I’ve just started watching the 21st century Battlestar Galactica series, so if you want to discuss things that happen in the series, please do so in spoiler tags.
Anyway, in the series, humans are almost completely annihilated by the Cylons.
With just less than 50,000 people left, I was wondering how they will be able to (or, more likely, not be able to) sustain a modern, technological fighting force.
How small do you think would be the minimum population for humans to sustain a modern technological fighting force (e.g. jet fighters and aircraft carriers)?
Keeping something running is a lot easier than creating it in the first place. Especially when it’s just out of refit. Plus the Galactica gets top priority.
Once you run out of the irreplaceable spare parts, especially computer parts, you’re done.
While the Galactica and the Fleet could very probably fabricate most metal parts, there’s no frakin’ way they could build more computer chips, computer memory, or the like.
For that matter, fabrication of artificial materials would also stop you cold. They would not be able to make things like Kevlar, artificial fibers, or a very large number of necessary chemicals. At least not on any reasonable scale of production.
So for Galactica, it’s a battle of attrition against existing supplies and the ability to resupply from the ruins of the old culture or from captured Cylon materials.
This is the falacy of the “small population, high tech” scifi model, such as the ‘common’ experience of very small cultures or “lost colonies” that somehow retain or develop higher levels of technology in scifi shows or books. There is just no way that such a small base could fabricate all of the materials it needs to create that technology, let alone develop the sophisticated technology - and continuously improve it - to make even today’s level of technology.
Why or how would a colony of say, 1000 people, ever develop and improve machines to make computer chips like we make today? They wouldn’t need them if they didn’t have them, and they couldn’t MAKE them if they did.
Economy of Scale, Competition and Demand drive improvement. These things do not exist unless you have the teeming billions.
It depends on the opponent.
Against a benign natural environment, maybe 10 people armed with plows and sickles.
Against an invading force of thousands of MechaGodzillas, you’d better have millions.
Why not? I’ve heard it suggested that some high-tech materials production would work better in a zero-G environment, and that there are other theoretical materials that can’t be produced on earth because of gravity. Who’s to say there aren’t itinerant factory ships that make a loop among the planets to provide enough exotic materials to last a planet until the next visit?
I don’t see the problems as the small things – the problem would be the big things. There’s nothing to produce another Galactica, or more ships of any significant size. You’d need a huge space and a huge amount of labor to integrate all the various systems – life support, propulsion, control systems, etc. – to make a working ship.
I think 50k people could do it, if that’s basically all they did. On the series, though, most of thepopulation seems to be unskilled refugees living on the dole.
Because the production of exotic materials depends on the prior production of larger amounts of slightly less exotic materials and base materials.
Every complex machine requires other complex machines to make the parts.
Without the chip making machines already in place, you can’t make more processors, no matter how hard you try, and without the manufacturing base of the colony worlds, you are NEVER going to be able to make more chip making machines.
If you look at stuff like Lithium-Ion batteries, it takes an IMMENSE manufacturing base and a sizable foundation to be able to make something like that. There’s no way a Gaius Baltar or anyone like that is going to be able to whip up a couple more in the back of a workshop in the fleet.
How do you know ? Have they gone into their manufacturing technology in the show ?
Without knowing what kind of manufacturing technology they have, the question’s unanswerable. It could be anything from “way more than Galactica has” to “one guy with an autofactory”.
That’s an interesting tack to take - of course the writers could just say “they’ve got Von Neumann machines that create more of themselves until they’ve got sufficient numbers to fabricate a battlestar on their own straight from raw materials. All it takes is the one guy to add water to the packet labeled “sea monkeys” first…”
There’s nothing wrong with that scenario, but it does seem inconsistent with the way technology in the series is depicted on-screen (a rather high need for manpower seems necessary to run the Galactica and get water from the ice planet, for example.)
But aside such dramatic differences between their technology and our own, using a modern analogue - could the town of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, with its population of slightly over 50,000, maintain the USS Nimitz and its complement of fighters for any significant length of time?
Without giving away any of the rest of the series (though I’m sure you know it does go on for 4 seasons, so obviously they don’t get wiped out anytime soon) they do address this issue here and there.
