# Population of Holy Terra



## dedredhed (Jun 22, 2010)

So, I was on lexicanum the other day, and i looked at Terra's profile, and the population said 'unknown'. So I look it up, and the warhammer 40k wiki says, "perhaps the largest hiveworld, Terra has a 100 trillion population" :shok:
If that IS accurate, then i think the "perhaps" is pretty....:shok:
Anybody know if that is accurate, and if it is then anybody else know anything bigger


----------



## Child-of-the-Emperor (Feb 22, 2009)

I don't believe i've read a figure anywhere regarding Terra, but 100,000,000,000,000 seems a bit extreme to me. There are plenty of Hives and the Imperial Palace itself though, both of which would house untold billions. But I remain highly dubious of the figure given on the 40k wiki. More than likely, its just some crazed fan going around editing without any source.

And on a side note, we know that the population of Mars is 20,000,000,000 and that other Hive Worlds have in the region of around 500,000,000,000 (or at least Ichar IV does), obviously though it varies. Given this, I find it impossible for Terra to house 100,000,000,000,000 people.


----------



## Baron Spikey (Mar 26, 2008)

I don't think it is accurate, lexicanum doesn't have that info (and whilst that could mean next to nothing with both sites being open to editing by users- i.e unreliable) and 40k wiki doesn't provide it's source for that number.

As far as I'm concerned- no reference source= bullshit


----------



## gothik (May 29, 2010)

wow thats a lot if its true...does anyone know where i can get a referance on holy terra, a map of the world, the different countries (reigons) stuff like that,


----------



## Doelago (Nov 29, 2009)

It could be true if you think a bit about it, as millions of pilgrims arrive to earth every day just to see the Imperial Palace and those kinds of things. And if I have understood correctly, most of them never leave, so basically they could just be thrown down to the lover levels and become workers.

But as there is no real reference I say that the info on the Wiki is bullshit...


----------



## gen.ahab (Dec 22, 2009)

There is no conceivable way one could fit 100tril people on earth. Even with Terras' layout it could not be done.


----------



## Illiadar (Jan 21, 2010)

100 trillion people might be able to fit on earth. Think Coruscant- layers and layers of city. New York City holds about 8.3 million people (this information drawn from wikipedia, which isn't the best source, but wikipedia in turn took it from a census bureau document) and only covers ~800 square km. Now considering the land surface area of the earth is 148,940,000 square km, with the density of new york city everywhere, an estimated 1,545,252,500,000 could live on land. If we can find a way to build aquatic cities, or drain the oceans, that would bump the number up to 5.1 trillion. Now, layer those cities 20 times in a Coruscant-like fashion, and there, you've got 100,000,000,000,000. But given that hive worlds are _not_ Coruscant, and instead of a planet-city there are individual spikes of population at hive cities, I'd put the population at something like 1-8 trillion.


----------



## GWLlosa (Sep 27, 2009)

When you say "Layer those cities 20 times" I assume you mean vertically. If we assume that each 'layer' takes a half a kilometer, you're talking about cities going 10km into the sky. That means that in your example, about 20% of the earth's population would live above mount everest in terms of altitude. Seems difficult to maintain.


----------



## DonFer (Apr 23, 2010)

The horus Heresy game has a neat map of the area around the imperial palace, Now I dunno exactly what area of Terra that terrain covers, but it's something to start with..


----------



## dedredhed (Jun 22, 2010)

well, i thought it was a bit extreme :no:

The whole world IS covered in city (not the only planet to my knowledge)
i could see something like maybe.... :read:750 bil perhaps?


----------



## Ensanguined Priest (Feb 11, 2009)

I dont think those figures are _too_ out-of-this-world..
After all, in the Codex Imperialis it says 


> The mere administration of the Imperial Palace is said to involve over ten billion people.


Now i realize thats still a ways from 100 trillion, but if that many alone can be responsible for a single location in administration, other sectors and populace is sure to add up massively.

However many it is, its a bloody lot of people...


