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Subject: How many people do we need?
Charles Stross is an author whose work I occasionally enjoy. He recently asked and answered a very important question:
This is a question I've often wondered. It's very similar to that other big question, how fast can you rebuild a significant level of technology if you're starting from zero?
Here's the answer.
And he wraps it up with a point very much expected from a sci-fi author:
Quote by Charles Stross:how many people does it take, as a minimum, to maintain our current level of technological civilization?
This is a question I've often wondered. It's very similar to that other big question, how fast can you rebuild a significant level of technology if you're starting from zero?
Here's the answer.
I'd put an upper bound of about one billion on the range, because that encompasses basically the entire population of NAFTA and the EU, with Japan, Taiwan, and the industrial enterprise zones of China thrown in for good measure. (While China is significant, more than half of its population is still agrarian, hence not providing inputs to this system).
I'd put a lower bound of 100 million on the range, too. The specialities required for a civil aviation sector alone may well run to half a million people; let's not underestimate the needs of raw material extraction and processing (from crude oil to yttrium and lanthanum), of a higher education/research sector to keep training the people we need in order to replenish small pools of working expertise, and so on.
And he wraps it up with a point very much expected from a sci-fi author:
space colonization? Get back to me when you've tracked down how many people it takes to design and build a space suit. (The number is in the hundreds, if not the thousands.) More realistically, we won't have autonomous off-world colonies unless and until they can cover all the numerous specialities of the complex civilization that spawned the non-autonomous, dependent-on-resupply space program. Or, to put it another way: colonizing Mars might well be practical, but only if we can start out by plonking a hundred million people down there.
BLEARGH