Space Colony
Oct. 8th, 2017 01:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethIf you're bringing people with you to another planet, people who will literally be 100% of the humans you see for the rest of your life, who do you bring?
There's a lot of different ideas about how many humans you need for a viable long term population. It depends on who is doing the math and what their initial assumptions are.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn1936-magic-number-for-space-pioneers-calculated/
http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/deep-space/a10369/how-many-people-does-it-take-to-colonize-another-star-system-16654747/
https://www.space.com/26603-interstellar-starship-colony-population-size.html
80 or 160 works for ten generations if it ends with meeting many more humans. But that only works for a colony if you send generation ships packed with a lot of genetics to unpack when you get there, which has problems on a 10 gen timescale.
But 10,000 to 44,000 is the other end of the scale, to cope with both very long term genetic variability and possible causes of death without progeny. I think GURPS draws the line of outpost (needing outside support) vs colony at 10K, so that's a nice guess.
Obviously you personally are not going to have a list of 10K people off the top of your head. ... or if you do, I am not going to have room in the comments to read them all.
But how would you sort? What people would you need to bring? With a whole planet to choose from, who could you live with forever?
10K sounds big when you're trying to fit them in a spaceship, but my home town is nearly twice that and feels pretty small when you're trying to get anything social going.
And most modern communities are just part of a local network. Everyone goes up to Norwich for most of their needs, and Norwich is waaaaaaay bigger than 44K.
So packing a civilization small? Not simples. Can't just pick a town and go with it.
Also the temptation is to only bring people who agree with your politics. I mean just from them being willing to leave there will be a certain degree of overlap. And there's got to be some shared economic assumptions or you'll be arguing about who owns the ship. And then there's the monarchy, theocracy, democracy possibilities. So, you've got to have a certain amount on common.
But being too much matching would mean leaving strategies and thought patterns behind.
You want a lot of different sorts of diversity, but it's a survival requirement they get along, so whatever mechanisms of civilisation you all sign up to, they better be pretty robust.
Also, just to be clear, LGBT people can of course be included, and people who don't want children, and people whose job it is to sit around and think all day, and disabled people have to be included and planned for because there'll certainly be more of those as you go along. You just need a number of people and diversity of tasks that'll work long term anyway. That's why the higher numbers, they don't assume a precisely managed replacement rate of humans.
I'd be tempted to start with people with shared fandoms.
... no, for serious. They'll have something to talk about, shared focal texts, a starting point that may suggest a shared set of values, or at least a way to talk about values that seems relatively neutral. They'll share a dream.
It has to be easier to get along with a shared starting point.
But with that very familiar context you can imagine all the drama you'd be packing too. The flame wars would be epic, if there was never again the possibility of just leaving...
Also, if you start with space scientists, you get a lot of fandom people anyway.
But F&SF is super popular, so it might not be much of a sorting mechanism.
I'd also be really tempted to bring a bunch of actors too.
... I'd plan to ask them first.
... it's just, I've seen what local school plays and amateur dramatics and cabarets can manage, and while the degree of creativity involved is one of the better aspects of humanity, we are, on the whole, no Hollywood. Because the big productions draw on a far wider pool of talent. So, it gets to seeming nice to just start by bringing the best culture creators we can persuade, same like we'd obviously bring the best scientists. The fact that the best are famous in their respective fields, and actors more broadly, is just coincidence. Bringing skills is logic.
... and now I'm imagining a colony of 10K writers. Epic and *articulate* flame wars...
Culture and science are so much bigger than you can fit in a small town, you'd want everyone to have diversified skills. Like if you could choose between two doctors and only one played an instrument you'd probably want to bring them. Or artists or writers or actors.
... I have a *very good reason* to want to bring Peter Wingfield. Made of logic and everything.
Space Colony, as an idea, is a way of weighing up your priorities and values. Apparently my first thoughts are F&SF fans, actors, writers, and only then medics...
But it's also a daydream of getting away from all them others. Which... is less nice.
Slight improvement on the appeal of the apocalypse, but you have the same math problems after the end. If you need to scrape together 10K survivors to have a chance of human survival, there's really a lot of stories that are just about the slow dying of the light, cause groups that small aren't going anywhere in the long term.
