What happened to the Romulan Empire after Romulus was destroyed

[EmperorTiberius]

I agree that the way Trek is presented, it seems if the Romulus is destroyed, they would most likely, but not necessaritly, fall. It has to do with failiure of the writers to comprehand true size of space, it's capabilities, and growth of states like Romulans. A massive state that stretches across thousands of light years would have millions of earth like planets, and population to match. If I'm not mistaken, you would have millions of Romulus like planets, with quadrillions upon quadrillions of Romulans still alive. I don't see why these colonies shouldn't have powerful industrial capacity as well.

 

[Timo]

How do you populate a colony? Moving billions is impracticable; giving birth to billions takes hundreds of generations, or then some very severe birth control policies (say, 30 children per mother).

Also, millions of Earth-like planets? Trek has plenty of those, granted, but supposedly only because our heroes choose to visit those rather than non-Earth-like ones. In "Metamorphosis", Kirk exclaims that "we" are on a thousand planets and expanding. Whether that's us the humans or us the Feds, it's orders of magnitude below your estimate. And sort of realistic.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[EmperorTiberius]

How do you populate a colony? Moving billions is impracticable; giving birth to billions takes hundreds of generations, or then some very severe birth control policies (say, 30 children per mother).

Also, millions of Earth-like planets? Trek has plenty of those, granted, but supposedly only because our heroes choose to visit those rather than non-Earth-like ones. In "Metamorphosis", Kirk exclaims that "we" are on a thousand planets and expanding. Whether that's us the humans or us the Feds, it's orders of magnitude below your estimate. And sort of realistic.

Timo Saloniemi

Assuming Romulans started with 10,000 colonists, what would their population be in 2000 years given modest 2% growth rate?

 

[Edit_XYZ]

Assuming Romulans started with 10,000 colonists, what would their population be in 2000 years given modest 2% growth rate?

A generation being born every 30 years - in 2000 years, at 102% growth rate per generation, after 67 generations, their number would be 683400.

Bye bye romulans.

The scenarists' sense of scale isn't off only with regards to space, but sociology, as well.
Add a few centuries and every rag-tag band with a cool back-story is an empire.
Every conquered people can - and will - inevitably rise and free themselves, overthrowing their conqueror in due time (historic evidence indicating the opposite).

History is fluid - but not that fluid.

 

[Captain_Amasov]

Star Trek Online is suppose to be a continuation of the existing timeline (running under the time travel theory that changing history creates an alternate timeline, so the original timeline still exists, you just can't return to it from the past anymore). So it exists in a universe where Romulus is destroyed. I don't have all the details (I'm not able to play a lot because of the computer I have) but Romulus is suffering political turmoil. Factions are fighting for dominance, the Klingons are moving to annex star systems (and the reason they haven't gone full force is the war with the Federation) and Starfleet is trying to prevent Klingon expansion while maintaining stability even if the Romulans object.

Pretty much, there's essentially two factions that have arisen inside the Romulan Empire in STO: the remnants of the old empire led by Empress Sela, with backing from the Tal Shiar; then there's the Reunification movement and the Remans; led by the Romulan D'Tan and the Reman Obisek. However with Sela now missing and the head of the Tal Shiar, Hakeev, dead the Romulan Senate is once again in disarray as factions within it vie for power.

This leaves the Reunification movement, along with their Reman allies, unopposed to set up a new homeworld for themselves and to seek aid from both the Federation and the Klingon Empire.

Incidentally, before his death, Hakeev was in league with the returning Iconians; who were responsible for both Sela's disappearance and the destruction of the Hobus star, which ruptured subspace.

 

[T'Girl]

Nero and his crew probably those people who in the face of a natural disaster (Hurricane Sandy/Katrina) know the warning but don't think to move their families away from home.

Given that Nero had his own massive ship, capable of transporting tens of thousands off of Romulas, including the families of Nero's crew (and his wife), and he didn't, is one of the biggest glaring plot holes of the last movie.

The Romulan Empire is so centralized (see: Nemesis, where one room full of people are killed and Shinzon effortlessly takes over) that a collapse is very much a possibility.

Shinzon had the support of the Romulan military prior to assassinating the politicians.

