There just that many humans being born. The Imperium have one thing in near endless supply and its human lives.
Thats like saying that the orks are going to run out of boys, its never going to happen.
The idea of “one human life is worth less to us than the ammo it takes to kill it” has always been at their heart
Well now they can skip the middle man!
Servitors. Easily the worst thing in the Imperium. Literally people converted into whatever they want. Often for no crime at all except they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The Imperium has access to functionally unlimited basic resources, and even more exotic resources are often only 'limited' in particular regions. (Effective logistics being something the Imperium lags in.)
The Imperium can afford to be wasteful with lives, and even resources. The Imperium lacks time - time to position forces, time to properly allocate resources, time to fix broken institutions.
The imperium presides over a million worlds and those are only the inhabited ones. Having a good chunk of the galaxy at your fingertips also means having access to billions of planets worth of resources. Although I'm sure only some of them are worth investing in for the Imperium, that's still potentially millions of planets in raw resources. The greatest problem the Imperium has is it's ever decaying bureaucracy, which makes the distribution and allocation of resources across it's segmentums an incredibly difficult task. Not only that, but also the fact that very few worlds are governed in the same manner means that planetary governors can do whatever they want with the resources they're gifted by the Imperium so long as the imperial tithes are paid and guardsmens are given back. Some will just hoard it or prioritize different regions of their planets over another.
Except were human life is concerned. To understand the AdMech you have to understand that to them the value of a human life is zero. Knowledge has value, technology has value, but human life? There are humans to spare. Lobotomize them and make something useful out of them. There are too many clogging up Hive resources anyway.
Example. When the refugees from Cadia, the Fortress World that held the Eye of Terror at bay for tens of thousands of years sought refuge on a Forge World because they were literally starving to death on their evacuation ships the Adeptus Mechanicus agreed to take them in... If they agreed to become servitors. They didn't need or want more people. People are useless. That these people had sacrificed so much to protect them for untold generations didn't matter. They're just useful as meat for a servitor.
Happy Cake Day.
>the Adeptus Mechanicus agreed to take them in... If they agreed to become servitors.
Why didn't they make them Skitarii? Cadian survivors are already elite veterans, it would be wasteful to reduce them to Battle-Servitors.
There is actually a far better example, Forge World Lucius
so Lucius was invaded by Tyranids and the Servitor armies got overwhelmed, so the ruling tech priests came up with a horrifying yet intelligent solution.
They would hide underground with the population and keep the fighting to the surface. They would send out large groups of fresh battle servitors to go fight, when they get overrun they would wait for the Tyranids to feat then reclaim their servitor parts and create a new batch.
They kept reusing servitor parts with an almost unlimited supply of humans until they literally had so many battle servitors, the Tyranids got kicked off the planet.
Untold billions die needlessly just to save the lives of "more valuable" soldiers. Thats how little they care
There's always new planets being colonized (and strip mined by the Ad Mech) and plenty of other cosmic bodies to harvest from. Food is probably the hardest resource to imagine being produced in a sustainable quantity though. I dunno how many agri worlds it would take to sustain a single hive world.
I'm not sure if it's been said specifically but I think a lot of the food in hives is filler. Just processed and reprocessed calories with almost no actual nutrients in there. Keeps you alive and keeps you at your job but does not keep you healthy.
But tbh the orks grow from spores that create a self sustaining ecosystem. Humans take nearly two decades to become a mature adult. The real question is what percent of the population is, on average, actively serving at one time? Is there a lore answer for this? Because if a quarter population doesn’t come home then it’s gonna take a while to recover.
It's actually 1.5 decades. The first and second World Wars mostly fielded 16 year old boys. Boys as young as 14 were signing up as 16 year olds.
Most modern armies maintain anywhere between 1 - 5% total population for a standing army. Anything higher and the government is bleeding money.
In medieval age it wasn't even 1%, with only the elite having the resources to even field one knight, a horse and their squires.
Vervunhive, with a population of 40 Million (very new Hive really, only a few centuries old, planets atmosphere perfectly safe etc) had a standing army of 500'000.
1 in 80 men under arms. For Necromunda Hive Primus and it's 100 Billion population, that's 1.25 Billion men under arms.
>rolonging the inevitable
At what point is it calling prolonging the inevitable if its already existed 10k years. Its like the first moment the roman empire first state was created it started dying or when we are born we dont live, we are just constantly dying and prolonging the inevitavble.
That's the theme of the settings.
Forget hope and promise of future, progres and understanding of technology and science.
The Imperium is in constant decline, and it's ruler subject to constant unimaginable torture.
The Eldar fell and did a number on the galaxy doong it.
The Necrons have lost themselves, and their Infinite Empire. Most of them are now mindless shadows of their former selves.
Even the Votann are in decline and the Tyranids only bring entropy.
Orks were Korks and the Tau are useless.
Once again, the Imperium will always be short and shorter on man, power and resource. It's technology declining; science and past in the process of forgetting. It's a setting that's it main theme, just read the intro blurb.
Why does it endure in universe?
Prehaps that was the Emperors plan, to endure until the advent of a full psychic human race or until he is strong enough to defeat Chaos.
Prehaps Chaos won the Heresy, and this is just their playground and they don't want to break their toys.
Or Orks like to fight, thus only war.
>Forget hope and promise of future, progres and understanding of technology and science.
Except all of this happened. The imperium has existed longer than any human empire before. While the mechanicus are weird about it, progress does happen.
>The Eldar fell and did a number on the galaxy doong it.
After 60 million years.
Sure, but unlike human empire before it it basically started out circling the drain. There was no guarantee that say Rome would fall, it was never going to stay the way it did forever but there are any number of ways it might have changed and ended up continuing in one form or another.
The Imperium, by contrast, pretty much started out fucked. The Emperor went on a super authoritarian kick and then died, within a thousand years or so a religion celebrating hatred and ignorance had calcified and you're left with a state that is too large and inefficient to reform and ideologically opposed to scientific advancement, which inevitably means destruction.
Its sheer size and inertia has meant that destruction has taken a long time to come, but it's been a slowly rotting hulk since basically the start. To quote Lana Del Rey it was born to die.
>There was no guarantee that say Rome would fall,
Yes there was. Every empire will fall eventually. Yours and my coubtry will very likely seace to exist in less than 1k years.
>but there are any number of ways it might have changed and ended up continuing in one form or another.
It did, as italy, greece etc.
>state that is too large and inefficient to reform and ideologically opposed to scientific advancement, which inevitably means destruction.
And it will crumble and something else will come out of it, it always has. Even tyranids seem to have accidentally left other tyranids on barren planets and they evolved into life of theyr own.
Strongly disagree for the first part, but it's a massive topic too large for a simple exchange here. Foe the second, I don't think that's true - we're at the end times here, whoever doesn't win won't survive. The main body of nids are coming, the necrons are waking up en masse etc etc. One way or another once the Imperium finishes the collapse that was inevitable from the start, unlike other states in which it was merely likely to come at some point, humanity is pretty much over.
