Ensuring post-apocalyptic survival at TL8?
 

Greetings, all!

Yes, the question is somewhat 2012-inspired. Assume a hypothetical situation:

You're in charge (either single-handedly or in a council of unspecified size, up to but no larger than the number of planned survivors) of making sure a small part of humanity (and civilization of at least TL7) survives. The new place to live will be roughly Earth-like in climate and ecology.

For an absolutely clean and simple experiment, assume this is a colony on an Earth-like world after Earth's destruction, but disregard the cost of actually launching the craft and landing on the world - only putting up the colony. For other examples, you can also assume a Perimeter-style dimension-hopping base that shifted to an IW-ish Earth where humanity never developed.

In any case, what would be the minimum population (which would be, based on some googling, probably slightly above 200 for genetic reasons, but probably more like 1k+ for other reasons), cash cost, and material requirements of such a project? I.e. to maintain TL7 or even TL8 on the 'new world' in no more than one generation.

This more of a thought experiment, though a civilian space colonization program would be a fitting solution too.

Thanks in advance!

Re: Ensuring post-apocalyptic survival at TL8?
 

I think you would need around 2000 people there.All adult pairs 1000 males +1000 females....due need for population growth speed.

Starting 2 years would be spent in hard labour of setting things up.Next 3-8 years,depending on climate,would be spent in consolidating things,moving from makeshift homes to sturdier ones,"building civilisation"..from plumbing,electricity,kindergartens(very important due labour needs),schools....made to last.

From 5th year on baby-boom is to be expected and enforced.Anywhere from 50-70% of female population will be pregnant.On TL7/8 artificial fertilization would be used to speed process up and more importantly to gain on genetic diversity (If cloning is available all families would be required to foster few clone kids).Most likely minimum number of children would be prescribed per family,anywhere from 4+,somewhat again depending on climate and other conditions of life.

Targeted goal for baby boom would be minimum increasing twofold population/generation though more likely it would be up to 3 fold increase.

Major problem such community would face in early years is food.So you could expect 65-70% of population becoming farmers.Further 20% would be miners,due extensive need of higher TLs for mineral ores.5% would be in science/education(preserving TL knowledge) and 4-9 in construction,with 1% in exploration/security/hunting....
This numbers are very rough and there would be much overlap,community projects pulling on whole or part of population base,wast majority of people chosen would be multiedisciplined....

Than Big question is:

How much technology,spare parts can they bring with them? ...

If unlimited (as theyre in bunker on Earth in stasis for 20y before opening vault) than things look peachy for them.

If theyre going with starships,multidimensional devices...etc..anything restricting amount of gear they can bring with them than ...

....First generation will have to downscale their TL by 2-4 TLs depending on discipline....than they will have to extract ores,build tools to build tools to build tools to start producing their TL stuff.Process could last several generations depending on area/discipline/science involved.

Thats from top of my head..interesting topic though :))

Re: Ensuring post-apocalyptic survival at TL8?
 

But that's the failure to meet the primary requirements of the challenge. The question is how much people, money and materials (mass) is required to avoid dropping the TL by more than 1 by the time the new generation grows up.

As I said, disregard the transportation costs themselves if they're fiddly. Just name your requirements for manpower, funding and mass. I bet many people would be interested in this scenario from a Spaceships PoV, but I think being more generic is better.

At TL9 and TL10 this isn't much of a challenge because of 3D-printers and Infomorphic lifeforms (which basically reduce survival minimum to that of a Von Neumann machine with the data to build a bioroid and some ghosts archived somewhere).

Re: Ensuring post-apocalyptic survival at TL8?
 

Tens or hundreds of thousands. As a starting point, just to maintain all the knowledge which makes up TL8, you'd need something like the faculty of a large university. Say, 2000-3000 people. They can only spend part of their time doing useful work, so you'd have to at least partly mirror them with more specialists, so say 4000-5000 high-tech specialists. You'll need several (ten? twenty?) times that many to keep the industries they support actually going; that 4-5k includes the engineers who design power plants and automobiles, but you need a lot more people to build and maintain them. Then you need teachers for the next generation of children (a separate set of specialized skills), janitors and other manual laborers, bureaucrats (I include public servants like police and firefighters in that category), and farmers to feed them all. Each is a small percentage of the total population, but it adds up.

On the plus side, you've got a large enough population base that genetic diversity pretty much takes care of itself.

A ready-made city with a very diverse range of chemical plants and factories (from microchips to consumer electronics to heavy machinery to aerospace), or one which can be constructed quickly from prefab materials, plus food supplies for a year or two, livestock (heavy reliance on animal power is probably inevitable for a few years until power generation gets up to speed). Don't forget that they'd need to be well situated with regard to water supply and farm land.

Lots.

Re: Ensuring post-apocalyptic survival at TL8?
 

Summarizing TBC's post and putting a real comparator on it, you'd need to transplant a city the size of Albuquerque (only with a far more diverse manufacturing base). It'd cost at least a couple trillion dollars (leaving aside transportation costs), possibly several trillion. But yeah, genetic diversity is not a concern.

Re: Ensuring post-apocalyptic survival at TL8?
 

Than ,Id say 1mil+ City.

Though there isnt any city in world that could sustain its TL by itself.

So you need:

a)1*Major University (With 2 dozen different universities encompassed in it)
-something like, today with 40+K students
Example is some small country central university like "Zagrebačko Sveučilište" (Universities of Zagreb)...which encompass 95% of Uni level education in Croatia (Only thing missing there to my knowledge is Naval university,though it does include shipbuilding)

-so essentially some smaller Countrys centralised Capitol is needed

b)All major and minor industries

c)Something on level of Million+ tonnes of spare parts,until some very minor stuff dont get set up for production

d)A LOT of people to run whole mess( 1 mil as probably minimum)

e)A lot of food reserves until your production is properly set up(some stuff takes years after planting to give fruit:Wine,Olives,Apples....)
-also from where will you get rubber...etc (if In north hemisphere)..if synthetic...again new techs needed

And with all above I think youd be lucky to keep your TL in full,since there is no place on earth(except Amasonian tribes,which are beside point in this discussion) that has everything "homemade"...so specialised parts will start giving way to wear&tear and some of it you wont be able to replace no time soon and you will have to "reinvent"(or refabricate) whole technological base to 2homemade" one.

Re: Ensuring post-apocalyptic survival at TL8?
 

this is alternate history series 1st book 1632 about some small West Virginia town getting transported from today to 1632 year.

Interesting parts are with retooling to make tools to make tools and problems about some stuff we take for granted today.

Re: Ensuring post-apocalyptic survival at TL8?
 

Well, Space suggests 50 million people. It would probably be easier to preserve the knowledge for later use than to move enough people to actually maintain the use of TL 7-8 in a start-up colony with no contact with the mother world.

Re: Ensuring post-apocalyptic survival at TL8?
 

Well, storing knowledge is probably a non-issue.

50 million is a scary number - I was hoping the answer would be no larger than Iceland (in fact, I was hoping the most pessimistic answer would be 100k).

If things are so bad, I guess it would never be an interesting premise for a hard-science scenario. (BTW, reminds me of Alpha Centauri, whose realism is often debated from both sides . . .)

And now I guess that the only way to get any concrete numbers is Spaceships . . . which is good, in a way.

Re: Ensuring post-apocalyptic survival at TL8?
 

As others have noted, maintenance of genetic diversity is a non-issue when it comes to initial population size. In addition to the sizable population required for maintaining TL8, you could honestly maintain diversity with an extremely tiny workforce. This is because eggs and sperm are much easier to transport and store than people are, and if you are maintaining TL8 in-vitro fertilization is going to be readily available.