A generation being born every 30 years - in 2000 years, at 102% growth rate per generation, after 67 generations, their number would be 683400.

Going beyond modest growth.

If Romulans arrived on Romulas 2000 years ago and produced another generation on average each 50 years, that would mean that 40 generations have passed since first arrival.

And if they gradually colonized/invaded other surrounding worlds.

If we started with 10,000 people, and each couple in each generation produced an average of 3 children who in turn reproduced, the population of the Empire could be up to 110 billion people.

That about 16 planets with current Earth population, or one planet (Romulas) with Earth population, and 1,000 planets with a hundred million population.

Four children per generation (50 years) gives you 10,995,116,277,000,000 people.

And if they had five children (like my parents did) per couple, that would give them enough people after 2,000 years to populate 1.8 million planets with a current Earth population.

Here's the population calculator I used (kind of cool). http://wardricker.com/timegrowth.php

 

[Xerxes1979]

One also has the option of playing the "not really Star Trek canon/it never happened" card.

Does Nu Trek have a stronger base of support than the status of Star Trek V?

 

[F. King Daniel]

I think "yes" would be an understatement.

 

[T'Girl]

Does Nu Trek have a stronger base of support than the status of Star Trek V?

In terms of "status?" Not really, it comes down to who you talk too.

 

[RPJOB]

But are the Romulan colonies puny, or are the population and resources more evenly distributed? I don't think there's an answer in canon, but I picture it as reasonably well distributed. The Romulans were powerful enough to turn the tide in the Dominion War and too powerful for the Federation and the Klingon Empire to deliberately pick a fight with or conquer. How would they maintain a large empire without a great many powerful/resource rich planets? I don't see all of that power coming from one planet with a few puny colonies.

Also, taking out Romulus might lead to the government relocating - and being attacked en route by a dozen different factions wanting to be the next government.

Would this be much more dangerous than usual? They probably guard against assassination on a daily basis, being the paranoid people they are. And do we know that there are a dozen powerful opposing factions just waiting for an opportunity to pounce? I'd think the Romulans would pull together in the face of a crisis. They're xenophobes - their first priority would be maintaining their borders and not looking like a target to their neighbors.

At the end of the week, there would be sixteen new capital planets and fifty-eight separate warfleets of changing allegiances

If this were the Klingon Empire, sure. A hundred different clans would battle it out. But the Romulans always seemed more united than that. They had their problems, but they didn't give the impression that the empire was on the verge of collapse. Quite the opposite, actually.

But if you're starting out with the "puny colonies" viewpoint, we're not going to agree. Your argument does make sense if the colonies are small.

From Memory Alpha:

Benzar (taken in 2374, likely returned to the Federation)
Carraya IV (Carraya system) (likely outside of actual Romulan territory)
Chaltok IV
"Eden" (likely uninhabited)
Khitomer (within Romulan territory as of 2369)
Rator III
Remus (Romulan system)
Romulus (Romulan system)
Unnamed Minshara class planet

Surprisingly few Romulan planets have been mentioned. Many, many more Klingons plants have been seen or mentioned, Even the supposedly resource poor Cardassians have a list many times longer than the Romulans. Maybe there's something in the Romulan psyche that doesn't like colonizing. Like the Jews wandering the the desert for 40 years, once they settled somewhere they were in no mood to budge. A few slave races could do all their mining, food production, etc. with a token Romulan garrison to keep the peace. Add in the Romulan arrogance seen in STXI where they didn't believe Spock (Nah, it couldn't happen to us, we're Romulans!) and I could see them having few colnies to carry on. More than we've heard of but fewer than the other major empires. And let's not forget that everything between Romulus and the Hobus supernova is toast as well.

 

[Timo]

One could argue that Romulan worlds go unmentioned because the Star Empire is a closed state. Our heroes clearly lack access and perhaps also knowledge. In contrast, we learned of Cardassian worlds chiefly in episodes where our heroes traveled in Cardassian space, such as in "Return to Grace"...

And let's not forget that everything between Romulus and the Hobus supernova is toast as well.

