Of course procreation can be more fun than fornication.
Weird Harold wrote:hanuman wrote:How many colonists were there by the time the Plague started, and how many of them died?
There's no textev, but the plague hit two generations (40 years) after landing and killed 60% of whatever the population expanded to from the original 50,000 (including 13,000 minors)
Elizabeth I, second monarch of Manticore, is said to have "had a large vigorous family," suggesting that the colonists ran to typical frontier families of 5-10 kids. A very rough guess would be a population of 250,000 to 500,000. Almost definitely under a million.