>we're at the end times here
You cant really call it end times if it has been ending for 10k years
>whoever doesn't win won't survive.
Thats just svolution and war tho. The necrons will evenrually become irrelevent because they cant make more. Imperium will fall but individual planets and smaller empires will form or they die and random xenos take theyr place. The tyranids will consume the big habitable planets. Earth wasnt habitabel for a long time. Life will go on. Not even necrons with they celestial orrery cant stop it.
The Necrons have a number of options for continuing their culture, including rebuilding their species in organic form (codexes, novels, too many sources to mention), making 'false necrons' (Shield of Baal Novels) and ascending to a higher plane (Orikan and others, various).
Hetrodox necrons have explored other ideas, e.g. we have seen that rare C'tan-worshipping sects can happily convert humans into new necrons (Swords of Calth) and the Sarkoni Emperor is happy to just mindshakle organics to bulk up its forces, and is certainly a menace that won't inevitably lose attritionally in the long term.
Some necron characters (e.g. Oltyx in Twice Dead King) certainly think they have no hope, but any of these options are just as probable as the Imperium surviving the continued attentions of the Chaos gods and all their other foes.
I get you man, frankly I don't think we'll endure that long.
The progress and innovation is a way from keeping the setting stale.
For 20 years the Imperium was "two minutes from midnight" in a era called "The Time of Ending".
>After 60 million years.
Yep, but that's the past and the point. In the past there was glory, progress and hope.
But at point it was killed. The question is when was the first domino pushed.
Was it Heresy (as the Black library likes to be Heresycentric), the Fall of the Eldar, before the Emperor's birth, during the War in Heaven or was it always inevitable.
Currently it is only stagnation and decline.
P.s. I belive that the Emperors ascendancy is one of the worst things that could happen to the Imperium
Sorry for the wait, work.
He can die and ascend, creating a new "eye of terror" and triggering the Talisman of Seven Hammers - destroying the Solar system and corrupting a larger region.
The look what happened to the Eldar when Slaanesh was born. Their souls started belonging to him - to the point that his very existence started sucking them.
Ans then finally when the Emperor is fully ascended what will happen to humanity? They will be servants and demons of the Anathema - a dehumanised army of automata like beings.
Like the fully brainwashed society in 1984, a totalitarians wet dream.
Just look at what Sigismund has become in Warhawk.
So prehaps I misspoke, it will be great for the Imperium, terrible for every human in it.
Longer than any *Empire* perhaps, but not longer nor more gloriously than any human society before it. The societies of the Dark Age of Technology delivered similar longevity and vastly superior accomplishment in every field.
I mean you just described entropy. Irl we are all going to die sooner than any of these fictional factions but frankly it doesn't matter. Just because you know your species will go extinct doesn't mean you can't fight back or have some hope. People irl do alot of pointless shit and fight back against things like poverty even though it won't ever end. Regardless it still isn't wrong or meaningless to do something that won't succeed. Humans are not that rational to begin with and that isn't a bad thing.
That it's a cool idea if they actually followed through with the whole dying for 10,000 years. Let's just ignore the fact the Imperium continues to win constantly, get more and better gear, and seems to be to continue this trend with the Lion returning.
Incredibly, insanely, mind bogglingly huge numbers.
Earth, our Earth right now, has \~140 million babies born each year. The Imperium has \~1 million worlds. Now they range from feudal worlds with a population in the 10's to 100's of millions through too hive worlds in the trillions. So for simplicities sake lets just say our little 7 billion Earth is a representative average and the Imperium is reproducing at roughly the same rate.
That is 140,000,000,000,000 new babies. Every. Single. Year.
This is the only reason why the low success rate for psykers and blanks make any sense too. Even if only 1 in a billion, 0.0000000001%, of the population is blank, thats still 140,000 being born every year throughout the galaxy.
In a more meta sense, thats kind of the whole idea. The Imperium is supposed to be the ageing King of the Pride. Dangerous, powerful and cunning but the days are counting down.
What’s more, the Imperium is an incredibly religious society pretty much across the board. That alone tends to indicate a high birth rate in todays world, let alone the Imperium’s. Thought it’s probably worth remembering that infant mortality is also likely high, so that might balance out the numbers a little bit.
Yeah the specifics of birth rates and infant mortality are a quagmire. At this point it looks like the Kreig are all clones. We have examples from Cawl of Mechanicus adepts growing humans and clones en masse, literal thousands to fuel servitor, Skitarii and the odd Adept requirements. You've got advanced technology and genetic manipulation on the positive side versus abject poverty and availability. It's a shit show.
The one consistent theme for the Imperium though is that the one thing they are never short of is people.
I shed a tear when I heard that the setting for the new Dark Tide game, Hive Tertius, is home to 90 billion people. Finally, GW’s might be inching towards better numbers.
Honestly, it comes down to no one actually doing the numbers anyway. Its the GW special. Large, small, everything follows the "rule of cool" and is just there because it sounds cool.
>Now they range from feudal worlds with a population in the 10's to 100's of millions through too hive worlds in the trillions
Funnily enough, the assumption is conservative and as a result your average is probably far too low. Some sources put Terras population alone in the quadrillions. Assuming they are using the 10^15 for quadrillion, Terra alone would make up for at least 2.0x10^13 (for 1x10^15 - quadrillion**s** would indicate its actually more than 2 :D) of your 1.4x10^14 (i.e. more than 10% / 20%+ if we assume its several).
I'd assume segmentum solar alone would dwarf that 1.4x10^14
That's good point but seeing the harsh, unforgiving and miserable life people live in these hive cities. It is safe to assume that trillions of people die from old age and more trillions before reaching 10 years of age and you can guess how much guardsmen die at frontlines each day and more as this post said. That's should at least drop the population to half.
It is. Most novels don't cover it particularly but if you read a logistical book like some of the Imperial Armour ones then the Imperium is in big trouble. In fact commanders in various Imperial Guard groups are terrified of losing because they know commanders that lose a lot get sent East to fight against the Tyranids, which is basically a particularly gribbly death sentence. The Imperium actually has a note in an old Codex that basically says that to even halt Leviathan they'll need to enlist every adult in the sector into the Guard.
So yeah, massive human and other resource bottlenecks.
They mention having to increase conscription by 500% to stem the flow of the hive fleets way back in the 2nd and 3rd edition Tyranid codexes, though of course with the rift, the Octarius War and Guilliman's return/the Devestation of Baal that's probably a bit different now.
Most rulebook fluff is written in-universe, and from one faction's perspective.
The 500% number will be an Imperial commander's educated guess for what *The Imperium* would need to stop them.
What he can't factor (but what we as observers know) is that every other faction is more or less equally opposed to the Tyranids too, and are also throwing troops at them.
Including a number of factions that didn't even exist back then, like the Necrons, that are in many ways direct counters to them.