In general, I think you'll be best off having a cut-off colony start out at sub-TL in fields not immediately related to establishing and maintaining the colony, but with the knowledge retained in digital form (ideally, interactive teaching programs will be available to help jumpstart the field once it's feasible to get back into it). This way you don't have to start out with a massive population but can still rebuild within a few generations.

Re: Ensuring post-apocalyptic survival at TL8?
 

Okay, so we're completely removing inbreeding from the equation.

What would be required to more-or-less preserve TL8 or TL7 - in maintenance if not production - with a 100k pop or so? Making allowances for late-TL8 and maybe some early-TL9 stuff like Bioroids, NAIs, mature hydroponics etc.

Re: Ensuring post-apocalyptic survival at TL8?
 

Well, first off you have your basic food and protection for the elements.

For food I'd suggest local food gardens worked by the people who eat from, with more dedicated agriculture focussing on producing fibres for clothing. Structures can be built out of what's local and environment is going to dictate much of what is needed for them.

As far as people go I think you need 10,000 people to prevent inbreading. Population control is important since children are a drain of resources for 15 or so years at least. You'll want contraception, especailly to maintain a TL7-8 standard of living, so herbal medicines that can be grown in said food gardens would be most useful. You're also going to want and get some kind of medical program up and running, starting with basics like sanitation. I would recogmend that all poo be kept in an underground tank with the metahne it produces being caught as a source of fire.

Beyond that you need somekind of record keeping and learning structure. You need to be able to teach people new skills in an organised manner and record everything.

most importantly you're going to want good civil structures. I recogmend you have communal housing which make internal decisions on a collective consensus basis. These houses then send a delegate to a governing council to speak on their behalf, though the way they vote is dictated by the household. You also want a good court system to resolve disputes and a bill of rights to preserve people's, well, rights.

Re: Ensuring post-apocalyptic survival at TL8?
 

I think the tipping point of TL preservation comes with self-replicating rapid prototypers (personal-scale fabrication units, i.e. "3D printers") and a small-scale way to produce plastic suitable for use in those printers from waste organic matter.

And we (just barely) have that right now.

That's not going to get you industrial steel quantities or large scale mining or forestry products. But when you have a 3D printer for every ten families, a great many of the ongoing small necessities can be met by just printing up a new thing.

What can you make with 3D printers?

• Forks, knives, spoons, plates, cups, bowls are easy.
• Light construction material like chair segments, table pieces, scaffolding and tanks for your hydro/aeroponics.
• Pens, electronics enclosures, bottles, toothbrushes, buttons/snaps, zippers, complex miniature machinery
• LEGO blocks. Don't underestimate the utility of teaching children to build everything and anything from easy-to-fabricate common pieces.
• With a laser sintering head (or electron beam) you can 3D print metals, which allows circuits, which lets you build increasingly complex machines.

For preservation of knowledge, standard computer methods are an ok start, but cd/dvds can have media failures in only a few short years. So amongst the first tasks might be an on-going project to duplicate and spread all computer-based knowledge, and also to print it out to physical long-term storage like paper manuals or microdots.

Re: Ensuring post-apocalyptic survival at TL8?
 

I'll give my answer before perusing the other, more interesting, replies:

First, if possible, pre-screen the colony's starting population to exclude dangerous personality types.

Beyond that, given the environment you describe, it should be totally possible and reasonably inexpensive to establish a self-renewing TL7 colony -- provided they don't have a serious bad-luck event. (The mitigation method for this is diversification -- establish more than one community within reach of helping one another.)

Anybody really serious about such an effort would, of course, throw as much money into it as possible, and I think on this basis imagination and utility would run out for standard TL8 gear before the money would.

Go with a cadillac shopping list --
Advance mobile hospitals and genetics labs: $40,000,000
Duplicate high-power computers: $6,000,000
Duplicate mobile fission plants with electric power take-off systems: $30,000,000
Core manufacturing suites: $60,000,000
Mobile petro-chemical extration and refining equipment:
Mobile porta-mine kits:
Mobile water-treatment facilities: ...

Anyway, you get the idea -- you're in under $1B for even the most ludicrously over-supplied venture.

The biggest challenge down the line will be how to bring back skills and knowledge that the first generation didn't need. Ideally, people would be selected to represent a diversity of knowledge and you'd take simply as many as you possible could, given that basic necessities shouldn't be a serious problem.

Re: Ensuring post-apocalyptic survival at TL8?
 

I ran the numbers on this problem five or ten years ago and I concluded that 500 specimens would be sufficient to avoid inbreeding. (Kim Stanley Robinson could do it with 300, but he's smarter than I am.... and also sexier and more pleasing in the eyes of Cthulhu...)

Furthermore, I convinced myself that it would be possible to get 500 highly motivated, multi-talented geniuses who could memorize the skills for an entire nation.

E.g. a physician who can also serve as a piano tuner and violin maker, who recites Chaucer to relax.

The physician would be married to a biotechnologist who can breed up all kinds of organisms, from microbes to clones.

And so on.

Key technologies in my simulation included composting, renewable energy, hydroponics, and aeroponics.

Re: Ensuring post-apocalyptic survival at TL8?
 

I strongly disagree with this estimate.

You don't need all the departments.

You don't need the math department. You don't need the statistics department. (Are pure mathematicians vital to the frontier?

"Hey, Klaus, now that we're on an alien world, let's devote our lives to finding a more elegant proof for Fermat's Last Theorem."

"No, no, John, I want to paraconsistent logics!")


You don't need the dance department, the theatre department, or the interpretive basket-weaving department. (Basket-weaving is good for the soul, but the engineering wizards will just do crunchy tech for eight hours each day, and then basket-weave for an hour or two as a relaxation method.) You need the core faculty of a vocational/technical college, not the entire faculty of a university.



Again, you don't need designers. Design work need not be a full-time job.

You definitely don't need farmers at all. If you have full-time farmers, the colony will be very inefficient.

Consider the impact of earthships, raised-container greenhouses, "square foot" gardening, vertical gardening, aeroponics, hydroponics - every family can have enough space to grow its own food. Maintaining food crops and putting earthworms in the compost would be the vital home maintenance duties.

You don't need a sewage system that pipes the sludge out of each house and centralizes it - such a system would suck. You need each family to live in a Buckminster-Fuller-style earthship -- a hyper-efficient machine for living that will recycle their sewage into topsoil with trivially small labor input.


Say, five hundred people total.

Re: Ensuring post-apocalyptic survival at TL8?
 

If you're throwing reality out the window, why not just have one unaging superman with photographic memory?

Re: Ensuring post-apocalyptic survival at TL8?
 

I'm not throwing reality out the window, I'm throwing capitalism and democracy out the window.

Democracy says that you have to get the whole bell curve of the population in there. Democracy almost always throws freedom of association out the window, whereas frontier communities have some freedoms of association that big cities lack. (Of course, frontiers also lack anonymity, an important component of many freedoms of association.) Democracy says, "Galt's Gulch is possible, and therefore it is forbidden."

Capitalism says that you have to have jobs (or at least stable social positions, such as "prison convict") for people who are not smart enough to understand algebra.

Earthships are a proven technology. Aeroponics is a proven technology. And the whole community doesn't have to advance the state of the art, it just needs to keep the power running and the replacement parts plentiful.

Is there a reality-checked source that says human manure doesn't work as compost? Is there a reality-checked source that says fireproof buildings (such as most earthship designs) are worse than government-run professional fire-fighting organizations?

