User blog comment:Legionwrex/I figured out how many Reapers there are!/@comment-1978336-20120802110847

Sovereign said that there are so many Reapers that they would "blacken the skies of every world." That makes me believe that there are at the absolute very least several tens of millions of Reapers. What also makes me think that is how they spread through the galaxy so quickly in ME3. The galaxy is huge, and in sci-fi stories like Mass Effect, we often forget quite how immense it is because of how quickly people seem to travel from place to place. But in reality, even with something as convenient as the mass relays, the galaxy takes a while to traverse. Most trips in the Mass Effect universe are composed of not one single continuous jump, but rather a series of "bunny hop" jumps from system to system. The Reapers would need immense numbers to spread throughout the galaxy at the rate they do in ME3, many times more than a mere 18,000.