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How large would an isolated colony need to be to maintain 'modern' standard of technology?

Susano

Susano

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Volksstaat Hessen, Deutsches Reich
Just a question I had while thinking about Mass Effect Andromeda, but it can be applied to any other similar scenario, though. Certainly, the scenario of a space colony developing independently and isolated from wherever the colonists came from is wide spread enough in sci-fi. Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri would be another example that comes to mind.

However, doesn't it stand to reason that most those colonies, if they remain on their own, would suffer severe technological degradation? The knowledge about various technologies may be stored and kept, but most of it couldn't actually be produced, to the limited population and being cut off from the original industrial base. I mean, consider what all would needed to be produced to uphold a modern (or sci-fi modern) level of technology: Pharmaceutics, electronics, transportation vehicles, machines... and all the tools for producing those would need to be produced independently as well, and all the raw materials necessary would have to be mined as well, and oh, somebody needs to do agriculture as well.

It seems to me you just need a certain amount of people to build up the industrial base necessary to maintain modern technology levels. But how big is that amount of people? Typical sci-fi 'pioneer' colonies of less than 10k people is certainly too few, and even 100k people would be, I think. 1m people might still be too few, but maybe one can argue against that. Is 10m enough? How would you see this problem and where would you draw the line?
 
That depends on your automation technologies. If everything can be done by robots, you just need enough people to make said robots.
 
10k people sounds about right. No, you don't actually need that many people to maintain technology, doubly so with Mass Effect tech. Now if you were to say our modern Earth, I up it to a million because let's face it, some tech is shit and not necessary while others are crucial, depending on a person's standpoint. Point is, once a tech level has been reach AND the know how, you don't need a genius to invent the thing in the first place. Assuming there are teacher existing, then this won't be such a huge issue. That's why information, be it in books, stone tablets, electronics etc. were so important in our previous generations to learn.

I mean, look at Earth today. Technically, we're an isolated colony of only Earth by ME standards. Sure it's not amazing comparatively, but dammit is history ain't a fucking bitch otherwise.
 
It's a rather weird idea to imagine that a civilization capable of interstellar travel en mass would not have similarly developed levels of automation, record keeping, and advanced education/training methodologies.

It's also rather strange to imagine that the first batch of interstellar colonists would not be all or predominately tremendously skilled multi-field experts carefully vetted with multiple redundancies in mind. Modern astronauts barely breach the atmosphere and just look at their qualifications. You're not going to get a bunch of regular people or Luddites that'll devolve to percussive maintenance or cargo worship once something breaks down.

The same redundancies also applies to whatever record keeping and automation that the colonists use.

It's also really unlikely that the first or succeeding generation of colonists would accept a lower standard of living (technology) as a matter of course. People always seek to ease their burdens. Every measure will be used to preserve the trappings of their tech level and tools.

If some sort of catastrophic event or series of such events happens that overcomes all of these measures then the colony will die regardless of what happens to the tech level.

So in this case you can start with very few (< 1000) initial very knowledgeable colonists along with a strong, redundant tech base including mass automation and miniaturization. These will TEACH (not just train, TEACH, this distinction is all important) the next generation their knowledge and skills. Because a strong base of fundamental knowledge and skills is what will allow the colony get off the ground. Colonization is going to be a endeavor of reasoning and problem solving using advanced scientific understanding and technology with massive governmental and corporate support. The romantic idea of independent, intrepid homesteaders scrabbling for a living somewhere in exchange for "freedom", a cause, or something is just that...a romance. It happened before the modern day. It won't happen again.

A somehow isolated colony will have a slower growth in science and new technology simply due to having a smaller pool of minds working on such things. They will fall behind the curve against the average. This might be mistaken for technological degradation to people that finds them later. But it's not.
 
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Estro said:
You'd need higher for enough genetic diversity. I cannot find it, but I recall a study that says that you need at least 4-5 thousand people for long term suitability, and that is when you are choosing for genetic diversity and not any other factors.
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Remember what mutations are and different habitats.
 
Estro said:
You'd need higher for enough genetic diversity. I cannot find it, but I recall a study that says that you need at least 4-5 thousand people for long term suitability, and that is when you are choosing for genetic diversity and not any other factors.
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I have this on this matter.
 
Estro said:
You'd need higher for enough genetic diversity. I cannot find it, but I recall a study that says that you need at least 4-5 thousand people for long term suitability, and that is when you are choosing for genetic diversity and not any other factors.
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That is true. But a technologically advanced society will also likely have cryogenics and artificial fertility technology. They can bring the necessary genetic diversity with them in the form of embryos and eggs and sperms. Moving large number of adult people will get costly and is basically unnecessary.

Also even 4~5 thousand is well under 10K. Manpower is not the limiting factor.
 
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Theoneandonlyz said:
That is a true. But a technologically advanced society will also likely have cryogenics and artificial fertility technology. They can bring the necessary genetic diversity with them in the form of embryos and eggs and sperms. Moving large number of adult people will get costly and is basically unnecessary.

