My personal headcannon is about 1,000,000 on Cybertron (not counting drones or Cyber wild life), with another 250,000 or so on the Moons and the Colonies. )My headcannon is primarily G1 based)

 

What continuity are we talking about?

 

Whichever one you want to.

 

Has to be in the millions at the minimum. Unless major parts of Cybertron are uninhabitable or the planet itself is smaller than I think it is.

 

Trillions. Probably a hundred trillion or more in some universes.

They don't need as much space to exist that people do; we have tens of thousands of cuisines that are grown/harvested, they just use Energon, so the amount of surface area that needs to be dedicated to sustaining the population is incredibly smaller for Cybertronians proportionately. They don't need extravagant living areas because they don't have the same needs we do; clothing, personal objects, a garage, refrigerator, ovens, plumbing, etc. Cybertronians simply don't require as much space and resources as humans do. If the moon was terraformed and had a population density of a city like Manilla, it could hold 1.46 trillion humans. ~200 times the population of Earth. The moon, at one quarter the size of Earth.

Start adding in planetary levels, as seen in several continuities and the amount of livable space on Cybertron goes up drastically.

Add in other planets, Velocitron, Micro, etc. Those planets who have been thoroughly saturated with life forms and not just a city or two would hold billions at the very least; Micro being all micromasters could be even more populated. The Allspark Almanac had dozens of planets in the Autobot Commonweath and the Decepticon Empire each. Then you have Gigantion, which could likely sustain a Trillion on it's own easily, if not 10 trillion (An unused story idea was that Gigantion was planning on becoming the new hubworld for spacebridge travelers at some point in the future, allowing millions to come and go daily), then add in the colony worlds which were just a city or three. Then you could add in the Titans and their crews, who were measured in the thousands.

Another thing to bear in mind is that death from old age is rare in Cybertronian culture, though most have slowed "birth" rates to compensate for it, but few pre-war series have zero "birth" rates, so there's a near constant slight upward tick compared to organic populations that almost balance birth/death rates.

A society that practically doesn't have death from old age, who doesn't need as much space/material for logistical purposes, who can endure far more environments, who have dozens of planets in their dominion? The population is going to be enormous.

 

I go with an opposite mindset. Cybertron is about 1/2 or 1/4 Earth size, Cybertronians are functionally immortal and they are the 'apex predators' of their domain.

A forest usually has about 10,000 rabbits and 3 or 4 hawks and 1 or 2 bears, right? So Cybertron could probably measure its population in the high thousands. Colonies may take you into the millions range.

 

Not many cause Hasbro wasn't selling toys yet 1984-present is the current baby boom

 

I can certainly understand and respect that completely.

I suppose ultimately it's a question of several variables, almost like a Drake Equation.

How large is the Cybertronian influence in the Galaxy? Do they have multiple fully colonized worlds, or just small settlements here and there, or just really Cybertron with a few oddball branches.
How population dense is Cybertron?
What % of the population have died in the war leading up to whenever the fiction starts?

There are roughly 480 G1 Transformer toy characters (counting characters like Optimus Prime, Starscream, Megatron, etc. once, nor counting combiners either as they're made from counted component members, nor counting different named but same model characters from Japanese and American fictions, such as Masterforce Hydra and Hasbro Darkwing only gets counted once). That's not including any later added characters, like the Rainmakers, Devcon, etc., nor characters retconned to be in the G1 universe, like Bulkhead, Slipstream, or Lockdown, nor any of the army builder types, from Air Warriors to Autotroopers. So using whatever the current living Transformer population and working back using the variables, you could come up with your own estimation of how big your preferred/personal fiction Transformer universe was pre-war.

The fiction is rather cavalier about having a tragically high casualty rate as well; Marvel comics and novels like Exodus have entire cities wiped out wholesale in the early days of the war, profiles like Bluestreak's have him as the only survivor of his city, etc. Then you add in G1 cartoon stories where the Autobots blew up the planet of Paradron just to keep the Decepticons from having the resources of the planet and there's minimal discussion or moral dilemma at the action (as if they'd taken such actions before and it was at least partially normalized behavior), then the death toll had to be catastrophic. In Prime we see on screen more than 1000 Vehicons die and it's a non-issue, not worth mentioning. Over one thousand Cybertronians killed by 8 other Cybertronians in a period of about two years and it's not viewed as a horror; that's not even tacking on however many Insecticons they killed or how many died off-screen.

 

If we're going by how big Cybertron was in the cartoon, then not too many. In the millions. If we're going by the Marvel comics,(The size of Saturn) then Cybertron should have trillions, if not quadrillions of inhabitants.

 

And how much of that population were mold re-uses?

 

An actual answer based on the fiction would be billions, based on Beast Machines' Megatron's claim that billions of extinguished sparks were on Primal's hands.

While not a pre-war number, IDW's Lost Light series references to billions of lives Megatron saved in the Functionist universe.

 

Other questions to ask are how often do they die, and how quickly do they replenish their numbers? Because even if we limit their lifespans to centuries instead of millions of years, there's gonna be a metric crapton of them running around before the war.

 

All of them.

 

But that’s well after the war

 

It wasn’t specified which prewar population. What Megatron’s claim tells us is that Cybertron, during peacetime, could have billions of residents. That’s a lot more Info than you’ll get discussing the Sunbow cartoon, for instance. We are limited in info by the mediums and intent of the writers who write stories about a depopulated and war torn world. You have to take what we can get. The fact that the period between G1/2 and the Beast Era is called the Pax Cybertronia (aka peace of Cybertron) tells us there is a reasonable expectation that population levels are as good as any other period could hope for.

 

Reasonable

I guess it’s just flawed human perception That makes me think that the population might have been smaller 9 million years in the past

 

G1 Marvel limited#1 back in 1984 had it at billions. With the designation of Autobots being the primary life form.

I am paraphrasing ".....though taken by surprised and destroyed by the billions the Autobots .........."

It is around the panel with Big Red.

The scripts were done by Bill Mantlo, plot by Ralph Macchio.

 

Good catch. So there’s at least three mediums that reference billions of individual Transformers.

 

Yup. Maybe the BW writers also referenced the Marvel comics?

P.S. Reading those 35 yr old comics sure makes me feel so old. It used to cost like $0.75. Now I know how Ironhide feels....... 

 

I'm 22 and didn't live through G1 IRL but reading the Marvel G1 US/UK super-saga for the first time has been a real treat.

Can't believe I forgot the "billions" lines from Marvel and Beast Machines. Doh!