One of the things that make me frustrated about a lot of post apoc stuff. Everyone squabbling for scarce resources, horrible blood drenched conflict, and a waste of the one resource we absolutely know is on its way out, remaining humans. I know its no use collecting more than you can feed, they may well need to be widely distributed to live off whatever's left, but you or your descendants are going to need them or their descendants for certain sure.
... granted most post apocalyptic fic doesn't cover ten generations, but the math is pretty clear...
and it's also no use only having 10K humans on a planet if they can't reach each other.
Communications would be key, transport closely after, and travelling a long way just to meet and marry would make really good sense.
I'd want to bring the widest packable variety of foodstuffs too. I, personally, do not eat meat or dairy, but if the survival of the colony depends on growing food under conditions you can't possibly predict in the relevantly long term, you want all the biodiversity humanly possible.
... on this planet too, but, over that I have no control.
But packing food animals makes all of this a whole lot more complicated, because then as well as generation ship for humans you've got to do the same calculations for cows. And sheeps. And chickens... just for starters.
Even if you're getting there through a Stargate - by far the simplest starting assumption, since it means you can check for basic habitability and breatheable air without sending a ten generation tin can - you need to at least plan as if the gate malfunctions soon as everyone is through it. I mean, gate based societies thus far tend to be small and use the gate instead of going all over the planet and get their genetic variability from other worlds, but then they're stuffed if the gate goes.
It's probably a lot easier just to pack plants. But it is in no way easy.
And you'd need a really spectacular set of gardeners and agricultural specialists to look at a completely unknown set of soils and not waste all your accumulated biodiversity.
... so the ideal colonist is an actor with medical training who can grow some sort of food.
I've thought on plot bunnies that start with having a sf convention through a Stargate, that then stops working. You'd probably have medics and military in the mix somewhere, but you'd very probably not have done the math on genetic variation, and 10K would be a really large con around here.
I've also got one where a planned colony of 200 go through the Stargate partly to make propaganda films for declassification, to sell the world on the universe, but also to build up their own planet with naquada mining and a university with medical school that can trade through the gate. They need to build quickly in preparation for the rest of the 10K arriving. But they have all the usual hostilities to contend with too.
... imagine being a builder and having to worry about... well, building in a war zone, not a new idea, just with some alien whatsits on top.
Builders and plumbers and carpenters and all sorts, you'd need.
... huh, imagine trying to keep the skill of carpentry alive on a generation ship, simply because you know you'll need it eventually. Or lumberjacks...
You wouldn't want to rely on Earth for all your culture because it's going to drift away from locally interesting pretty quickly. It's another country now. Consider how foreign soaps and comedy travel, and then imagine a few light years in the way.
And how would you feel about crowd scenes?
Stargate Atlantis fandom has done a few plans, for 200, mostly as crit of how ridiculously under prepared canon was. Start with olives and honey and sweet potato and all the staples of a thousand years that you just can't be sure are out there...
Colony design is ridiculously tricky, and some of the early ones will fail. We should start practising now. Intentional communities designed for a minimum of outside input, the ultimate in local supplies.
... but I think we'd currently be really bad at this, because even if we allow unlimited data import, there's still so many other things we'd want from the wider world.
How do you even dress yourself without half the stuff being from the other side of the world?
... must pack tailors and seamstresses and people with the knowing of fibre arts...
So much human knowledge, how do you pack it all small?
Appreciation of interconnected specialisation rising...
There's a lot of different ideas about how many humans you need for a viable long term population. It depends on who is doing the math and what their initial assumptions are.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn1936-magic-number-for-space-pioneers-calculated/
http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/deep-space/a10369/how-many-people-does-it-take-to-colonize-another-star-system-16654747/
https://www.space.com/26603-interstellar-starship-colony-population-size.html
80 or 160 works for ten generations if it ends with meeting many more humans. But that only works for a colony if you send generation ships packed with a lot of genetics to unpack when you get there, which has problems on a 10 gen timescale.
But 10,000 to 44,000 is the other end of the scale, to cope with both very long term genetic variability and possible causes of death without progeny. I think GURPS draws the line of outpost (needing outside support) vs colony at 10K, so that's a nice guess.
Obviously you personally are not going to have a list of 10K people off the top of your head. ... or if you do, I am not going to have room in the comments to read them all.
But how would you sort? What people would you need to bring? With a whole planet to choose from, who could you live with forever?
10K sounds big when you're trying to fit them in a spaceship, but my home town is nearly twice that and feels pretty small when you're trying to get anything social going.
