How would vore affect the human population?

[P1an3tv0re]

Have you ever wondered what would happen to the human population if vore was possible, well im going to attempt to calculate it.

(Warning this estimate does not take into account non-fatal vore, animal preds, animal prey or anything along these lines as well as population growth/ births)

This was just a fun little thought experiment.

Feel free to correct me or use my statistics for your own calculation.

Now lets start.

Population:
54% are male.
46% are female.

Role:
43% prefer to be prey, the majority being male.
21% prefer to be observers (neither predator nor prey), about half being male, half female.
18% prefer to be predators, about half being male, half female.
18% are fine with taking on any role.

All statistics are from:
https://www.deviantart.com/de-vore/art/ ... -463248859


Lets assume the majority of people who like vore are into some form of bdsm. 75% of people are into bdsm.

Lets say the amount of people in that 75% who are into vore is 0.1 to 1 to 10% minimum and maximum.

7.8billion x 0.75 = 5.85billion.
5.85billion x 0.001 = 5.85million.

5.85million minimum
58.5million average
585million maximum

18% prefer to be preds, 18% are fine with being either so lets say its 12%.So 18+12=30% are preds
5.85million x 0.3 = 1.755million.

1.755million preds

Now estimating prey. Lets say on average 1 pred eats 2.5 people per day (not physically 2.5 people, just that on average)

1.755million x 2.5 = 4.3875million

4.3875million people eaten per day. 4.3875million x 365 days = 1.6014375billion people eaten.

Assuming preds were eaten too, and that 5% of the preds were eaten, that leaves 1667250 or 1.66725million preds.

7.8billion ÷ 1.6014375billion = 4.87062404871

4.87years ABSOLUTE MINIMUM until whole planet is dead.



Im going to be honest, im lazy and im going to leave it here.

If anyone wants to use my maths to correct me or make a more accurate answer, feel free to. Just please notify me as to your correction.

That will be all.

-P

[CuddleSlut]

I have a couple problems with this premise.

1. You seem to suggesting that 43% of the population would be willing prey for fatal digestion. Realistically, that's only going to pop up in people who are suicidal.
2. Fatal digestion and vore would most likely be treated the same as murder and punished accordingly, so very few people would actually do it.

More likely, if vore became real, it'd be used for fully consensual non-fatal bedroom stuff with regurgitation afterwards, and have zero significant impact on the population at all.

[rugli]

I have personally have no idea, how it would be if vore was possible in real life, i.e same size soft oral vore for example. But your callculations are based on if it was fatal. But we have no idea if that would actually be the case if it was possible. They might be correct or slightly off, but it would also depends on if it was form of abuse or if some one would do it willingly knowing the death risk involved even if it could give the ultimate pleasure? But if we flip it and say it would be non-fatal then I don't think it would affect the population much, I would like to image that vore would be popular form of sex if it was possible in real life if it was non-fatal. As you probably know oral sex is probably one of the most popular form of sex around, and you cannot turn on main-stream porn movie without being exposed to oral sex in some form, whether the film features, gay, lesbian, strights etc .

[MementoMori]

Well I'll tell you one thing, there'd definitely be one less person in the human population. (Myself as a prey)

In all honesty though, impressive math skills, and the original post was an interesting read, pretty thought-provoking. I liked that you mixed the population overlap of BDSM vs. Vore in there. x)

Edit: One thing is, though, if vore was real, and humans were eating eachother to sustain themselves, I believe they would take a very long time to digest eachother, like a snake does. So, if they only ate another human once every 2 weeks, rather than around 2.5 humans a day, what would that number be? Would the birthrate outweigh the predation rate? Would it still wipe out the entire population or no? I'm not the best at mathematics like this so I'm not gonna attempt it myself XD

[Unfortunate]

Your premise leaves a lot of variables that would need to be taken into consideration, and some variants on the formula that would be interesting case studies:

The first and most important point to make: Vore is a niche fetish, and even if it became possible, not everyone would approve of it. It would likely be considered taboo or obsene, and would probably get a reputation in history as a criminal act akin to murder, a war crime, or depending on the culture in question; even an act worse than murder, like the total spiritual destruction of another thinking being.