...Although this could quite possibly only include one planet - the one whose orbit lies between Romulus and her homestar, as shown in ST:NEM.

http://movies.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/nemesishd/nemesishd0581.jpg

That is, assuming that the wave from the unnamed supernova propagated at the sublight velocities we saw when it hit Romulus, it must have originated at the homestar and not at any neighboring star.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[F. King Daniel]

Visual evidence in cases like this can't be taken as proof of anything. The FTL shockwave in STVI and the warp 7 ion storm in "The Catwalk" were seen to be moving relatively slowly when they stuck Excelsior and Enterprise head-on. And, the Enterprise should have been at matching warp with V'Ger for it's entire approach to Earth, yet appeared to be plodding into it at impulse speed.

Most damning of all to the theory that it was the Romulan sun going supernova at subwarp speeds is this: If Romulus was destroyed and the mission failed, why did Spock deploy the Red Matter at all? Why did he "have little time" once Romulus was gone? How does Romulus' destruction alone "threaten to destroy the galaxy"? (Unless The Galaxy is the name of Spock's favourite pub on Romulus)

 

[Timo]

To literally threaten the galaxy, the supernova would have to expand beyond its initial system eventually. In which case it would not matter whether this is the Romulan home system or some other system: creation of a black hole would have to be done at the initiating system, and before the shockwave got too big to be swallowed by said black hole.

Whether the threat to neighboring or faraway systems from the shockwave would then be in terms of hours, decades or centuries would be immaterial: Spock would in all the cases only have "little time" to stop the disaster in its tracks.

And natural supernova wavefronts do threaten neighboring star systems to the distance of hundreds of lightyears. Plenty enough to qualify as "the galaxy", as that would encompass all the major Star Trek players in the modern "small UFP" model of Trek cartography. A sublight shockwave that took centuries to do its work would be just as deadly as a FTL one in this respect.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[EmperorTiberius]

Assuming Romulans started with 10,000 colonists, what would their population be in 2000 years given modest 2% growth rate?

A generation being born every 30 years - in 2000 years, at 102% growth rate per generation, after 67 generations, their number would be 683400.

Bye bye romulans.

The scenarists' sense of scale isn't off only with regards to space, but sociology, as well.
Add a few centuries and every rag-tag band with a cool back-story is an empire.
Every conquered people can - and will - inevitably rise and free themselves, overthrowing their conqueror in due time (historic evidence indicating the opposite).

History is fluid - but not that fluid.

A generation being born every 30 years - in 2000 years, at 102% growth rate per generation, after 67 generations, their number would be 683400.

Going beyond modest growth.

If Romulans arrived on Romulas 2000 years ago and produced another generation on average each 50 years, that would mean that 40 generations have passed since first arrival.

And if they gradually colonized/invaded other surrounding worlds.

If we started with 10,000 people, and each couple in each generation produced an average of 3 children who in turn reproduced, the population of the Empire could be up to 110 billion people.

That about 16 planets with current Earth population, or one planet (Romulas) with Earth population, and 1,000 planets with a hundred million population.

Four children per generation (50 years) gives you 10,995,116,277,000,000 people.

And if they had five children (like my parents did) per couple, that would give them enough people after 2,000 years to populate 1.8 million planets with a current Earth population.

Here's the population calculator I used (kind of cool). http://wardricker.com/timegrowth.php

No my friends. If you use maltusian equation, (althought it's not very accurate predicting long term growth, it will give you approximate idea of what you're dealing with), you get:

N=N(0)*e^growth rate*time
N=(10,000)*(2.71828182846)^(0.02*2000)
N=2,353,852,668,403,270,380,782
Over 2.3 sextillion Romulans.

Lets say tons of them died in wars and some didn't get to procreate etc, and we have only 2 sextillion in time of the movie.

If you divide that by 7 billion (population of today's Earth), you get
2e21/7e9= 285,714,285,714

285 + billion major population centers

Even if you forget about the equation, assume there is something wrong, that there were bottlenecks and slowdowns, you can't escape the very real possibility that there would be millions of earth sized plannets at the very least.


One reason why we see Starfleet not care about a particular colony (ie Alpha Ceti VI where Khan was left) is because there are so many colonies that they can't get to them or even keep track of all of them. If there are millions of colonies, and thousands of ships, one ship would cover hundreds or thousads of colonies and there would be no time to get to all of them on a regular basis. Once you colonize a planet, you have to be self seficient for a long time.