Re: Ensuring post-apocalyptic survival at TL8?
 

Ahem, we're talking about maintaining TL, i.e. reproducing techy stuff (at least the essentials of those TLs - i.e. machines, [primitive] computers, plastics, hydroponic farms etc.).

Re: Ensuring post-apocalyptic survival at TL8?
 

I think same as Flyndaran....

Edit: Molokh just posted while I was writing.


Youre missing few things here:

Who will pass all that specialised knowledge to next generation(Which is 1st premise of Molokhs question).

When spare parts run out who will produce new ones and how?

Who will feed numerous offspring's? If your automated Hydroponics are that good..where is limit? Amount,wear/tear...etc Regardless someone has to work even in automated Hydrophonics.

How many little things do you think constitute overall TL? And besides main point is to have expanding community which will preserve its TL level and in 2nd-3rd generation even start to increase it.

Who will tune Pianos when Physician is having fulltime job of being physician and let alone teach children poetry.Besides when will he find time to teach next generation of physicians....If hes doing it..knowledge will be lost..let alone piano tuning and nuances of poetry.

What about wife? Is she breeding agricultural organisms or for medicine or for any of hundreds of potential fields? How can she do all that stuff.How much time will she lose doing manual work that less -educated/specialised lab technicians are usually doing to take workload from top scientists to be able to devote to core problem?
How will she pass all that knowledge?

see... ;)

Re: Ensuring post-apocalyptic survival at TL8?
 

Raising TL above 8 isn't strictly necessary for meeting the challenge, no. Being able to maintain it indefinitely for further generations, though, is essential, so other people's point about universities is very important.

BTW, ditching democracy is acceptable, but remember that a revolt inevitably will result in loss of equipment, knowledge and TL, so we must keep the population content. As mentioned before, this can be compared to the Alpha Centauri scenario, but without the hostile ecosystem and the TL9ish starting gear.

Re: Ensuring post-apocalyptic survival at TL8?
 

Allow me to roll out my insanely huge collection of DIY insanity.

Primitive Computer Hardware: FabLab a la Gershenfeld can make circuit boards.

http://fablab.marcboon.com/pcb/

A large number of circuit boards adds up to a crude "integrated circuit."

Computer Software: Use Linux and BSD.

Primitive Plastics: Use organic farming to get bioplastics.

Hydroponic Farms: Check issue 18 of Make magazine.

Arduino for home agriculture-
off-grid laundry -
drip irrigation -
solar heating
sustainability
etc.

Machines. Use the Gingery approach to work up to the Factor-E Farm level. Vincent R. Gingery was an American who started with a bucket of sand and a lot of junk and managed to build his own machine shop. He wrote quite a few books about it.

The modern equivalents of Gingery are the folks building open-source machine tools at:

http://openfarmtech.org/index.php?ti...nstruction_Set


They can start with rural junk and end up with:

HABITAT PACKAGE:
CEB Press (brickmaking machine)
- Sawmill
- Living Machines (I think that means water purifiers)
- Modular Housing Units |

AGROECOLOGY PACKAGE:
LifeTrac Multi Purpose Tractor -
MicroTrac -
Agricultural Spader -
Agricultural Microcombine -
Hammer Mill -
Well Drilling Rig -
Organoponic Raised Bed Gardening -
Orchard and Nursery -
Modular Greenhouse Units -
Bakery -
Dairy -
Energy Food Bars -
Freeze Dried Fruit Powders |
ENERGY PACKAGE:
Pyrolysis Oil -
Babington Burner -
Solar_Combined_Heat_Power_System -
Steam Engine Construction Set -
Solar Turbine -
Electric Motors/Generators -
Inverters & Grid Intertie - Batteries |
FLEXIBLE INDUSTRY PACKAGE:
Lathe -
Torch Table -
Multimachine & Flex Fab -
Plastic Extrusion & Molding -
Metal Casting and Extrusion |
TRANSPORTATION PACKAGE:
Open Source Car




Clearly I failed to communicate my notions of labor economics. Your question would not have arisen if I had expressed myself clearly. I do apologize for writing so clumsily, but I do not change my claim.

Maybe I'm missing out on the communication, but if you think I'm lacking a boatload of data on how to improvise industrial tools, I've got a lot of posting to do.

Re: Ensuring post-apocalyptic survival at TL8?
 

I don't believe you have a realistic notion of how knowledge gets passed on and how skills get maintained.

A skill that is practiced is remembered by its practitioner;
a skill that is practiced in a small community tends to get passed on within the community.

Modern education often serves as soul-destroying busywork that obstructs skill transmission.

Do you disagree?



The Gingery method was detailed in my previous post. Gingery was one real-life person who built a ridiculously complete machine shop. His methods are widely studied - but apparently not by everyone.


Apparently my previous post on this matter did not make my position clear.

I have already claimed that each household can produce abundant food with minimal work. Apparently you wish to contest some part of that claim, but we haven't gotten down to specifics for some reason.

http://books.google.com/books?id=9_s...ing%22&f=false

http://www.your-vegetable-gardening-...gardening.html

Your rhetoric is ambiguous. Are you implying that everyone else on this thread has a complete, itemized list of TL details, but I don't? Are you implying that the number of little things is incalculably vast?

Reality Check: Real-life academics write papers about how many little things make up real-life TLs.
Let me quote four papers.


I don't want to speculate about how many generations would be required to advance tech until we can agree on more fundamental issues of the argument.

I don't think I made myself clear with the piano-tuning comment. Let's leave that to the side and return to the issue of labor economics after we have a handle on the engineering feasibility of using five hundred people to build a toolset.


I can't be sure from your written communication style, but I think you're letting your rhetorical flourishes distract us from the issues.

When you ask "How can she do all that stuff?" I'm not sure if you're stressing that it's impossible, or if you're requesting an explanation.


I don't concede any of the points I think you've tried to make. However, my grasp of your communication is loose, and I don't know that I'm evaluating your thoughts as they were intended.

Also I apologize for not posting this many hours ago - for some reason I couldn't log onto this forum for most of yesterday.

Re: Ensuring post-apocalyptic survival at TL8?
 

Even if I can get the majority of readers to agree to my engineering notions of how industrial co-evolution works, I think the second sticking point will be labor economics.

If I can ask your indulgence, I'd like to first address the hardware issues of fab labs and open source machine tools.

If we can get consensus on the mechanics of that, I will further argue that skills can be preserved and transmitted without recognizable universities.

Consider, for example:
http://opensourcemachine.org/

That website reads in part:
I am not sure that most of the readers of this forum would even agree with that basic claim. Perhaps they would claim that the Multimachine would never work, or that it could never be built by people without college degrees, or that it requires too much starting capital.


In brief, Molokh's issue is fictional (i.e. "How can the GM move fictional characters to a fictional world and have them do a fictional Robinsonade?") but the science underlying my contentions concerning this issue is factual. Over the past ten years, many highly-skilled workers and academics have considered issues of industrial sustainability.

Unfortunately, the popular media, notably Kevin Kelly, have suggested that industrial interdependence is simply too complex to be considered. This has been disproven by McCarthy et al. Industrial evolution can be mapped out by means of cladistics.

Most of the readers of this thread will probably decline to read engineering journals. (A flat-out refusal to read might be preferable to a shallow reading! Then again, if anyone reading this has an interest in the journals, by all means post a reply or PM me.) However, the practical side of this field has been extensively documented on the web by a very diverse assortment of interested parties.