People fear otherness: In the early days of humanity, if you saw somebody you didn't recognise, it was usually a situation one would need to gauge very carefully; if nobody else in your group is able to identify them they could be a potentual friend, but they could just as easily take everything from you, even your very life.

Is vore an age old ability of humanity or and newly aquired mutation?
If it was an issue since the dawn of man, we would simply learn to adapt to it; however that would manifest. If it was an entirely new, impossible to explain phenomenon then things would devolve into chaos. Of course, case 0 would require somebody to actually discover they can do it first, and it may be a secret these new preds would keep to themselves: When fully discovered, it would be fully expected for witchhunts to start up. And if there wasn't an easy way of ID'ing them, expect insane witchtrials too. Predators are likely to become a long suffering "others" to regular people, and co-existing would be strained or even impossible.

If the majority of people were prey (and unwilling), they would see the preds as dangerous outsiders and a threat to humanity. You may very well wind up with "Prey" who are professional predator hunters. These people may have lost the lottery to gain the biological advantage, but that doesn't mean they'd not fight back.
If the majority of people were willing prey, or incapable of fighting back, they would probably become slaves to predator masters, who would drive the weak to build their halls. Predators would basically become like warlord clans with hordes of vassals who have no choice but to serve. If that was their history, there'd be no telling what their modern equivalent to us would look like...

If these rules were applied specifically to only us vorarephiles, the situation would also drastically change.
There would then be another ingroup/outgroup scenario, and even the non preds would probably catch some of the flak. It would be a band together or be destroyed situation. If I personally became a predator, I sure as hell wouldn't go public about it, and would probably view it as a curse and not a blessing.

If your rules were to be applied to only one country... you've basically got predator super soldiers. There would be research being carried out, they'd be bred for war, selective breeding would be used... they'd gain a massive reputation from foreign powers, who's media would speak endlessly of the flesh craving monsters that obey their leader. It would be the perfect recipe for a very dangerous dictator to sieze power; The preds could quite literally remove the undesirables, and they'd very much be the dreaded enforcers and attack dogs of Fearless Leader #73.

Reality would be harsh experience for predators, one paved with blood: You'd basically be stuck either constantly on the run, banding together to fend off attacks from everyone else, starting outright wars to ensure your right to exist, become horrifying monsters that dominate and subjugate the weak, be the glorified executioners acting on the behalf of a dangerous individual or... perhaps simply trying your best to fit in, and hope you don't blow it.


I'll be frank. I'm into the fetish, yes, but I'm not suicidal and have things I wish to do. Being devoured by a total stranger would not do my future prospects much good. So yes, even though I'm into it; In this scenario you describe, I would probably not be the same person I am now. And even if I was I would likely sleep with a weapon at arms reach.

Don't take this the wrong way pal, I'm not being the contrarian for that smug satisfaction it gives. IMO this is likely what would happen, though not all would agree: Some will think my outlook's too grim, and others will think it's not grim enough.
The one bright side to all of this musing is the fact that some of my scenarios would make for interesting stories. If any caught your eye, dear reader, then go right ahead and be inspired!

[Redatheart]

Dont leave out the fertility rate
4.3 million people eaten each day (0.0005% of the population) is met with roughly 385,000 births each day (https://www.theworldcounts.com/challeng ... born-a-day)
A person/government/thing of decision making could enact policies to ramp up the birth rate to meet the meat demand, but there could also be policies directed at who exactly is for eating and who is for reproductive purposes

[SJ777]

The rate of people being eaten seems way off, without a bunch of unstated assumptions. There have been threads where people did calculations and figured that fully digesting an adult human of average-ish size would take, if I recall right, around a month. So if we're just assuming that vore is now physically possible, no other radical changes to give preds super rapid metabolisms or whatever, that'd be more like around a dozen prey per year per pred. Taking your number for preds, that's about 21 million prey consumed per year. Probably lower in practice if we assume that pred's aren't like, biologically required to eat a person every month like clockwork, just capable of it, but even with 21 million prey per year, doing some math with the previous post's birth numbers, about 140 million people are born per year, which definitely outstrips the number of people being eaten. Even if you shave a bit off the birth numbers to account for the loss of kids those prey would have had in a given year if not eaten, there's still a sizable enough net gain for humanity to not eat itself to extinction.