----------



## dedredhed (Jun 22, 2010)

Terra in the present time is an Imperial hive world, the largest in the galaxy. The Earth was stripped of all forms of natural resources many millennia ago; its soil is utterly barren and its atmosphere is a fog of industrial pollution. Massive, labyrinthine edifices of state sprawl across the vast majority of the surface. Terra's oceans long ago boiled away due to the immense heat produced by having so many billions of people compressed onto one world. All liquid water to meet the population's needs is now delivered from orbit my freighters who take large ice-bearing comets from the outer Solar System and bring them into Terran orbit to be melted down and dispersed to the population. Many mountain ranges have been leveled - perhaps all but the Himalayas, which remain all but untouched due to the genetic engineering laboratories said to lie underneath where the Emperor created the Primarchs and the first Space Marines after the Unification Wars more than ten millennia ago. The chambers of the Astronomican also course throughout the whole mountain range. Despite being devastated during the Horus Heresy and by the terrible wars fought across the surface of the world during the long Age of Strife, Terra is probably the most vastly-populated and built-up hive world in the Imperium. Beneath countless layers and millennia of urban accretion, catacombs hold older cultures completely different from the surface ones. Much of the population of Terra exists in the most terrible squalor, their greatest hope that one of their offspring might be accepted into the Adeptus Terra, the Priesthood of Earth, as a Menial, an adept of the lowliest sort. A square meter of land on Terra costs more than a palace on any Hive World; only the most wealthy citizens can even afford to own a small section of land. Terra's entire surface, with the exception of the Antarctic region, is covered in labyrinthine edifices of state, including the Imperial Palace, the Ecclesiarchal Palace and the many departmental headquarters of the Adeptus Terra, the Imperial government. The headquarters of the Imperial Inquisition on Terra lies beneath the ice caps of the south polar region of Antarctica and is one of the most secure installations in the entire Imperium..


----------



## PrinceThaine (Dec 17, 2009)

I had read that before somewhere. Two things made me question it.

'Terra's oceans long ago boiled away'

'Imperial Inquisition on Terra lies beneath the ice caps of the south polar region of Antarctica'

How can there be ice caps without any water or am I missing something? Either way, 100t people is probably doable, but realistic? Probably not.


----------



## Doelago (Nov 29, 2009)

Well... Its clearly not impossible, cause it could actually be like Coruscant, with the whole planet being one god damn big city, but in the Imperial way. That would make i possible to fit in millions of people in small areas, as the Imperium of man knows nothing of things such as "human rights", so it would be quite possible for them to just put hundreds of people into a small room and tell them to do that and that.


----------



## Baron Spikey (Mar 26, 2008)

Except there are structures which stretch over vast areas of the planet and are very sparsely populated (relative to many Hive Worlds), such as the Imperial Palace the throne room of which stretches over a great deal of central asia or western europe (depending on your reference source) but only has a population of a few thousand.


----------



## gothik (May 29, 2010)

DonFer said:


> The horus Heresy game has a neat map of the area around the imperial palace, Now I dunno exactly what area of Terra that terrain covers, but it's something to start with..


thanks donfer ythat would be a great help. k:


----------



## DonFer (Apr 23, 2010)

gothik said:


> thanks donfer ythat would be a great help. k:


You're welcome! Glad to be of any help :grin:


----------



## Belthazor Aurellius (Jan 16, 2009)

I seem to recall having read somewhere how hive cities are constructed. Perhaps the Guns of Tanith, or something. Anyways, the description was of a hive city that stretched miles into the surface, not off the surface. Obviously, hive cities are described as stretching miles into the sky, but the description in said novel played it off like an iceberg. The glimmering spire was where all the wealth was, but beneath it, miles more deep into the planet's crust and even stretching into the mantle (some planet's cores are deader than others, and the AdMech does have shielding tech against the heat of magma so they can have generators near the heat source without them melting... I cite Dark Mechanicum (HH Novel) for that), a hive generally was primarily under the surface.

I also recall in science classes, we were told (both in high school and university) that the sun's radiation keeps the mantle and core of our planet hot. Without the sun's energies, the mantle would slowly cool, and the core too would chill. If all the fluff about Holy Terra being wrapped in a thick blanket of industrial smog and nuke mushroom debris (the latter may not be canon) is true, then Holy Terra would be in perpetual winter.

The way I'd heard about the oceans was that the majority of the oceans were boiled away during vast and horrendous wars, combined with the fires of industry. So, logically, if all the liquid evaporated, and the world is covered now in perpetual smog, would it not logically dictate that what water remains will forever be ice? (Southern polar ice cap)

Lastly, running back to the description of hive construction. Given how cold Earth would be, figure in that a majority of humans living on earth never see the light of day or even the gloom of smog, because they live miles beneath the surface. Factor in the possibility their hives reach very near to the core of Holy Terra. Measure the diameter of our planet, and now figure in the surface area you could provide for living space by inserting honeycombed catacombs beneath each hive about halfway to the core...

Not only is it plausible that Holy Terra contains 100,000,000,000,000+ humans, it's probably more than likely.

Also, aren't all the grand architectural sight seeing spots of Holy Terra clogged with pilgrims from across the galaxy? Despite being officially populated by only thousands, consider how many vagrants must be living there on an unofficial level, traveling from holy site to holy site within these sepulchral tombs.

If you need a visual example of a human civilization that habitates near the core of the Earth, watch the matrix, and then envision that their civilization is only the bottom mile of a hundred-mile deep hive, with a much denser population to cubic footage ratio (the humans in the Matrix are being hunted to extinction, the Humans on Holy Terra flood the city in cess and pool).

Hope that helped.


