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three BILLION people?

Evacuate Earth!!!! In one week?

  • Sure, no problem. They would muster up a fleet and get it done

    Votes: 8 21.1%
  • Ummm, are you nuts? There are not enough ships to muster...most are going to die

    Votes: 30 78.9%

  • Total voters
    38
  • Poll closed .
There was a TNG episode "Ensigns of Command". An alien race told the Enterprise to evacuate a colony of 15,000 in 3 days or else. Picard said not doable for designated time. It was implied 6 months was need for the task.
 
The TNG staff worked up numbers for planetary evacuation; they're published in the technical manual. A Galaxy-class ship is capable of supporting 15,000 evacuees for short periods, and can transport 1,250 people per hout via transporters and shuttlecraft. So it's twelve hours to load, twelve hours to unload, plus flight time to the destination.

Even with a population of one billion or so, this is going to take a long time.

And since a black hole "passing through" would also destroy the Sol System, said destination is quite a distance off.
 
Well since the population of the Earth right now is 6.5 Billion, I'd really half to wonder what happened that even WW3 only killed 600 Million, that there were only 3 Billion people in the world ~360 years from now when by all rights the Human population doubling every 38 years for the last 200 recorded years factoring in how that expansion would "plateau" the larger it got leading to more like 12 Billion at least by the TNG era being alleviated by colonies and Starfleet allowing a fraction of that number to move off world settling the figure back to maybe 8 Billion.

*stops to take breath*

How did you arrive at 3?
 
How could Earths population only be 3 billion in the 24th century??? It's at over 6.5 billion now, shouldn't it be more like 12 billion?

No. In fact, it should be lower than it is now, for a couple of reasons:

1) The planet's population growth in real life is the result of population explosions occurring in rapidly industrializing countries like India. As populations grow more industrialized and thus more educated, population growth rates tend to decrease on a macro level, and as individuals grow more educated, they tend to have smaller families on a micro level. Since one of the fundamental premises of Star Trek is that everyone is well-educated, real-life tells us that they'll probably have smaller families, meaning that the population growth rate should decline, possibly even becoming negative for a time before stabilizing.

2) A larger population is bad for the planetary ecosystem. This is due to a number of factors. To start with, for every individual living an industrialized, Western lifestyle (which Star Trek implies is the norm), it takes acres and acres of land to support that lifestyle. Further, there's the basic, fundamental fact of thermodynamics: Every living organism generates heat, and the more human beings you have on the Earth (with the accompanyingly larger levels of technology and industrialization), the more heat you have. Eventually, the heat becomes so large that it would damage the entire planetary ecosystem, inhibiting the ability of even the super-industrialized world of Trek to support the population. And that's not even taking into account the fact that we don't know how power is generated on planetary surfaces in the 24th Century; I'd certainly hope, for instance, that they don't use matter/anti-matter reactors, since those things seem like they'd be incredibly dangerous in an atmosphere.

3) A larger population is just a bad idea. A smaller population means that resources go further. On top of that, it becomes proportionally difficult to manage a population as it gets larger. For instance, I sent an email to my state senator the other day on an issue and just got a call back from her today; in India, which is supposedly a democracy, each legislator represents such an incredibly large number of constituents that meaningful democratic accountability to the average Indian becomes virtually impossible. A smaller population is more conducive to human liberty and to democracy.


Fuck.

That was SO good you actually turned me on!
 
I'd say if they had help from not just starfleet ships, but the other member races ships they could do it. Although they would be cutting it close I think they could scramble all the ships up.
 
Logistically impossible. Regardless of whether use transporters or shuttlecraft it's too many people in too short a period of time.

1 week equals 7 days, equals 168 hours, equals 10,080 minutes, equals 604,800 seconds.

Divide 3,000,000,000 by 604,800 and you would have to move 4960 people every second, non-stop, for the whole week. Add in the number of ships it would take to hold all those people, delays in getting those ships into orbit, transporter malfunctions, shuttle breakdowns, etc., and it would be impossible.
 