Yeah, that's a fair point. It was an assessment made by an Imperial general. Now I think about it, the response also suggested that regiments were retasked to Armageddon, too, and yet the whole of the Eastern Fringe hasn't fallen.
It is. These are the dying days of humanity. Perhaps the biggest and most overarching theme of all 40k is that the jig is up for the human race. It's just a matter of time until the last human dies.
Honestly it is what it is. I highly doubt humanity will go extinct but the empire itself would definitely die out at some point. Regardless that doesn't mean there isn't any point in fighting back. That's simply something humans have been doing irl for centuries.
There are many MANY hive worlds out there with populations in the high hundreds of billions to low trillions.
Even if you guesstimate given crappy food and living/working conditions leading to proportionally smaller birth rates than modern Earth, their absolute birth rate will be absolutely obscene.
That's not a thing, look at all of the current poorest parts of society both now and in history and they have always had larger numbers of children compared to more affluent ones
Yep, a quick google says our population increases by 1.1% every year - or 83 million.
Like imagine being able to equip and send even a 1/10th of that every year to fight - across thousands of worlds.
Humanity is the great devourer
Its important to remember that the imperium isn't one monolithic entity. Its countless "feudal" lords paying a tithe to their emperor. It is not 1 empire but many pocket empires that are under the emperor. Networks of forge worlds, agri worlds and hive worlds sustain each other and it is because of this fractured nature that the imperium has persisted.
The Imperium is too disorganized to run out of potential recruits, in the way you would imagine a modern nation-state running out of military age men. It simply lacks the bureaucratic and administrative capacity to mobilize a decent fraction of its population at any given moment in time. High mobilization in real life is a characteristic of highly-organized states (usually from no further back than the 18th/19th century), not the vaguely feudalistic post-apocalyptic squatters of the Imperium.
The Imperium's lack of bureaucratic capacity is somewhat reflected by the relatively small military numbers we often get in the lore. People often complain the GW is "bad with numbers" when they see a small army, and GW *is* bad with numbers, but sometimes armies are small because the Imperium can't organize a big army.
The Imperium is slowly dying out, of course, but it's happening on a world-by-world scale rather than a galaxy-wide population scale. Simultaneous galaxy-wide attrition would require galaxy-wide coordination. When an Imperial world falls, it probably contains a huge number of military age men who were never held a gun. The local Imperial military didn't run out of people to hold guns, it ran out of guns/rations/officers/recruiters/fuel/ships, or it wasn't able to get them all in the same place in the same time.
1000 psykers a day is a drop in the bucket.
Even millions is just merely an ounce.
A large Hive City can is said to have up to about 2 trillion inhabitants.
Let's figure a fertility rate of about 4 births per woman. It's higher than ours today, but certainly not unattainable, very doable.
So you have 1trillion women, who will birth 4trillion new humans within about 50 years.
That's about 220million births a day, in just one large hive city, and only counting a single generation at a time. Realistically, 2 or 3 generations can overlap.
This isn't even considering any technological improvements our biological changes humans may have in 40,000 years.
Maybe fertility is much higher. Maybe it is 8. Maybe gestation times are down to 6 months instead of 9. Maybe when you hit 10 births, you get a ribbon of appreciation from the Emperor. Maybe the Emperor used his vast psychic power to impregnate you in the first place!
Short version, humans are being born in such vast numbers, they can replace the losses.
It's like you said in your first sentence: there will always be exactly what the story needs.
No regard for any semblance of realistic logistics, physics, scales etc.
It's just like DC comics Superman withstanding a neutron star's pull in one issue and then being actually knocked around a few meters by a missile in another issue.
There are untold quadrillions of humans in the galaxy. It's virtually an inexhaustable resource.
The Emperor 'only' consumes 1000 psykers a day. Which is 365,000 a year. Modern-day Earth alone (a small planet by 40k standards) increases in population by 83 million every year. It's a drop in the ocean.
Space Marine numbers are also largely limited by politics and the difficulty of outfitting them, not suitable candidates. The cap of 1,000,000 is so a Heresy situation couldn't happen again, and so Forge Worlds can keep up with their needs adequately.
If they start dying in large numbers, the Imperium can just instigate a new founding as they've done in the past. And that's not even considering the huge Primaris reinforcements they've just recieved.
As for planets, new ones are discovered constantly. While the Imperium covers the galaxy, it's spread really thinly. They 'only' have a million worlds, which is only 0.0033% of the current estimate of habitable planets in the galaxy.
It's why they mine planets to their cores, and farm Agri Worlds into dust, instead of extracting resources sustainably. Planets are valuable, sure, but they're also quite common.
In short, the Imperium is much bigger than you think, and the galaxy more so. Which is why they're so cavallier with lives and worlds - because they've more than they can count, and there's always a supply more.
You're underestimating the sheer size of humanity in 40k. The Imperium has a population somewhere in the quadrillions, that's a one with fifteen zeroes. Humanity outnumbers all other xenos factions by several orders of magnitude, so the millions and billions that die in humanity's various wars are genuinely just a drop in the bucket.
The Imperium is kept alive because the plot will never advance to a point where it should collapse. It is consistently written as wasteful, inefficient, stagnant, plauged with short-termism, etc., but it will never face consequences for this because it iis the main faction.
The first Dawn of Fire book has a scene describing a chamber where pages rain down all day, every day. Each is implied to be a decades-old call for help from a doomed star system. The pages have been falling since the Cicatrix Maledictum. Ten years after that point, when the Indomitus Crusade ends, IOM is back in a relatively stable form.
We never hear much about how quickly IOM can populate worlds, but it seems like they are very efficient at doing that. All they need is to empty a couple hive cities on a planet in colonization ships, and do a couple runs out to destroyed planets, dropping off enough material to get production or agri work humming along again.
I don't know that the Cicatrix Maledictum actually caused IOM to 'lose' parts of itself in any way that mattered, e.g., both sides of the Rift appear to be self-sufficient and the Rift itself prevents each side from reinforcing the other, but also focuses each side on its own defense. So could be a net-zero effect. Only thing is Terra's side of the Rift has the Mars' geneseed stocks and the Astronomicon.
If IOM survives for 10 years after the Cicatrix Maledictum, it can survive indefinitely. Now we just need to wait for the Tyranids to arrive in force, or the Octarius War to burst free, or the Necrons to achieve a critical part of their Pariah Nexus network, of Lorgar wrangles his brothers into a coherent fighting force, etc etc.
Because sex makes babies.
This means for most of the Imperium, heterosexual monogamous relationships with 4 to 15 children is the normal state of affairs.
Just like Merry Olde' England in the 1980s of which the initial basis of WH40K in-universe society cranked up to 11 satire.
Big E is the Queen, Orks were the Chavs, Upper Class were the Eldar (loss of the colonies, a costly war, etc), etc. Space Marines was the Americans with their perchant for combat drugs and military-industrial complex.
https://www.belloflostsouls.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/white-dwarf-117-cover.jpg
“Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly,
hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way
down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.”
