlds would have a population in the low millions and the smaller vessels in the thousands. A craftworld the size of Alaitoc has a living space larger than a typical Earth continent, with the majority of the population concentrated in habitat domes and a scattering of others across the ‘wilderness’ zones. This would equate to a small present-day city spread across an environment the size of North America. Perhaps the Path series doesn’t quite convey how massive some of the domes are and how much of a craftworld is virtually unihabited – like most conflicts, the majority of the human invasion is focussed on the populated areas. Hopefully the battle scenes in the forest dome, involving huge columns of tanks with flyers and titans in support, demonstrates that each dome could be considered a separate combat zone, each the equivalent of a country to be invaded and conquered.

These numbers are higher than those in the old quotes for the simple reason that craftworlds, at least the major ones, are considered to be on a par with many human worlds in terms of their military potential and the smaller numbers just don’t hold up to this. However, tens of millions of eldar seem to go against the whole point of them being a dying, numerically-challenged race, so a few million seems a good compromise.

Frankly even billions of Eldar is still a dying race compared to humans and orks. Alaitoc being the size of North America is something maybe that we can go with, but the population must be larger.

In the subsequent Iyanden supplement, billions are said to have fallen to the Tyranids, so the Eldar population count has been kicked up to the multiple billions for a single Craftworld.

Craftworlds are not cruise ships. They are probably the largest spacefaring vessels out there. Though armed, their primary function is civilian not military.

Craftwords also show that the pre-Fall eldar could build pretty damn impressive void structures.

It is quite likely a significant proportion of their population was not on planets directly, but in various orbital habitats and vessels built to meet their desired specifications.

As such, basing the population on the density of planets within the Eye of Terror region is probably not particularly helpful when they could build as many idyllic habitats as they like.

 Grey Templar wrote:
Well, again, assuming an average of 7.5 billion is I think the mistake. I'd be much more inclined to go with hundreds of billions per world on average.

Even if Eldar want more "space" than a human would accept, the Eldar have spatial distortion technology. A house that only covers a few hundred square feet of real space could have thousands of square feet on the inside. Every Eldar could live in a mansion with the physical footprint of a tiny apartment. Other than actual outdoor spaces everything could be contained in spatial distortion fields.

Even humanity developed such things in the DAoT, and the Eldar surely had much more advanced versions.

Again, I agree that they probably should be able to utilize space-bending technology and load their population to the gills. But what little information we have kind of suggests that they just didn't. First of all, I'm not aware of any evidence suggesting they had much motivation to jam a bunch of extra population onto a planet. They had robots for labor. They were increasingly self-absorbed as they approached the Fall. They surely had the tech to avoid pregnancy if they didn't want to be pregnant. If you're an aeldari noble setting things up on his new vacation world, you could probably set up the infrastructure (including space-distorting housing) to host hundreds of billions of servants; but why would you?

And also, while they should have the means to use space-distorting tech, it kind of seems like they just didn't? Like, you can't spend five minutes wandering around a necron facility without coming across something that's bigger on the inside. But with eldar? The only places we really get descriptions of space distorting phenomena are inside the webway. Drukhari have the tech to do some serious space distortion (like how they're basically stacking layers of bigger-on-the-inside areas on top of each other to hold back their current daemonic invasion problem), but again, that seems to only ever get used in the webway. I can't prove that aeldari don't use space distorting tech outside the webway because you can't prove a negative, but there is a conspicuous lack of evidence of them using it; especially compared to 'crons.

Don't get me wrong; amazing tech is amazing. Space is big. If they were so inclined, the aeldari could of had absolutely enormous populations even on a single planet. But while they hypothetically could have done all that, do we have any evidence that they actually did? Because everything I remember about pre-Fall aeldari kind of suggests they probably didn't.


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 Haighus wrote:
Craftwords also show that the pre-Fall eldar could build pretty damn impressive void structures.

It is quite likely a significant proportion of their population was not on planets directly, but in various orbital habitats and vessels built to meet their desired specifications.

As such, basing the population on the density of planets within the Eye of Terror region is probably not particularly helpful when they could build as many idyllic habitats as they like.

That's fair. If they were making extensive use of orbital or void habitats, it seems like we'd maybe have more examples of finding the ruins of such structures. But it does make sense that they would make use of such structures; especially given what (little) we know about craftworld construction.

Dont you see that the answer is not something that can be determine with any sort of precision... Just that "pre fall" Eldar population was much higher than in the 40K setting.

If you cant determine a number with a confidence of 2 degrees of magnitude, perhaps you are simply especulating.

 Wyldhunt wrote:
But while they hypothetically could have done all that, do we have any evidence that they actually did? Because everything I remember about pre-Fall aeldari kind of suggests they probably didn't.

Well, the evidence they did is the observation of "Quintillions of Eldar dying". Yes, it was through a warp vision, but that is about as close to an actual observation of the actual event outside of having been present.

Evidence that there never were quintillions of Eldar is non-existent(you can't prove a negative). There is no evidence that quintillions of Eldar didn't die. There is a lot of evidence that a LOT of Eldar did die. Numbers are unknown other than a claim by someone having a warp vision.

There isn't really any reason for the vision to be incorrect on that specific detail. No reason for exaggeration. No plot point hinges on the difference between trillions and quintillions.

So the evidence amounts to,

1) There was an ancient Type 3 Civilization called the Eldar.

2) The birth of a chaos god caused the destruction of 99% of this civilization's population and territory, leaving behind the Eye of Terror.

