There are hundreds of billions of stars within the Milky Way. That much has been speculated to be true.
I have heard that the average Hive World contains between 100 and 500 billion citizens, and also that Hive Worlds make up 14% of the Imperium's worlds.
So does anyone have an estimate as to the total population? An Imperial-wide census would be absurd, of course, but has anyone heard anything ever?
prademac said:
So does anyone have an estimate as to the total population? An Imperial-wide census would be absurd, of course, but has anyone heard anything ever?
No It would be impossible to reach an accurate number. And considering the time aspect, if you say one number, then the next second the number might be completely different because millions of humans just died and was born the second before.
The only thing in ways of an official census is a quote I've read that says that the number of Imperial servants that have died in the service of the Emperor outnumber the stars themselves. Of course, it took quite a bit of time, but that's a pretty huge number, so we can only imagine how many humans there are within the Imperium of man at the moment.
A friend of mine, while bored, once used the values in the 3rd Edition 40k rulebook (which listed world types, average populations, and the relative numbers of those kinds of worlds). Assuming approximately a million worlds under the rule of the Imperium, and using those figures, the conclusion was come to that the population of the Imperium was approximately 3.3E+17, or 330,000,000,000,000,000, or 330 quadrillion. This figure is, of course, extremely rough, but it provides a decent sense of scale - it's about fifty-five million times the number of people on Earth today.
That's a fantastic statistic. Thank you.
What a difficult number to comprehend...