What's That Soph?
So, I hear you like demographics. Or, at least, the comments on the last post tell me you like demographics.
Describing the constituent species of the Empire can be a mite tricky, depending on exactly how you define things – leaving aside any nasty outworlder prejudices about the status of neogens or uplifts, some species – relevantly, the mezuar and chiril-{n,m}, don’t have identities which lend themselves to headcount, and thus various approximations must be used.
And complicating things further, of course, is that the Empire’s immigration procedures don’t give a lump of species-appropriate excretions what species you happen to be, which leads to, oh, just over 8% of the population being “other”.
But given that, here’s the rough breakdown in a nice, user-friendly pie chart:
And here is the same data in a table, giving you what those percentages translate to in terms of approximate population numbers out of the Empire’s roughly 2.57 trillion sophonts:
| eldrae | 12.54% | 322,278,000,000 | |
| arthál | neogen | 0.31% | 7,967,000,000 |
| chfsssc | 2.48% | 63,736,000,000 | |
| chiril-{n,m} | unconventional identity | 0.36% | 9,252,000,000 |
| ciseflish | 9.14% | 234,898,000,000 | |
| dar-bandal | uplift | 7.65% | 196,605,000,000 |
| dar-célmek | uplift | 1.10% | 28,270,000,000 |
| dar-cúlnó | uplift | 2.26% | 58,082,000,000 |
| dar-e’sevdra | uplift | 1.83% | 47,031,000,000 |
| dar-ííche | uplift | 3.36% | 86,352,000,000 |
| dar-vorac | uplift | 2.15% | 55,255,000,000 |
| digisapience | 14.56% | 374,192,000,000 | |
| esseli | 3.31% | 85,067,000,000 | |
| galari | 7.28% | 187,096,000,000 | |
| kaeth | 6.74% | 173,218,000,000 | |
| mezuar | unconventional identity | 1.39% | 35,723,000,000 |
| myneni | 4.91% | 126,187,000,000 | |
| selyéva | 2.78% | 71,446,000,000 | |
| sssc!haaaouú | 3.92% | 100,744,000,000 | |
| temísi | neogen | 0.49% | 12,593,000,000 |
| verviani | 2.69% | 69,133,000,000 | |
| zal!en | neogen | 0.43% | 11,051,000,000 |
| other | 8.32% | 213,824,000,000 |
You may note that even the arthál, with the smallest demographic footprint due to their relatively recent creation and source population of fandom enthusiastic enough to change species, still manage to outpopulate Earth.
And that with 173 billion kaeth around… well, let’s just say the Legions don’t have any trouble recruiting.