Board Thread:Warhammer 40k General Discussion/@comment-27151416-20171013124926/@comment-2045915-20171016002432

No, quadrillions is simply not physically possible even in the Warhammer universe unless Terra contains extradimensional space, in this case from the Warp. The heat generated by quadrillions of people in such a small space alone would make the planet uninhabitable, never mind if they have industrial-level energy sources such as fusion plants, which are the primary source of all Imperial generatoria.

I think you have to consider what a large number we're really talking about. If I simply emptied the entire sphere of the Earth, so that you could literally fill the world from the absolute centre of the Earth's core out to all the arcologies let's say they built across the surface once the oceans were drained, you STILL would have trouble getting to hundreds of BILLIONs, never mind QUADRILLIONS. To be honest with you, if they published as a fact that the entire GALAXY contained a population of quadrillions of people, I would find that implausible, though possible under certain conditions.

If the author is being serious and not creating a subjective exaggeration on the part of the character, I'm afraid he is simply mistaken in his comprehension of what that number actually entails. It's simply completely implausible unless you've built HUNDREDS if not THOUSANDS of massive hive cities in the Webway connected to Terra, which as far as I'm aware is definitely not the case on the Throneworld.

If the number appears in other canon sources, I would, of course, have to include it on the page, but I would do so then under enomous protest and with great misgivings, because this is just outright violating the suspension of disbelief of any fictional universe, no matter how over the top it normally is in other aspects. I think it does a real disservice to the fans. So still, I'd have to see it in more than one canon product, and hopefully in a context of a codex or other source that isn't obviously the subjective viewpoint of a character. That's my reasoning behind the stance. Quadrillions is a number so large, that frankly, you might almost say infinity live on a single world.