Talk:Ranking and Grading/@comment-4855320-20121008174837

The Company's Chapter 35 (vol 2) release has an interesting estimation of the number of regulars in the tower (go read it). Although I agree with the count (and I'd say the lowest numbers are most likely), something important should be noted: Rankers are most probably immortals and Regulars not. So, the 500 billion regulars lives are actually distributed through all the thousand years which the test system exists, while Rankers numbers might have been accumulating ever since the beggining.

If you divide 500 billion for, lets say, 20 thousand years, it will give an average of 25 million new Regulars trying to climb the tower a year (for a comparison, 1.5 million immigrants go to the USA every year). And if you divide the 100,000 Rankers for 20,000 it will give the number of 5 new Rankers a year.

Also, it may be possible to estimate the total amount of people living in the tower. Considering that only 2,5% of the population tries to climb the tower, behind those 25 million there are 1 billion people. Since these are flux data, the actual number of the tower's population will be (copying the vegetative growth of the world pop. today: 1% a year) 100 billion people.