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Crankit posted:Imagine the amount of fish you would want to eat in a day, then multiply by 10000 you idiot. A diet with people eating fish every day is likely to end up with everyone having mercury poisoning in something like 20 years. Don't worry though if they really do eat a lot of fish the lean meat will cause them to poo poo theirselves to death long before that. What's that? 4 large boats daily? 20? I don't know fishing. It's a food supply chain that would also involve trapping and crabbing and oysters, etc. Lots of moving parts.
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Jul 24, 2014 04:20
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You're going to want a shitload of boats so they can spread out and avoid fishing spots dry, fishery is also a seasonal thing, so if you can only exploit a specific resource six months out of the year, you need to fish your daily consumption times two very day that season is open. You also need different types of boats - you can't catch lobsters with a shrimp trawler (well, you can but it's woefully inefficient), and you can't trawl for shrimp with a lobster/crab boat. poo poo if you want to get real pedantic threes a difference between lobster boats and crab boats. Lobster pots are really loving small. I don't know enough about fishery management to give you exact numbers, but sustaining a community of 10k beyond subsistence level on fish is going to be... Well it's going to require luck and careful balancing.
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Jul 24, 2014 06:52
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According to Wikpedia the biggest trawler can catch and process 350 tons per day. If it is able to go to sea 200 days a year we can provide every person with 7 tons of fish per year. Even 1/10th of that would exceed expected demand by a lot. So sustainable utopia needs 1 fishing boat, maybe with a handful of extra specialised boats.
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Jul 24, 2014 18:08
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The "unlimted money and energy" things are really ruining your thought experiment, op. Turn the cheat codes off.  I've been playing a lot of Tropico 4 the past few days, and it's hard enough to keep things working when you have a population of 500, let alone 10,000.
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Jul 25, 2014 14:15
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OldMemes posted:The "unlimted money and energy" things are really ruining your thought experiment, op. Turn the cheat codes off. I like the idea of removing these as factors, since, realistically, either can be quite difficult in real life. And that's boring. I'd rather instead focus on the logistics of building a self-sufficient, modern society. How it would - or could - work. For example, how would you handle food distribution? Grocery stores? Restaurants? Cafeterias? If trying for a modern society, I assume you'd have to provide a range of cuisines - Asian, Mexican, Italian, etc.
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Jul 26, 2014 01:19
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redshirt posted:For example, how would you handle food distribution? Grocery stores? Restaurants? Cafeterias? If trying for a modern society, I assume you'd have to provide a range of cuisines - Asian, Mexican, Italian, etc. No, first you have to define what a modern society is, and determine if it can work scaled down. In our world economy the 85 richest people own more than the 2,000,000,000 poorest. Scale that to a population of 10,000 and you have a virtual slave race. If you're creating a microcosm of our world you'd have way, way bigger problems than figuring out who wants pancakes and who wants spring rolls.
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Jul 26, 2014 01:56
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Aggressive pricing posted:No, first you have to define what a modern society is, and determine if it can work scaled down. In our world economy the 85 richest people own more than the 2,000,000,000 poorest. Scale that to a population of 10,000 and you have a virtual slave race. If you're creating a microcosm of our world you'd have way, way bigger problems than figuring out who wants pancakes and who wants spring rolls. How about futuristic modern? Egalitarian, self-sufficient, and able to reproduce.
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Jul 26, 2014 02:04
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redshirt posted:How about futuristic modern? Egalitarian, self-sufficient, and able to reproduce. In that case I'd more or less try to make it like Iceland, though with more genetic diversity. Since it's a volcanic island you can claim geothermal energy, which means free heat, electricity, hot water, and considering the amount of automation that could be built it, you could have textiles, metal smelting, and lots of other things with little demand on the population.
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Jul 26, 2014 04:33
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You could probably use seaweed as a biomass source for ethanol and biomethane. Then you can have fuel for boats and cars (you could probably get by with some combination of trains, boats and bikes, actually- 300 square mi isn't that much) Textiles wouldn't be super complicated, you could just weave grass or any other fibrous plant into clothing. Really the biggest problem is water.