For example, Jeff Vail wants to build a sustainable society that can survive peak oil:

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/4720

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/4741

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/4774

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/4844


Conversely, the fabrication crowd (the fablab/reprap hackers) are just hackers: they just love the act of using technology.

http://reprap.org/bin/view/Main/WebHome


The Whole Earth/Organic Farming/Urban Farming bunch are somewhere in-between. They like the activity for its own sake, but they also want to save the world:

http://www.nature.my.cape.com/greenc...ewalchemy.html


In short, the technology side of this is a real-life technical topic. It should not be hand-waved; rather, you should pick a set of technical experts that you trust and put their opinions into GURPS terms. (Note that the technical experts are not unanimous: Jay Hanson of dieoff.org might believe the human race will go extinct; Neil Gershenfeld might believe that Hans Moravec will lead us to a post-human singularity in ten years; Jeff Vail will probably predict wars against "global guerrillas.")

Beyond the technology, the issue of universities is a question of economics and demographics. I am less sanguine about proving that rigorously, because I don't think economics is very clear-cut. Even if it were clear-cut, it tends to produce acrimonious controversies.

Re: Ensuring post-apocalyptic survival at TL8?
 

Part of the difficulty here is deciding what you mean by maintaining a TL7 or 8 civilization. There are a good many millions of different products manufactured now, if your civilization must be actually making them all right now to qualify as TL8, then you really will need millions of workers and trillions of dollars of infrastructure.

If you don't have to produce them all right now, then the question becomes how many of them can you not be producing before you decide the TL has dropped. After 1 engineer who can read and a patent library probably can figure out how to produce most of them given a year or two - is a civilization with this still TL8? Probably not. But where you decide to draw the line above that is pretty arbitrary. What *is* the TL of a civilization that, say, can't make x-ray tubes right now, hasn't made one in two generations, but has a warehouse full of spares and could tool up to make them by the end of next year if nothing more important comes up?

Much of the difficulty is that TLs aren't purely about either knowledge or current production, there is a significant standard of living component for individuals, and probably an equally signficant standing infrastructure and existing trade routes component for civilizations. In some ways, I think you could argue that a new colony could *never* not drop many TLs in the first few years after it arrived, no matter how much stuff it brought along, simply because a part of being a TL5+ civilization is having in place stuff like mining and transport infrastructure that it is going to take time to set up.

How many people do they need to construct all that in a generation? Well, not much infrastructure really lasts more than a half century replacement time, and probably not more than couple percent of our population is involved in replacing it, call it a billion man-years, so maybe 50 million people to rebuild it in a generation. Capital costs are in the same order of magnitude as wages, so probably not more than trillions of dollars of equipment given some of it can be bootstrapped as part of their civilization building effort.

Re: Ensuring post-apocalyptic survival at TL8?
 

Malloyd: TL8 is defined as the information-oriented era with some other bits. It would include (based on GURPS Basic Set): Personal computers (at least on the level of 286), fuel cells, advanced batteries, solar power, gas turbines, hydroponics, DNA-related tech, essential pharmacy, medical scanners (X-ray etc.), organ transplants, unmanned (AI or teleoperated) scout craft, plastics and metals etc.

Things Basic suggests for TL8 that I allow to ignore due to being near-useless for small communities: anything space-related, fission power plants.

I'm also assuming we can skip over luxuries which are easily doable at TL8, but are not feasible for scaling reasons - coca-cola factories, TV channels (aside from Youtube-like DIY video repositories).

Is that sufficient to describe it?

Re: Ensuring post-apocalyptic survival at TL8?
 

I disagree, and here's why. As they say,
'The one who cannot do, teaches to do; the one who cannot teach to do, teaches to teach. The one who can do, can only do.'

While it sounds harsh, it is also a very true proverb. For instance, my SO plays several musical instruments, but is incapable of teaching me, because of being unable to explain how to do it, or even explain what a note is.

Sure, bad teachers still can produce good students - but only when the student is stubborn, curious and talented, and not otherwise. The rest they will accuse of being inept, lazy or whatever, but the result will indeed be near-zero.

A student's only real requirement is willingness to learn. After that, a good teacher can always make the student into a good student. A good teacher and a talented, willing student will result in a perfect student. An unwilling-to-learn student will give bad results even with a very good teacher.

Re: Ensuring post-apocalyptic survival at TL8?
 

What is DIY?

Ill start with :

"Phuuuuh" and continue with "Aaaahhhhhh" lol

I started reading at 09:00 and after following your links and links of links and watching several videos it is now 14:52 h...

One more lol haha :d


1) I would like to thank you for that info.It was very,very interesting read(specially links onto links) and I learned a lot today :))

2)
Even if I agreed on passing very specialised knowledge from one person to next...which as efficient educational model I dont,since sooner or later youll have "bad teacher"/"non interested student" case or case of student without aptitude for that line of work(someone with deficiency in math in high tech field) when all that high tech knowledge will go down the drain.

More important is basic nature of Universities as institutions.You dont learn "What you will need to know" .... thats what technicians learn/do. What you learn ,as engineer...etc, is "What you may need to know" which makes tremendous difference in base of knowledge,implementation of same and multidisciplinary application /cooperation of same.

What I do agree on is that modern education model is in desperate need of change from mostly "rote learning" and stuff that it still didnt surpass.But thats irrelevant for our discussion.

3)

I was referring to very specialised spare parts,not something you can build in good machine shop but something you need specialised high tech factory to make,since we do assume that such community would have top of the line machine shops.

4)
Large industrial Agriculture is much more efficient that family based agriculture. Im not disputing that with some profound thought agricultures labour man-hours can be cut down tremendously,but it still doesnt change fact that modern world has tendency toward specialisation which leads to efficiency(Real world is full of imperfections so no need to dispute this,since it isnt working exactly like that even in todays world,although it should).

5)
[QUOTE =Agramer]How many little things do you think constitute overall TL?[/QUOTE]
Not rhetoric,just my subjective impression that number is really vast,dont have clue what that number would/should be,but if I start using terms as "quality of life","way of life","ease of living" which are ambigous it gets complicated.
So no,I dont have clue how much of those 2little things" is needed to preserve <i>fully</i> targeted TL but number must be very high.

6)
I have never disputed that. I disputed 500 people preserving TL in full during two generation span.

7)
Im stressing that such multidisciplinary doctor of sciences is wasted resource on everyday jobs that would be in "normal world" delegated to technicians with small supervision of such expert.But that with your 500 people mark we dont have room for those technicians.

8)

On your 2nd post I mostly agree with what you say and what most of people linked said.

What I do disagree is that we will have "Replicator"(ala Star Trek) technology on TL8. Yes Rot machine is nice and will do a lot for mass produced goods and even specialised parts that could all be made at home,but still a lot of technology will be out of reach of such machine during TL8(OR it will be mamuthian mobile factory).

Yes,skills can ... but still Unis are what kickstarts whole process and are actual centres of "new thought"(Yes,Im aware of numerous non-University related inventors,but still most of major breakthroughs are achieved through assistance of Unis to some degree).


To summ all of above :

You presented me with very interesting read and I learned a lot of new stuff.

I fully disagree that fully functional TL8 society can be sustained with such small number of people(Im not even delving into deep sea/space programs here).


15:35 h /post :)

Re: Ensuring post-apocalyptic survival at TL8?
 

Hm ... Is anyone else able to explain to you what a note is?

Re: Ensuring post-apocalyptic survival at TL8?
 