Mind, this is completely ignoring any questions of morality and how people would react and all of that, just what the raw numbers would more likely look like in a vacuum as I understand things.

[folomo]

A person/government/thing of decision making could enact policies to ramp up the birth rate to meet the meat demand, but there could also be policies directed at who exactly is for eating and who is for reproductive purposes

In most advanced countries fertility rate is way below replacement rate, and so far no advanced country has been able to increase the birth rate with any of their policies.
Depopulation will be the new problem in 50 years.

[Fallen]

I tend to lean into the realistic side of things, and I've actually been working on a bit of a project(that might wind up posted here at some point,) that actually delves into what a realistic predator-prey dynamic might look like, so this thought experiment piqued my interest.

If you're going to go for a realistic scenario, it's important to keep in mind the calorie content of the human body. Basically, depending on how well the body is absorbed, an adult human will give a predator between seventy thousand and a hundred and fifty thousand calories. One per month isn't too far off, though with the predators I came up with for the project I mentioned at the start of the post, the increased strength and regenerative capacity they need to be the kind of folks who can pick someone up off the street and swallow them -- and to an extent, the physiological adaptations, too -- require a furnace that runs just a bit hotter than a human. A fully grown predator would probably burn about 3,500 calories per day with moderate activity, and I raised their maximum sustained metabolic rate from ~6,000 calories to ~10,000 calories. When running off of a large meal(of any variety, but preferably the whole and alive kind,) they tend to run hotter, sleep less, and work more, so they'll be more likely to operate at the upper end of that range, so what could support a human for between twenty-five and seventy days might only last them a week or two.

Needless to say, this is just one variety of pred. Still, it's something to keep in mind. Biologically speaking, I'm actually of the opinion that it's less reasonable to assume that someone already adapted to swallowing human-sized prey whole would have to take a whole month to digest them, partly because, given that humans walk upright, I can imagine that carrying around a hundred pounds of undigested meat for a month might actually be a net loss in terms of energy. Also, given that pythons, despite being cold-blooded, typically take a few weeks to digest meals weighing up to fifty kilos(probably? My research here's pretty minimal...) I'd expect a warm-blooded mammal to do better.

<tangent>

Basically, I think the limiting factor on prey consumption would be metabolic, not digestive. The body doesn't want meat to rot away inside it for too long, so what it can't digest, it'll try to pass, and at that point, you lose most of the calories and leave most of a corpse behind. It's almost like how pandas need to eat almost constantly because their bodies aren't actually adapted for eating bamboo.

For the sake of any kind of coherent narrative, I'd generally go with a plausible solution if no possible solutions are available. Increased stomach acidity, specialized enzymes(which would, themselves, have to survive in a more acidic environment,) and the old standby of mechanical peristalsis, which a lot of stories use, can all work together to bring digestion down to, I think, a plausibly(if not possibly) realistic level of four days, end to end. That's not actually far off from most normal meals, when it comes down to it.

</tangent>

But all that said, and getting back to the topic at hand, if we have 1.77 million predators, and we assume that those predators run a bit hotter than average, burning 3,000 calories per day, and that they get 90,000 calories on average from each person they consume, we can start to home in on a reasonable scenario.

Assuming the global birthrate doesn't go up in response to the added predation, we're looking at 78 million net births per year at the current rate.

If each predator *only* survives on other people, taking one per month on average, they'll consume 21.24 million people per year, as per SJ777's estimate. Personally, I think most preds would want a little variety, but we'll start here.

