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Comment by zaphoyd | Hacker News Reader

A somewhat related question. How many people would it take to sustainably maintain current levels of technology if given time to prepare, the ability to bring all of our knowledge (but not realtime communication with Earth), and a reasonable starting set of tools?

Would a generation ship with 10,000 people still be able to build an iPhone when they arrived? A GPS satellite? Is it a matter of knowledge/ability to specialize or is it the economies of scale that make it possible to build compact high tech items?

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It's less about the people and more about the resource capabilities on the ship. If the ship has machinery that can rebuild things like a chip Fab for example, and the knowledge to repair all said machines, it becomes more feasible. If the ship has no machinery to construct advanced machines/facilities even 100,000 might not be enough to construct advanced tech.

> even 100,000 might not be enough to construct advanced tech.

I think that's way too large of an estimate. As long as we could continue to access records of how we did things, and the planet had sufficient relevant resources, I bet we could bootstrap ourselves from having only primitive mechanical tools to today's tech in a few generations. Again, that's assuming the planet is relatively hospitable and has the correct resources available.

I'd assumed he was asking about "immediately on arrival", not "within a few a generations", but I agree with your assessment.

Not sure about the parent here, but I was certainly considering longer term. I would expect early on that there would be high tech tools and items brought on the ship or built form parts of the ship. Actually setting up local production from local resources (beyond what could be constructed on the ship) would probably take some time.

Longer term though.. is it practically/economically feasible to build and run a chip fab capable of building modern ARM CPUs for the needs of 10,000 people? What about the rest of the manufacturing chain for these sorts of devices? Or is the only reason we can buy a smartphone today for a few hundred dollars because of the economies of scale of building tens of millions of them on a 2 year replacement cycle?

Yeah you're right, looking back on my estimate I'm really underestimating humanity if 100,000 can't learn and build this stuff in the long term. 100,000 hungry and driven people could do a lot if survival was on the line.

Food and shelter would probably be a higher priority than smart phones, surely?

And I'm not sure 100,000 people is enough. You need the right people in the right place at the right time.

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