That's within the Earth 2009 production and organization paradigms. I think the point is, that a planned ark community could be established on more situation-appropriate paradigms for that purpose. Earth 2009 has a massive scale, established infrastructure forms, and legacy-organizational elements that make specialization an efficient choice. Take away scale and swap in different established infrastructure, and suddenly a diffused (frontier/self-sufficiency) model for production makes more sense.



I agree with you that 500 people seems low, but I think it's very very doable with say about 20,000 people, and arguable down to maby 5000 (leaving aside any tech-assisted population boosting).

Because scale is small compared to Earth 2009, in a lot of cases demand would not be sufficient to support specialization in a lot of cases anyway. While the super-doctors idea may be stretching things a bit, it seems to me that it would be reasonable to ask a select group of highly motivated people to bring or add a second or third occupational specialty to their erudition. Perhaps not as significant as their main line, but available if needed and teachable. Medic/beekeepers, Agronomist/videographer, etc.


Personally, I think the idea of needing a university for this challenge is too much 'mission-creep'. We're not trying to advance knowledge, where trying to avoid slipping any lower than TL7 with the smallest footprint possible. I don't think it's necessary or practical to include a replication of the structures of traditional academia in the mission requirements.

That said, you might want to include some kind of sub-function/facility/social structure/ethic that captures some core functions of universities: collegial free inquiry, teaching a shared paradigm for transmitting analytical meaning, eliciting critical thinking ability. Maybe you'd go with a stripped-down university to 'keep the flame alive', so to speak.

{BTW, regarding food production: there's no need to get too fancy, Molokh said it's an Earthlike ecology, so pick your best spot for your relatively tiny population, apply well known technology with a handful of people to ensuring a the basics, and food will practically take care of itself.}

Re: Ensuring post-apocalyptic survival at TL8?
 

I agree with your points except :
-lack of need of Uni (How much stripped down version? Just art and such or?)
-minimum population

There is no problem to make Military outpost at TL8 and to keep it at TL8 generation later.
But thats Military outpost and not preservation of full TL.

I could be wrong on minimum amount of people needed to preserve TL completely,though maybe someone here will dispute that :))

Edit:

What Im trying to say is that you need Structure to keep TL.Structure requires labour which requires big population due all segments that make our TL.

Maybe simplest example is just Medicine.How many different departments do big Hospital complexes have...so with few backups we are already at thousands of people and we just started.And if we lack even single department than our TL is already starting to slip due other Doctors not having same expertise as that department specialists.

Re: Ensuring post-apocalyptic survival at TL8?
 

To be sef sustainable youd need something like this.

Texas Medical center... has about 13 hospitals, a mental health facility, 19 academic schools, a pharmacy school... and employs 72,600, of which 15,000+ are doctors and upper level educators, plus an additional 33,000 students"

Numbers can be cut down but it is still a lot for just Medicine.


Other way to look at it is(after talking with Urologist-surgeon,when explained what were discussing here):

Now multiply this bare numbers by hundreds of Medical specialities and add some more for technicians not mentioned here(x-ray...etc) and top everything off with cooks,janitors...etc

Though he did say that regardless how good specific MD/student is that slips of knowledge wold happen during generation shift without formal education(Universities) and that in long run apprenticeship modle cant sustain such broad base of knowledge.

So from whatever angle we look we need thousands,more likely tens of thousands,for Medicine alone without even touching rest of Iceberg that constitutes TL7 or TL8

Re: Ensuring post-apocalyptic survival at TL8?
 

All right, duly noted, I need to sort through my thoughts on that.

I had originally prepared a melodramatic comment on modern education, but it would be too rococo in comparison to your terse critique.

So going forward, let's note the education issue as something requiring extra resources - whether that means a professional vocational school or a university will require more thought.

As a starter, I invite you to consider techshop.ws:

http://techshop.ws/take_classes.html

It is grist for the mill, as they say.

DIY is an abbreviation for "do it yourself." It is the modern version of "arts and crafts."

Agramer, I appreciate your detailed comments, but I have to ask you to wait a few days before I can get through them all and give them the attention they deserve.

Re: Ensuring post-apocalyptic survival at TL8?
 

Irrelevant side note: Your sig says : "Rule B492: live by it or die trying." But on that page I see several bits of GM advice, none of which call out to me as particularly inspiring. Does Rule B492 encompass all of them? Or is it some shorter passage, such as "All he has to do is listen to the players describe what they're doing, then use the rules of the game to tell them what happens..."?




Main topic:

The very unusual situation of starting a small colony on a new world with an initial capital investment of working tools distorts the costs of resources and labor, IMHO.

I have several hundred academic papers that I believe are relevant to these issues (they cover macroeconomics, business administration issues, engineering, etc). Whether my belief in their relevance is correct or not, it would be unreasonable to try to winnow them on a GURPS forum. Thus I will try to limit myself to easily accessible web pages.

I think the GURPS angle of this issue can best be expressed in terms of a handful of important leaders: Arizmendiarrieta, Gingery, Gershenfeld, Dunbar, Vail, Robb.


José María Arizmendiarrieta demonstrated what can be done by the co-operative economic system in a community with a high degree of fictive kinship.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%...izmendiarrieta


David J. Gingery asserted (and gave very impressive empirical evidence) to indicate that a functional metal-working shop can be built from scrap. He began by casting his own metal, and produced a lathe from cast metal. He was able to construct an entire machine shop from a cast-metal lathe.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_J._Gingery

[The wikipedia page has extensive links.]

Neil Gershenfeld showed how a bunch of high-school students with less than a semester of training can produce serviceable integrated circuits out of basic industrial products.

http://cba.mit.edu/people/index.html
http://fab.cba.mit.edu/
http://ng.cba.mit.edu/

Robin Dunbar indicated that humans function more efficiently in small groups of less than 200 persons.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar_number


Jeff Vail picked up on many of the efficiencies of communities that use Dunbar's number. I chose the figure of 500 as an optimal community size in order to have three "tribes" of about 150, plus a "priesthood" of about 50 to lead the "rhizome community." This notion is the most speculative part of my claims.

http://www.jeffvail.net/2007/01/what-is-rhizome.html


John Robb developed some of Jeff Vail's work in a number of directions, including the ecological engineering done by the New Alchemy Institute.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Alchemy_Institute

http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/...le-edible.html



Given the above background, it remains for me to explain why I think that being a doctor in a town of 500 souls is not a full-time job, and why I think that universities are not necessary.

The first question requires more detail. I take the following statements to be noncontroversial:
a - Capital can be substituted for labor;
b - Tribal communities are composed of an armed citizenry, not a disarmed peasantry regulated by a military caste;
c - Armigerous tribal citizens have an inherent preference to defend their own property and their own rights rather than demanding protection, arbitration, and regulation from centralized authority.
d- Demand for medical services in a highly-intelligent tribal frontier community is very different from demand for medical services in a bell-curve civilized community. Civilized medical agencies seek to maximize private profit. Tribal communities seek to maximize the common good. As a real-life example of how homogeneous communities demonstrate great cooperation, consider the Mondragon Co-Op.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondrag...ve_Corporation


Given a,b, c, and d, let us consider the demand for medical services in a tribal community. Does a physician punch a clock and work a set number of hours (perhaps eight at the clinic and four "on-call")? I doubt it. The tribe will demand excess capacity so that there are enough physicians to deal with genuine emergencies, but physicians are so highly skilled and multi-talented that they do not need to limit themselves to medicine. They would be full-time doctors only when emergencies demanded it. Most of the time, routine medicine would substitute capital for labor, and the physicians' excess labor would be available for other needs. While this does not perfectly correspond to the Mondragon experience in the Basque region, I believe it is the correct extrapolation from the smaller tribal size and the highly intelligent gene pool.


