Ok, I was going over some SR history and I'm starting to realize that part of my mental image is wrong. I tend to think of this place that is so crammed full of people that they are fighting over every resource and there are so many humans that life is cheap, but the fluff paints a different picture.

VITAS took out 25% of the worlds population. That's 1 in 4 people just gone.
Great Ghost Dance had to kill a ton of people in the West.
VITAS again that took another 10% of the remaining population. That's @32.5% of the total world population dead so far.
The First Crash. No real numbers here, but it was global.
The Cermak Blast and Bug city. Kiss Chicago goodbye.
The Quakes. Kiss most the people in LA and NYC goodbye. (So far that's 3 of the 10 largest American cities wiped out.)
Crash 2.0 no real numbers but people talk about it being in the millions.

That's not including the "smaller" events like
The Night of Rage.
Deus (kiss 100,000 people in Seattle goodbye).
Any of the wars.

Does this mean that everyone run to the cities during the plagues and crashes (stupid thing to do when cities are falling into oceans or getting nuked) and that the countryside is pretty much barren?

Can't really think of how to shape the world I'm building with the facts I have.

My take on it is that people are crammed in cities. Some of the countryside is inhabitable because of past disasters or because of the pollution from nearby corp factories and what's left is just filled with fully automated farms.

Neither Chicago nor LA oder NYC had been totally destroyed.

And you need to keep in mind that humans and escpecially orks are a fast-breeding lot (the latter with 2 or 3 kids per birth often), what would bring up the worlds population to old numbers quickly.

I consider losing 50% or more of your population and most your infrastructure destroyed. And yes they did rebuild LA and NYC, but the death toll was of the charts. Millions of people for each disaster.

And 60 years later is only 3 generation (5-6 for orks). Still not enough time to repopulate after disasters of that magnitude. Besides, I can't picture 1/3 of the world population being orks. I guess that is what Humanis is selling "They will out breed us and we will be there slaves!!!"

Not sure how much pollution there is out in the NAN.

But I like the image of massive automated industrial plants and farms laying waste to the countryside.

Easy... in the next X years the populations grows, then some dies, and if you just think of the population as having grown enough in the meantime to have the difference killed off, your good. Don't forget the effects of population redistribution, with the still ongoing movement of population from agrarian to sub/urban areas, you can actually have a decrease in total population with overcrowding at the same time. And keep in mind that the PCs are in one place, what matters are the populations conditions at that spot. The fact that there is one person per thousand square miles/kilometers in the countryside doesn't matter when you are in a 10,000 per square density area.

I've always gone with the assumption that the population numbers in SR (outside of the barrens) are about the same as they as they are in real life. The explosive population growth of humanity has been "balanced" by all the horrific death. This is good for the game for two reasons: It contributes to the dystopian feel, and it makes imagining aspects of the world easier since the pop. numbers are about the same.

I have always run it that the majority of people are crammed into the big cities / sprawls, with lots of open territory left in the NAN and other similar places.

Keep in mind that the global distribution of VITAS was not even. The plague broke out in New Delhi and spread from there. I don't remember which one but one book clearly stated that most VITAS deaths occured in the Third World while First World countries, with their more advanced and available medicine and quarantine measures, had far fewer victims.

So there might be areas with sparse or no human inhabitants in Africa or Asia.

I like my Shadowrun world teeming and crowded so in my game, I tend to have population figures higher than modern numbers. Now as for canon, the location sourcebooks (notably Shadows of North America, Europe and Asia), give population figures that are roughly the same or moderately higher than modern day populations. And Runner's Companion says the global population is 6 billion (in the shadowtalk fluff for Free Spirits).

As for VITAS, Shadows of Asia stated that 500 million people died of VITAS in India (IIRC) and Cyberpirates said 85+% of people in sub Saharan Africa died (IIRC). That would account for a huge chunk of the 25% of the global population who died of VITAS. That being said, India's population had jumped back to 800 million plus by the 2060's (see SoA's population figures).

Personally, I prefer to see the world pretty crowded - at least the urban parts of it...

Don't forget all the Awakened flora and fauna.

For me it's highly variable. There was a number of huge die offs, wars and the like.

However the next thing that happened was that the NAN was established and people were pushed out.

The result is that Seattle and the Cities are crammed, most of UCAS/CAS is about the same as it was.

But NAN territories are often wide open. Just you and the paracritters for miles.

you forget somme littles points:

imagine all the population of the north america (usa and canada) relocated in 1/3 of the territory (thats a very rough estimate) also Japan and china are are extremly overpopulated and its one of the reason why Imperialistic Japan did some territory expension. Lots of people left those territory for other less populated area.

right now in 2008 there is conflicts and war in many country and thousands of people die. we have desease, natural catastrophy... While we dont have Vitas, in SR4 sex desease and cancer are a thing of the past wich account for most mortallity now.

medical science is warp speed ahead of us, cheeper and a LOT faster.

also population growth is not linear. and with all the awakened, the toxic wastelands, the fringe corpo warfare and the automation and optimization of agriculture, less people are needed and wanted in the country side and more people are packed in cities.

you can bet that sometimes if the corps are slow to react to natural disasters and deseases its probably because they dont mind if the population gets trimmed a little as long its not their custommers bases.

So I would say that it all balance out... or maybe SR4 comes slightly ahead.

Something to keep in mind while doing the calculations; they are predicting 12 billion people in 2030 or so.

