The thought just occurred to me: they talk about it being a big deal that the Ocampa only live nine years and… We assume they mean nine Earth years. But they never actually establish how long an Ocampan year is. If they have an orbital period similar to, say, Saturn, she could easily outlive Tuvok while lamenting that she “only” gets nine years.
Didn’t they also establish that Ocampan women only go into heat once in their lives, and have human size litters aka usually just one child, meaning they would be at Chinese levels of birth deficit?
Yes. Kes was artificially put into it and made a point of saying it happens only once.
As to them having a tendency to single births, I don’t remember. There do seem to be few enough of them to indicate a population in decline, but…
If each couple can only have one child ever, their population would halve every generation, wouldn’t it? That’s… Isn’t that wildly unsustainable, biologically?
I suppose they could represent an evolutionary dead-end…
That’s only if you assume male-to-female ratio of 1:1 if they had, say, 10 women for each man, they would only lose 10% of their population per generation. However, if roughly one in ten pregnancies were with twins, the population would be stable.
Pretty sure the universal translator translates units too. Many times aliens (from outside the Alpha quadrant) using “parsecs” for instance. Wouldn’t really make sense otherwise, since the translations of those would be often pointless
The thought just occurred to me: they talk about it being a big deal that the Ocampa only live nine years and… We assume they mean nine Earth years. But they never actually establish how long an Ocampan year is. If they have an orbital period similar to, say, Saturn, she could easily outlive Tuvok while lamenting that she “only” gets nine years.
Didn’t they also establish that Ocampan women only go into heat once in their lives, and have human size litters aka usually just one child, meaning they would be at Chinese levels of birth deficit?
Yes. Kes was artificially put into it and made a point of saying it happens only once.
As to them having a tendency to single births, I don’t remember. There do seem to be few enough of them to indicate a population in decline, but…
If each couple can only have one child ever, their population would halve every generation, wouldn’t it? That’s… Isn’t that wildly unsustainable, biologically?
I suppose they could represent an evolutionary dead-end…
With the known population, they wouldn’t even last a century.
That’s only if you assume male-to-female ratio of 1:1 if they had, say, 10 women for each man, they would only lose 10% of their population per generation. However, if roughly one in ten pregnancies were with twins, the population would be stable.
This is a big part of why I love this community.
Pretty sure the universal translator translates units too. Many times aliens (from outside the Alpha quadrant) using “parsecs” for instance. Wouldn’t really make sense otherwise, since the translations of those would be often pointless