Setting up new colony

[rancke]

I've been wondering what sort of resources it would take to set up a new colony using artificial wombs and fertilized ova. I have some vague ideas, but I'd like to put some concrete numbers on them.

Humans (or uplifted simians ) assumed throughout.

(Oh, and don't feel shy of challenging my basic assumptions if you have better ideas).

The idea is to get a viable colony with the smallest investment and no outside help once the colony ship has left the mother world.

The ship would carry along X thousand fertilized ova optimized for maximum genetic diversity. How many? I recall seeing some posts about minimum viable populations on more than one occasion, but googling has failed to produce anything useful on the subject.

It would also carry a number of artificial wombs (And replacement parts to last their projected use). Say, one per 25 ova.

It would also carry a number of what I will call caretakers, although they'll also be doing construction and whatever else is needed. Their number should be as low as possible (albeit allowing for a modicum of redundancy).

Finally, it would carry enough supplies to allow the colony to survive until it became selfsufficient. How much would that be? Partly it would depend on how soon the children are put to work, I suppose.

When the colony ship lands, the first batch of colonists will be started while the caretakers begin setting up infrastructure.

Nine months later, the first batch of colonists are turned over to caretakers and the next batch is started. This continues for, what, 20 years? At this point all the ova would have been used and the colony would have reached its minimum size.

I'm aware that an initial working population of adult colonists would work out better, but I have plot reasons why that's not feasible.


Hans

 

[RandyB]

How much automation? How many non-sophont biologicals (who might compete for resources with the colonists)? How many robots (who would need their own maintenance supplies, but would not consume resources needed by biologicals)?

I would assume a Garden World, to keep issues of environment relatively simple.

Also, depending on the time required for the colonists' species (plural?) to reach sexual and social maturity, the first "freeborn" colonists might be born in the latter years of the frozen ova being born, introducing the possibility of a social divide on that basis. Blurring the case, matured colonists might volunteer to carry the frozen ova on cultural grounds. (Or a disaster of some kind might make it necessary, if said disaster disabled/destroyed some or all of the artifical wombs.)

 

[rancke]

How much automation? How many non-sophont biologicals (who might compete for resources with the colonists)? How many robots (who would need their own maintenance supplies, but would not consume resources needed by biologicals)?

TL 15, as cheap as possible. If automation is cheaper, automation. If more caretakers are cheaper, more caretakers. If supplies are cheaper, more supplies. But keep in mind that everything has to be carried along.

I would assume a Garden World, to keep issues of environment relatively simple.

T-prime at a minimum, yes. With enough care in selection of colony site to assume fairly benign conditions.

Also, depending on the time required for the colonists' species...

Humans (or species with similar gestation period) assumed.


Hans

 

[navanod]

Well, some quick google-fu turned up the "50/500 rule", which says you need at least 50 adults (for wildlife, anyway) to avoid the worst genetic problems, but 500 is enough to survive extinction. This article says the 50/500 rule is at least a magnitude off, so add a 0 to each just in case.

I'd suspect you'd need probably 10-20% of the population as Caretakers, at least until your first batch of colonists was 10-12 years old, which is about the youngest a kid can contribute useful work to an agrarian society, at least. Then they can start helping take care of the younger kids, doing light farm work, taking care of animals, etc.

Just my .02 Cr.

 

[rancke]

Well, some quick google-fu turned up the "50/500 rule", which says you need at least 50 adults (for wildlife, anyway) to avoid the worst genetic problems, but 500 is enough to survive extinction. This article says the 50/500 rule is at least a magnitude off, so add a 0 to each just in case.

Colony planners are not going to worry about environmental changes. The big problem is to avoid inbreeding problems. So with the suggested factor ten increase, we would be looking at 500 fertilized ova and 20 artificial wombs. Add 10% for redundancy?


Hans

 

[navanod]

Yeah, that sound reasonable.

Ah, from "Space Colonization" in Wikipedia

Population size

In 2002, the anthropologist John H. Moore estimated that a population of 150 to 180 would allow normal reproduction for 60 to 80 generations equivalent to 2000 years.

A much smaller initial population of as little as two female humans should be viable as long as human embryos are available from Earth. Use of a sperm bank from Earth also allows a smaller starting base with negligible inbreeding.