 

[RPJOB]

To literally threaten the galaxy, the supernova would have to expand beyond its initial system eventually. In which case it would not matter whether this is the Romulan home system or some other system: creation of a black hole would have to be done at the initiating system, and before the shockwave got too big to be swallowed by said black hole.

Whether the threat to neighboring or faraway systems from the shockwave would then be in terms of hours, decades or centuries would be immaterial: Spock would in all the cases only have "little time" to stop the disaster in its tracks.

And natural supernova wavefronts do threaten neighboring star systems to the distance of hundreds of lightyears. Plenty enough to qualify as "the galaxy", as that would encompass all the major Star Trek players in the modern "small UFP" model of Trek cartography. A sublight shockwave that took centuries to do its work would be just as deadly as a FTL one in this respect.

Timo Saloniemi

A sphere a hundred light years in diameter would be an almost insignificant speck within the galaxy. And Spock didn't say the Alpha Quadrant or the Known Galaxy. He spoke of the galaxy as a whole. I fail to see how a black hole could stop the supernova once it's already expanded to engulf other star systems. He did say that he didn't have much time after Romulus had been destroyed.

 

[Timo]

A sphere a hundred light years in diameter would be an almost insignificant speck within the galaxy.

Not for Spock, or for any of his audience. Essentially, it would amount to All Known Space. And even Spock plays fast and loose with such terminology from our viewpoint, using "world" in the sense of "universe". Commodore Barstow in "Alternative Factor" is happy to consider "the entire galaxy and beyond" his jurisdiction, too, despite this being very unlikely to be factually accurate.

I fail to see how a black hole could stop the supernova once it's already expanded to engulf other star systems.

Indeed, which is why it is natural to assume that it only ever engulfed one star system (thus necessarily the Romulan homesystem) before Spock deployed the red matter.

The question this begs is, what did Spock hope to achieve with his red matter originally? If it can suck in a supernova that has expanded to beyond the orbit of Romulus, wouldn't it then automatically also destroy Romulus if deployed as originally planned? Clearly, Spock did not intend to destroy Romulus to save the rest of the known universe - such destruction was "unthinkable" to him.

Did Spock originally intend to use a lower dosage, perhaps? We see red matter create black holes of varying sizes and strengths, so such fine tuning would probably be possible. Perhaps a smaller drop, administered earlier, would just kill the Romulan homesun and give days or weeks in which to evacuate the planet. Or perhaps a very small droplet would turn an impending supernova into a far more slowly dying type of star, giving an evacuation timespan of decades, centuries or millennia.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Edit_XYZ]

Spoiler: quotes

Assuming Romulans started with 10,000 colonists, what would their population be in 2000 years given modest 2% growth rate?

A generation being born every 30 years - in 2000 years, at 102% growth rate per generation, after 67 generations, their number would be 683400.

Bye bye romulans.

The scenarists' sense of scale isn't off only with regards to space, but sociology, as well.
Add a few centuries and every rag-tag band with a cool back-story is an empire.
Every conquered people can - and will - inevitably rise and free themselves, overthrowing their conqueror in due time (historic evidence indicating the opposite).

History is fluid - but not that fluid.

A generation being born every 30 years - in 2000 years, at 102% growth rate per generation, after 67 generations, their number would be 683400.

Going beyond modest growth.

If Romulans arrived on Romulas 2000 years ago and produced another generation on average each 50 years, that would mean that 40 generations have passed since first arrival.

And if they gradually colonized/invaded other surrounding worlds.

If we started with 10,000 people, and each couple in each generation produced an average of 3 children who in turn reproduced, the population of the Empire could be up to 110 billion people.

That about 16 planets with current Earth population, or one planet (Romulas) with Earth population, and 1,000 planets with a hundred million population.

Four children per generation (50 years) gives you 10,995,116,277,000,000 people.

And if they had five children (like my parents did) per couple, that would give them enough people after 2,000 years to populate 1.8 million planets with a current Earth population.