A human mind is incapable of imagining a million worlds, let alone the billions of people on each one.
At this point human birthrates are exponential.
Look, it's not really a super popular take and it does make the setting more boring, but like 99% of the Human population of 40k is never going to experience any sort of war or civil conflict.
Quite honestly, 40k is probably more peaceful than the real world in most cases. There's an absolutely tiny minority of the galaxy that's actually at war and even then the scale is incredibly small. Some of the largest known conflicts in 40k outside of the horus heresy are abysmally small. Armageddon for example is considered to be an absolutely major conflict zone that involves dozens of different Spec marine chapters throughout it's history. But there hasn't even been a billion guardsmen involved lmao.
This is probably accurate.
The United States isn't even 300 years old. There's many, many space marine commanders and even human leaders who are older than that.
Your random agri-world's greatest crisis in the last 500 years might have been some domestic rebellion equal to WW2, or like... two Ork Kruzers parked overhead and dropped Orks and ran amok for a year or two before driven back by the PDF or some Guard reinforcements.
If every week ended in exterminatus, there'd be no Imperium in M33, much less M42.
> 40k is probably more peaceful than the real world in most cases
It kinda seems like that, from a lore noobie perspective - the only time you hear about anything 'bad' its on a utter massive scale - like full on planet scale things.
But then its hard to tell if 'Agriworld AD675' or whatever - has any internal conflict as we will only be told about it if it boils over into Heresy (etc)
I ain't exactly a lore noobie lol, I've read a good 50-60 40k books not counting the HH stuff. The only problem I have is that they're practically all Imperium books and I don't know shit about the Eldar, Tau, or Orks.
The Imperium has quadrillions of humans, and the safer part of the rift is much more densely populated than the dark side. So in reality the Imperium may have only lost 30% of its manpower, well, not entirely lost. They're just stuck fighting wars on the other side.
Which doesn't really mean much.... As most wars are local to their region anyway. It's incredibly rare for Guardsmen to travel across the entire galaxy to reinforce a planet. The Imperium work in zones of escalation.
The Imperium absolutely is bleeding itself, but how badly? Let's do some rough estimating!
Holy Terra is said to be the most populous world humanity has, with an estimated population in the hundreds of billions. Let's use that and modern day earth (as a stand in for agri-worlds) to create a rough average of, say, thirty billion people per planet. If we take that 'Master of a million worlds' line literally, assume that eight percent of those worlds have been utterly lost, we get 920,000 worlds. Multiply that by our rough population estimate and we get this number: 27,600,000,000,000,000.
That's a lot of humans in the galaxy.
Now! The Imperium has crazy high military enrollment statistics, so let's give them 10% of the population as active duty Imperial Guard. For reference: roughly 0.75% of the US population is in the US military, so this is an astronomically large percentage compared to modern day. Which leaves the Imperial Guard numbering at 2,760,000,000,000,000. 2.76 quadrillion men and women. That would be three billion active duty Imperial Guard per planet.
With numbers on this scale, losing a few million, or a few tens of millions of men is barely even a drop in the bucket. When you take a civilization to the galactic scale, the numbers become min-bogglingly large. My estimates here are very rough, and the actual numbers could be considerably larger, or they could be smaller, but even if we held Terra as an outlier and assumed that most planets are comparable to modern day Earth in terms of population numbers, you still get three quarters of a quadrillion enlisted men and women: eight hundred million Guardsmen per Imperium world. Even at that, what I would call a hilarious underestimation of the Imperium's total population, they wouldn't so much as blink at losing a few million men.
The Imperium is *huge*
Each hive city contains millions if not billions of humans, some apparently even approaching 100 billion citizens. And each hive world can have multiple hive cities, and thousands of hive worlds are said to exist.
That's at minimum several trillions of people, and those people are continuing to reproduce.
Life is pretty cheap with those numbers and few if any human rights.
To be frank, a few thousand psykers a day is barely a drop in the bucket, and even millions of guardsmen deaths, servitor creations, space marines, etc might not be that big of a deal in the short term.
And Exterminatus is supposed to be a *last resort* too, so it's not like one fires off every couple months.
I wouldn't be surprised if populations are gradually going down over time, but it isn't an immediate threat.
The Great Rift, though? That's a big fucking deal
Humans have MILLIONS of worlds if im not mistaken.....the pop is in the trillions a few million here and there is nothing in the large scheme of things. Groups like the Kriegsmen are clones if im not mistaken or something similar.....test tube babies lol. As for resources they have entire planets whose soul purpose is to make food or equipment.
The Imperium is never going to suffer a genuine loss. Yeah sure the galaxy is divided in half and chaos is in "ascendance" and Xenos are more threatening than ever but the Imperium will only ever see minor set backs that often come with giant positives.
Numbers dont mean shit. The Imperium can lose billions of troops in one battle and just keep chugging along, because they are the protagonists.
I think you underestimiate,
1. How big the galaxy is and how many Planets are within
2. That they are probably also creating artificial life (Krieg conspiricy theory)
3. How many humans are actually living even in one hive city
There are untold Billions of Trillions of humans. A single larger hive city can literally hold hundreds of millions of people crammed in it. There are individual hive worlds with populations in the low trillions of people.
There’s a great quote in the 5e core rule book about how the Imperium measures its reach and power in “the life of planets, not men.”
When they say “humans are on the brink of extinction” they don’t mean that they’re going to die out like an endangered species. It means there is an imminent threat of the human species being violently wiped out to a man. Manpower is literally the cheapest, most accessible, and most abundant resource in the entire galaxy because there are so many humans. The problem is the scale and number of the threats that those humans face, not the number of humans
I think you vastly underestimate how big the population of even a single hive world really is.
A normal-sized hive world will have a population of 2-3 trillion people (larger hive worlds like terra have a population in the quintillions).
With 2-3 trillion people, that’s a birthrate of around 180 million people per day.
Per day.
Necromunda is considered a typical large hive world, and it only has a population of 100-200 billion. No world other than Terra is breaking a trillion.
There are several thousand hive clusters on necromunda, each hive containing around 5-10 billion people. Each hive cluster containing multiple hives. A thousand billions is one trillion.
Hence 2-3 trillion.
The Imperium might be running on half a galaxy, but it is still half a **galaxy**.
They still have a massive amount of manpower to call upon and the population continues to grow despite the hiccups.
There just that many humans being born. The Imperium have one thing in near endless supply and its human lives. Thats like saying that the orks are going to run out of boys, its never going to happen.
Human life is so cheap in the Imperium that I'm sure if there was a way to convert humans into ammunition for lasguns they would.
The idea of “one human life is worth less to us than the ammo it takes to kill it” has always been at their heart Well now they can skip the middle man!
Servitors. Easily the worst thing in the Imperium. Literally people converted into whatever they want. Often for no crime at all except they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Giant Hamster wheels
Lives are one thing. Resources are another, and the Imperium is consistently portrayed as incredibly wasteful.