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Jul 28, 2014 05:45
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Monorail. Also I’ve only skimmed the thread, but if it hasn’t been mentioned yet Crop Rotation/Grazing is your friend. And retain as much of the original forest as possible surrounding any fields/pastures – don’t clear en masse, helps with run off etc. In terms of Produce Crops – Anything that doesn’t consume too much water, that said with unlimited power you could run a desal plant like a motherfucker. Chickens – Nuff Said. Goats – Meat, Milk, Wool - Goats are hardy fuckers and as somebody has already pointed out a great alternative to youtube. Sheep – If the climate is dry enough, probably not as utilitarian as Goats but you get more bang for your buck. Seafood – Set up fish farms etc., Oyster Farms could be particularly lucrative. Otherwise establish the island as a Marine Wildlife and implement draconian laws protecting the sea life - save the whales with fast attack boats, torpedo anyone caught fishing in your waters. Cause some international incidents when your PMC sinks a fleet of Japanese Deep Sea Trawlers – be like a sea loving hippie Kim Jong Un. Rougey fucked around with this message at 07:44 on Jul 28, 2014 |
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Jul 28, 2014 07:37
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Keldoclock posted:You could probably use seaweed as a biomass source for ethanol and biomethane. Then you can have fuel for boats and cars (you could probably get by with some combination of trains, boats and bikes, actually- 300 square mi isn't that much) With unlimited power, I can't imagine water would be an issue since desalinization could always be employed easily enough. As for transportation, again, given the unlimited power (fusion reactor), I'd think all vehicles, including boats, should be electric. Making any kind of fuel on island would greatly add to the complexity, I'd think. Clothing is an interesting area to consider. Obviously you could stock up, but at some point you'd have to start making clothes. Growing any kind of cotton seems foolish. Would silkworms be equally foolish?
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Jul 28, 2014 13:00
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redshirt posted:With unlimited power, I can't imagine water would be an issue since desalinization could always be employed easily enough. You would want some hydrocarbon fuel, gas engines are more powerful and are better than electric in a number of circumstances. You also have to consider that even with a massive amount of electricity, you won't necessarily have enough battery material to power all the things you'd want. And for power, you really should go with geothermal, if you have a fusion reactor, then you need to maintain a fusion reactor. You'd have to maintain the geo as well, but if something goes wrong with the fusion, then you've irradiated your entire living area. And that's important as the best fusion reactor avaliable today is powered by a lot of nuclear bombs. Make clothes out of hemp, after all, you'll need some recreation.
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Jul 28, 2014 15:11
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Good luck economically building a fusion reactor for a population of 10,000, how about you hook a bunch of stationary bicycles up to the electric grid instead.
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Jul 29, 2014 02:53
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Scald posted:Good luck economically building a fusion reactor for a population of 10,000, how about you hook a bunch of stationary bicycles up to the electric grid instead. Solar, tidal, wind, and geothermal, but he wants the one that might as well be a warp core for how realistic an option it is.
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Jul 29, 2014 14:22
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The modern economy is too specialized and interconnected to scale down the logistics for modern technology to a mere 10,000 people. If you want to use your infinite money to give the island an unlimited supply of molybdenum and coltan and so on, that wealth is going to lead to your little island getting invaded. Indefinite isolation with a modern lifestyle is flatly impossible.
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Jul 29, 2014 23:09
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redshirt posted:With unlimited power, I can't imagine water would be an issue since desalinization could always be employed easily enough. Really? I mean like, I am just an engineering student but a desalination plant seems like a very complicated endeavor- OK you have unlimited energy (does that unlimited energy for 25 years at infinite draw to build the place, X amps for the lifetime of your society, or does that mean literally infinite energy?) but like, how do you build a desalination plant that lasts forever? Here's a picture of such a plant in Spain.  You need spare pipes, bolts, JB weld, filters, you need to maintain the infrastructure that moves the energy from the power plant to the water plant, you need to distribute the water across the island... Everything needs maintenance and replacement if you want it to work forever. There is no other way. So, that being said, let's look at what we CAN do with ten thousand people and unlimited resources. I think for water the best plan would be something like a solar-operated distillery plant if we cannot get freshwater some other way. Dig some holes, put something shiny and durable at the bottom (silver?), cover them with a tough, clear plastic, and open up locks to allow water to drain in. Sun heats up water, water is collected in (stainless steel?) tanks and then drunk. Plus, you get sea salt for salting fish or whatever. In a long term scenario where that plant eventually fails I think you would need either metals and bioplastics to replace it, or metal to build a MSF evaporator or some kind of crude thermal device. Clearly we are thinking in the wrong direction here. We need to find a metal alternative, a plastic alternative, or something. Maybe we can like, genetically engineer plants to turn saltwater into freshwater. Modify coconuts or something. We could modify the people to be able to drink coconut milk exclusively without getting sick or something, perhaps. I think that's an OK idea. If we get some human stock from some kind of arid area and then just get things to a point where they can get all of their water from plants, that could be sustainable forever.