Here's the population calculator I used (kind of cool). http://wardricker.com/timegrowth.php

No my friends. If you use maltusian equation, (althought it's not very accurate predicting long term growth, it will give you approximate idea of what you're dealing with), you get:

N=N(0)*e^growth rate*time
N=(10,000)*(2.71828182846)^(0.02*2000)
N=2,353,852,668,403,270,380,782
Over 2.3 sextillion Romulans.

Lets say tons of them died in wars and some didn't get to procreate etc, and we have only 2 sextillion in time of the movie.

Very well. Let us calculate the malthusian exponential.
initial population 10000
growth rate 0,02 PER GENERATION (30 years).
67 generations (in 2000 years)
N=(10000)*((2,71828182846)^(0,02*67))

Total number of romulans after 2000 years: 38190.

Of course, the malthusian exponential growth has little validity in the real world:
Humans - or romulans - don't grow like bacteria in a petri-dish, EmperorTiberius. They will NEVER ever reach 2.3 sextillion in number in 2000 years (not even close - by a GIGANTIC margin) - so that you can "generously" subtract 0,3 sextillion.
This, real world history abundantly shows.

If you divide that by 7 billion (population of today's Earth), you get
2e21/7e9= 285,714,285,714

285 + billion major population centers

Even if you forget about the equation, assume there is something wrong, that there were bottlenecks and slowdowns, you can't escape the very real possibility that there would be millions of earth sized plannets at the very least.

One reason why we see Starfleet not care about a particular colony (ie Alpha Ceti VI where Khan was left) is because there are so many colonies that they can't get to them or even keep track of all of them. If there are millions of colonies, and thousands of ships, one ship would cover hundreds or thousads of colonies and there would be no time to get to all of them on a regular basis. Once you colonize a planet, you have to be self seficient for a long time.

With a population of 38190 romulans, I'm pretty sure you won't have more than a few VERY SMALL inhabited towns. So much for the star empire.

 

[T'Girl]

It depend on how large your petri dish is.

Unless Romulas has a Coruscant or Trantor level of population (not my impression based on what we were shown) then Romulas's population would only have risen to several billions.

However, if you expand the size of the dish to include surrounding planets, and then surrounding star systems, this would enable the Romulan population to grow over the course of two millenium into the hundreds of billions. If the Empire encompasses multiple thousands of inhabitable worlds, then most would have (compare to modern Earth) relatively low population density.

The Romulans would have "Lebensraum."

With a population of 38190 romulans, I'm pretty sure you won't have more than a few VERY SMALL inhabited towns. So much for the star empire.

Which is a prime reason for the Romulan population not to be under forty thousand. They certainly would not have anything that could be described as a "Star Empire."

It might be possible for the total Romulan population to be in the hundred million range and still have them do all the things we've seen and had suggested through dialog. But getting much below that make their society difficult to image.

 

[EmperorTiberius]

Spoiler: quotes

A generation being born every 30 years - in 2000 years, at 102% growth rate per generation, after 67 generations, their number would be 683400.

Bye bye romulans.

The scenarists' sense of scale isn't off only with regards to space, but sociology, as well.
Add a few centuries and every rag-tag band with a cool back-story is an empire.
Every conquered people can - and will - inevitably rise and free themselves, overthrowing their conqueror in due time (historic evidence indicating the opposite).

History is fluid - but not that fluid.

No my friends. If you use maltusian equation, (althought it's not very accurate predicting long term growth, it will give you approximate idea of what you're dealing with), you get:

N=N(0)*e^growth rate*time
N=(10,000)*(2.71828182846)^(0.02*2000)
N=2,353,852,668,403,270,380,782
Over 2.3 sextillion Romulans.

Lets say tons of them died in wars and some didn't get to procreate etc, and we have only 2 sextillion in time of the movie.

Very well. Let us calculate the malthusian exponential.
initial population 10000
growth rate 0,02 PER GENERATION (30 years).
67 generations (in 2000 years)
N=(10000)*((2,71828182846)^(0,02*67))

Total number of romulans after 2000 years: 38190.

Of course, the malthusian exponential growth has little validity in the real world:
Humans - or romulans - don't grow like bacteria in a petri-dish, EmperorTiberius. They will NEVER ever reach 2.3 sextillion in number in 2000 years (not even close - by a GIGANTIC margin) - so that you can "generously" subtract 0,3 sextillion.
This, real world history abundantly shows.