I think the answer is pretty much the number of human beings in the Galactica fleet - at least ten or twenty thousand, preferably more. To maintain a 2007-level force of reasonable sophistication you’d need enough people to do a lot of industrial functions - machining, welding, engineering, smelting and casting, resource extraction. Assuming you had at least one or two people who knew each of the major technical skills, 40,000 might be enough.
The problem in the show that keeps nagging at me is getting the resources, though; there’s nothing to mine in space. If you plunked down 40,000 survivors of a holocaust - say, a plague - into the middle of the United States, getting things up and running again would not be all that hard, because all the stuff you need’s there for the taking.
And when you say sustain, do you mean indefinitely, or for a given period of time? To use BSG as our example, clearly Galactica and its fleet can go on for some time; they have some manufacturing capabilities, and you can cannibalize things like computer chips here and there. But eventually you’ll run into a bottleneck at some point unless you land the fleet and start an industrial base where resources can be found.
Not long. Without an Oil Refinery and Oil Wells, jet fuel would be gone in short order. Most metals wouldn’t be a problem and small metal shops could fabricate most things they need, but a lot of other things, like special jet engine parts, could not be fabricated to sufficient quality. Building new missiles would be impossible, they simply could not create the electronic components.
So if you were to, say, take that to a Final Countdown scenario where the Nimitz goes back in time to WWII;
With some help and expertise, Pre-WWII America could produce the jet fuel and cannon rounds for the jets. They could not under any circumstances produce more of the modern missiles or repair any of the jet engines or electronic components if they failed.
Note: There are a number of Scifi/Fantasy book series that deal with a town or island going back in history and changing things. The common failure they all have that I have seen is that the authors take liberties with what the people would be able to produce with the resources and technology of the time.
No, but indeed it points out the inconsistency you referred to before.
First of all, obviously a town of 50 thousand c. 2000AD does not contain within itself the industrial base nor all the people with all the necessary skills to operate the Nimitz Battle Group… because the technology involved requires a prodigious amount of resources, human, material, capital and informational. Come to think of it, only a handful of whole countries on Earth can put together and operate even one carrier battle group. None can do so self-sufficiently if cut off from imports of strategic materials. And those are entire countries with populations of millions and real economies with producers and consumers.
However, following Czarcasm’s line of thought, let’s think of it this way: if you think pre-industrial, it is NOT far-fetched that a small population can manage to be self-sufficient, given access to basic resources, and between what they can live off the land and what they can pinch from their own enemies mount an effective resistance. The rub is, of course, that “living off the land” is not viable for a modern technoindustrial society. But what if there is some other Production Revolution in our future, compared to which our current technoindustry pales?
So, the SF trope of the small colony that maintains high technoindustrial capability would seem to me to indeed* **mandate ** * the artifice/blackbox of access to *“Von Neumann machines that create more of themselves until they’ve got sufficient numbers to fabricate [ anything ] on their own straight from raw materials” * (let’s grant the iffy assumption that asteroids and comets provide sufficient raw materials for a wandering spacefleet). Even then, you need to have redundant knowledge storage of the processes for EVERYTHING so you can feed that to the infinitely-programmable Level I Von Neumanns, and deliberately train a couple of hundred of your population at any given time to be fully qualified Von Neumann engineers.
Anything less, you’re vulnerable to the The Machine Breaks scenario.
But, and that’s why TV “SF” shows are usually not really SF but “Adventure, with SF stuff thrown in for ambience”, the actual fruition of that scenario would involve such a paradigm shift in the concepts of production and labor that IMO would look like going from neolithic hunting-gathering to whatever Bill Gates and Carlos Slim are doing tonight. It would make societies and workplaces look like nothing we could recognize, or write TV shows about.
Ah, but these are people who’ve been at war with a machine race they created. They aren’t going to want to make the same mistake again. In fact, they’d err on the side of caution. Which means that they’d likely design a system that requires a lot of human involvement, due to it being stupid and due to it not having a bunch of smart autonomous robots that can walk around and do stuff on their own without supervision.
Not all that long. However, since keeping them supplied with spare parts is a bit of a pain, they have limited onboard manufacturing facilities. Being the sci-fi equivalent, I think it’s a good assumption that the Galactica has a similar capability, but naturally more advanced. The question, of course, is how much more advanced.
