What it says on the tin. How many terrans, protoss, zerg exist? Surely billions of terrans exist in the Koprulu sector at least. According to the sizes of the zerg broods in the SC1 manual, there are(or were) only about 12,171,000 zerg.
We aren’t really shown how fast zerg or protoss or even terrans grow up. To think that there have not been additional adult generations since the carnage of the Brood war(if terrans age as fast as humans do)- that would mean that surely at least a hundred billion would exist.
Or perhaps terrans have cloning technology.
Protoss seem to not procreate much. None of the major characters are below 200 years old unless I missed a spot somewhere.
The zerg, well, I can’t think of anywhere that mentions how fast it takes to birth a zerg.
Larva is the Zerg baby. So how long do you think it need to grow into an Ultralisk?
The Protoss are mostly over 300 years old. Artanis is the youngest major character, currently.
The Terran birthrate is very, very, very high. They are mature as fast as human do, though.
We know Artanis is young, but we don’t know if he’s younger or older than V or Selendis. Not to mention have no info on Karax’ age.
All Protoss we know are definitely above 200 years of age as Spirit said.
Don’t think about population. If we have any sources they are very likely to indirectly contradict other canon stuff, because sci-fi writers have no sense of scale.
I think Zerg are a “military race”. They start multiplying for a conflict, but they don’t especially try to multiply outside of one.
That’s why they are “endless”, yet “run out” once in a while, mass producing individuals is not an issue, but they won’t wastefully multiply (unlike Terrans that may completely randomly multiply and spread).
Protoss…are complicated. Before SC2, it seemed like there were only 2 kinds: Aiur Protoss, and Dark Templars (eventually tied to Shakuras in BW).
While they “existed” on other worlds, those 2 worlds were the main ones, somehow they never “ran out of space” or “ran out of resources” there, not sure how that work exactly.
Terran constantly whine about lack of reinforcements from “the core worlds”, but Protoss never seemed to expect reinforcements from outside, probably a headache canon-wise.
Yeah, you’re right. Karan might be younger. Selendis could be younger, but it was hinted that Artanis is the youngest Protoss to ever hold such high office. So Selendis might be older.
Vorazun is definitely older. I highly doubt that Raszagal can conceive at the age of 800 or older.
Why couldn’t she.
We know next to nothing about Protoss birth.
Something, something about Zeratul having a jealous fits. I need to censor myself. After all, this is not your awesome place…
Given Raszagal’s age, it seems pretty unlikely to me that Vorazun is younger or even as young as Artanis.
Protoss birth is probably the biggest secret left in the Starcraft universe. And likely something we’re not gonna know.
Do protoss even sexually conceive at all?
If had to guess it would be more of a psionic link type of deal and they are somehow able to manipulate matter psionically into an infantile protoss .
Probably no romance involved, I can see procreation being seen as simply as bodily function, and societal duty.
I’m confident romance is a concept purely terran in origin.
Nerazim are far more expressive emotionally. They could understand romance.
Khalai are currently emotionally stilted by the loss of Khala… before they had that general feeling of all-lovingness for one another so I would agree with them considering romance “alien”.
I have this totally unsupported speculation that the archon fusion is derived from the reproductive act. Normally, protoss fuse temporarily in order to exchange genetic material and produce an external egg or something (no pregnancy, it wouldn’t physically fit). The archon resulted when a couple didn’t separate and became permanently fused.
That’s actually pretty dope.
Koprulu terrans multiply like wild fire
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If the Protoss doesn’t use sexual act to procreate, then they won’t have a gender. For whatever reason, natural selection says that bi-sexual procreation is the best way to go.
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Fun trivia: the SC1 manual explicitly specifies the gender of the human characters, but not those of the protoss characters. Oversight? Or perhaps an indication that protoss weren’t originally intended to have genders? Who knows, it doesn’t matter now.
The manual uses male pronouns for the few named characters like Khas and Tassadar. Terrans likely got the exception because they were the only race with a female character (Kerrigan) in the original game, thus needing the distinction.
Perhaps. But I think that’s super boring and uninteresting.
maybe the author used masculine pronouns because the author felt a gender neutral pronoun like singular “they” would be clunky given the limited format, or simply didn’t know a gender neutral pronoun was an option (because this was two decades ago). Much like how cybertronian transformers are traditionally depicted with masculine gender coding despite being biologically sexless, with feminine-coded transformers appearing later on and still being rare even today.
Additionally, if pronouns indicate gender already, then why state gender explicitly on its own line? It seems redundant, no?
The zerg characters use masculine pronouns too (sometimes alternating with a gender neutral “it”), but they’re not biologically male as far as we know.
This might be because Kerry was the only female character. It might not. We can’t say for certain, can we?
Maybe if SC had been made today, the protoss and zerg would be non-binary. Maybe not. We’ll never know.
The reality of setting creation frequently is.
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I’d be more concerned about how the text is so… male-centric. The only instance of feminine pronouns comes from the entries for Kerry and the zerg Queen.