If we gave them the goal of actually bringing population growth to zero, that means our hypothetical scenario could support 6.53 million preds without even leading to a decline in the population. I'd actually argue that it'd be more than that, since some of the people who got eaten in a given year would otherwise have died, and the increase in the death rate, once people got used to it, might actually lead to an increase in the birth rate. And honestly, even though I'm basically 100% prey, I can't imagine anyone living like that, eating one person once a month and nothing else. It probably wouldn't even be a healthy diet.

Assuming that was what they all stuck to, however, about one in every thousand people would be predators. If they were evenly distributed, that would put at least one in most population centers, though they probably wouldn't go to places where they'd be hunting alone, and there I go worldbuilding again. Always happens, I swear...

[Thagrahn]

I'm with @Fallen, drop the average number eaten to one a month for actual consumption, and allow for the Preds to also be able to supplement their diets with more normal foods to get through the month.

Biggest change here would be the expected lifespan of a given person since being to old to reproduce would likely also be less appealing to predators. Thus, initial prey targets would be considered prime during their 30's since they would have a chance to have already reproduced, but still fairly fit and attractive.

It's likely that only Predators would reach the retirement age range, but potential prey would be harder to acquire at that point. Some might be lucky to be in an area with a large number of prey interested in being prey to such old preds, but other preds would start to have problems catching unwilling prey.

So, prey population would have average lifespan of 35 years, preds lifespan could average at 70.

This still leaves the reproduction rate above the number of people consumed plus the number of preds that ultimately starved each year.

* * * * * * *

Switching gears a bit, the shorter lifespan of the group targeted as prey would have ramifications on colleges and industries relying on entry level workers more heavily since there would be a significant risk of a worker being eaten by a pred in a supervisor role.

However, this could be seen as both an instinctive to have better work ethics due to the fact that a worker could be eaten instead of fired for poor performance.

Final side note would be the development of technology designed around non-fatal vore since it could have both punitive and recreational uses.

[Redatheart]

In most advanced countries fertility rate is way below replacement rate, and so far no advanced country has been able to increase the birth rate with any of their policies.
Depopulation will be the new problem in 50 years.

Governments in developed nations are doing next to nothing to increase there population's birth rates. They have found it cheaper to either A) import more people from other parts of the world or B) Invest heavily in automation
The only developed countries that are actually investing in their own birth rates that I know of are Poland and Hungary, and they have begun to see success in their programs
But even then, the population of Europe+USA+Canada dont even make up a third of the world
The birth rates of Asia and Africa are still going strong, with Africa's birthrate exponentially higher than any other continent. Africa alone is projected to have >4 Billion people by 2100

[Fallen]

I've returned...with some math.

Basically, this topic gave me an idea for a story setting, so I decided to actually work out what the effects would be for society as a whole.
The short answer is that the effects would be potentially catastrophic, chaotic, and slightly confusing.

I'll be using the US for reference, here, but since I made the predator distribution global, it doesn't change much from country to country.

I started with the concept that predators appeared as a response to population stresses, and that anyone has a chance to become one. The number of active predators depends on the global birth rate, for some reason, and seems to be tailored to put the death rate at about 10% above the birth rate. Predatory instincts develop around age 16, and by age 18, predators have to consume the equivalent of one decent-sized adult every 60 days or so or face debilitating hunger pains. I also put their average at around one person every 45 days. To achieve the desired result, I came up with a revised estimate of roughly 18,000,000 predators, globally. About 780,000 of them would be in the US, if they were evenly distributed. They probably wouldn't be, but if I was going to simulate this all the way down, it'd take weeks. In any case, 780,000 preds in the US would take roughly 6,350,000 people per year in the US.

In terms of age ranges, kids were immediately declared off-limits, and people over 45 aren't considered appetizing. The age group with the highest appeal to predators is between 25 and 30, but that's just the peak of the bell curve, and it falls off smoothly on both sides.

Still, that meant that the 27 years between 18 and 45 are basically the most dangerous years of a person's life before they turn 80 or so. Based on numbers from the US Census Bureau, I was able to determine the rough number of people in that age range, which came out to about 117,500,000.

