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Your life depends on millions of people.
You and I need millions of people.
We can’t know them all. We will never meet them all. But, self-sufficiency is an illusion, often an expensive and thinly drawn one at that. The more high tech and comfortable your life is? The more true this is.
I do not care if you have a cabin in the woods. I do not care if you “reject modern medicine” —
This is one of those things I find “obvious” but I can imagine it starting a big argument for some.
@futurebird I know it’s not your point, but an interesting question is: What is the smallest human population that could sustain a modern lifestyle?
@dx @futurebird
Charles Stross has written a fair bit about that on his blog over the years. For modern civilisation he puts the number in the range of a hundred million people:
https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/07/insufficient-data.html
@futurebird @jannem @dx Yep. (I used it as a starting point for debunking Elon Musk's Mars colony proposals, before he outed himself as a full-on Nazi …) You need to educate not only your entire work force but their teachers *and the researchers who will solve your as yet unknown problems in future* and the faculty who will keep the apparatus honest—so make that two or more rival universities!
100M people was my lowball estimate for a viable space colony with no long-term resupply.
@cstross @futurebird @dx
Also, just to note that while 100M is about the population size of a major industrialized economy (USA/north America; EU/Europe; Japan; China), none of our *actual* economies would be able to go it alone.
We're all far too intertwined and interdependent for a single region to be self-sufficient to the point where anybody could maintain anything like our civilization.
@jannem @futurebird @dx Yep. My point was, complexity of society matters. In the 17th century it was just about possible for a colony with 100-odd families to make a go of things—although they'd be short of stuff like metals for a long time, and would regress somewhat if not resupplied. But there is no easy lower threshold for "no resupply" on Mars, never mind a generation ship: you go with every human skill you might conceivably need, or you all die, no exceptions.
@jannem @futurebird @dx Musk bullshitted about a million people onMars being "viable". It'd only be viable the way London was before 1800—as a net population sink, where more people die than are born, sustained by continuous immigration and outside trade. And there's nothing on Mars to use to trade for supplies. No biosphere, no minerals it's cost-effective to import.
@futurebird @jannem @dx Come to think of it, it's exactly what I'd expect from a racist white South African settler … ("White Man's Graveyard" and all that)
I wondered if his idea of a Mars colony included the subscription each colonist would have to pay for their oxygen.