If you divide that by 7 billion (population of today's Earth), you get
2e21/7e9= 285,714,285,714

285 + billion major population centers

Even if you forget about the equation, assume there is something wrong, that there were bottlenecks and slowdowns, you can't escape the very real possibility that there would be millions of earth sized plannets at the very least.

One reason why we see Starfleet not care about a particular colony (ie Alpha Ceti VI where Khan was left) is because there are so many colonies that they can't get to them or even keep track of all of them. If there are millions of colonies, and thousands of ships, one ship would cover hundreds or thousads of colonies and there would be no time to get to all of them on a regular basis. Once you colonize a planet, you have to be self seficient for a long time.

With a population of 38190 romulans, I'm pretty sure you won't have more than a few VERY SMALL inhabited towns. So much for the star empire.

I don't understand why you have 38k number there, it's nonsense. Growth rate is calculated per year, not 30 years.

Also, our history is useless in Romulan case. They have warp drive, capability to colonize other planets, so territory is not an issue in the beginning . Most likely medical, foods, and other technologies are far beyond our own. This is ripe ground for tremendeous growth. They would have enormous population

 

[Edit_XYZ]

No my friends. If you use maltusian equation, (althought it's not very accurate predicting long term growth, it will give you approximate idea of what you're dealing with), you get:

N=N(0)*e^growth rate*time
N=(10,000)*(2.71828182846)^(0.02*2000)
N=2,353,852,668,403,270,380,782
Over 2.3 sextillion Romulans.

Lets say tons of them died in wars and some didn't get to procreate etc, and we have only 2 sextillion in time of the movie.

Very well. Let us calculate the malthusian exponential.
initial population 10000
growth rate 0,02 PER GENERATION (30 years).
67 generations (in 2000 years)
N=(10000)*((2,71828182846)^(0,02*67))

Total number of romulans after 2000 years: 38190.

Of course, the malthusian exponential growth has little validity in the real world:
Humans - or romulans - don't grow like bacteria in a petri-dish, EmperorTiberius. They will NEVER ever reach 2.3 sextillion in number in 2000 years (not even close - by a GIGANTIC margin) - so that you can "generously" subtract 0,3 sextillion.
This, real world history abundantly shows.

With a population of 38190 romulans, I'm pretty sure you won't have more than a few VERY SMALL inhabited towns. So much for the star empire.

I don't understand why you have 38k number there, it's nonsense. Growth rate is calculated per year, not 30 years.

It's quite simple, actually. Actually, I already explained it above:
It is calculated per 30 years in the case of humans (humanoids) because they need 30 years to mature and reproduce AKA grow in number - NOT 1 year.

And that's why you only have ~40000 romulans, as opposed to your mathematical exponential fantasy number.

PS - really? This is supposed to be 'nonsense'?
Let's see some arguments supporting this assertion.

Also, our history is useless in Romulan case. They have warp drive, capability to colonize other planets, so territory is not an issue in the beginning . Most likely medical, foods, and other technologies are far beyond our own. This is ripe ground for tremendeous growth. They would have enormous population

It's not about space.
For your petri-dish/exponential to be an accurate analogy:
EVERYONE needs to have more than 3+ children; but not just any children. ALL these children need to survive until they have just as many children as their parents had; to find a mate; to have just as many children;
Etc.

This never happened in humanity's history.
Why?
Because it takes a LOT more time, resources and hazard for a human to grow and reproduce than for a bacterium.
Because life was - and is - dangerous and full of hazards (dying, not finding a mate, not having enough children, etc, etc).
Because resources are scarce.

In the trekverse, even more so than in ours. Also true with regards to resources - we have quite a few lines in trek (and politically decided massacres of colonies due to lacking supplies, etc) to attest to this.

All this is especially true for pioneering life (empire building) or war times - which are the romulan national sports.

As such, our history is highly relevant.
Certainly FAR more relevant than a simplistic exponential - Which goes double when one considers that exponential curves are only mathematical abstractions: in the physical world, these curves always stop - sooner, rather than later.