The second question is, in my opinion, more obvious. Universities and government schools are (IMHO) grossly inefficient at processing highly intelligent pupils. Since the community consists only of highly intelligent parents, barring grotesque mutations, the children will be highly intelligent.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeschool

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unschooling

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Illich

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodor..._%28scholar%29

http://www.librarything.com/work/254268

I submit that if Illich and Roszak cannot convince the reader that modern schooling is a hideous Procrustean bed that deforms and mutilates the human spirit, then my own writings to that effect would be a tale written by a Gene Ray, full of $CREAMCAPS and TYPO"S, signifying www.timecube.com.

But my own neurosis about Procrustean beds is not relevant to Molokh's GURPS campaign. Molokh has said that she wants teaching as a separate economic sector, and my existing model has to be adjusted accordingly. But right not it is after midnight in my time zone, and I have to get up at five-thirty.

Re: Ensuring post-apocalyptic survival at TL8?
 

Technoshop is "how to make" class...

Technicians knowledge is "How to make" or "How to operate".

Engineers knowledge is "Why does it do that in such conditions and what would change if we change conditions" type of knowledge.

example: FABRICATION: Aluminum Sand Casting class on technoshop...

Itll teach you how to "blacksmith" aluminium.....what it wont teach you is(Which would be expected from engineer to know):

-what if humidity is high in area...will/what would be structural changes
-how does metal react on different temeperatures(outside ones) during casting
-How long will it last,How long if made under different conditions
-How much weight can it support
-How much(minimum) extra support would it need to hold something
-Can it be done in "cheaper" way(using less material)
...etc

....Now even if you amas amazing amount of "how to make/How to do" you will still lack knowledge that engineer brings to table.

Edit: Ouch ,you posted while I was typing...
/postpones above ,again,5+ hour read for later date :)) .....

Re: Ensuring post-apocalyptic survival at TL8?
 

I don't 'want' to make teaching a separate economic sector. I'm saying that transfering advanced knowledge cannot be done by people who are not taught/talented enough to do it. It also takes time and effort. Since it has to be done all the time, it just as well might be done by professionals. Though this isn't a final decision - I'm not a judge, I'm a person interested in the discussion. I like seeing different PoVs.

As someone who experienced both homeschooling and schoolschooling, I can say that while schools have their learning-stoppers, these are mostly related to other pupils. I know that individual education is more efficient, but I doubt it would be economically feasible when workforce is limited.

Re: Ensuring post-apocalyptic survival at TL8?
 

Well, my physics textbook and teacher said they're just frequencies at which the instrument produces sound. But musicians say that's not what a note is, yet can never explain what it is, saying I will understand when/if I learn to play. Since I can't differentiate them by hearing, I have no idea who of them is right, and if the latter, what is a note.

Re: Ensuring post-apocalyptic survival at TL8?
 

1) Some stuff will be very hard to produce due to infrastructure requirements yet still and valuable. (Computer chips, chemicals that are industrially valuable but hard to make/mine, high precision instruments that are rugged yet hard to build, pretty much anything that needs a market of 1M+ to be an economically valuable industry...) For this sort of stuff, just bring a long term supply plus copious notes on how to manage it when you run out. This will allow you to concentrate on stuff you can do more easily.

2) People seem to be assuming massive population growth is easy. I think it is going to be one of the hardest parts in a TL8 society. Are you going to enslave all the women to pump out kids? If not, you need a way to convince them to do so voluntarily. If so, how are you going to keep them enslaved? How many people are going to be needed to take care of and educate the kids? How are you going to deal with the political consequences of a youth that massively outnumbers it's elders? Politics in general are going to be severe - everyone here has been ripped from their home and their home has been destroyed, along with many people they loved. PTSD everywhere. Oh, and you're surrounded by pristine wilderness - anyone who really dissents can run away unless you run the place like a prison...

3) Recruitment. You need talented TL8 folks willing to take a huge risk here. On one hand, if the approaching apocalypse is not obvious, you will need a large incentive to get the recruits to sign on for training/orientation. (Untrained and unoriented colonists are not recommended.) If the approaching apocalypse is obvious, people are going to use political clout to get chosen as colonists, and you will end up with a colony of professional politicians and bazillionaires. If the obviousness changes during prep time, you might end up with suitable colonists you've recruited and trained at great expense getting bumped by politicians.

4) Planning. You can probably get a very good return on investment if you spend money researching the problem more thoroughly than you might on an internet message board. If your colony will cost a trillion dollars and you have ten years to prepare, consider spending 100 billion in the first 5 years on modeling the problem and finding solutions to them.

5) Redundancy and fallback. Always have multiple copies of anything vital (includes specialists) if at all possible. Always have a fallback position for losing all of them that isn't "all die, oh the embarrassment!"

Re: Ensuring post-apocalyptic survival at TL8?
 

First, a comment from MartinL:
Well, since this is GURPS, I had rather assumed I could get settlers with 15-point Fanaticism, "Do whatever it takes to make the colony succeed."

Next, a comment from Molokh:
I have a speculative notion that full-time professional work is not the most efficient way to allocate highly skilled labor.

If that speculation is moonbeams and unicorn giggles, then, yes, by all means allocate for full-time professional teachers in the personnel budget.

If that speculation is worthy of the time and brain-power required to entertain it, I should flesh it out later, as in, next week. Real life is taking up too much time...


Following quotes from Agramer:

Hmm.

It would be cynical to say that what engineers learn in the real world is how to keep silent and nod patiently while listening to less technically inclined people.

In the real world, broadly speaking, yes, there's a difference between a 100 IQ technician and a 150 IQ engineer, but I wonder how much of that is inherent smarts rather than training. It would be hard to measure.

For this discussion, I'm assuming the experiment is able to draw on a starting population where no IQ stat is lower than 14 in GURPS terms, and that no child will have an IQ lower than 15.

That right there might be a deal-breaker for some GMs.


You may not realize this, but a high-quality machine shop is a high tech factory.

A high-quality machine shop nowadays has CNC, and CAD/CAM at the minimum. A really high-quality machine shop nowadays is a fab lab, in the Gershenfeld sense.

Fab labs can make (large and bulky) computer chips with one technician and a whole lot of starting capital. Personnel is not the bottleneck - the time, expense, and trouble required to get a fab lab functioning is the bottleneck.

I disagree strongly. Industrial agriculture functions in the same way that Goldman Sachs makes money - massive government intervention covers up fundamentally bad design.

In fact, there are (at least) two kinds of academic journals that do try to quantify tech level. One is the macroeconomics sort, another is the R&D management sort, such as Technovation.

If anyone reading this has an interest, try entering the phrase "technology level" into your favorite academic lit search engine. I think you'll find that - at least in the macroeconomics journals - the resulting papers mostly seem to use the notation A for "technology level" in their models. This notational similarity makes me think that somewhere there is an existing body of macroeconomics theory that has set the precedent.

After 17 Dec 2009, I'd like to post a little summary of some macroeconomics papers that are relevant to tech level. This week, I'll be a little busy. It is very easy for me to get sucked into the problem of finding academic opinions that square with my viewpoint, and until 17 Dec 2009, I need to budget my time a bit.

Edit: I should probably start with the cladistics papers, but first I need to focus on some real-world deadlines.

I guess we should find some actual real-world case studies of small engineering teams - if possible, from coops like the Mondragon Co-op - and see if I can fit some real-world data to my notions of labor costs.

