Dark Continents 5 will likely make reference to the number of people displaced by the African Blight. Figuring that out ended up being a lot harder than I expected.
First, I had to know how much area the Blight covers. Easy, right? As we all recall, the Blight began Dec 9; to May 5 is 4 months and 26 days. At 11 km/day, that’s 1617 km. Except it’s actually 1666 km, because 11 km/day is rounded down. Also, under the 30-day month convention, the spread was 4.87 months times 340 km/month, or 1655 km. And of course, it hasn’t simply spread in a circle: the Sahara is serving as a buffer in the north.
So, with that vague spread in my, I set out to find how many people were in it. I found this “Find Population on Map” tool. (I think it’s for 2015.) A 1666km circle centered at Kemba got me 242,524,500 people, a generous overestimate. Attempting to use the polygon tool got me around 195 million, likely an underestimate. Finally, adding 200km to the circle for preemptive evacuations got me 348,817,400. Erring on the high side, I thus guesstimated 275 million would be displaced, in today’s population.
To get to 2037, I needed population growth estimates. Most of what I found were 2050/2100 estimates, but the UN’s World Population Prospects had sufficient detail. In 2017, Middle Africa has a population of 163,494,885 people; in 2037, it’ll be 285,422,821. This growth rate, 1.75, sounded about right; indeed, most of the Blight is roughly in Middle Africa. Thus, applying the rate uniformly, I got a corrected estimate of 480 million people displaced.
This has lead me to a realization: I am a monster. Hitler, Stalin, Mao, the freaking Mongols—all are mere amateurs before my genocidal grimdarkness!
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