(Quite) Accurate Total NPC Population Numbers!

jasch

J
Hey everyone,

I just wanted to make a quick post about the total number of NPCs living in Elite Dangerous.
tl;dr: There are currently 6,612,313,733,791 NPCs as system population! That's it.

Longer version:
The number isn't completly accurate because it's based on eddb.io data, so it depends on when a system was last updated.
But I think it's reasonable to assume that it's somewhere around 6.612 trillion NPCs.

How I got that number:
Easy, just downloaded the data from eddb.io. Here are the bash commands I used (linux user here, so command line is my first way to solve problems).
Code: 
#!/bin/env bash
wget https://eddb.io/archive/v5/systems_populated.jsonl
cat systems_populated.jsonl | sed "s/.*\"population\"\://g;s/\,\".*//g" > popnum
awk '{ sum += $1 } END { print sum }' popnums

Credits:
Olivia Vespera - original idea, got me to calc the number
eddb.io - providing the data
community - filling eddb with data
 

Olivia Vespera

Olivia Vespera
This was a number I had always wanted to know. I knew it was in the trillions but now we know.


Some of the data in eddb.io could use an update though. There are 10s of pages with inhabited systems labelled with 0 population.

If you feel like exploring the bubble, this is an interesting place to start.
 

Bryan K

Bryan K
No wonder the Thargoids are showing up. Population control.

I'm amazed this can be calculated at all. Very impressive, OP.
 
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Nerwan

Nerwan
Wow, that's a lot of people!

P.s.

+1 For using sed and awk, code review failed for using cat when you could have passed the filename as a parameter to sed ;-)
 
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Bran Tse Mallory

Bran Tse Mallory
bootsam said:
(Yeah, its MATHS not math)
Click to expand...

Not an argument we need here... PvP v PvPer's is bad enough but never get the math people started on this! :D
(Both are considered correct in English)

6 Trillion is a huge number but I wonder what the average is per system taking into account the number of systems with only a station or those with multiple Earth-like inhabited worlds?
 

Nerwan

Nerwan
RandomGun said:
But everyone loves cats! And since six trillion(?) people have many cats there should be one in the script too. Yeah! Cat.
Click to expand...

I take your point, although I've always felt there should be a standard UNIX dog command.. It's just not fair ;-)
 

Snarfbuckle

S
So what's the population growth then?

If we assume a 1.02 growth rate per year as per estimated of 2018 and 7.5 billion and 1300 years of growth (counting from year 2000 to 3300)

(7.500.000.000 X 1.02%) X 1300 = 9.945.000.000.000

30% lower than estimated with current population rates.

Now, we can most likely add a NUMBER of factors to why the population has not grown in a linear fashion like the fact that today our birth rate has decreased slowly since the 1950's.
Unless disaster strikes and a large baby boom is needed it might just continue to decline a little as humanity spreads across space.

http://www.geohive.com/earth/his_history3.aspx

We can also assume that we have drops in birth rate even more due to the dangers of space travel and the danger of new worlds, bacteria and Thargoids.

- Loss of life during space travel
- Loss of life on new colonies
- General danger of the Elite universe (lots of ships getting blown up everyday)
- Galactic conflicts
 

jasch

J
Nerwan said:
Wow, that's a lot of people!

P.s.

+1 For using sed and awk, code review failed for using cat when you could have passed the filename as a parameter to sed ;-)
Click to expand...
Thing is that I didn't write out the sed in one go, so having the rule at the very end speeds up the editing of it ;)

bootsam said:
+1 for doing Maths in your spare time. :)

(Yeah, its MATHS not math)
Click to expand...
"spare time" it took me a few minutes, mostly because my bash foo is terrible. Much to learn I have.

dynamicbob said:
btw thats a static population it doesnt grow or shrink
Click to expand...
Actually, according to themroc from eddb.io, there have been changes in the population recently.
They know for sure that Archenar had a change. If it's only a one time thing or not isn't known yet.

Nerwan said:
I take your point, although I've always felt there should be a standard UNIX dog command.. It's just not fair ;-)
Click to expand...
Code: 
alias dog=cat
solved your issue ;)
 

Mechanist

Mechanist
Bryan K said:
No wonder the Thargoids are showing up. Population control.

I'm amazed this can be calculated at all. Very impressive, OP.
Click to expand...

Human population is still insufficient for harvest compared to total numbers of systems in the galaxy.
We wait.
You breed.
[alien]
 

S3B4ST13N

S
Olivia Vespera said:
I'm not quite sure. Look for a system with 0 population on EDDB.io and go there and find out if the upload resolves it.

Of note, there's a system with 1 single lonely person.
Click to expand...

Maybe he likes it that way?

I'll test tonight if EDDB uses EDDN.


EDIT: The good news is that EDDB uses EDDN. Which means station data/shipyard/commodity data can be updated.
The bad news? It doesn't seem to record population numbers, still checking the JSON file. [hehe]
 
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Sapyx

Sapyx
Well doe to the OP for extracting this data out of the available resources.

Nearly a year ago I made an attempt at guesstimating this figure, based on the population reports from Powerplay and extrapolating to include the non-Powerplay fringe territories. See this thread. My guesstimate was 5.9 trillion. With the actual figure at 6.6 trillion, it seems that the Fringe was larger and more populous than I had calculated.

Snarfbuckle said:
So what's the population growth then?

If we assume a 1.02 growth rate per year as per estimated of 2018 and 7.5 billion and 1300 years of growth (counting from year 2000 to 3300)

(7.500.000.000 X 1.02%) X 1300 = 9.945.000.000.000

30% lower than estimated with current population rates.

Now, we can most likely add a NUMBER of factors to why the population has not grown in a linear fashion like the fact that today our birth rate has decreased slowly since the 1950's.
Unless disaster strikes and a large baby boom is needed it might just continue to decline a little as humanity spreads across space.

http://www.geohive.com/earth/his_history3.aspx

We can also assume that we have drops in birth rate even more due to the dangers of space travel and the danger of new worlds, bacteria and Thargoids.

- Loss of life during space travel
- Loss of life on new colonies
- General danger of the Elite universe (lots of ships getting blown up everyday)
- Galactic conflicts
Click to expand...

I believe the primary fault with your calculations is the presumption of near-continuous growth. In the future history of the ED universe, this has not happened.

It is recorded in lore that the nuclear and biological weaponry deployed in WWIII (mid-21st century) exterminated the vast bulk of the human population, which was still at that time entirely confined to Earth itself. I don't think actual percentages or numbers of deaths have been given, but we can safely assume that the entire Human population in 2060 was less than a billion, probably even less than half a billion. All the ED lore books state is that the loss of life was "huge", the war "almost bringing extinction" to the human race, and that post-reconstruction Earth looked almost nothing like pre-war Earth "due to devastation and depopulation of nearly all the cities and towns".

Now, it's entirely possible that the only reason the lore-books say this was the sheer impracticality of modelling a photo-realistic Earth in a 1990 computer game, so the "war destroyed everything on Earth" scenario was given to explain why your hometown could not be found if you tried to fly there in your spaceship, or indeed why the only cities left on Earth appeared to be the six or seven starport-cities. But as far as I am aware, this particular piece of lore has not been redacted or retconnned.
 
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