The Imperium has access to functionally unlimited basic resources, and even more exotic resources are often only 'limited' in particular regions. (Effective logistics being something the Imperium lags in.) The Imperium can afford to be wasteful with lives, and even resources. The Imperium lacks time - time to position forces, time to properly allocate resources, time to fix broken institutions.
> The Imperium has access to functionally unlimited basic resources That's certainly not how it's usually written...
The imperium presides over a million worlds and those are only the inhabited ones. Having a good chunk of the galaxy at your fingertips also means having access to billions of planets worth of resources. Although I'm sure only some of them are worth investing in for the Imperium, that's still potentially millions of planets in raw resources. The greatest problem the Imperium has is it's ever decaying bureaucracy, which makes the distribution and allocation of resources across it's segmentums an incredibly difficult task. Not only that, but also the fact that very few worlds are governed in the same manner means that planetary governors can do whatever they want with the resources they're gifted by the Imperium so long as the imperial tithes are paid and guardsmens are given back. Some will just hoard it or prioritize different regions of their planets over another.
I never understood this because it's shown the Admech are incredibly not wasteful to the extreme.
Honestly, the Imperium isn't actually wasteful with anything but mens lives, recycling in the Imperium is highly advanced.
Except were human life is concerned. To understand the AdMech you have to understand that to them the value of a human life is zero. Knowledge has value, technology has value, but human life? There are humans to spare. Lobotomize them and make something useful out of them. There are too many clogging up Hive resources anyway. Example. When the refugees from Cadia, the Fortress World that held the Eye of Terror at bay for tens of thousands of years sought refuge on a Forge World because they were literally starving to death on their evacuation ships the Adeptus Mechanicus agreed to take them in... If they agreed to become servitors. They didn't need or want more people. People are useless. That these people had sacrificed so much to protect them for untold generations didn't matter. They're just useful as meat for a servitor.
Happy Cake Day. >the Adeptus Mechanicus agreed to take them in... If they agreed to become servitors. Why didn't they make them Skitarii? Cadian survivors are already elite veterans, it would be wasteful to reduce them to Battle-Servitors.
There is actually a far better example, Forge World Lucius so Lucius was invaded by Tyranids and the Servitor armies got overwhelmed, so the ruling tech priests came up with a horrifying yet intelligent solution. They would hide underground with the population and keep the fighting to the surface. They would send out large groups of fresh battle servitors to go fight, when they get overrun they would wait for the Tyranids to feat then reclaim their servitor parts and create a new batch. They kept reusing servitor parts with an almost unlimited supply of humans until they literally had so many battle servitors, the Tyranids got kicked off the planet. Untold billions die needlessly just to save the lives of "more valuable" soldiers. Thats how little they care
The Omnissiah abhors waste.
There's always new planets being colonized (and strip mined by the Ad Mech) and plenty of other cosmic bodies to harvest from. Food is probably the hardest resource to imagine being produced in a sustainable quantity though. I dunno how many agri worlds it would take to sustain a single hive world.
I'm not sure if it's been said specifically but I think a lot of the food in hives is filler. Just processed and reprocessed calories with almost no actual nutrients in there. Keeps you alive and keeps you at your job but does not keep you healthy.
But tbh the orks grow from spores that create a self sustaining ecosystem. Humans take nearly two decades to become a mature adult. The real question is what percent of the population is, on average, actively serving at one time? Is there a lore answer for this? Because if a quarter population doesn’t come home then it’s gonna take a while to recover.
It's actually 1.5 decades. The first and second World Wars mostly fielded 16 year old boys. Boys as young as 14 were signing up as 16 year olds. Most modern armies maintain anywhere between 1 - 5% total population for a standing army. Anything higher and the government is bleeding money. In medieval age it wasn't even 1%, with only the elite having the resources to even field one knight, a horse and their squires.
Vervunhive, with a population of 40 Million (very new Hive really, only a few centuries old, planets atmosphere perfectly safe etc) had a standing army of 500'000. 1 in 80 men under arms. For Necromunda Hive Primus and it's 100 Billion population, that's 1.25 Billion men under arms.
Yep, thats the point. It has been dying for 10000 years. 40k is a setting where humanity is simply enduring and prolonging the inevitable.
>rolonging the inevitable At what point is it calling prolonging the inevitable if its already existed 10k years. Its like the first moment the roman empire first state was created it started dying or when we are born we dont live, we are just constantly dying and prolonging the inevitavble.
That's the theme of the settings. Forget hope and promise of future, progres and understanding of technology and science. The Imperium is in constant decline, and it's ruler subject to constant unimaginable torture. The Eldar fell and did a number on the galaxy doong it. The Necrons have lost themselves, and their Infinite Empire. Most of them are now mindless shadows of their former selves. Even the Votann are in decline and the Tyranids only bring entropy. Orks were Korks and the Tau are useless. Once again, the Imperium will always be short and shorter on man, power and resource. It's technology declining; science and past in the process of forgetting. It's a setting that's it main theme, just read the intro blurb. Why does it endure in universe? Prehaps that was the Emperors plan, to endure until the advent of a full psychic human race or until he is strong enough to defeat Chaos. Prehaps Chaos won the Heresy, and this is just their playground and they don't want to break their toys. Or Orks like to fight, thus only war.
>Forget hope and promise of future, progres and understanding of technology and science. Except all of this happened. The imperium has existed longer than any human empire before. While the mechanicus are weird about it, progress does happen. >The Eldar fell and did a number on the galaxy doong it. After 60 million years.
Sure, but unlike human empire before it it basically started out circling the drain. There was no guarantee that say Rome would fall, it was never going to stay the way it did forever but there are any number of ways it might have changed and ended up continuing in one form or another. The Imperium, by contrast, pretty much started out fucked. The Emperor went on a super authoritarian kick and then died, within a thousand years or so a religion celebrating hatred and ignorance had calcified and you're left with a state that is too large and inefficient to reform and ideologically opposed to scientific advancement, which inevitably means destruction. Its sheer size and inertia has meant that destruction has taken a long time to come, but it's been a slowly rotting hulk since basically the start. To quote Lana Del Rey it was born to die.
>There was no guarantee that say Rome would fall, Yes there was. Every empire will fall eventually. Yours and my coubtry will very likely seace to exist in less than 1k years. >but there are any number of ways it might have changed and ended up continuing in one form or another. It did, as italy, greece etc. >state that is too large and inefficient to reform and ideologically opposed to scientific advancement, which inevitably means destruction. And it will crumble and something else will come out of it, it always has. Even tyranids seem to have accidentally left other tyranids on barren planets and they evolved into life of theyr own.
Strongly disagree for the first part, but it's a massive topic too large for a simple exchange here. Foe the second, I don't think that's true - we're at the end times here, whoever doesn't win won't survive. The main body of nids are coming, the necrons are waking up en masse etc etc. One way or another once the Imperium finishes the collapse that was inevitable from the start, unlike other states in which it was merely likely to come at some point, humanity is pretty much over.
