
Could just two people repopulate earth? - franze
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20160113-could-just-two-people-repopulate-earth
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jandrese
The article touches on it briefly near the end, but those estimates of how
many breeding pairs you need are made under the assumption that you want to
keep the incidents of genetic disease to roughly the same level we have now in
the world at large.

If you are willing to accept higher rates of disease--willing to conceive more
children and abort more diseased ones, then you can get away with a much
smaller starting population.

Pre-screening the initial population and weeding out as many deadly mutations
as possible would also help a lot.

Your new population will of course be more vulnerable to diseases as there
will be far less variety in their natural immunities so it is tricky, but if
the Earth were reduced to just a small handful of people it's not necessarily
curtains for humanity. Indeed in ancient times tiny tribes of highly inbred
individuals managed to survive and eventually give birth to modern humans.

