[ExI] breakout culture (Was: ambition)

[Tomasz Rola]

On Fri, 1 Feb 2013, Anders Sandberg wrote:

[...]

> Yes, the typical village or band size is around 100-150 people, limited 
> by the Dunbar number. This is likely too small to survive indefinitely: 
> one interesting result of my simulations is that stable populations 
> probably need several such groups linked together into a tribe to be 
> demographically long-term stable.
[...]

Interesting. So, I understand your sims are set up for pre-industrial 
civilizations? Or maybe even before agrarian revolution? Because for early 
industrial-like civ (say, England around 1800), my very wild guess is, it 
would require about 20-200 kilopeople - but this again depends on what is 
the role of economy, the more economy the more people needed to sustain it 
for given tech level, production needs consumers, something like this. But 
on a space ship, no need for money (well, not sure about it but let's 
assume), so production is maintained with disregard of costs, as long as 
technical side is ok (enough energy and materials and people to operate 
the devices).

BTW, I can easily imagine a population of one, with proper tech, sustained 
"infinitely". As long as there is no supernova or angry asteroid or 
"lucky strike" by gamma ray or...

Hmm, I guess for real world survival longer than few (hundred) millennia a 
really good tech is a must (and IMHO we are at best halfway there, even 
without starting the whole uploading business, just for creatures 
resembling humans in form and lifestyle). And this makes any other 
assumptions, like limits based on genetics or even Dunbar's number a 
little less significant (like, we can fabricate genes out of "genopedia" 
as needed, we can integrate with some kind of info-processing implants or 
maybe grow better brains by better genes etc). Or so I would say.

Regards,
Tomasz Rola

--
** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature.      **
** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home    **
** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened...      **
**                                                                 **
** Tomasz Rola          mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com             **