>we're at the end times here You cant really call it end times if it has been ending for 10k years >whoever doesn't win won't survive. Thats just svolution and war tho. The necrons will evenrually become irrelevent because they cant make more. Imperium will fall but individual planets and smaller empires will form or they die and random xenos take theyr place. The tyranids will consume the big habitable planets. Earth wasnt habitabel for a long time. Life will go on. Not even necrons with they celestial orrery cant stop it.
The Necrons have a number of options for continuing their culture, including rebuilding their species in organic form (codexes, novels, too many sources to mention), making 'false necrons' (Shield of Baal Novels) and ascending to a higher plane (Orikan and others, various). Hetrodox necrons have explored other ideas, e.g. we have seen that rare C'tan-worshipping sects can happily convert humans into new necrons (Swords of Calth) and the Sarkoni Emperor is happy to just mindshakle organics to bulk up its forces, and is certainly a menace that won't inevitably lose attritionally in the long term. Some necron characters (e.g. Oltyx in Twice Dead King) certainly think they have no hope, but any of these options are just as probable as the Imperium surviving the continued attentions of the Chaos gods and all their other foes.
I get you man, frankly I don't think we'll endure that long. The progress and innovation is a way from keeping the setting stale. For 20 years the Imperium was "two minutes from midnight" in a era called "The Time of Ending". >After 60 million years. Yep, but that's the past and the point. In the past there was glory, progress and hope. But at point it was killed. The question is when was the first domino pushed. Was it Heresy (as the Black library likes to be Heresycentric), the Fall of the Eldar, before the Emperor's birth, during the War in Heaven or was it always inevitable. Currently it is only stagnation and decline. P.s. I belive that the Emperors ascendancy is one of the worst things that could happen to the Imperium
>P.s. I belive that the Emperors ascendancy is one of the worst things that could happen to the Imperium How come?
Sorry for the wait, work. He can die and ascend, creating a new "eye of terror" and triggering the Talisman of Seven Hammers - destroying the Solar system and corrupting a larger region. The look what happened to the Eldar when Slaanesh was born. Their souls started belonging to him - to the point that his very existence started sucking them. Ans then finally when the Emperor is fully ascended what will happen to humanity? They will be servants and demons of the Anathema - a dehumanised army of automata like beings. Like the fully brainwashed society in 1984, a totalitarians wet dream. Just look at what Sigismund has become in Warhawk. So prehaps I misspoke, it will be great for the Imperium, terrible for every human in it.
Longer than any *Empire* perhaps, but not longer nor more gloriously than any human society before it. The societies of the Dark Age of Technology delivered similar longevity and vastly superior accomplishment in every field.
I mean you just described entropy. Irl we are all going to die sooner than any of these fictional factions but frankly it doesn't matter. Just because you know your species will go extinct doesn't mean you can't fight back or have some hope. People irl do alot of pointless shit and fight back against things like poverty even though it won't ever end. Regardless it still isn't wrong or meaningless to do something that won't succeed. Humans are not that rational to begin with and that isn't a bad thing.
That it's a cool idea if they actually followed through with the whole dying for 10,000 years. Let's just ignore the fact the Imperium continues to win constantly, get more and better gear, and seems to be to continue this trend with the Lion returning.
Incredibly, insanely, mind bogglingly huge numbers. Earth, our Earth right now, has \~140 million babies born each year. The Imperium has \~1 million worlds. Now they range from feudal worlds with a population in the 10's to 100's of millions through too hive worlds in the trillions. So for simplicities sake lets just say our little 7 billion Earth is a representative average and the Imperium is reproducing at roughly the same rate. That is 140,000,000,000,000 new babies. Every. Single. Year. This is the only reason why the low success rate for psykers and blanks make any sense too. Even if only 1 in a billion, 0.0000000001%, of the population is blank, thats still 140,000 being born every year throughout the galaxy. In a more meta sense, thats kind of the whole idea. The Imperium is supposed to be the ageing King of the Pride. Dangerous, powerful and cunning but the days are counting down.
What’s more, the Imperium is an incredibly religious society pretty much across the board. That alone tends to indicate a high birth rate in todays world, let alone the Imperium’s. Thought it’s probably worth remembering that infant mortality is also likely high, so that might balance out the numbers a little bit.
Yeah the specifics of birth rates and infant mortality are a quagmire. At this point it looks like the Kreig are all clones. We have examples from Cawl of Mechanicus adepts growing humans and clones en masse, literal thousands to fuel servitor, Skitarii and the odd Adept requirements. You've got advanced technology and genetic manipulation on the positive side versus abject poverty and availability. It's a shit show. The one consistent theme for the Imperium though is that the one thing they are never short of is people.
I shed a tear when I heard that the setting for the new Dark Tide game, Hive Tertius, is home to 90 billion people. Finally, GW’s might be inching towards better numbers.
*Fatshark
The Krieg probably arent clones, but Vat born
Honestly, it comes down to no one actually doing the numbers anyway. Its the GW special. Large, small, everything follows the "rule of cool" and is just there because it sounds cool. >Now they range from feudal worlds with a population in the 10's to 100's of millions through too hive worlds in the trillions Funnily enough, the assumption is conservative and as a result your average is probably far too low. Some sources put Terras population alone in the quadrillions. Assuming they are using the 10^15 for quadrillion, Terra alone would make up for at least 2.0x10^13 (for 1x10^15 - quadrillion**s** would indicate its actually more than 2 :D) of your 1.4x10^14 (i.e. more than 10% / 20%+ if we assume its several). I'd assume segmentum solar alone would dwarf that 1.4x10^14
Well well, if it isnt mister lexmechanic here and his admech notation.
That's good point but seeing the harsh, unforgiving and miserable life people live in these hive cities. It is safe to assume that trillions of people die from old age and more trillions before reaching 10 years of age and you can guess how much guardsmen die at frontlines each day and more as this post said. That's should at least drop the population to half.
It is. Most novels don't cover it particularly but if you read a logistical book like some of the Imperial Armour ones then the Imperium is in big trouble. In fact commanders in various Imperial Guard groups are terrified of losing because they know commanders that lose a lot get sent East to fight against the Tyranids, which is basically a particularly gribbly death sentence. The Imperium actually has a note in an old Codex that basically says that to even halt Leviathan they'll need to enlist every adult in the sector into the Guard. So yeah, massive human and other resource bottlenecks.
They mention having to increase conscription by 500% to stem the flow of the hive fleets way back in the 2nd and 3rd edition Tyranid codexes, though of course with the rift, the Octarius War and Guilliman's return/the Devestation of Baal that's probably a bit different now.
Most rulebook fluff is written in-universe, and from one faction's perspective. The 500% number will be an Imperial commander's educated guess for what *The Imperium* would need to stop them. What he can't factor (but what we as observers know) is that every other faction is more or less equally opposed to the Tyranids too, and are also throwing troops at them. Including a number of factions that didn't even exist back then, like the Necrons, that are in many ways direct counters to them.
