Quote Originally Posted by Kalmageddon View Post
Hey folks, I need a bit of help for my latest campaign.
Basically the question is this. A colony is founded with 500 colonists, all in their mid-twenties, 50 years later I need to figure out how much the population has realistically grown.
Suppose mortality and average life span comparable to that of a today's first world country and that there are a lot of incentives to make babies.
Several questions before I try an answer on this:
1) What's your starting sex ratio? If you start out with something like a 4:1 female to male ratio, you'll get a lot more kids faster.
2) What are the conditions this colony exists in? Even with a lot of incentives to reproduce, you'll get fewer kids if simple survival is difficult. Unless you have near-unlimited resources, the burden of feeding and caring for small children, expanding housing/farming areas, and so on is going to be a limiting factor in how fast the population can grow.
3) Related to the previous question, is this a theoretical question (in which case it's just a math problem), or are we imagining an actual colony trying to eke out a living?
4) Any objection to future generations starting young? If your second generation starts as soon as the first one hits puberty (or just a few years after), you'll grow a lot faster than if you wait until they're in their twenties.