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Jul 30, 2014 02:59
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We need to genetically engineer superorbital glands onto the population. Thirsty? Just dunk your head in ocean and sneeze out some salt!
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Jul 30, 2014 14:58
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Keldoclock posted:Really? I mean like, I am just an engineering student but a desalination plant seems like a very complicated endeavor- OK you have unlimited energy (does that unlimited energy for 25 years at infinite draw to build the place, X amps for the lifetime of your society, or does that mean literally infinite energy?) but like, how do you build a desalination plant that lasts forever? Great post - this is the kind of details I'm really interested in. The nitty-gritty of what it takes to keep a modern society going. Would not a large scale 3D printer be able to fabricate many parts needed to keep desalinization and other water projects going? And if not, what would it take, industrially, to produce the parts on site. A bigger question, maybe: What size society is necessary to be modernly self sufficient? A hundred thousand people? A million? A hundred million?
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Jul 31, 2014 02:53
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Worth listening to, particular in light of the conversation here. Cuba Unlikely Leader in Agriculture Sustainability
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Jul 31, 2014 05:29
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redshirt posted:Great post - this is the kind of details I'm really interested in. The nitty-gritty of what it takes to keep a modern society going. A lot of it also has to do with how much rare materials are available. Probably the best classic example would be concrete. The Romans built tons of buildings out of concrete. But the ancient Roman recipe for concrete required volcanic ash. Without that volcanic ash, you just end up with a wet mess. After the collapse of the Roman Empire, plenty of people were stuck without a steady source of that sweet, sweet ash, so no more concrete buildings. thrakkorzog fucked around with this message at 10:45 on Jul 31, 2014 |
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Jul 31, 2014 10:26
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Rougey posted:Worth listening to, particular in light of the conversation here. The reason I'm emphasizing the word "modern" is because the more primitive a society becomes, the easier it is for it to be self-sustaining. There are plenty of people on Earth doing it right now. But what if you wanted to provide tomatoes daily for 10,000 people? Entire salads in fact. New technologies would be needed, obviously. Greenhouse skyscrapers are still concept only.
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Jul 31, 2014 21:28
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You can get between 36-thousand and 58-thousand pounds of tomatoes per acre. It we look at the low end you can get 40-thousand pounds of tomatoes per acre. That is four pounds of tomatoes per person per day per acre. To keep up that rather brisk pace for a year, you only need 365 acres. The island itself is 192,000 acres in size, meaning for less than 2% of its total area, people can eat a ton (well, 3/4ths of one...) of tomatoes every year. Potatoes produce about the same though carrots and beets aren't quite as dense, probably half to a third of what tomatoes can do. But it is safe to say that if 5% of the island's landmass was dedicated to just growing vegetables, every person would have somewhere between 5 and 8 pounds of veggies to eat per day. That is way more than enough so you don't have to at all worry about greenhouse skyscrapers or whatever.
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Aug 1, 2014 18:21
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redshirt posted:Would not a large scale 3D printer be able to fabricate many parts needed to keep desalinization and other water projects going? And if not, what would it take, industrially, to produce the parts on site. Well, the trouble is, your design spec asks us to build something that will last literally forever. So, no. Without the industrial base to keep the printer functional, I think you need to take your designs and simply them to the point where you can maintain and replace everything with ordinary tools. It sounds like you want something more like [url="https://"http://opensourceecology.org/"]Open Source Ecology[/url] but even less realistic. We've done the math and figured out that we can feed this many people forever. They have power in their homes (and we can build light bulbs and stuff in ways that can last forever, blowing glass from sand and using plant filaments, recycling the metals used), clothes to wear (leather or cotton), homes to live in (probably wood, maybe brick or dirt construction depending on soil properties). The island is small enough you could have communications in a sustainable way, maybe just by having X metal in the wires and then .5X in storage to repair and replace, with the old materials being recycled. With unlimited money we can use otherwise impractical materials to make it so that damage to the infrastructure is very unlikely. I think that something like a telegraph system could be maintained forever. It's not like these people are ever going to grow or expand, so they don't need computers. Books are probably fine as a storage medium for information. I think something like an 18th century standard of living is viable here. The trouble is not that modern industry requires people- it requires globalization. Without international trade and exchange of knowledge, our world would not function as it does today. Indeed, many people argue that the modern American lifestyle is unsustainable and only possible because of exploitation of less powerful countries. To be honest, I would be inclined to agree.