The worlds population doubles every 40 years, so I could easily see the worlds population being higher than it is now, even with all the big die-offs

Yeah, that was my point, too. I think that there'll be a large gap between the rich and the poor, and that the poor will conglomerate in urban centers, since poverty hits rural areas seemingly faster. So the world might actually feel empty; there's almost nobody between one sprawl and the next.

Don't forget, the hell that is the 6th world started to go to shit when? um...early 90's? there where what? thought to be 9 billion at that time? still a lot of people Granted you also have to take into account that a lot of those numbers are most likly 3rd world countrys, I mean even in some of the slums in the 1st world the mortality rate is better then some third world nations, and with the crash, the virus's the pollution, the politics, then counting the wars, Think of how many there died compared to the 1st world nations,

Actually...
...1st world countries would suffer more, simply due to population density and ease of travel.

1 person in NYC or London or Shang Hai would infect many more than 1 person in the Sahara desert.

Quarantines and medicines work when the people have been identified and quarantined and there's actually enough medicine and space for them...
...But what happens when the very people who do the quarantining, medical work or running the infrastructure are the ones affected ??

With so many people dead from disease, famine and other disease come into effect...
...What happens when you have 1 million bodies to clear up ??
...What happens when the infrastructure breaks down, and no-one gets food or power or can travel ??

Going from memory when people were discussing what was to become Shadows of Europe the rule of thumb was that population levels had mostly recovered to roughly current day levels, if not a touch higher, by the 2060s. That was just taking into account global factors like VITAS and other events of course, local conditions could affect the levels in either direction.

The short version is go bug Peter about this kind of thing if you're really that interested.

Not really. The US only lost ten states to the Native American Nations, and they were the least populous of all. The UCAS even kept most of the plains states, so they had enough space for resettlement. Canada fared worse. Most of its land was even more sparsely populated, but it was left with much less land to be resettled.

The worlds biggest, overcrowded cities are not in the first world: Lagos, Mexico City, Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Shanghai, Bombay - cities with a bad infrastructure, huge slums (first world cities don't have anything that comes close to it) and medical help only for a small part of the population.

The US may have only lost 10 states, but they lost 30-50% of their available landmass with the rise of NAN. That's *not* a small chunk. While not severely populated, Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, Oregon and Washington all contain fairly hefty population centers. It wasn't a small loss.

And population centers aside, the US lost a lot more than just land and places to live with the advent of NAN. NORAD and several national research laboratories, nuclear weapons storage, and waste storage facilities, plus the White Sands missile test range (which has no equal anywhere else in the country), Area 51, Tonopah Valley (I may be misrembering this one) a few international airports and hubs.... You can see how this list can keep going. There was a decent amount of stuff lost by the US to NAN. Granted, they got 10 years to move everyone and everything out, but that couldn't have been an easy task.

Current population growth rates applied to the SR universe has post-Vitas 2070 on par with ~2000. Deaths from disasters & war are probably balanced out.

But the key to SR anti-diaspora is services. See, isolated 3rd world villages are self contained. Food is grown, water from a well or stream and waste is composted. If a third of the village dies the other 2/3 carry on. Losing a third of the livestock is worse.

Meanwhile, industrialized nations are dependant on complex systems for food, water and waste disposal. Lose any one and the city becomes uninhabitable, or a plague ridden cesspool for waste disposal. Major cities have enough staffing redundancy that a 25% die off puts services in skeleton crews with reduced performance but not total shutdown.

Small towns are screwed. Their utilities have less redundancy with many staffers wearing multiple hats. The odds of the only two guys who know how to run the waste treatment plant both dying is like 1 in 8. With only 3 critical utilities, about 33% of small towns become unliveable. It goes to 50% if any one of those utilities has a single point of failure.

Furthermore, small towns get the shaft on external deliveries. There is more bang for the buck in disaster recovery for delivering food, fuel and medicine to large cities. Economies of scale take hold. When BP loses 35% of their fuel delivery drivers, who gets cut off? Smallville or Metropolis?

Even towns that have all their utilities up and running can die from secondary causes over the next few years. Town industries will close from direct and indirect forces. Tourism tanks hard as people seek to reduce exposure and quarantines go into play. Housing values would drop from the glut on the market, killing many small town's tax revenues, reducing police & fire protection and closing schools. Which leads to a further depreciation in property values that results in a fiscal death spiral.

So the end result is that cities are densely populated while the rural areas are ghost towns.

However, the greatest problem with outbreaks is that 1st world cities are more cosmopolitan...
...So when something happens, not only does it happen fast [just as in the non-1st world cities mentioned], but they spread faster to other cities because those affected can infect people from a wider number of cities.

The BBC did a documentary about an outbreak, but I can't find the details - sorry

What you're talking about is the vector speed.

In a third world nation, it might take a couple days for a mule-train to get from the nearest "city" up to the village. The spread from village to village can take months if it requires multiple infectious relays. It took 4 years for the Black Plague to march across Europe, and we can assume the 1300s was "3rd world." That's a vector speed measured in miles per day.

Today the vector speed can be in countries per hour, or continents per day. happen in less than 4 days with a single infected holiday goer taking his time on the train. A businessman can infect every continent but Antarctica in the same 4 days with a couple of intercontinental flights and the associated indirect contagion of his fellow travelers.

Go read the first dozen chapters of "the Stand" for a good example of how fast a superflu would spread. Sure, it's fiction, but ignore the 99.99% fatality rates and the spread of infection is still fairly well thought out.

I'm sure there are some "empty" spots in the world, but they're no good for goin' runnin'.