Something I've often wondered: could you recreate a civilization that vaguely approximates modern society "from scratch" with dramatically fewer people by focusing only on those technologies & institutions that are most important? In other words, if society had a nuclear holocaust next year but several highly-educated people survived and they managed to keep a complete readable copy of society's collected knowledge, could they build an advanced technological society with < 1M people?
I'm reminded of software rewrite efforts. Big software projects never get designed from scratch and implemented, they evolve by accretion. Somebody builds something halfway useful, they get capital (or volunteers) to help improve it, and eventually you've organized the planet's information and made it universally accessible and useful. In the process you acquire a shitload of technical debt so that it becomes very difficult to understand or change the lowest levels of the system.
Trying to rewrite large software projects with bug-for-bug compatibility and feature completeness always fails. You run into the same issues as trying to build a complex system from scratch.
But trying to rewrite a large software system where you're allowed to move the goalposts and sacrifice feature completeness often results in a system with an order of magnitude less code that's simpler for the majority of users as well. You get to prune out all the features you thought would be useful but turn out to be more trouble than they're worth, and you can often take simpler paths once you know where you're going.
Are there similar shortcuts available for human society? For example, could you race from farming villages to electricity by building wooden windwills that turn dynamos of simple copper wire loops? What would that change in how we approach industrialization, if you could start building machines without needing the labor of thousands of people and their supporting society? Are there similar shortcuts for semiconductors & integrated circuits, or do you really need the full might of a modern industrial society before you even have the raw materials?
On earth you can skip a great many things as you get air and water effectively for free. This means you need a lot less redundancy not just in personnel, but also how quickly you need to respond in an emergency. Further, people are going to be vastly more productive with fewer people devoted to food production.
The downsides are things like pest control becoming more important. On mars you can avoid pesticides by either not bringing them or killing them off by dropping the air pressure in a field to effectively zero and or dropping the temperature to -100C.
I'm reminded of software rewrite efforts. Big software projects never get designed from scratch and implemented, they evolve by accretion. Somebody builds something halfway useful, they get capital (or volunteers) to help improve it, and eventually you've organized the planet's information and made it universally accessible and useful. In the process you acquire a shitload of technical debt so that it becomes very difficult to understand or change the lowest levels of the system.
Trying to rewrite large software projects with bug-for-bug compatibility and feature completeness always fails. You run into the same issues as trying to build a complex system from scratch.
But trying to rewrite a large software system where you're allowed to move the goalposts and sacrifice feature completeness often results in a system with an order of magnitude less code that's simpler for the majority of users as well. You get to prune out all the features you thought would be useful but turn out to be more trouble than they're worth, and you can often take simpler paths once you know where you're going.
Are there similar shortcuts available for human society? For example, could you race from farming villages to electricity by building wooden windwills that turn dynamos of simple copper wire loops? What would that change in how we approach industrialization, if you could start building machines without needing the labor of thousands of people and their supporting society? Are there similar shortcuts for semiconductors & integrated circuits, or do you really need the full might of a modern industrial society before you even have the raw materials?