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Aug 2, 2014 01:48
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Keldoclock posted:
This is really the problem, at the rate our 'modern' society uses resources, we consume something like 50% more than the world produces every 18 months. The island would have to be culturally, economically, and technologically very different than anywhere in the first world. The alternative is to end up like Snowpiercer, technology and luxuries going extinct one by one.
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Aug 2, 2014 12:38
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redshirt posted:As a hypothetical, tell me how to build a completely self sustaining society of at least 10,000 people - self sustaining both in the present, and in the future - with the following assumptions:  But on the small chance it's not related, I love the question for being related to them anyway.
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Aug 2, 2014 22:59
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ilkhan posted:Those conditions sound absolutely nothing like an O'Neill cylinder. I wasn't thinking of it specifically, but of course it applies. Were these ships intended to be 100% self-sufficient? On a related note, I highly recommend anyone with a chance to do so to visit the Biosphere in Arizona - it's half way or so between Tucson and Phoenix. Wonderful place and the tour is cool - for instance, the structure has giant "lungs" that rise during the day and lower at night and provide a ventilation system for the contained space. It seems the only true limiting factor to the Island would be the rare elements used in modern electronics. Which is tough, of course, if the intention is replicating modern society, forever. However, I wonder if replicas or approximations using more common materials is possible.
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Aug 3, 2014 03:00
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What happens when your 3000 slaves revolt or when a few hundred people are sick of fish and tomatoes all day and break off or revolt (ignoring the fact that people can't thrive on only fish and tomatoes)?
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Aug 3, 2014 03:49
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redshirt posted:Great post - this is the kind of details I'm really interested in. The nitty-gritty of what it takes to keep a modern society going. 3D printers are great, but there are a ton of things you just can't make with one. Good metal springs, for instance: springs need to be made of specific alloys and then heat treated to alter their crystalline structure so they're actually springy. That's not possible with current or plausible future 3D printer technology, and you're going to need springs to make any reasonably complex mechanical device. Chemical-industry products are another big one. That desalination plant uses reverse osmosis, which depends on specially treated membranes. Those are just two examples out of many. Modern industrial production is hugely interconnected. There are tons of specialized factories that only make one type of part, and they do it as cheaply and efficiently as possible; those parts are incorporated into other designs. If you don't have the economy of scale of an entire nation or world buying your screws, springs, small electric motors, or whatever, then you have to make them yourself on an inefficient, small-batch basis instead. Again, look at that desalination plant. There are all kinds of things in there: pipes, motors, concrete, fasteners, gaskets, pumps, membranes, sensors, walkways, storage containers, control equipment, and so on. Little or none of it was made specifically for that location; it came from dozens of different and highly specialized manufacturers set up for mass production of all those different parts. When the plant was designed, engineers picked mass-produced parts out of a catalog to fit the application. Each one of those part suppliers in turn depends on other factories and many different sources of raw materials. The logistics behind almost any manufactured item are incredibly complex. A potentially more interesting question is, "what could be done to get the same results with far fewer people?" For instance, desalination is easy enough with sheet metal, rivets, and wood: hammer together some stills and build a fire underneath them. It's nowhere near as efficient, scalable, or maintainable as the modern-society version, but it gets the job done. And, with designers informed by the knowledge we have now rather than "that's how my pappy did it," you can make some surprisingly sophisticated devices with simple materials and methods. But, you'll still run into scalability issues, and you're not going to get iPhones, cars, desalination plants, and disposable ballpoint pens. There are a lot more limiting factors than just electronics production.
