I'm dealing with Pfeilschifter's challenge to Brunt's estimates of the Italian population in the late Republic. I've never been good at math, but so far everything looks like guesswork to me. Populations at t and t1, are assumed; carrying capacity of the land are assumed; birth and death rates are assumed. So, how does this work?
I'm sorry, is there a variant of the Drake Equation for human populations?
Because none of the variables in the original make sense to ask about Late Republic Italy. At best, the rate of stellar formation is an arbitrary constant, at worst, you're down a long road of overfitting.