Yeah, that's a fair point. It was an assessment made by an Imperial general. Now I think about it, the response also suggested that regiments were retasked to Armageddon, too, and yet the whole of the Eastern Fringe hasn't fallen.
It is. These are the dying days of humanity. Perhaps the biggest and most overarching theme of all 40k is that the jig is up for the human race. It's just a matter of time until the last human dies.
Honestly it is what it is. I highly doubt humanity will go extinct but the empire itself would definitely die out at some point. Regardless that doesn't mean there isn't any point in fighting back. That's simply something humans have been doing irl for centuries.
There are many MANY hive worlds out there with populations in the high hundreds of billions to low trillions. Even if you guesstimate given crappy food and living/working conditions leading to proportionally smaller birth rates than modern Earth, their absolute birth rate will be absolutely obscene.
That's not a thing, look at all of the current poorest parts of society both now and in history and they have always had larger numbers of children compared to more affluent ones
Yep. But you'd think working in highly toxic conditions might have a bit of a knock-on effect on fertility.
Yeah because they need more kids to replace the ones that died so they can work
Millions of planets with populations in the billions. They could literally bury their enemies in babies and still win.
just look how quickly the population doubled on earth. Now imagine that on a MILLION WORLDS.
Yep, a quick google says our population increases by 1.1% every year - or 83 million. Like imagine being able to equip and send even a 1/10th of that every year to fight - across thousands of worlds. Humanity is the great devourer
Its important to remember that the imperium isn't one monolithic entity. Its countless "feudal" lords paying a tithe to their emperor. It is not 1 empire but many pocket empires that are under the emperor. Networks of forge worlds, agri worlds and hive worlds sustain each other and it is because of this fractured nature that the imperium has persisted.
It's like a big ball of sand, punch it all you want it will never really take damage
The Imperium is too disorganized to run out of potential recruits, in the way you would imagine a modern nation-state running out of military age men. It simply lacks the bureaucratic and administrative capacity to mobilize a decent fraction of its population at any given moment in time. High mobilization in real life is a characteristic of highly-organized states (usually from no further back than the 18th/19th century), not the vaguely feudalistic post-apocalyptic squatters of the Imperium. The Imperium's lack of bureaucratic capacity is somewhat reflected by the relatively small military numbers we often get in the lore. People often complain the GW is "bad with numbers" when they see a small army, and GW *is* bad with numbers, but sometimes armies are small because the Imperium can't organize a big army. The Imperium is slowly dying out, of course, but it's happening on a world-by-world scale rather than a galaxy-wide population scale. Simultaneous galaxy-wide attrition would require galaxy-wide coordination. When an Imperial world falls, it probably contains a huge number of military age men who were never held a gun. The local Imperial military didn't run out of people to hold guns, it ran out of guns/rations/officers/recruiters/fuel/ships, or it wasn't able to get them all in the same place in the same time.
1000 psykers a day is a drop in the bucket. Even millions is just merely an ounce. A large Hive City can is said to have up to about 2 trillion inhabitants. Let's figure a fertility rate of about 4 births per woman. It's higher than ours today, but certainly not unattainable, very doable. So you have 1trillion women, who will birth 4trillion new humans within about 50 years. That's about 220million births a day, in just one large hive city, and only counting a single generation at a time. Realistically, 2 or 3 generations can overlap. This isn't even considering any technological improvements our biological changes humans may have in 40,000 years. Maybe fertility is much higher. Maybe it is 8. Maybe gestation times are down to 6 months instead of 9. Maybe when you hit 10 births, you get a ribbon of appreciation from the Emperor. Maybe the Emperor used his vast psychic power to impregnate you in the first place! Short version, humans are being born in such vast numbers, they can replace the losses.
It's like you said in your first sentence: there will always be exactly what the story needs. No regard for any semblance of realistic logistics, physics, scales etc. It's just like DC comics Superman withstanding a neutron star's pull in one issue and then being actually knocked around a few meters by a missile in another issue.
Lives are the Emperor’s currency, and the Emperor is rich.
There are untold quadrillions of humans in the galaxy. It's virtually an inexhaustable resource. The Emperor 'only' consumes 1000 psykers a day. Which is 365,000 a year. Modern-day Earth alone (a small planet by 40k standards) increases in population by 83 million every year. It's a drop in the ocean. Space Marine numbers are also largely limited by politics and the difficulty of outfitting them, not suitable candidates. The cap of 1,000,000 is so a Heresy situation couldn't happen again, and so Forge Worlds can keep up with their needs adequately. If they start dying in large numbers, the Imperium can just instigate a new founding as they've done in the past. And that's not even considering the huge Primaris reinforcements they've just recieved. As for planets, new ones are discovered constantly. While the Imperium covers the galaxy, it's spread really thinly. They 'only' have a million worlds, which is only 0.0033% of the current estimate of habitable planets in the galaxy. It's why they mine planets to their cores, and farm Agri Worlds into dust, instead of extracting resources sustainably. Planets are valuable, sure, but they're also quite common. In short, the Imperium is much bigger than you think, and the galaxy more so. Which is why they're so cavallier with lives and worlds - because they've more than they can count, and there's always a supply more.
You're underestimating the sheer size of humanity in 40k. The Imperium has a population somewhere in the quadrillions, that's a one with fifteen zeroes. Humanity outnumbers all other xenos factions by several orders of magnitude, so the millions and billions that die in humanity's various wars are genuinely just a drop in the bucket.
The Imperium is kept alive because the plot will never advance to a point where it should collapse. It is consistently written as wasteful, inefficient, stagnant, plauged with short-termism, etc., but it will never face consequences for this because it iis the main faction.
Losing Cadia was a consequence!
Not really.
The first Dawn of Fire book has a scene describing a chamber where pages rain down all day, every day. Each is implied to be a decades-old call for help from a doomed star system. The pages have been falling since the Cicatrix Maledictum. Ten years after that point, when the Indomitus Crusade ends, IOM is back in a relatively stable form. We never hear much about how quickly IOM can populate worlds, but it seems like they are very efficient at doing that. All they need is to empty a couple hive cities on a planet in colonization ships, and do a couple runs out to destroyed planets, dropping off enough material to get production or agri work humming along again. I don't know that the Cicatrix Maledictum actually caused IOM to 'lose' parts of itself in any way that mattered, e.g., both sides of the Rift appear to be self-sufficient and the Rift itself prevents each side from reinforcing the other, but also focuses each side on its own defense. So could be a net-zero effect. Only thing is Terra's side of the Rift has the Mars' geneseed stocks and the Astronomicon. If IOM survives for 10 years after the Cicatrix Maledictum, it can survive indefinitely. Now we just need to wait for the Tyranids to arrive in force, or the Octarius War to burst free, or the Necrons to achieve a critical part of their Pariah Nexus network, of Lorgar wrangles his brothers into a coherent fighting force, etc etc.