And most modern communities are just part of a local network. Everyone goes up to Norwich for most of their needs, and Norwich is waaaaaaay bigger than 44K.
So packing a civilization small? Not simples. Can't just pick a town and go with it.
Also the temptation is to only bring people who agree with your politics. I mean just from them being willing to leave there will be a certain degree of overlap. And there's got to be some shared economic assumptions or you'll be arguing about who owns the ship. And then there's the monarchy, theocracy, democracy possibilities. So, you've got to have a certain amount on common.
But being too much matching would mean leaving strategies and thought patterns behind.
You want a lot of different sorts of diversity, but it's a survival requirement they get along, so whatever mechanisms of civilisation you all sign up to, they better be pretty robust.
Also, just to be clear, LGBT people can of course be included, and people who don't want children, and people whose job it is to sit around and think all day, and disabled people have to be included and planned for because there'll certainly be more of those as you go along. You just need a number of people and diversity of tasks that'll work long term anyway. That's why the higher numbers, they don't assume a precisely managed replacement rate of humans.
I'd be tempted to start with people with shared fandoms.
... no, for serious. They'll have something to talk about, shared focal texts, a starting point that may suggest a shared set of values, or at least a way to talk about values that seems relatively neutral. They'll share a dream.
It has to be easier to get along with a shared starting point.
But with that very familiar context you can imagine all the drama you'd be packing too. The flame wars would be epic, if there was never again the possibility of just leaving...
Also, if you start with space scientists, you get a lot of fandom people anyway.
But F&SF is super popular, so it might not be much of a sorting mechanism.
I'd also be really tempted to bring a bunch of actors too.
... I'd plan to ask them first.
... it's just, I've seen what local school plays and amateur dramatics and cabarets can manage, and while the degree of creativity involved is one of the better aspects of humanity, we are, on the whole, no Hollywood. Because the big productions draw on a far wider pool of talent. So, it gets to seeming nice to just start by bringing the best culture creators we can persuade, same like we'd obviously bring the best scientists. The fact that the best are famous in their respective fields, and actors more broadly, is just coincidence. Bringing skills is logic.
... and now I'm imagining a colony of 10K writers. Epic and *articulate* flame wars...
Culture and science are so much bigger than you can fit in a small town, you'd want everyone to have diversified skills. Like if you could choose between two doctors and only one played an instrument you'd probably want to bring them. Or artists or writers or actors.
... I have a *very good reason* to want to bring Peter Wingfield. Made of logic and everything.
Space Colony, as an idea, is a way of weighing up your priorities and values. Apparently my first thoughts are F&SF fans, actors, writers, and only then medics...
But it's also a daydream of getting away from all them others. Which... is less nice.
Slight improvement on the appeal of the apocalypse, but you have the same math problems after the end. If you need to scrape together 10K survivors to have a chance of human survival, there's really a lot of stories that are just about the slow dying of the light, cause groups that small aren't going anywhere in the long term.
One of the things that make me frustrated about a lot of post apoc stuff. Everyone squabbling for scarce resources, horrible blood drenched conflict, and a waste of the one resource we absolutely know is on its way out, remaining humans. I know its no use collecting more than you can feed, they may well need to be widely distributed to live off whatever's left, but you or your descendants are going to need them or their descendants for certain sure.
... granted most post apocalyptic fic doesn't cover ten generations, but the math is pretty clear...
and it's also no use only having 10K humans on a planet if they can't reach each other.
Communications would be key, transport closely after, and travelling a long way just to meet and marry would make really good sense.
I'd want to bring the widest packable variety of foodstuffs too. I, personally, do not eat meat or dairy, but if the survival of the colony depends on growing food under conditions you can't possibly predict in the relevantly long term, you want all the biodiversity humanly possible.
... on this planet too, but, over that I have no control.
But packing food animals makes all of this a whole lot more complicated, because then as well as generation ship for humans you've got to do the same calculations for cows. And sheeps. And chickens... just for starters.
Even if you're getting there through a Stargate - by far the simplest starting assumption, since it means you can check for basic habitability and breatheable air without sending a ten generation tin can - you need to at least plan as if the gate malfunctions soon as everyone is through it. I mean, gate based societies thus far tend to be small and use the gate instead of going all over the planet and get their genetic variability from other worlds, but then they're stuffed if the gate goes.
