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Trantor is stated to have a population of “forty billions”.

I haven’t found any mention of Trantor’s surface area, but if we assume it is similar to Earth’s 510,065,623 km², then that means a mere 78 people per km², or less than one person per hectare.

Even if we assume reasonable losses of land area due to infrastructure, industry, offices, public spaces, etc., but notably no land for agriculture (Trantor was fed by the output of 20 other planets), this is nowhere near enough people to populate the crowded, multi-level, planet-wide city that Asimov describes. We’re off by several orders of magnitude.

I considered he might be using long scale billions (a million million), but references to there being about 50 million people in each of the 800 districts shows he was indeed using short scale billions (a thousand million).

Is this just a matter of Asimov having written the books in the 1950s, when the Earth’s population was only 2.5 billion (less than a third of today’s nearly 8 billion) and thinking 40 sounded like enough without actually doing the math?

StephenS
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    Re. "Is this just a matter of Asimov having written the books in the 1950s": To be precise, the number "40 billion" was first mentioned in "Dead Hand," written in 1944. – Ubik Dec 11 '21 at 16:10
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    Asimov's nearest referent for a megacity would have been Manhattan, which had a density of hundreds of people per hectare. It is unclear whether he did any calculations at all: if he assumed that population growth would level out at 40 billion, he would have had no reason to imagine a planet entirely covered in cities, and if he assumed that the planet were entirely covered in cities, the most trivial estimates would have shown 40 billion to be too small. – Adamant Dec 11 '21 at 16:21
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    Was the entire landmass covered or the entire planet? Big difference. – Valorum Dec 11 '21 at 17:44
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    @Valorum The entire planet was domed except for the Imperial Sector. Presumably that included the oceans. There was mention of tunneling under the continental shelf, which wouldn’t exist without oceans, but we don’t know what fraction of the surface was ocean to begin with. – StephenS Dec 11 '21 at 17:51
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    @StephenS - In that case 40Bn does seem very low. As compared to Coruscant's one trillion. – Valorum Dec 11 '21 at 17:55

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