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Aug 3, 2014 19:48
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ljw1004 posted:Modern society is a huge interconnected web with huge raw-material demands. There are mines that are 3*3 miles large and employ 20,000 people already. The world population of 7 billion is only big enough to support two or three chip fabs. A software company like Microsoft employees 100k people. Pretty much this. You could possibly (with excellent, high quality iron and coal reserves) begin to approach high Italian renaissance or Victorian era quality of life, oil lamps, iron axles on some carts, etc. but the idea of smelting your own aluminum from a nuclear reactor and also building and maintaining parts for said nuclear reactor would eat up all of the resources for the island. In the case of a steam engine for a train, Probably it would take 10,000 people just to mine the coal, smelt the iron ore, transport the raw materials about the island, machine the metal, assemble the engine, not to mention the agricultural base required and the items they need (leather goods, metal buckles for horse reigns, cups, plates, tea kettles, bottles, pants, belts, shoes etc).... just to build one somewhat complicated but still very low-tech device. At a rate of probably one a year (smelting iron requires a lot of coal that needs to be transported to the smelter). Building a semiconductor chip fab is totally unrealistic. This island would not have cell phones or transistor radios. You could not perform spaceflight over any scale of time, the parts you build and machine would rust or oxidize at a rate faster than you could produce one entire rocket, let alone refine the fuel for to launch. Squeezing blood from a stone, etc etc Take a look at the island of Grenada off the coast of Venezuela, continuously inhabited by 20,000+ people, roughly 10x20 miles in size, lush jungle, their primary exports are Nutmeg, Rum and Banannas (in that order). They then trade these things for goods like gasoline, cell phones, Suzuki Sidekick jeeps, tires, spanish style roof tiles and concrete. And beef. The island would collapse in six months if the main port were destroyed and they were unable to import traded goods.
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Aug 3, 2014 20:37
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Jolly Green Giant posted:What happens when your 3000 slaves revolt or when a few hundred people are sick of fish and tomatoes all day and break off or revolt (ignoring the fact that people can't thrive on only fish and tomatoes)? Cannibalism, obviously.
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Aug 4, 2014 17:22
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Jolly Green Giant posted:What happens when your 3000 slaves revolt or when a few hundred people are sick of fish and tomatoes all day and break off or revolt (ignoring the fact that people can't thrive on only fish and tomatoes)? Yes, that's the plan - fish and tomatoes only. Read the thread! I would think it would be fairly easy to provide a full range of food choices, except beef and pork. And even that could be had on rare occasions. And a society of engineers has no slaves. Slave would make no sense in such a society.
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Aug 4, 2014 20:33
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You'd still have to trade with the outside world. This isn't some kind of John Galt type thing, is it, op?
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Aug 4, 2014 21:27
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OldMemes posted:You'd still have to trade with the outside world. It's a thought experiment. And its primary principle is "modern self-sufficiency". So, no trade whatsoever, once the Island is up and running. I want to again emphasizes the word "modern", as it's been proven countless times in history that a society can be entirely self-sufficient if they operate at very low technological level.
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Aug 4, 2014 21:48
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redshirt posted:It's a thought experiment. And its primary principle is "modern self-sufficiency". So, no trade whatsoever, once the Island is up and running. Then it is literally impossible. Ignoring your magic money (which is worthless if you refuse to trade) or energy, then how do you get luxury goods you can't produce yourself? What if you need a resource your island doesn't have? How do you add new genetics to the gene pool? How do you bring in new ideas? The people wouldn't be happy there.
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Aug 4, 2014 21:59
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OldMemes posted:Then it is literally impossible. Ignoring your magic money (which is worthless if you refuse to trade) or energy, then how do you get luxury goods you can't produce yourself? What if you need a resource your island doesn't have? How do you add new genetics to the gene pool? How do you bring in new ideas? The people wouldn't be happy there. Maybe they would not be, maybe you're right and it's not even remotely possible. Several posters have mentioned at length the difficulties in maintaining, for example, desalinization plants. I was hoping folks could brainstorm ways to make it work. The idea of unlimited money and power is to provide a theoretical foundation that allows you to think about the more interesting stuff than power and money. The unlimited money would only be of use when building the island - after that, you're right, it's worthless to the Island itself. redshirt fucked around with this message at 22:11 on Aug 4, 2014 |
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Aug 4, 2014 22:08
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What does unlimited power even mean? Energy doesn't exist as a platonic abstraction, it takes the form of heat at a specific temperature, electricity at a specific voltage, etc. So are you positing a magical power plant that generates high voltage electricity, and then the island has to somehow supply transmission infrastructure? Or does every house have a magical outlet that provides 120V electricity ex nihilo for them to plug in their bamboo light bulbs and charge their coconut smartphones? Do they have infinite gasoline as well? Infinite coal? Infinite firewood? All of the above, magically appearing in your fuel tank whenever you need it?