It's probably a lot easier just to pack plants. But it is in no way easy.
And you'd need a really spectacular set of gardeners and agricultural specialists to look at a completely unknown set of soils and not waste all your accumulated biodiversity.
... so the ideal colonist is an actor with medical training who can grow some sort of food.
I've thought on plot bunnies that start with having a sf convention through a Stargate, that then stops working. You'd probably have medics and military in the mix somewhere, but you'd very probably not have done the math on genetic variation, and 10K would be a really large con around here.
I've also got one where a planned colony of 200 go through the Stargate partly to make propaganda films for declassification, to sell the world on the universe, but also to build up their own planet with naquada mining and a university with medical school that can trade through the gate. They need to build quickly in preparation for the rest of the 10K arriving. But they have all the usual hostilities to contend with too.
... imagine being a builder and having to worry about... well, building in a war zone, not a new idea, just with some alien whatsits on top.
Builders and plumbers and carpenters and all sorts, you'd need.
... huh, imagine trying to keep the skill of carpentry alive on a generation ship, simply because you know you'll need it eventually. Or lumberjacks...
You wouldn't want to rely on Earth for all your culture because it's going to drift away from locally interesting pretty quickly. It's another country now. Consider how foreign soaps and comedy travel, and then imagine a few light years in the way.
And how would you feel about crowd scenes?
Stargate Atlantis fandom has done a few plans, for 200, mostly as crit of how ridiculously under prepared canon was. Start with olives and honey and sweet potato and all the staples of a thousand years that you just can't be sure are out there...
Colony design is ridiculously tricky, and some of the early ones will fail. We should start practising now. Intentional communities designed for a minimum of outside input, the ultimate in local supplies.
... but I think we'd currently be really bad at this, because even if we allow unlimited data import, there's still so many other things we'd want from the wider world.
How do you even dress yourself without half the stuff being from the other side of the world?
... must pack tailors and seamstresses and people with the knowing of fibre arts...
So much human knowledge, how do you pack it all small?
Appreciation of interconnected specialisation rising...
no subject
Date: 2017-10-08 09:09 pm (UTC)I'd filter for wide acceptance of fostering children. In different planetary conditions, you get different fertility problems - some women will have an easy time with births; some will not; neither of those is going to directly connect to an interest or competence in parenting.
Everyone gets basic first aid training as part of prep, including basic midwifery and baby care. Everyone learns how to start a fire, build a basic shelter, identify poisonous plants (sniff, touch, taste), find NSEW without a compass, walk barefoot on rough ground, put out a smouldering fire, cook things on a stick.
Chose polyglots. While 10k-20k is easy to filter for a single language, having a second or third common language will help create and support cultural diversity. Find ways for people to be part of communities or they'll fracture on unexpected lines.
Grab renfaire and SCA people - whether or not they're directly skilled in archaic techniques, a lot of them at least know the basic ideas. It's not hard to create paper if you know "something something smashed wet cloth and plant pulp let drain while keeping flat;" it's hard to create ink if you have no idea how that gets done. (Lampblack/charcoal + oil, + gum fixative if that's available.)
Leather clothing is easy. (Relatively.) Cloth of any sort is incredibly labor-intensive. In medieval Europe, a woman's drop spindle was almost a third arm; if she wasn't actively using both hands for something else, she was spinning; if she was, it was tucked under one arm or in her belt, and then she'd go back to spinning as soon as she put other things down. A society that starts relatively egalitarian can extend that to men as well.
I've often wondered how a post-apoc/colony setup with low tech resources but modern knowledge, esp medical knowledge, would manage. An understanding of germ theory would drastically change low-tech survival rates. Also, we have an amazing array of educational philosophy that ancient cultures didn't have: we know how to teach literacy and basic math to 20-50 kids at a time, efficiently.
We'd just need a reason for them to care about learning, because if 80% of their life is going to be farming and hunting, it's hard to convince kids that they need to do book reports algebra lessons. The plans would need to shift to match the reality of life in the colony.
Communication - Setting up Pratchett's clacks system would be good for larger communities. News would be interesting because typesetting technology has mostly vanished in the last couple of decades; before that, it was something that worked for centuries and would be exportable to a low-tech area. (Or at least, the idea & plans would; sending lead blanks might be too expensive.)
