Ensuring post-apocalyptic survival at TL8?

[riprock]

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..."?

Originally Posted by Figleaf23

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).

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.