----------



## Doelago (Nov 29, 2009)

You made a god damn good point there Aurellius, you should become a teacher XD + rep


----------



## gen.ahab (Dec 22, 2009)

In the wolfblade novel, it describes Terra as a planet with many layers, each containing remenents of a lost cizilization, the inner layer is even said to hold such ancient cities as Nova York. Below the first few layers, not much lives which would mean that the planets inhabitants are focused primeraly upon the upper levels of the planet. In the novel the hive spires were not noted as descending below the surface of the planet, of course I could be wrong. In may have been intemperate to say is was not possible but considering this and the fact the imperial off limits zones cover a large portion of the planets surface and some of the inner layers, I doubt it is true. Nice little lesson though.


----------



## Barnster (Feb 11, 2010)

You can't dig down that far, you can only dig down into the crust of the planet, the mantle is still a volcanic liquid, primarily iron. and the crust isn't actually that thick. 

Does anyone know how they could possibly control tectonic currents and shifts though? Think about how many people are killed in a large earthquake, then scale that up several million. if it affects a hive city.

You get similar problems if you go up. Not only does the air get thinner, but also if terra is covered in industrial smog denser than mexico city, there would virtually be no oxygen, with no natural resourses there would be no plant life to replace the oxygen via photosynthesis.

Theres also problems when you consider green house effects with a dense layer of co2, temperature would be astronomically high, Remember nuclear winter is not about temperature but whether things grow or not. no sunlight gets through the smog goes back to dead plants, so no oxygen.

All current science would suggest that terra would be a dead uninhabitable world.


----------



## gen.ahab (Dec 22, 2009)

Umm... Where did the water go? Yes they burned away but it would still be in atmo. Anyway, barn is right, the planet should be a lifeless hell.


----------



## nocturnalK (Jun 15, 2010)

I believe hive construction was mentioned in the novel fallen angels.
Working off memory here they went to at lease level 20 and they actual gave a figure for how my people a hive was designed to accommodate


----------



## K3k3000 (Dec 28, 2009)

It wouldn't be above 40K's over-the-top philosophy to say Earth holds 100 trillion people. Frankly I say they should stop fiddling around with real numbers and embrace the Gajillion.


----------



## Baron Spikey (Mar 26, 2008)

K3k3000 said:


> It wouldn't be above 40K's over-the-top philosophy to say Earth holds 100 trillion people. Frankly I say they should stop fiddling around with real numbers and embrace the Gajillion.


I thought Gajillion was a real number? Doesn't it mean 'more than a really fucking big number'? :biggrin:


----------



## Blueberrypop (Apr 27, 2010)

Well 100 trillion could be possible unlikely but possible. You can't get an accurate population on a planet with so many people coming and leaving so frequently. As for earth being a burning hell there is probably some sort of tech that makes it hospitable, it is the year 40,000.


----------



## gen.ahab (Dec 22, 2009)

Giant air recycling systems? Well that's a huge fucking ***** in the armor. Lol


----------



## Barnster (Feb 11, 2010)

Once again proof that Horus was not the tactical genius the emperor thought he was.

Abbadon to Horus " Why don't you just destroy the massive air recyclers, it would wipe out the imperial army?"

Horus "Because um, um um, I'm a tactical genius, not a person with any grasp of basic science!"


----------



## Belthazor Aurellius (Jan 16, 2009)

Heh. You forgot, the Imperial Army has a) rebreathers for prolonged deployments and b) space marines, who can breathe cyanide gas, like it's oxygen-enriched perry-air (space balls ref). Civilians would die, and Horus ultimately believed he was fighting the Emperor to put an end to religious fanaticism and the worship of false gods. He did not worship Chaos, nor did he really rely on daemonic assistance. He wanted the Emperor, not all of mankind wiped out. Granted, he must have been blind to not see what he was doing would wipe out all of mankind, but that's a character flaw, not a tactical misstep.


----------



## gen.ahab (Dec 22, 2009)

Well really it was one giant cluster fuck for Horus and his forces. But really, he did rely on the power of the dark gods. If they hadn't boosted his power he would have been bitchslaped. Anywhoooo... Yeah. Lol


----------



## Blueberrypop (Apr 27, 2010)

The powers just lead him but did not intervene. They did really want to take out EVERYONE, they just preferred killing the other marines.


----------



## gen.ahab (Dec 22, 2009)

Are you serious? He was bloated with the power of the four gods. lol The emperor would have beat him senseless. They gave him a huge amount of power.


----------



## Belthazor Aurellius (Jan 16, 2009)

Never said Horus' followers didn't want to killenate everything. Just said Horus himself only wanted dearest daddy dead.


----------



## Child-of-the-Emperor (Feb 22, 2009)

In regards to the layout of Terra, by the beginning of the Heresy at least:



Nemesis said:


> ...but there were still great swathes of it (Terra) that were unclaimed and lawless...


It also mentions that Rainforests still endure on Terra.


----------