Musical instruments, and the knowledge and tools to make them, would be important. A lot of modern people have no idea how entertainment works if it doesn't come through a screen. You don't need to filter for "the best actors" any more than you need "the best scientists" - you need ones that can cope with drastically different circumstances than they're used to more than you need best-in-field on earth today. You need doctors and nurses with efficient, accurate triage skills more than you need the best surgeons.
For setting up a colony, you can have hi-tech data sources - solar-powered ereaders/microfiche containers with hundreds, thousands of books and instruction manuals; in a couple of generations, the people who can deal with those are elite scholars, removed from everyday life, but they're not meant to last forever, just to provide some of the knowledge that humanity's built up over the last several thousand years.
But other than that, the tools and knowledge need to be suitable for low tech, non-industrial settings: Slide rules. Compass & protractor. Flint and iron spark-boxes to start fires. Double-boiler distillation. Block and tackle construction. Sun-baked bricks. Tiny grinding mills for herbs, that show how to build a large one for grain.
Measurement's one of the hard parts - if you lose "the official meter" or "the last 8-oz measuring cup," how do you make sure everyone's using the same measurements? (You make Stonehenge, or something like it: A monument that, on solstice or equinox days, casts shadows in particular spots, and you measure those shadows, and that becomes you official true measurement base. When the sun shines through Magic Keyhole 1, you note the shadow on Shadow Rock; when it shines through Keyhole 2, you check the next shadow - the space between them is One Span, and that's what you use to measure fabric, distance between towns, and so on. You make a box that's One Span Cubed, and the water that fills it is One Spanful, and you divide down from there. And so on.)
I'd filter strongly for religious tolerance, nonviolent approaches to problem-solving, and abhorrence of rape culture. Fighting for those three would probably be most of the arguments with whoever's approving/funding the mission. Insisting that you want to leave behind a talented hunter and nurse with eidetic memory because one has a history of smacking around their partners and the other believes that women with short skirts are "asking for it" is a big fight with the finance committee, but is likely to be better for the colony in the long run, whether that's 8 generations or 800.
no subject
Date: 2017-10-09 08:34 pm (UTC)filter for fostering is a good plan.
as is first aid for everyone.
extra languages is a good thought. ... though my first thought is Latin and some of the scriptural sort, which would be most use in Stargate. Language use in multilingual people can do interesting things, like changing by context, public private languages.
Is very true about communities fracturing. Trying to keep a colony woven together is going to be a work.
see I was thinking more makers and engineers, 3d printing and so forth, but a lot of make do and mend. SCA etc makes perfect sense too. If you arrive somewhere with just some humans and have to start over, skills.
... maybe make it a requirement that they've participated in some large event where an empty bit of land got turned into a functioning community? and got invited back to do it again later?
clothes are super labor intensive.
...
bring nudistswe know more about knowing things, is good. and organising the knowledge.
we also seem to be relearning some agriculture stuff like organic techniques of mixed planting that increase yields, so keeping knowledge in circulation is clearly tricky.
How much time is food production depends on tech level. is indeed going to be tricky to keep incentives in place. But having filtered hard for multi skilled people in the first place you'd have a seed generation that found it useful to study widely and valued that.
communication and music as tools we'd need to remember how to make... that's a lot of skill there.
best actors would be context dependent, yeah. I hadn't even thought of the screens thing, but stage and screen acting are different things, as is live storytelling and other small group interactive skills. entertainment industry stuff optimised for Hollywood includes a lot of assumptions that annoy too many groups here now. you'd have an absolute survival need to be inclusive in a smaller group, or the wrong stories could put fault lines in.
flexibility and coping are indeed necessary.
keeping knowledge relevant is going to be a trick. I mean history is a hard enough sell when its about your back yard, if it's history of another planet... let alone politics and all the rest... but the idea of it being for specialists seems :( even if realistic. I mean even if you send a university you don't necessarily get one in the next generation.
non-industrial is a mental adjustment and a half. you'd need building block technologies right enough.
measurements... I mean if the gravity and air pressure is different I can imagine measuring things to be tricky from the get go. but once the original measures are lost... yep.
filter for tolerance nonviolence and consent, yes yes yes. skills are no use if they wont use them. and the long term benefits are incalculable.
no subject
Date: 2017-10-09 05:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-10-09 10:34 am (UTC)so comms and transport matter a lot.
if they have like a marriage town and can go there the math is different than if they're all in 200 person villages all over the planet. smaller communities need a lot of long term genetics planning and the goal to hook up with a wider community in several generations.
