Ensuring post-apocalyptic survival at TL8?

[Turhan's Bey Company]

Originally Posted by Molokh

In any case, what would be the minimum population

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.

Originally Posted by Molokh

material requirements

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.

Originally Posted by Molokh

cash cost

Lots.