So, every year, 6,350,000 out of 117,500,000 would be culled. That's about 5.4%. So, on average, you'd have a 94.6% chance of making it to the end of a year that you started alive. I honestly think that most people wouldn't think much about that. We tend to see a 95% chance as basically a guaranteed success. I mean, any D&D or XCOM player can tell you that it is by no means guaranteed, but I think that after a while, we'd just assume that it wouldn't happen to us.

Of course, the chance of actually making it to age 45, for an eighteen year old, is only 22%. That's harder to ignore. Once you get past thirty, though, it does get easier.

Now, however, we get into some even crazier consequences. One of the reasons why the birth rate has gone down since the development of modern medicine is that, simply put, a whole lot of kids used to die before they turned eighteen. Families had lots of kids because they couldn't be sure if any one of them would actually survive to have kids of their own. Now, imagine you have a child, and you know for a fact that they've only got a 22% chance, at best, of making it to 45. Assuming you started at a 2% chance of being taken at 18, and ramped it up slowly from there to around 10% between 25 and 30, kids would have a roughly 80% chance of making it to the most dangerous age group.

So parents would already be thinking that maybe, just maybe, they should have more kids. But it gets more complicated.

One of the other 'soft' rules I added to the scenario was that predators were discouraged from making orphans. That means that being a parent automatically confers some protection, and being a single parent, especially of multiple kids, is basically a get-out-of-jail-free card. Mostly. I mean, it wouldn't always work, but it would definitely have an effect. So not only do you have parents trying to have more kids, you also have more people trying to become parents.

Far from reducing the population, the immediate effect -- especially given the restriction on underage prey -- would, quite possibly, be an increase in the population. Which would mean more predators, too, which would mean that they existing 18-to-45 crowd would be stressed even more, which means more parents, etc.

Yeah, this gets out of hand real quick. Should still be fun to write in, however.

[Redatheart]

Fantastic writing Fallen!
What I could see happening is men become the most often preyed upon, as not only are you much safer from making orphans, it only takes one guy to impregnate multiple women in a single day
Perhaps the male population gets cut down to practically 10% of the population until they become a protected, hyper-sexually active demographic, while women fight for survival to get impregnated by them before they are eaten by their peers

Not unlike modern domesticated meat animals. You have one rooster per few dozen hens, one bull for several cows, one male goat for several female goats, etc.

[Fallen]

Ooh... I like that line of thinking. It makes sense on multiple levels, too. As a society, we do seem to have the idea that it's better for a child to have a single mother than a single father if they can only have one parent. I won't speak to the actual validity of the statement, though I'd probably lean toward thinking it's true, but regardless, it's probably the way people would act.

So...I dove back into the spreadsheets. By separating out figures for men and women, I was able to come up with, I think, a believable bell curve that fits the scenario as it is. It...has some interesting side effects.

First, I figured the rates for 18-22 year olds wouldn't be all that different. Most of them wouldn't have managed to have a kid at that point, so they'd be essentially equally available. Women would enroll in college at higher rates, since they'd know they'd be likely to wind up raising one, two, or even three kids at a time on a single income. They want that income to be as big as they can get it. That would mean taking quite a risk, but the 'prime' age range is still 25-30, here, so they're relatively safe. Both men and women have a better than 80% chance of making it to 22.

As a side note, I suspect colleges and universities would be trying to recruit as many women as possible, as well, which would make it harder for men to get in, and harder for women to actually get laid while in college. After all, why bother educating a guy who's got maybe a 15% chance of making it to 30? They won't be terribly economically productive, they'll be busy trying to have as many kids as possible, and they won't last long enough to contribute to the Alumni Association.

With a college degree in hand, women would get started trying to have their first child and get a job at the same time. Worst case, they've got nine months to get settled before their first bout of maternity leave and they have to figure out how to balance raising a baby with holding down a job. Employers would finally offer comprehensive maternity leave packages, too, because they know their employees are busy raising the next generation of employees. That's vital work. The work week might shrink as it becomes obvious that folks need to spend more time at home, as well.