Also even 4~5 thousand is well under 10K. Manpower is not the limiting factor.
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You suggested sub 1K, however, which I thought deserved correction.
 
Estro said:
You suggested sub 1K, however, which I thought deserved correction.
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I still think so because there are ways to get around the genetic diversity issue in the initial grouping. Bring zygotes or egg and sperm is one of them. No need to do everything the literal hard way.
 
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So if you want to figure out how much infrastructure your going to need your going to have to determine several things:
1) Speed of R&D
2) How much of a call is there for new/personal stuff.
3) The tech involved itself.
4) What is the environment of the colony world?
5) What kind of social order is the colony running on?
6) What kind of agriculture are you dealing with?
7) Is this a concentrated or spread out population
8) Are you atmosphere bound (assumes atmosphere) or are you operating in orbit and beyond at some level?
9) Are you dealing with base line humans or are genemods and/or cybernetics common?
10) Are you terraforming?
11) Do you have animals/plants/and ecosystem existing on world or with you to contend with? Animal life tends to up infrastructure.

For instance, if your looking at tech with the idea of planned obsolescence built in its going to be near impossible to keep everything running without massive infrastructure or constant influxes of new supplies from the outside. If your R&D is advancing at a high enough clip you run into problems of never being able to make anything as by the time you get the infrastructure capable of handling the manufacturing its making obsolete models. In the US (and other countries) computer Hardware has a government mandated speed of release... which is why that upgrades and enhancements are so regular in rate. The reason is that security infrastructure would be virtually impossible to keep up with otherwise. This is also a major reason why coding is so buggy (example Farmville) with the hardware advancing so fast the programming gets sloppy as you can get the same performance with truly awful coding. If we don't run into some kind of major hardware limitation... coding will continue to be sub par. If a colony hasn't got the R&D to constantly upgrade hardware tech they are going to have to write much, much more clever code to get the same performance out of the same old equipment.

Every time the military and the space program in the US looks for electronics it goes for stuff around two decades old, specifically as its true and tested by that point. Old tech is more mature tech so its gone past the level of refinement in which its performance is being upgraded and is well into the cycle of durability equal to silly levels of abuse being ignored.

If your looking at tech that is designed to outlast the user, its going to be far easier to reach a critical mass of tech saturation as the tech keeps around and intact long enough that you can shift more of your production off of keeping that tech in circulation. If your looking at a modular tech with lots and lots of the parts usable for many, many different pieces of equipment its going to be a vast simplification of the supply chain. At the cost of size. Dedicated parts are often smaller and better at their specific job, but you pay in needing more infrastructure. That is the standardization versus customization debate.

These kinds of thing effect the answers you seek.
 
1. Automation
2. Manufacturing capability
3. Resource extraction

Modern technology requires a wide variety of materials to be harvested from different places across the globe, refined, shipped to a central manufacturing center specialized in producing a specific product, and then assembled by some ratio of humans overseeing machines.

If we can do it here on Earth it stands to reason the Initiative can accomplish the same with a far greater number of resource rich planets and far more advanced manufacturing and automation capabilities, even with greatly reduced available manpower.
 
I am not going to take into consideration any future tech, only real modern ones.

To maintain and advance a colony on a hypothetical twin Earth with no humans, you need several million people, perhaps tens of millions.

Without that you can't have the economies of scale necessary for industries like aircraft, automotive, machine-tools, electronics and energy, among others.

Even then it will be more austere, cruder versions of them compared with what we have, with less diversity, and that would be much slower to develop and improve further.
 
About all I can think of to contribute here is that I believe you need around 70k humans for a sustainable population. Less than that runs into issues with limited genetic diversity, if I recall correctly.

One thing I will note is that modern technology is actually more advanced than what's currently in use. If expenses are ignored, we can automate a lot more things than we currently do.
 
The main issue is how much infrastructure you would need, many things require large machinery to manufacture which is hard to scale down.
Like you'll need to mine and refine 50+ types of metals, chemical plants for hundreds of substances.
Factories for every vehicle type and tool including the nuts and bolts they are made of.

To keep it manageable you will have to standardize many things, ex only having one general CPU design and using it for everything. This in turn will make things less efficient.
So even if you keep the same tech level it will perform worse.

3D printers and automated lathes, help immensely since they can create custom plants with one machine instead of one per design.
But that does not cover the mining & refining steps. Also if you have that future tech other things like superconductors might require giant facilities to manufacture.

If you have sufficient automation, this can be solved but your colonies population numbers might be misleading.
10'000 humans living in a factory city large than New York.

QUOTE="Stormwhite, post: 8194697, member: 4143"]
One thing I will note is that modern technology is actually more advanced than what's currently in use. If expenses are ignored, we can automate a lot more things than we currently do.[/QUOTE]

This is only partially true, a lot of the automation requires no new science or innovative technology, but doing the engineering work to design it still advancing technology.
 
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