Island 103

November 8th, 2020
Island 103
Who Populates your Island?

Now we have to fill the space, to bring to life the hundred souls who will be mooching about amongst the pines or palms in search of blackberries, boars, or bifocal lenses. The people of the world are the most important component, and their social interactions are at the heart of the exercise. Perhaps you have already started to consider the difficulty with trying to create one hundred distinct personalities in your mind, when it’s hard enough to create your own, but we’ll work through a few ways you can combat this mountain, going over, under, round, through, or settling on the near side.

The options are more or less endless, even just considering as few as three basic identifiers. In a gross simplification of a demographic exercise, you could choose only three ethnicities, give the option of three religions, and limit the potential sexualities to three and there would be, with just 10 people, 205,891,132,094,649 options for variation. Things get complicated pretty quick.

So you have some options. I’ll outline some of the biggies.

1. Rag-doll
Your island is populated by simple people who have no allegiance to anything or anyone, they were born out of the earth only moments ago, with or without the curiosity to learn why. These humans can be shaped to a religious ideology you propose, use a system of government that doesn’t exist, share they wealth, love, and land freely without the social freedoms and inhibitions of free market capitalism.

2. An Island of YOU
If you’re finding it hard to get inside the minds of others, why not simply put a hundred people who think like you into the space. At least that way they’ll all be on the same page, assuming you catch them all on a good day. This allows the easy formation of coherent governments, religions, and agreed-upon laws, even if, in reality, you wouldn’t get on with yourself very well, though I hope you would!

3. Make it up
Pick a baseline of 50/50 born male or female and work from there. Remember the exercise will only go in the directions you chose, allowing for sparks and unexpected conditions, so if you’re not interested in religion then don’t create one, or accept in the back of your mind that these are all religiously accepting people, allowing all and any beliefs to manifest in whatever way an individual might desire, just like in real life.

4. Demographics
One way to populate the island could be to use your own country, taking their demographics and directly transposing them onto your hundred, using percentage grades as rough markers. Depending on where you pick, and the specificity of the location, you can find starkly varied and interesting results, consider the difference between picking a US town from rural Wyoming compared to an equal population sized area from Manhattan. In general, demographics, being the hard statistics they are, can only give you a sweeping picture of a place, and do as much to unearth the feel of a city or country as studying a geological survey might.

That being said, for a neat guide to starting a society, they can be helpful for producing relatively unbiased numbers, even if the specifics are lost amongst the whole. Let’s use the UK and London as examples…

UK Birth Rates

Births/100 - 1.7
Deaths/100 - 0.91
Natural Change per/100 - 0.16 or +1 every 6.25 years
Mother’s Mean Age at Birth - 28.5

Life expectancy

Male 78.6
Female - 83.1

2011 Age Structure

UK London

0-4 6.2 6 7
5-9 5.6 6 (5) 6
10-14 5.8 7 5
15-19 6.3 6 6
20-29 13.6 14 (13) 18
30-39 13.1 13 18
40-49 14.6 15 14
50-59 12.2 12 10
60-69 10.8 11 7
70-79 7.1 7 5
80-89 3.9 4 3
90+ 0.8 1 1
102 (100) 100

This leaves us with six or seven babies who need proper babying, five or six primary school aged children, about twelve secondary school/college age, our youngest contingent totalling twenty-four for both London and the UK. Then our adult group, the largest, equals roughly double that with fifty-three aged between twenty to sixty in the UK and sixty of the same bracket in London. Finally our oldest group makes up the other twenty-three/sixteen. So you’re looking at a quarter in the youth, half adult, a quarter older. The slightly shifted weight in the London numbers comes from their vast quantity of twenty-five to thirty-five year olds, with that ten year span making up roughly twenty percent of the population.

Depending on how dictatorial you wish to be you can chose how to use this information. For example, you may wish to assign a certain percentage of the 50-59 age group to be teachers for the ages 5-19, or you could choose to cull those over the age of sixty to save on mouths to feed and put everyone over the age of nine to hard work in the fields for food. Current stats also point to having one more woman than man, likely in the 65+ age group.

Most common cause of death:

Male 1. Ischaemic heart disease. 2. Dementia and Alzheimer’s disease
Female 1. Dementia and Alzheimer’s Disease. 2. Ischaemic heart disease

Ethnic Groups

UK London

White 87.2% 87 59.6% 60
Black 3% 3 13.3% 13
South Asian 4.2% 4 18.5% 19
Mixed 2% 2 5.0% 5
Other 3.7% 4 3.4% 3

Religion

UK London

Christian 59.49% 59 48.4% 48
Muslim 4.4% 4 12.3% 12
Hindu 1.3% 1 5.0% 5
Sikh 0.7% 1 1.5% 2
Jewish 0.4% 1 1.8% 2
Buddhist 0.4% 1 1.0% 1
Unspecified 7.2% 7 8.5% 9
None 25.7% 26 20.7% 21

Urbanisation

Urban population - 83.4% (Annual rate of increase 0.89%)

Sexuality

UK London

Heterosexual 93.4% 93 89.0% 89
Gay/Lesbian 1.2% 1 3.2% 3
Bisexual 0.8% 1 2.0% 2
Other 0.5% 1 0.3% 1
DRN 4.1% 4 8.1% 8

Men are more likely to identify as Gay, Women are more likely to identify as Heterosexual, (bi erasure).

Country of Birth

Largest two foreign-born groups are India and Poland, followed by Pakistan, Romania, and Ireland.

National Identity Population

English 51.4% 51 84.3 84 (+33)
Scottish 5.93% 6 8.2 8 (+2)
Welsh 3.26% 3 4.7 5 (+2)
Northern Irish 0.81% 1 2.8 3 (+2)
British 18.77% 19 100 100 (+81)

So what do we have? Taken from the UK… One hundred people, a white majority, mostly Christian or agnostic leaning. City dwellers greatly outnumber rural, and a large split in ideology of nationality between the nations that make up the combined nations. In London we see considerably more diversity in ethnicity, religion, and sexuality. Remember, the difference between one and three people is a huge jump in such a small population size. The picture, however, is stark, and may lead to very swift minority discrimination if you’re population are anything like most of today’s. Just bear in mind what you’re seeking to unearth, and be tactful with your decision making.