The only way I can see is to use the transporters. Dematerialize the person and store his/her pattern in the buffer till it could be safely rematerialised. It would take a lot of transporters though.
 
No way. Not even if all the races of both the Alpha and Beta quadrants showed up in all their ships (provided they had time to do so), there's no way we could evacuate the entire planet.

Don't assume that it would just be humanoid life, either. Remember in Trekverse, hump-backed wales, dolphins and other cetacean life are sentient and worth saving as well. You'd have to beam them all up out of the water and into massive water tanks on the evac vessels that would make the tank that Scotty cobbled together in STIV look like a fish bowl.

Not.gonna.happen.
 
PEOPLE!

This is Star Trek we're talking about here. All we need to do is conjure up some interesting technobabble and "poof" it's all taken care of. ;)
 
Unless Ive got the arithmetic wrong (and assuming a billion is 1000million)

You would have to transport 1,653 people per second, just to get them off the planet never mind to somewhere safe. So ... No chance.

Whoops ..... Ive only calculated for one billion, and just noticed Dr Daystrom has already figured this out above^
 
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Unless Ive got the arithmetic wrong (and assuming a billion is 1000million)

You would have to transport 1,653 people per second, just to get them off the planet never mind to somewhere safe. So ... No chance.


1 week equals 7 days, equals 168 hours, equals 10,080 minutes, equals 604,800 seconds.

Divide 3,000,000,000 by 604,800 and you would have to move 4960 people every second, non-stop, for the whole week.

Please check my math.
 
If you have transporters that large or powerful, you might as well dematerialise the incoming enemy ships as they arrive.
 
Well, a phase cloak sounds like a better idea.
Transporting a lot of of people by storing them in the pattern buffers ... it's possible, but you have to take into consideration the buffers would have to be large enough to support at least 2000 people per starship, and Voyager to our knowledge had issues with storing about 20 telepaths in their buffers.
Actually, scratch that ... they had issues re-materializing them after being in the buffer too long.
It's entirely possible they could store a large amount of people in a buffer, but their stability remains an issue.

Without Quantum slipstream technology to travel from one place to another really fast, it would be too much people in too little time.
 
Timo brings up a good point. If you tied the planetary energy generators to a series of Pegasus-style "cloaks" could you turn the Earth insubstantial to avoid the catastrophe?

And SCI-while your argument about population sounds logical-you included a reference to agricultural needs of a large population. This would not be such a large factor due to replicator technology.

Earth is s'posed to be a "paradise". Certainly the limited views of it we got in the movies/series suggests a garden-like setting. When Harry walks down the streets of San Francisco it looks populated but not over-crowded.I think we are looking at 1-2 billion people as an upper end and as low as 900million. I think that colonization is a large displacement factor in Star Trek's universe, coupled with lowered birthrates, long-term effects of large-scale warfare/fall-out/starvation/disease from the late 20th-late 21st centuries and let's not forget that Col Green's effect has never been calculated(as far as I know) and he could have wiped out millions-his practices are usually referred to as "genocidal". All of this could lead to a smaller overall pop to transport. Is it possible-maybe. Is it probable-I still think not unless you use one of Timo's more extreme suggestions.
 
Here's an idea: what if they just partially transport people up, and then store them in the transporter buffers like Scotty did in TNG's "Relics". I don't know if there's a limit to the number of signature they can store, but if they get every transporter system on the ship going (including emergency and cargo transporters) and several other ships going, there's a chance it might work.
 
I don't think it's really a question of capacity, as we've seen people suppose several alternatives, including the transporter buffer suggestion, the really tricky part is time - there's simply not enough time to transport that many people - one week ain't enough, even with the entire resources of the Federation put to the task.

Unless of course the Federation does have access to the Scalosian water, then there's probably plenty of time.
 
^Ah, but if the transporter buffer idea is workable, there's nothing saying that the people need to be ready for transport. You're sitting on the pot one minute, and the next minute, you're falling on your bare arse several L.Y's away and a week or two later. Thus, if you can fit everyone, just beam everyone up and store them quickly. I'm sure once they realise that their lives have been saved that they'll forgive the captain. ;)
 
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