Edit: Also, I should be able to document a case of a single person working with a fablab, and a single person working with a reprap, in order to document that TL 8 already has robotics and automation that (as far as I know) GURPS doesn't hint at in the rules for TL 8.

Re: Ensuring post-apocalyptic survival at TL8?
 

Just to snip at this.

Why cant Countries with "unlimited" finances devoted to Nuclear power create it if you can do all of it in "small machine shop"?

Iran,N.Corea...etc ?

Why is it such a problem for them?

Re: Ensuring post-apocalyptic survival at TL8?
 

I think IQ 14-15 is waaaay too optimistic. IQ11-12 seems more reasonable.

Re: Ensuring post-apocalyptic survival at TL8?
 

The truth of this statement depends entirely on the size of the community. If the community is large enough, then it's most efficient to have everyone working full time in one specific area - the greater the specialization, the better. This is simple, first semester economics.

On the other hand, if the community is too small to require a person working full time, then no, it isn't efficient to have that person work full time.



That probably is a deal breaker. IQ 14+ people are incredibly rare in a realistic setting, and you won't be able to guarantee that all children will have higher IQs than their parents. Some of them will be dumber just by random variation.

Check out all the "What is GURPS IQ?" and "Who has high IQ?" threads from a few months back.




This meshes nicely with my first point. Industrial agriculture is less efficient in a small society, but simple economics show that it will always be at least as efficient as small-scale agriculture in a large society and will most likely be more efficient. Same deal with full-time professional work, basically.


I'll note that 500 people is way, way too little to include all of the specialties required for maintaining TL8. Remember that you need all those different specialties of medicine, as well as tons of specialties in other fields, like research sciences, engineering fields, different fields of mathematics, etc. If you don't have all of those, you aren't fully TL8.

500 people is probably way too low for ensuring survival, too. You'd have to set up multiple small colonies like that to get any sort of decent survival odds, but each colony will be subject to catastrophic failure if even a small percent of its population dies because there are simply too few people in the colony to allow for much redundancy.

Also: You can't just substitute capital for medical service. If there's nobody around to treat or diagnose a problem, you can't spend money to fix it. What you spend money on is the guy treating and diagnosing the problem.

Re: Ensuring post-apocalyptic survival at TL8?
 

It refers to the rule about the GMs common sense being the ultimate guide. (Bottom left corner, I think.)


Are these communities functioning unit within a larger social superstructure, or it the suggestion that 200 is the optimal number of people for a whole society?

Personally, I find neither of those propositions controversial.

I beg to differ there. In economic theory and taking an economy in aggregate, capital can be substituted for labour. But at TL7/8 in practical terms that's not universally true, and this community (be it 500 or 20000) is not going to have the scale to allow it to be statistically correct. There are no machines that can yet substitute for a human surgeon, for example.

That's a bit of a truism, though.

That would have to be a matter of argument or data, I would think, rather than being tendered as a non-controversial item.

Re: Ensuring post-apocalyptic survival at TL8?
 

The last time I checked, many countries have various applications of nuclear power, and it isn't a technical problem.

It *is* a political problem. I see a lot of news stories about Iran and North Korea getting political problems due to their technical successes with nuclear science.

I suspect you're listening to hearsay and getting false impressions, but if you have some news stories you want to cite, please give a link.

Okay, if you're going to add a constraint like "modal IQ must be no higher than 12" than I can't promise you a solution with 500 people.


First semester economics also says that Alan Greenspan can counterfeit money indefinitely and people without jobs should be given suburban houses with mortgages.

I'll stick with barbarous relics and J.K.Galbraith.

I've heard of regression to the mean before. I just don't agree with you about exactly how it works. Also, there isn't a consensus on exactly what measures could be taken to deal with low-intelligence children.

For example, one might envision a fanatical police state where unpromising children were subject to infanticide.


Again, "simple economics" says that Keynes was right. History, as told by the Austrian school, says that Keynes was wrong. (And quite possibly some competing school of historians says Keynes was the love child of time-traveling Robert Anton Wilson and Cthulhu.)

Rather than citing "economics," I think it would be best to cite specific titles and authors concerning specific technical problems.

On the topic of square-foot food gardening, for example, here is Jeavons:
http://www.amazon.com/How-Grow-More-.../dp/0898157676


Do you have any citation with a list of the exact specialties that are required to maintain TL8? Because if you do, I hope you can ease my task of the cladistics issue I mentioned upthread.

Industrial cladistics is still being discussed in the scholarly journals of several fields. I think I need to give a condensed outline of the findings before anyone else on this thread will be bothered to investigate cladistic issues seriously.

500 people is for a particular scenario that includes ideal weather and geography, bountiful natural resources, fanatical devotion to the cause, and sky-high intelligence levels.


One can indeed substitute capital for many medical services. Anyone who decides to take an aspirin rather than pestering a physician has substituted the capital of aspirin for the services of the physician.

This is not the same as saying the substitution of capital for labor never runs into limits.

Thanks, I'm looking at page 492 now and I see: "Use common sense."


I think the serious anthropologists who studied it say that humans prefer to live in self-contained tribes of 100 to 200. Obviously, this is not always an option in modern societies: even the Amish enclaves have to face the outside world every so often.

In pop-sci terms, the Dunbar number can be made to promise almost anything for your company, just so long as you buy Malcolm Gladwell's next book. Practically speaking, I opine that most people work better within a small "tribe" of closely trusted persons, and that most people like to shut out the larger society whenever possible.

I have recently observed a university with more than 10,000 students. Everyone tries to define a little "tribe" or "village" of less than 200 souls and behaves as if the rest of the university - and the rest of the city - is not part of the tribal world.

Yes, but how often does one need surgery when living in a resource-rich planned community with lots of automation?

I should have been much more specific; I should have said something like, "I have a list of cases wherein high-tech professionals managed to accomplish feats which had been previously dismissed as 'impossible' by substituting capital for labor."

And then I would have to do the hard part, which is actually reel off a list long enough to satisfy everyone.

I suppose most people are not aware of the numbers of moving parts in a mechanical pencil, or the numbers of parts in a crude automobile, or the number of parts in a modern airplane. (I would look it up, but I'm at my GURPS library, not at my office.)

First distinguish between "part type" and "part." A toy car might have two part types, namely "wheel" and "body," but five parts, because there are four instances of the wheel part.

Let's assume there's 10 part types in a mechanical pencil, 1000 part types in a crude automobile (that's a 1910-style auto, a 2009 auto has many more types of parts.), and 10,000,000 part types in a modern airplane. (I suspect that's closer to a Piper Cub than a DC-10.)

Even if our fictional community of 500 people had all the parts to a DC-10, they wouldn't be willing to spend the time and energy to put them together. Conversely, they might be willing to do a "barn-raising" style of one-time labor donation in order to assemble 1000 types of parts into a 1910-style automobile, because the community might greatly benefit from a little basic transportation.

A normal community would not be able to make all 1000 types of parts. But Neil Gershenfeld, with a fab lab, could make all 1000 types of parts. Thus a fab lab is a typical example of how capital can substitute for labor even with a solo operator.

By the way, how many folks were aware that some people assemble functioning airplanes from kits?

http://www.zenithair.com/zodiac/xl/index.html

So one might conceivably have a single IQ 14 individual who might operate a fab lab to produce a kit (he would have the blueprints from the get-go). That same individual might then assemble those parts into that plane, and even fly that plane.