A dude is claiming to have seen in a warp vision that quintillions of Eldar died in this cataclysm. The Warp is confirmed magic, and can even allow for time travel. There is no reason for this information to be unreliable, no benefit to anyone for it to be untruthful or an exaggeration. It is certainly not impossible given the Eldar's level of technology and age, so there is nothing preventing them from having attained those population amounts.

So the simplest and most logical explanation is to believe the story unless we have something more reliable that contradicts it. Evidence that there definitely were never that many Eldar, like census records of the Prefall, OR evidence that someone is lying about that number for some reason.

There’s plenty of reason for the information to be unreliable: the individual relaying it is human (mostly) and as such simply not built to really understand the concept of “quintillions” of anything, so they could simply be mistaken. I mean, did he count them individually? Or was there a convenient “body count” HUD overlay on the vision?

Although it could be argued to be an outlier, the Crone World depicted in Path of the Outcast by Gav Thorpe, shows an entire palace world inhabited by only a few hundred Eldar at most. Basically an entire world covered in palace for an extended family. This extremely low density suggests that Eldar worlds never reached the teeming populations that Imperial hive worlds reached, though that Crone World could be argued to be an example of the excesses of the late pre-Fall Eldar.

 Mr_Rose wrote:
There’s plenty of reason for the information to be unreliable: the individual relaying it is human (mostly) and as such simply not built to really understand the concept of “quintillions” of anything, so they could simply be mistaken. I mean, did he count them individually? Or was there a convenient “body count” HUD overlay on the vision?

Psykers are explicitly more evolved humans, specifically mentally, which is what allows for psychic powers to exist at all. I expect that comes with a more innate understanding of things. The ability to grasp concepts that otherwise are unfathomable. Simple hard numbers are most understandable than the seething madness of the warp, but psykers at least somewhat comprehend the warp and it's chaotic nature.

He didn't see "Eldar beyond counting" die, as a more general observation might have been made, he saw "quintillions" die. It's a bit too specific for just being a random throwaway figure.

As the warp is indeed magic and timely wimey , maybe he saw the psychic echo of the death of all future Eldar that would now never live because of the death of 99% of all currently living eldar. Damn you Kurzgesagt and your interesting philosophical animations!

Visions are not reliable as they are subjective experiences, not narrator given omniscient viewpoint. For example, BA's have hallucinated they were Sanguinius and killed Horus before the Emperor even arrived, but clearly that was not the true course of events.

Warp visions are not reliable as anything from the warp can be influenced by the emotions and desires of living beings. That is why divination is not 100% accurate. Furthermore, just like Astropath messages are transmitted as images and allegory, not literal dry text messages, warp visions may not be the literal truth of what happened like a camera recording.

I don't think quintillions of eldar pre-fall is unreasonable.

Making some big assumptions and comparing to our current understanding of the Milky Way, the numbers seem to check out.
Assumption 1)
Quintillions of eldar, so I'll be conservative and assume a population of 2 quintillion Eldar (2x10^18 Eldar)

Assumption 2)
Each Eldar “world” across their empire has an average population of 5 billion (doesn’t seem unreasonable given the current population of earth.)

Assumption 3)
Our current estimate of sun-like stars in the milky way is accurate, and the 40k milky way is similar in composition. Around 7% of the milky way’s stars are thought to be sun-like, and there are an estimated 100-400 billion stars in the milky way. Assuming 200 billion stars, that would mean 14 billion sun-like stars.
https://www.space.com/habitable-planets-common-sunlike-stars-milky-way

Assumption 4)
The pre-fall technology level means Eldar likely have orbitals and population centres similar to craftworlds, so we don’t need to look at rocky planets for population centres, but can work with the number of sun-like stars instead for determining potential population. So 14 billion sun-like stars that could be used by Eldar to support populations.

So, 2x10^18 Eldar, with an average of 5 billion per major population centre, suggests 400,000,000 populations, or 2.9% of the 14 billion sun-like stars support an average population of 5 billion.

There's stories in the collected book of Eldar tales from BL that talk about whole worlds made into palaces for a single Eldar. Vast areas that would have had a population but a very sparse one.



Don't forget Eldar had machines to do their work for them, they had no need for your standard social structure of a lot of underlings for few upperclass. They most certainly still had that as not everyone was on top; but many menial and functional duties were handled by machine.

With long lifespans and no social pressure they could well have enjoyed very sparse populations across many worlds.


Thing is when you've an empire that spans a galaxy, even a very sparse population is still utterly massive.




That said the whole dying race aspect should not be missunderstood. All it means is that each year there are generally fewer Eldar than the year before. You can still have billions and more just that the number is always going down. Which for species at war and with a long lifespan but generally slower reproductive rate - that's a big concern.

It may not even necessarily just be their reproductive rate. Eldar could be having serious genetic bottleneck issues. Perhaps the Eldar who left and formed the Craftworlders, being such a small portion of the population, were more closely related than the Eldar population as a whole. And since there isn't much contact with the Dark Eldar neither population has much genetic interchange.

Especially with what little we know about Eldar reproduction. We know it requires multiple "couplings" which suggests they might need much more varied genetic variance to avoid inbreeding.

The impression I got is that who did and didn't get eaten by Slaanesh was very random. So I'd wager they shouldn't have a genetic bottleneck. Plus don't forget how long ago it was. Even with a slower reproductive rate they should have moved well past a genetic bottleneck unless something funky was going on.