Researchers in conservation biology have tended to adopt the "50/500" rule of thumb initially advanced by Franklin and Soule. This rule says a short-term effective population size (Ne) of 50 is needed to prevent an unacceptable rate of inbreeding, while a long‐term Ne of 500 is required to maintain overall genetic variability. The Ne = 50 prescription corresponds to an inbreeding rate of 1% per generation, approximately half the maximum rate tolerated by domestic animal breeders. The Ne = 500 value attempts to balance the rate of gain in genetic variation due to mutation with the rate of loss due to genetic drift.

So, technically, you could as low as 150 and a sperm bank, and you should be good. I'm not sure a whole order of magnitude increase is required; some of the species from this list came back from as few as 25 animals (key deer).

I think with the sperm bank, you could go with a fairly low number and avoid the genetic issues fairly easily. But, setting up a new colony is going to be fairly dangerous (accidents, plague, etc), so you'd definitely want some redundancy in the system. 10-20% sounds reasonable.

 

[CosmicGamer]

I'm curious why any artificial wombs and fertilized ova are needed. If the caretakers can survive and build the civilization themselves why can't they also produce the new generation of colonists the old fashioned way with some medical assistance to help guarantee things?

 

[Xerxeskingofking]

I am taking some of the restrains to imply non-casual interstellar travel, and lack of FLT comms to boot (maybe a Long Night era effort? one cut off form civiliastion)

Also, what standard of "self-sufficient" are we looking for here? A "will carry on living and producing offspring" level, or "will have a simmilar tech base to thier founders" level? the latter is much harder to achieve, esp. without trade back to the motherland. we would need to build, within the working lifetime of the intial equipment, the industrail ability to replace them, and the means to gather the raw materials to supply that industry. we would also have to educate the newborns with the knowledge of ther founders, right form the start, so that when those founders grow old can die, thier children still understand how their machines work and can repiar and improve them.

with only one "drop" of equipment, the colony ships are going to turn up carrying a LOT of machine tools and other consruction and building machinary. most of this will be shoved into storage for 20 odd years until the first generation grows up.

Things i would do include.

before the ship arrives, i owuld already have the landing site picked out, via extentise scouting and mapping during the planning phases. key things would include access Water, food growing areas, oil. and defenable locations. my preffered location would be, (unsuprisingly), somewhere like Manhattan Island, with fresh water, access to the ocean for (later) trade, and the river surrounding you to protect you from ground attack of hostile native life.

during this early stage, i would plant a small, non substainable "starter" colony, not intended to last more than a year without supply, say. it would be doing things like building the first shelters, clearing and leveling building space, doing detailed biological and botanical suverys (looking for animals we can eat, plants with usful byproducts or uses as medicene, etc), finding suppiles of oil and other usful raw materialsm and building the initial shelters for the incoming colonists. these would be prefabs taken with them. the artificail wombs would be set up at this stage, though the ova would arrive later. most of the construction work would be done via robots building prefabs to a known design pattern, so it would be done with minimal supervision (say, one man per building team.)



once the main body arrives and the first batch of kids is in the wombs, the newly arrived custdoians will start the next phase of building, with fields being planted, fish gathered (if fishing is a viable option), and livestock raised (prefferably, a terrian breed which can metabolise the native plantlife and the native preditors won't recognise as prey. Genetic engineering may be needed at the planning stages to make this work). prospector teams are sent out to find the nearest scouce of Oil, and start mining it. A prefab refinery would be set up to turn the crude into useable petrol, butane, etc. most of the colonail vehicles would need to be either petrol powered, or fusion systems that can crack thier own H2 out of water (the latter for the main power grid, the former for mobile systems). If TL15 tech allows for cracking of water for hyrdogen on a very widescale basis, you may be able to skip the whole oil thing, at least in the short term (you'll need oil for plastics and such eventually)

at this stage, everthing is going to slow down a bit, as once everything is set up, you are going to have to wait for the kids to grow up before you can expand noticably beyound basics like Food, Water, and Fuel. I'd say you should not need more than 2-3 years worth of food form home, as by then you would have got the farms and such up and running, and producing food.