Marriage would become less common, simply because nobody wants to get attached to a man who's probably going to die soon, anyway. Besides, the guys would be looking to spread their seed as widely as possible before someone ate them, so they wouldn't want to be tied down. Still, raising multiple kids is a lot to ask of one person, so I suspect you'd see an increase in loosely-bound neighborhood parenting cooperatives. Mothers would look after each others' kids, older survivors would become valuable caretakers, and there would probably be work schedule arrangements so that there'd always be a few people around for babysitting duties.

An interesting consequence of the loss of monogamy would be a rise in half-siblings. Other than twins, you wouldn't expect one guy to stick with one girl long enough for two kids to share both parents.

On the male side of things, there would probably be a general push toward a cultural acceptance of the situation. After a while, men might see producing children as their purpose, and those lucky guys who manage to inseminate two or three women might actually feel at peace with their fate, having left their legacy. Not everyone would feel that way, of course, but there'd probably be a sizable portion of the male population who, after being taught for their whole lives that they could expect maybe 25 years of life, would be content with leaving a few kids behind.

There'd also be some pretty severe evolutionary pressure toward high fertility, too. Infertile women wouldn't last much longer than the average man, and highly fertile men and women -- especially men -- would pass their genes down to far more kids. A guy who can reliably get women pregnant in the one or two shots he gets with any one girl might have hundreds of children. A bit over half of them would be boys. A good percentage of them would probably inherit their father's fertility...

Once again, trying to control the population runs into some surprising roadblocks.

I've now spent two nights intending to write a story in this setting, and doing research, spreadsheet programming, and background analysis instead. Welp.

Incidentally, here are some of the percentages the spreadsheet produced:
(These are based on an 85%/15% split of male/female prey and a customized pseudo bell curve)
The percentage of 18 year old women who can expect to live to 45: 62.29%
The percentage of 25 year old women who can expect to live to 45: 82.47%

The percentage of 18 year old men who can expect to live to 45: 7.85%
The percentage of 25 year old men who can expect to live to 45: 12.03%
The percentage of 30 year old men who can expect to live to 45: 46.43%
The percentage of 35 year old men who can expect to live to 45: 75.96%

[Thagrahn]

Marriage would become less common, simply because nobody wants to get attached to a man who's probably going to die soon, anyway. Besides, the guys would be looking to spread their seed as widely as possible before someone ate them, so they wouldn't want to be tied down. Still, raising multiple kids is a lot to ask of one person, so I suspect you'd see an increase in loosely-bound neighborhood parenting cooperatives. Mothers would look after each others' kids, older survivors would become valuable caretakers, and there would probably be work schedule arrangements so that there'd always be a few people around for babysitting duties.

Actually, I think the big change to marriage would be for a woman marrying another woman to become the normal, and might share a man until he gets eaten.

[Fallen]

The problem there is that it would still give the child two legal parents. By thought was that that would be the primary reason for avoiding marriage. Relationships between mothers would be common, I suspect, but not in a legal sense. Basically, if the kids wouldn't become orphans if one mother died, that mother would still be at risk...so they avoid making plans for their own deaths.

It's kind of a hack to the system, but people are crafty like that.

[Aardvark]

Mind, this is completely ignoring any questions of morality and how people would react and all of that, just what the raw numbers would more likely look like in a vacuum as I understand things.

I imagine they would be covered in dust.

[Artemis]

So... Mortality rates go up, obviously. But they don't just go up. They skyrocket. If 43% of people are "prey", that means that the human population has a 43% mortality rate.

Let's put that number in context. That's 43/100 people dead. If you have two children, it's likely one of them is going to die. Almost half of every couple is going to die. At this point, with a mortality rate THAT HIGH, the extinction of the human race becomes a concern in the long-term. Most countries on earth cannot handle a mortality rate that high and will probably collapse.

Assuming that vore is just a fact of life now and people don't ever just decide to stop, the result is most likely a mad max scenario. Only worse, because the pred-prey dynamic--while intensely unrealistic in a real world scenario--would result in an inability to trust any group of people if adhered to strictly. You could get something less catastrophic if you assume that everyone is a switch and won't eat their allies. But at that point you have to start asking yourself why eat anyone?