Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-26006155-20190820122909/@comment-26907577-20190829160916

Yes. Not a debunking, but rather a new necessary assumption. It draws us away from Occam's Razor, but only slightly.

Let's work these numbers backward.

Average world population growth is about 1.1%/year

The reciprocal of 1.011 is 0.9891.

0.9891^100 is 0.33.

I've applied this to the 2010 population estimates to get those of a century before 201X, boosting the number of "villages" massively.

Suppose we define a village as somewhere where every house is within a leisurely 10-minute walk of the center. If it takes 20 minutes to walk an easy mile, then we can have a village with a radius of one half-mile, or 0.8 kilometers.

Suppose you need 10,000 square feet (929 square meters) to build a house. Multiply by 3/2 to try and include roadways: 1400 m^2. Area equals pi r squared, so the village can be 2,010,619 square meters in area. 2 million divided by 14 hundred is conveniently about 14 hundred. If we can have half of the buildings be residential, and 5 people in a home, that puts our hypothetical village cap at (approximately because of all my rounding) 3500.

Hmm. Let's back up to the 2,000 cap given by state law.

The monsters find out the truth about Alphys when she evacuates a genocide route. This implies they went to the True Lab. How many people can fit in there for a short time?

There are 1,565 2x2 tiles based on my count. This might be a little off. It's a general idea. Let's say that, on average, one monster can fit on each of these areas. And this is, naturally, not counting monsters killed in Ruins, Snowdin, and Waterfall, nor survivors in Home. Unfortunately, that last point means we still don't have an upper limit.

Let's keep the 2,000 for now. This permits 5,637 villages in states with mountain ranges. Wikipedia lists ~1,790 mountain peaks in the United States. If Chara could only walk ~14km to the mountain, then what are the odds of Mount Ebott being within that distance of a village? The cumulative land area of these 25 states is 3,048,089 square kilometers. 14^2 km^2 * pi * 5,637 = 3,470,982 km^2. So, if my math is correct and estimates not too far off, then there doesn't seem to be much difficulty in there being a nearby village at all.

Comments? I guess I just like calculating stuff that never needed calculating.