The Main effort at this stage is Education of the children. this is abosulty critical to the long term future of the colony. I cannot stress this enough. if you want the colony to maintain any sort of tech base, then you need to teach the kids pretty much everything. Keep the kids out of the fields, the caretakers can take care of survial matters. The kids need to learn, or this colony will fail as when the machines break down and no one can remeber how to fix them. focus of the education will be on things like basic mechanics, the biology of the world they are on, elementary physics, as well as literacy and numeracy. "soft" subjects like history, or the arts will not be taught, as thier simply isn't enough spare people to support those who can't contribute to the colony at this stage.

at this point, the colony is "self substaining" in the medium term, in that it can feed itself, provide for its own expansion, and has a limtied ability to repair complex machines. it can last like this for as long as ithe machines keep running (which is largely a matter of how they were designed. everything these colonists use will have to be as robust as possible, and able to operate with basic facilites and limited spare parts for at least 2 decades, maybe more) during this time, the raw materials for building a high tech base will be located and marked for future use (things like iorn ore, crude oil, silicon for electronics, etc). population will snowball as each genstations worth of hit its initial peak at about 19 years (at least, it will if i got the numbers right. one womb per 25 ova. nine months pre ova, 25*9/12= 18.75), then tail off to whatever the natural birth rate is (i think its about 3 per 1000, off the top of my head)

I would say the children would start coming into the workstream no earlier than 16 years After Founding, and depending on thier training, maybe not until 20 or more years. this would be the point where the colony can start building a meaningful industrial base, with significant mining, manufacturing and such beginning. the colony becomes truly self substaining when it can build new machine tools to supplment and eventually replace the ones brought with them. once it can do this, it can keep on doing this, meaning it can substain its level of mechanicsation.

form here, it can start to think about things like starting its own research, supporting people like artists and other cultural things, or even building its own local spacecraft (though thats a very long term goal).


as to hard numbers? god knows.

 

[Meteoric Assault]

For genetic variation to ensure species survival you need 4000. I will find the citation for the science nerds.

 

[Cryton]

For genetic variation to ensure species survival you need 4000. I will find the citation for the science nerds.

Actually, your going to find that the the number is closer to 10 000.

 

[Meteoric Assault]

Actually, your going to find that the the number is closer to 10 000.

Negative...
"On the other hand, in 2000, a Molecular Biology and Evolution paper suggested a transplanting model or a 'long bottleneck' to account for the limited genetic variation, rather than a catastrophic environmental change.[This would be consistent with suggestions that in sub-Saharan Africa numbers could have dropped at times as low as 2,000, for perhaps as long as 100,000 years, before numbers began to expand again in the Late Stone Age."

that is just the temporary defense of the number I quoted I digging into a textbook for the actual citation.

Here
There is a marked trend for insularity, surviving genetic bottlenecks and r-strategy to allow far lower MVPs than average. Conversely, taxa easily affected by inbreeding depression – having high MVPs – are often decidedly K-strategists, with low population densities while occurring over a wide range. An MVP of 500 to 1,000 has often been given as an average for terrestrial vertebrates when inbreeding or genetic variability is ignored. When inbreeding effects are included, estimates of MVP for many species are in the 1,000s. Based on a meta-analysis of reported values in the literature for many species, Traill et al. reported a median MVP of 4,169 individuals.

 

[hdan]

Send all women and an extensive sperm bank. The first few generations would all be from different fathers.

 

[rancke]

Send all women and an extensive sperm bank. The first few generations would all be from different fathers.

Not within project parameters.


Hans

 

[JustinInOz]

Have you read the CJ Cherryh book "40,000 in Gehenna"?

That might have a lot of details you are interested in.

 

[atpollard]

There is a marked trend for insularity, surviving genetic bottlenecks and r-strategy to allow far lower MVPs than average. Conversely, taxa easily affected by inbreeding depression having high MVPs are often decidedly K-strategists, with low population densities while occurring over a wide range. An MVP of 500 to 1,000 has often been given as an average for terrestrial vertebrates when inbreeding or genetic variability is ignored. When inbreeding effects are included, estimates of MVP for many species are in the 1,000s. Based on a meta-analysis of reported values in the literature for many species, Traill et al. reported a median MVP of 4,169 individuals.

Interesting quote.

One third millenium question though ... since the 'minimum population' figures are based on inbreeding of flaws, would it be possible to read the genetic code and eliminate the flaws from the initial seed population, thus allowing a smaller initial population.
(God is reported to have started with two hand picked individuals.)

As an alternative, the ancient Spartans inspected infants to cull those with defects ... could pre-emptive abortions mitigate most of the small population 'inbreeding' risks?

To OP:
Would it be practical to use some sort of viral gene re-engineering to correct genetic defects and allow an initial population of 500 rather than 5000? (based on the quote at the top)

 

[BillDowns]

How much space can fertilized ova take? I haven't tried to look that up, but I would not think very much. Send 10,000 to 20,000 fertilized ova, and there should not be a genetic drift issue.

