Ensuring post-apocalyptic survival at TL8?

[vicky_molokh]

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.

[Dangerious P. Cats]

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.

[DemiBenson]

Originally Posted by Molokh

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.

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.

[Figleaf23]

Originally Posted by Molokh

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!

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.

[riprock]

Originally Posted by Molokh

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 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.

[riprock]

Originally Posted by Turhan's Bey Company

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.

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.

Originally Posted by Turhan's Bey Company

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.

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.

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by riprock

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.

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

[riprock]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

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

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?

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by riprock

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?

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.).

[Agramer]

I think same as Flyndaran....

Edit: Molokh just posted while I was writing.

Originally Posted by riprock

.......snip....

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.

Originally Posted by Riprock

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.

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... ;)