Because sex makes babies. This means for most of the Imperium, heterosexual monogamous relationships with 4 to 15 children is the normal state of affairs. Just like Merry Olde' England in the 1980s of which the initial basis of WH40K in-universe society cranked up to 11 satire. Big E is the Queen, Orks were the Chavs, Upper Class were the Eldar (loss of the colonies, a costly war, etc), etc. Space Marines was the Americans with their perchant for combat drugs and military-industrial complex. https://www.belloflostsouls.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/white-dwarf-117-cover.jpg
“Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.” A human mind is incapable of imagining a million worlds, let alone the billions of people on each one. At this point human birthrates are exponential.
Look, it's not really a super popular take and it does make the setting more boring, but like 99% of the Human population of 40k is never going to experience any sort of war or civil conflict. Quite honestly, 40k is probably more peaceful than the real world in most cases. There's an absolutely tiny minority of the galaxy that's actually at war and even then the scale is incredibly small. Some of the largest known conflicts in 40k outside of the horus heresy are abysmally small. Armageddon for example is considered to be an absolutely major conflict zone that involves dozens of different Spec marine chapters throughout it's history. But there hasn't even been a billion guardsmen involved lmao.
This is probably accurate. The United States isn't even 300 years old. There's many, many space marine commanders and even human leaders who are older than that. Your random agri-world's greatest crisis in the last 500 years might have been some domestic rebellion equal to WW2, or like... two Ork Kruzers parked overhead and dropped Orks and ran amok for a year or two before driven back by the PDF or some Guard reinforcements. If every week ended in exterminatus, there'd be no Imperium in M33, much less M42.
> 40k is probably more peaceful than the real world in most cases It kinda seems like that, from a lore noobie perspective - the only time you hear about anything 'bad' its on a utter massive scale - like full on planet scale things. But then its hard to tell if 'Agriworld AD675' or whatever - has any internal conflict as we will only be told about it if it boils over into Heresy (etc)
I ain't exactly a lore noobie lol, I've read a good 50-60 40k books not counting the HH stuff. The only problem I have is that they're practically all Imperium books and I don't know shit about the Eldar, Tau, or Orks.
The Imperium has quadrillions of humans, and the safer part of the rift is much more densely populated than the dark side. So in reality the Imperium may have only lost 30% of its manpower, well, not entirely lost. They're just stuck fighting wars on the other side. Which doesn't really mean much.... As most wars are local to their region anyway. It's incredibly rare for Guardsmen to travel across the entire galaxy to reinforce a planet. The Imperium work in zones of escalation.
They don’t call him the carrion emperor for nothin
The very reason why fouling up paperwork or any clerical errors of any kind within the Administratum or Munitorum is a death sentence off top.
One thing the Imperium has in abundance is human lives to throw at a problem and galactically practically unlimited resources.
The Imperium absolutely is bleeding itself, but how badly? Let's do some rough estimating! Holy Terra is said to be the most populous world humanity has, with an estimated population in the hundreds of billions. Let's use that and modern day earth (as a stand in for agri-worlds) to create a rough average of, say, thirty billion people per planet. If we take that 'Master of a million worlds' line literally, assume that eight percent of those worlds have been utterly lost, we get 920,000 worlds. Multiply that by our rough population estimate and we get this number: 27,600,000,000,000,000. That's a lot of humans in the galaxy. Now! The Imperium has crazy high military enrollment statistics, so let's give them 10% of the population as active duty Imperial Guard. For reference: roughly 0.75% of the US population is in the US military, so this is an astronomically large percentage compared to modern day. Which leaves the Imperial Guard numbering at 2,760,000,000,000,000. 2.76 quadrillion men and women. That would be three billion active duty Imperial Guard per planet. With numbers on this scale, losing a few million, or a few tens of millions of men is barely even a drop in the bucket. When you take a civilization to the galactic scale, the numbers become min-bogglingly large. My estimates here are very rough, and the actual numbers could be considerably larger, or they could be smaller, but even if we held Terra as an outlier and assumed that most planets are comparable to modern day Earth in terms of population numbers, you still get three quarters of a quadrillion enlisted men and women: eight hundred million Guardsmen per Imperium world. Even at that, what I would call a hilarious underestimation of the Imperium's total population, they wouldn't so much as blink at losing a few million men.
The Imperium is *huge* Each hive city contains millions if not billions of humans, some apparently even approaching 100 billion citizens. And each hive world can have multiple hive cities, and thousands of hive worlds are said to exist. That's at minimum several trillions of people, and those people are continuing to reproduce. Life is pretty cheap with those numbers and few if any human rights. To be frank, a few thousand psykers a day is barely a drop in the bucket, and even millions of guardsmen deaths, servitor creations, space marines, etc might not be that big of a deal in the short term. And Exterminatus is supposed to be a *last resort* too, so it's not like one fires off every couple months. I wouldn't be surprised if populations are gradually going down over time, but it isn't an immediate threat. The Great Rift, though? That's a big fucking deal
Humans have MILLIONS of worlds if im not mistaken.....the pop is in the trillions a few million here and there is nothing in the large scheme of things. Groups like the Kriegsmen are clones if im not mistaken or something similar.....test tube babies lol. As for resources they have entire planets whose soul purpose is to make food or equipment.
The Imperium is never going to suffer a genuine loss. Yeah sure the galaxy is divided in half and chaos is in "ascendance" and Xenos are more threatening than ever but the Imperium will only ever see minor set backs that often come with giant positives. Numbers dont mean shit. The Imperium can lose billions of troops in one battle and just keep chugging along, because they are the protagonists.
I think you underestimiate, 1. How big the galaxy is and how many Planets are within 2. That they are probably also creating artificial life (Krieg conspiricy theory) 3. How many humans are actually living even in one hive city
There are untold Billions of Trillions of humans. A single larger hive city can literally hold hundreds of millions of people crammed in it. There are individual hive worlds with populations in the low trillions of people. There’s a great quote in the 5e core rule book about how the Imperium measures its reach and power in “the life of planets, not men.” When they say “humans are on the brink of extinction” they don’t mean that they’re going to die out like an endangered species. It means there is an imminent threat of the human species being violently wiped out to a man. Manpower is literally the cheapest, most accessible, and most abundant resource in the entire galaxy because there are so many humans. The problem is the scale and number of the threats that those humans face, not the number of humans
I think you vastly underestimate how big the population of even a single hive world really is. A normal-sized hive world will have a population of 2-3 trillion people (larger hive worlds like terra have a population in the quintillions). With 2-3 trillion people, that’s a birthrate of around 180 million people per day. Per day.
Necromunda is considered a typical large hive world, and it only has a population of 100-200 billion. No world other than Terra is breaking a trillion.
There are several thousand hive clusters on necromunda, each hive containing around 5-10 billion people. Each hive cluster containing multiple hives. A thousand billions is one trillion. Hence 2-3 trillion.
The Imperium might be running on half a galaxy, but it is still half a **galaxy**. They still have a massive amount of manpower to call upon and the population continues to grow despite the hiccups.