What's going to take more space is, as stated in an earlier post, is the equipment to make sure the colony survives with any viable tech base. The main emphasis should be on that subject.

 

[BillDowns]

How much space can fertilized ova take? I haven't tried to look that up, but I would not think very much. Send 10,000 to 20,000 fertilized ova, and there should not be a genetic drift issue.

What's going to take more space is, as stated in an earlier post, is the equipment to make sure the colony survives with any viable tech base. The main emphasis should be on that subject.

Perhaps I spoke too soon. A restriction is going to be how many children per year you can raise.

If using a family model, with part-time caretakers, and this family receiving new infants every year for 20 years, you will be looking at a limit of around 2 infants per year per family. Any more, and the mental stress will take its toll.

If using a creche model, a full-time caretaker can handle only about 4 infants until age 2 or so. As the children age, fewer caretakers will be required, but you will never replicate that first-year rate.

Either model are going to have social repercussions, which would bear looking into as well.

 

[atpollard]

What's going to take more space is, as stated in an earlier post, is the equipment ot make sure the colony survives with any viable tech base. The main emphasis should be on that subject.

Nine months later, the first batch of colonists are turned over to caretakers and the next batch is started. This continues for, what, 20 years? At this point all the ova would have been used and the colony would have reached its minimum size.

I'm aware that an initial working population of adult colonists would work out better, but I have plot reasons why that's not feasible.

Hans

You are going to have some serious 'childcare' issues for all but the smallest populations (and will need a large population to support a self-sufficient tech base). From historic census, very roughly half of the population can work with another 25% involved in child care and 25% actual children. Pushing the limit of children per caregiver, perhaps 1 caregiver per 4 children might be a practical upper limit (based upon Foster parent guidelines). At about age 12, the children can help with childcare of the younger ones, so we will only count individuals under 12 as 'children'.

Just for the sake of argument, assume that the colony lands with 100 artificial wombs and begins turning out 100 babies every 9 months. In 153 months (12 years and 9 months), the first native-born generation will reach 'adulthood' and join the workforce. However, the wombs will have produced 1600 children requiring 400 'caregivers'.

After 234 months (19 years and 6 months), each womb turns out its 25th baby and is finished with its work. The colony has 300 children under the age of two, 400 children between age 2 and 5 (pre-school age), 900 children between age 5 and 12, and 800 children between age 12 and 18.

A total of 2,400 native born minors (0-17) and 100 native born adults (18+). Add in the 400 imported caregivers and one gets 2800 children and caregivers needing 2800 'labourers' for support. Subtracting the 100 first term natives, yields 2700 'imported' workers.

Converting these figures into 'per womb' numbers, each artificial womb will generate 25 new colonists, but requires 4 full-time caregivers to raise the children to age 12 and 27 workers to support the colony ... to create a 56 person per womb colony in 20 years. So 31 colonists and an artificial womb will yield 56 colonists in 20 years.

Just for laughs, let's import 32 colonists (16 male workers and 16 female caregivers), no artificial wombs and make babies the old fashioned way (1 per 2 years). In 20 years, each pair of colonists will have had 8 children and 3 grandchildren for a total of 16 imported workers, 16 native born workers, 16 imported caregivers and 16 native-born caregivers and 144 minors ... for a total population of 208! With 96 children under the age of 12 and 32 caregivers, the 3:1 ratio of children per caregiver is better than the 4:1 ratio we used for the artificial womb.

You might want to explore a colony of all native born people with robotic workers and caregivers. Since robots do not sleep, each robot counts as 4 people (160 hour vs 40 hour work week). You might want to try runing the wombs for 37.5 years (50 births) to give more native-born colonists time to grow up and join the workforce.

I hope this helps.

 

[Gray Lensman]

Have you read the CJ Cherryh book "40,000 in Gehenna"?

That might have a lot of details you are interested in.

He beat me to that one, a couple of other books that I have read recently which may shed some light and/or give you ideas are Hmmm... Both by David Weber ... "Old Soldiers"
and the Safehold series which starts with "Off Armegeddon Reef"

 

[vitalis6969]

Wow... awesome thread. It has given me some great ideas to go with for a possible adventure, lost colony way out in the dark, devolved/screwed up genetics. Reavers meets the Cleavers meets Earth 2, and the intrepid adventurers home in on the landed colony ship's beacon, a full hundred years after the colony attempt.

-V