also the planet might be all islands or just one continent or anything in between, so, many variables. you'd want different weather and seasons effecting different groups, to give them different chances. but any individual challenge is easier with more people power.
i wonder who does this kind of maths?
like its town planning but other stuff on top.
no subject
Date: 2017-10-09 02:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-10-09 03:23 pm (UTC)https://beccaelizabeth.dreamwidth.org/3304551.html
it might have a limit, it might be indefinite. the colony would get to find out as it went along.
no subject
Date: 2017-10-09 06:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-10-12 01:23 pm (UTC)I don't know what the number would be for a technologically advanced society to be economically self sustaining, but I am guessing several million at least. That would be on a world with ample mineral resources and ecology that can sustain human agriculture yet somehow doesn't have a native ecology that would wipe us out with new diseases and microbes on arrival. I think it unlikely such a world could exist. Better to repair the one we have.
This might interest you: The Knowledge: How to Rebuild our World from Scratch
no subject
Date: 2017-10-12 04:31 pm (UTC)one problem is a lack of models, on account of how interconnected the world is.
one answer in a worldbuilding conversation suggested 10 million as a minimum for the modern world and Cuba as an isolated and slightly behind the times model. But the question specified a civ with all the necessary resources, and I read a thing, something in Analog I think that was about sustainability, and reckoned Cuba had problems of fuel/oil suddenly going away for politics reasons. so they dont meet the resource criteria.
... how many people it takes to extract necessary resources is a very tech level dependent thing but is certainly many, even assuming your planet has them.
GURPS Space actually has an answer, though it doesnt say where it gets it from. page 180 says an isolated colony needs a population of 100 million to maintain TL8 where we are now, 50 million to maintain TL7 where we were before personal computing, TL6 20 million, TL5 and the industrial revolution around 10 million, until those tens of thousands genetically sustainable could basically manage the Age of Sail. But the few hundred of the smallest calculations were still TL3 medieval, so that's something. ... SCA more useful than initially understood...
It also reckons actually losing knowledge is difficult, though possible, especially with localised storage with limited backups. it reckons it's the resources that would be limited, so presumably if they have maximum babies once they get there they can climb the tech levels as quickly as they can man all the positions.
This doesn't mesh well with even the idea of generation ships though. I mean the ship uses higher tech than its crew could sustain. I guess that means they couldn't build it? Or extract enough resources for repairs? Or something.
but i have no clue what assumptions they're using.
no subject
Date: 2017-10-12 05:04 pm (UTC)Cuba also isn't a good example because no country that small could have all the resources required to sustain an advanced economy. You need access to just about every mineral and natural resource.
I'm working on this problem myself for my Walking Dead posts, but I haven't worked out a solution yet. The answer is probably economic keywords. I do know that you can only not have famine once the population is large enough to support large capitalist corporations. So you could start with the population of Europe at the date when large corporations first became widespread. You could then cross reference that with economic changes in say China to find an equivalent but separate system. The Roman Empire would be another example but I doubt the population statistics are reliable enough. It is an interesting problem!
no subject
Date: 2017-10-13 06:17 pm (UTC)http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/07/insufficient-data.html
no subject
Date: 2017-10-13 07:33 pm (UTC)looks shiny, study on space settlements
no subject
Date: 2017-10-13 07:39 pm (UTC)Trade is Essential
It has been empirically demonstrated that selfs Efficiency grows with size in modern high-energy societies. For communities of 10,000 people there is little hope of achieving self-sufficiency as measured by lack or absence of trade. There have been studies of sociology, economics, and geography which indicate the degree to which various specialities can be sustained. Colin Clark, one of the world's distinguished students of economic organizations, reports (ref. 45) that cities need populations of 100,000 to 200,000 in order to provide "an adequate range of commercial services....". Moreover, populations of 200,000 to 500,000 are required to support broadly-based manufacturing activity.
ref 45 says
Baum, Paul: Issues in Optimal City Size, Los Angeles, University of California, 1971.
there's a lot about town planning in this space colony stuff, and it assumes ongoing trade
no subject
Date: 2017-10-13 08:20 pm (UTC)I don't know if you've seen my latest post but I crunched the numbers for how long it would take a very small population to recover to a level where it can sustain rapid population growth enough to recover to the number that can recreate present day civilisation. The answer was many thousands of years.