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Aug 4, 2014 23:09
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This has been an interesting thought experiment so I'll throw in my two cents after thinking about this a while. I'll make it a numbered list of random observations because I'm an engineer and I like numbered lists. 1. I think people are significantly over-estimating how fast electronics and whatnot will fail. Our space industry routinely develops electronics that last decades without any maintenance or replacement. There are communications satellites that have been functioning on orbit for longer than twenty years. They usually are disabled by running out of propellant or solar panel degradation long before the electronics fail. Sure, you'd be using up rare earth elements that will never be replaced, but I think the burn rate would be relatively low. 2. Our modern economy is predicated on replacing consumer goods with more technologically advanced products on a regular basis, often once every couple years. There's little financial incentive for a company to make a product that lasts a significant length of time, because it's obsolete so quickly. Go look at the obsolete technology thread in PYF for some examples. It's shocking how primitive products from only twenty years ago look. With a population of 10k, the pace of technological advancement will be significantly slower. Coupled with a huge incentive for sustainability, I think we'd probably be able to come up with products that last a lot longer. 3. Modern consumer electronics are probably out, but I think a modern society with luxuries such as climate control, modern plumbing, and electricity is feasible. A 25 year head start would give us enough time to improve the manufacturability and sustainability of most appliances. Often times exotic materials are used to make a device more cheaply producable or technologically advanced (think LCD TVs). We could probably figure out a way to make a lot of devices with basic materials. We don't need airplanes, communication satellites, and will probably just need to live without the internet and the modern med-tech industry. 4. With a significantly higher incentive on material reclamation, I think we could make improvements to how we recycle and reuse raw materials. Also, with 300 square miles of land and unlimited money, we could just build hundreds of acres of skyscrapers filled with nothing but spare parts and raw materials. By the time they've run out, we will probably have perfected how to sustainability manufacture the handful of advanced devices we consider necessary with what's on hand. Given all that, I think we could maintain a society that's stuck permanent in the 1960s technologically. I think the reasons it'd fail would be purely sociological.
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Aug 5, 2014 03:55
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P-Mack posted:What does unlimited power even mean? Energy doesn't exist as a platonic abstraction, it takes the form of heat at a specific temperature, electricity at a specific voltage, etc. So are you positing a magical power plant that generates high voltage electricity, and then the island has to somehow supply transmission infrastructure? Or does every house have a magical outlet that provides 120V electricity ex nihilo for them to plug in their bamboo light bulbs and charge their coconut smartphones? Do they have infinite gasoline as well? Infinite coal? Infinite firewood? All of the above, magically appearing in your fuel tank whenever you need it? What if fusion was captured perfectly into a limitless power source? What could you do with that? Is it enough to make a modern, self sufficient society?
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Aug 5, 2014 05:47
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redshirt posted:Yes, that's the plan - fish and tomatoes only. Except more food choices equals less efficiency, more land requirements (variety of land climates), more tools which require a variety of resources that then need to be either mined (metal tools), labored on (cutting trees), or assembled (combine harvester requires another whole supply chain of tools). Even if we assume they have all of the tools they need, everything needs to be maintained and repaired. A shovel will require a constant metal and lumber supply. A tractor requires a supply of tires (so you need rubber harvested and processed into tires), all of the metal more parts replacements which requires ore, processing of the ore, forge, casting, molds, shaping, and assembling (welding, which requires torches and a solder and there is another large vertical supply chain that goes into making and using torches). The entire vertical supply chain for one piece of machinery can require a lot of people even for a quantity of one. A society of engineers only? Who will decide what to build or maintain? Who decides on distribution? Who decides which engineers does the maintaining and which ones does the designing? who teaches them? Do we assume all these engineers also does the actual work? A better question might be what is the minimum number of people required to support a society in the 1800s or 1980s. Jolly Green Giant fucked around with this message at 08:04 on Aug 5, 2014 |
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Aug 5, 2014 07:58
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Jolly Green Giant posted:A better question might be what is the minimum number of people required to support a society in the 1800s or 1980s. The last time there was a major practical research into the topic of national self-sufficientness it was by the third Reich. From this we know that one can get very close to 1950s consumer tech with around 100 Million people as a maximum bound. With modern advances in recycling we could certainly improve on this, especially with some kind of scifi power source. Practically I do think a society of 1 million people should be able to sustain itself at a 1980s level. Presuming said power source, and a few years or decades of serious preparation effort to develop recyclable alternatives for goods that normally need imported materials.
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Aug 5, 2014 14:09
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