Rematog wrote:Hello, I’m new to the board, been following the strip for 3-4 years. Recently I’ve started reading the background pages on the site. I’ve come up with an observation based on statements in the Loroi backgrounds.
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Therefore: Average % of Eligible females having Encounter each year = 11,111/1,345,000 = 0.83% per year, less than 1%. Inversely, mean time between sexual encounters is 121 years. This is the point I wished to make. They must live an almost monastic existence with regard to sex.
For males, slightly better. Average % of Eligible males having encounter each year =11,111/202,500 = 5.5%, or inversely, mean time between sexual encounters is 18 years, better, but still not exactly a Human teenager’s dream of a world full of women….
It’s simple logic really, a very long lived race with a high percentage of births to sex encounters ratio will have to be having very, very little sex to have a stable population OR have very effective birth control.
Welcome to the board. I think your general conclusions are near the mark in that many Loroi females will have only a few sexual encounters during their lives, and most Loroi males won't have a many-sex-partners-per-day existence. But I think there are some incorrect assumptions that make the numbers seem more bleak than they should be.
The first one is that Loroi don't have anywhere near a 400 year average lifespan. Loroi can potentially live 400 years, but most don't. Many Loroi of the warrior class die at a young age, even in peacetime, and more die in wartime; There has barely been a 400 year span in Loroi history without multiple wars. I'd suggest an average lifespan perhaps between 150-200 years, though that doesn't change the numbers all that much.
The much bigger impact is the fertility rate. Because human females are only fertile for about two days per month, it takes a lot of mating encounters (unless they are carefully timed) to produce a pregnancy. The Loroi ability to store the male gametes for several weeks avoids this ovulation-roulette and dramatically increases fertility rates, but there will be other factors that limit it. I think if both partners were young and optimally fertile, the chance of pregnancy from a single mating might be as high as 80%, but not everyone will be optimally fertile, especially as they age. I can imagine fertility rates dropping dramatically, especially for females, past age 50 or so. However, it's usually the older females who have higher status, and so they will still be the ones occupying a significant portion of the males' time when mating rights become restricted.
It's also worth mentioning that a matching between a male and female usually consists of multiple matings spread across several days. This is partly to increase the chance of fertilization, but also partly to facilitate the other aspects of the rendezvous, both pleasurable and professional (if the male is an adviser or therapist, for example).
Finally, even in peacetime when mating restrictions are most in force, the overall Loroi population is almost never static. Even if there are areas that have reached some kind of limit, there is somewhere else that needs more population (especially new colonies). Males in a capped population will either move somewhere else, or females will be brought in from elsewhere to mate. Something like a very small research colony on a barren world with no room for growth would probably have very few males, or no males at all -- the females would often have to go offworld to mate.
In ancient times, overpopulation was a recurring problem, but one that was continually checked by almost constant internal warfare.