And if a single individual (with a fab lab and plentiful raw materials) can build a plane single-handedly, I believe a community that *starts* with all the necessary tools can continue to maintain those tools.


Of course, the only way to be sure is to give me enough money to set up my own fab lab. I can do it for a mere 30,000 Euros. I assume everyone else on this thread is convinced that the money will be well-spent, right...?

[Crickets....]

Re: Ensuring post-apocalyptic survival at TL8?
 

First, I see that the number 500 is scary to many people, so I'm considering assuming 100k, maybe even 300k (Iceland, right) as a safety measure.

Second, I don't think that a car is a good example of an esoteric TL8 device. Late-TL8 multifunctional cars (e.g. automobile/autosnowsled transformer) are being designed and built by single families in my country. Apparently, the greatest obstacle to making such production mainstream is getting the license to actually drive it afterwards.

Computers, splicing machines, X-rays and similar microtechnologies seem like the real challenge. Of course, I could be wrong about the last paragraph.

Re: Ensuring post-apocalyptic survival at TL8?
 

Are you saying that comparitive advantage doesn't exist? 'cause that's what makes an industrial farm or a full time work week instead of spreading the work out to lots of other people efficient. Unless you decide comparitive advantage doesn't exist, it will always be more efficient to specialize.


Anyone who takes aspirin instead of going to a physician is doing the wrong thing. It's not one-or-the-other - aspirin is able to do specific stuff that physicians by themselves can't do at all. He could write a prescription for aspirin or some other pain reliever, but if the pain is little enough that an aspirin would help you shouldn't waste the doctors time, and if its enough that you should talk to a doctor just taking an aspirin won't help you.

Now, if you can extend that to all drugs, you might have a point that you can significantly substitute capital for the services of a physician - but having everyone be their own pharmacist and physician is a terrible idea. People will inevitably make bad decisions and overdose or otherwise near kill themselves because they took the wrong combination of medicines, all because they aren't supposed to see an actual physician because you smartly decided giving everyone access to tons of medications instead of giving them access to a physician was a good idea.




None of that stuff helps all that much. You're still sticking all your eggs in one tiny, tiny, very vulnerable basket, and if only a few specialists die, your entire colony is going under.

Re: Ensuring post-apocalyptic survival at TL8?
 

I'm saying that first-semester economics grossly exaggerates Ricardo's notion of comparative advantage, and makes it seem like a general law.

Edit:
A bit of googling on terms like "comparative advantage" ricardo distortion gave me a large number of articles on how china's interactions with the USA were causing numerous economists to question the Ricardo doctrine, and how Ricardo's ideas are being stretched out of shape. I won't link to the top ten articles, but I skimmed many articles that called Ricardo into question.

http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/mov...es/000129.html


Not coincidentally, the economics teaching profession is not entirely free of conflicts of interest.

Mysteriously, the Nobel Prize for Economics is always awarded to economists who call for more centralization of social power. It's almost as though academics are not perfectly objective and immune to the principal-agent problem.

Re: Ensuring post-apocalyptic survival at TL8?
 

That passage you quoted doesn't refute anything about what I said. It's true, and it's certainly something I know, but it doesn't change the fact that a community that has people working in specialties will be more efficient than a community that has everyone doing everything. A guy who is trained really well to be a farmer will be a better farmer than a guy who's trained to be a farmer, a doctor, and an engineer, even if the other guy is just as good at farming as the first guy - the first guy has a compartive advantage at farming. Similarly, efficencies of scale apply to manufacturing, agriculture, etc.

Re: Ensuring post-apocalyptic survival at TL8?
 

Actually, I'm pretty sure that you haven't read my previous posts in the thread, because your claims flatly deny claims I made in post 34 with no quotation or sources cited to justify your denial.

So, basically, you CAN cite yourself as an authority. Go ahead. You can ignore all the stuff I wrote (in post 34) about why 500 is a relevant number of persons and go on a tangent about eggs in a vulnerable basket. That just means you want to have a separate conversation. This practice is sometimes referred to by the English idiom "they were talking past each other," or "they were arguing past each other."

You, Langy, have nothing whatever to gain by reading my posts. If you read them, you might figure out what I was talking about. It is better to keep ignoring whatever I write and insisting that your conversation is the right conversation to have. That is your winning strategy. Run with it.

The other folks in the thread who might take an interest in cladistics, such as Agramer, have already gotten as much cladistics education out of this thread as they are likely to get. Beyond that, their local university's department of industrial engineering might or might not be of service. But as for you, Langy, do not seek out any papers on cladistics. Avoid cladistics at all costs, and you win the game.

Re: Ensuring post-apocalyptic survival at TL8?
 

Cladistics ? :Cambridge dictionary doesnt ahve that word and I dunno what it means.


Though regardless from what I learned by reading your posts and following really interesting links upon links from them I still disagree with you about fundamental questions of this discussion.

You insist that small community can survive on its own and be very productive while keeping its tech base.

I agree with you with whole of above sentence.But I find tech base and TL being 2 very different subjects.In your interpretation, "tech base" is What we need to have operating to thrive as community but it still doesnt describe Full TL.

I asked Nuclear question about N.Korea and Iran...both refused to let observers in at some point,but they still dont have functioning A-bombs.why is that if thats so simple? you cant say its "political" since they are trying to get there and IF they succeed than it would become "The Political".
Though were here talking about technology and not politics,so why dont they have Bombs by now if thats so simple?

You also didnt comment on simple example of Medicine requirements for amount of Doctors/nurses/technicians necessary(which alone breaks your 500 people mark) to just hold things in order during their generation(not even considering lapses in passing knowledge to 2nd generation without structured school system,aka Medical Universities followed by specialisations).

Youre trying to refute that specialisation leads to efficiency while whole History shows us that it is true:

Single Master workers with apprentices were "destroyed as base of production" by Manufacture type of production which in change was surpassed by Factory type of production where in each step single worker was becoming more and more specialised and efficient(In that single aspect of whole process).


I really dont see any correspondence with Dunbar number and what youre inserting Dunbar number means for your 500 criteria.

Furthermore ,Dunbar number "is" around 50 people for normal person living in stable environment and it rises in times of need to 150ish,which is "maximum" number of people with whom single person can have stable relationship which is to some degree accepted by Military in size of company(80-150 man depending on Army),since Company commander(Captain) is last in chain of command who is on frontlines directly with his men.Above that officers tend to sit in command posts.

What does it have to do with our subject I really dont know.

Also after all reading Im just under impression that youre refusing to accept anyones other argument for anything and just continue citing some "Academic source" that doesnt prove anything or refutes anything claimed by other participants in this discussion,as that last economic quote wasnt(Actually it did prove that specialisation is more efficient but that wasnt your intention when you quoted it).

Re: Ensuring post-apocalyptic survival at TL8?
 

It's a philosophy of biological systematics, focusing on shared derived characters to define labels, ideally resulting in a taxonomy which is completely consistent with the true historical branching order of the evolution of the organisms (or in the technical jargon, all category labels are monophylatic). As far as I can tell, that has nothing whatsoever to do with the topic under discussion, and no alternate meanings which seem any closer.

Re: Ensuring post-apocalyptic survival at TL8?
 

This case invokes such limits, on a very practical level.

Interesting ... but inconclusive. Is the 200 number as tendered supposed to represent units functioning within a greater society or are they supposed to be stand-alone societies at that number?


Frequency is irrelevant. When high level medical service is needed, it's needed. And even more so when you're talking about a small population with each individual holding a substantial portion of the group's know-how.

Yes, that would have been less subject to quibbles.