It’s not that gay people would cause less relationship drama. It’s that a mix of gay and straight would cause less drama than the same number of either one alone. For the simplest example, in a population consisting of one gay couple, one lesbian couple, and one straight couple, nobody’s going to cheat on anyone, but in a population of three straight couples, they might.
What cheating? Any group colonizing Mars would have to recognize that maximum genetic diversity could only come from everybody breeding with everybody else, relationships be damned. Ideally, every female should have a child by every male. Otherwise you really risk genetic bottleneck. So all of the colonists should be heterosexual swingers, basically.
None should be named Smith, BTW.
That might work if it were not for the fact that we’re talking about humans.
Then either we send up a few hundred sperm and egg samples for implanting or we send 10,000 settlers. Anything else is doomed to failure, long-term.
It might actually make sense to try 1:2 men:women and have the homosexual couples be women. These couples can still bear children, so the colony could grow twice as quickly if they prove able to provide all the labor and expansion needs.
Also, I don’t see physical labor being quite as significant. Mars has lower gravity, but even more than that, there’s likely to be a lot of robotic and mechanical assistance. Robots are the least of the technological challenges we’d have to overcome in getting a Mars settlement going. Physical strength won’t be irrelevant, but a physically fit woman should be able to handle most of those needs.
Anyway, I totally agree with you that the most important criteria will be psychological rather than biological. A bunch of unhappy colonists will override any numbers you try to give them, especially when you consider that you can’t really discipline them in any way except by withholding resources from Earth… which will further screw up your timetables.
Or they’d go crazy because they can’t cheat, despite the need to do so.
Or they’d still end up cheating and the fallout would be greater because of the unthinkableness of it.
Not at all. If the starting set is 50 men and 50 women, that scheme would involve every woman each having 50 babies, for a total of 2500 humans in the second generation. That is obviously a ridiculously high birthrate, and quite unnecessary.
If instead you aim for a more manageable 4 kids per woman, then it just doesn’t matter if she has them all with 1 man or with 4 (from a long-term genetic POV).
If Maya has all her kids with Bob and Josie has all her kids with Derek, this is perfectly fine, as long as Maya’s kids don’t all pair up with Josie’s kids (and, in fact, even if they did, some rules against 1st and 2nd-cousin marriage would solve the problem perfectly well)
If we’re imagining a colony where robots do most of the work, leaving human beings free to raise kids and indulge in relationship drama, why exactly is this going to be the only colony on Mars?
If technology is such that we can set up a pretty safe, pretty easy, self-sustaining colony on Mars, then why can’t that technology be used back on Earth? If we can send one colony ship with dozens or hundreds of people, why can’t we send another ship next year, and another ship a few months later, and pretty soon we’re sending ships to Mars every other day and there’s regular traffic between Earth and Mars (and Ganymede and Titan and Ceres and Mercury and…)
A scenario where we have the resources to send one self-sufficient colony ship to Mars, once, doesn’t make any damn sense. If it’s that hard to colonize Mars that we can only send one ship then it’s too hard to send that one ship. And don’t give me any nonsense about Earth getting ruined. Even after a dinosaur-killer asteroid or a planetary nuclear holocaust, Earth will still be much easier to live on than Mars. You have to live in a sealed can on Mars, if Earth is ruined you can still live in a sealed can on Earth, except you don’t have to go to the trouble of shipping the can to Mars. If we’re imagining a Noah’s Ark scenario you build your Ark on Earth.
Any Earth economy rich enough to send one colony to Mars is rich enough to send more over the years. You don’t have to worry about 100 kids inbreeding, because a colony of 100 people ON MARS is doomed, because life on Mars takes advanced technology that a few hundred or a few thousand people won’t be capable of maintaining for generations and generations. If you dropped them on a planet where you could survive in shirtsleeves, then maybe. But Mars ain’t that kind of place. If you have the technology to safely live on Mars, you can live anywhere in the solar system. If you don’t, then you’re sending your colonists to their deaths.
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The solution: turkey basters. That would allow everyone to breed with everyone else, and still maintain stable bonding pairs. And it would allow the gay couples to contribute to the gene pool, which would be important for maintaining genetic diversity. But to avoid future inadvertent inbreeding you would have to have some way of keeping track of who is genetically related to who, which would set up some interesting social dynamics.
I thought there was an at least approximate answer to the minimum number of people needed to set up a self-sustaining group. I know I’ve heard many times people say that a given size is too small.
Given the average level of diversity, is there not a GQ answer to this?
Surprisingly, it seems to be up for considerable debate.
For instance, regarding minimum viable populations for endangered species, from here
(my emphasis)
versus
These are quite different from the number I’ve often heard bandied around for humans, which is 30 (and that number may have totally been pulled out of someone’s backside)
You would think that the minimum viable numbers for a group of specifically selected humans would be much lower, since one hopes that natural attrition would be a lot less than for wild animals (even on Mars), and you can screen them before for genetic defects.
If you screen them well enough, I should think you might be able to get away with just two, even - though obviously that’s no good for a Mars colony for reasons other than genetics.
That’s unknown. See, the advantage of an all women load is :
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They consume less oxygen and eat less food. They are also supposedly more efficient in that while they may have less physical strength, they supposedly consume less oxygen per unit of physical work done.
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All of them could potentially be used to make babies.
See, we don’t know for certain if, physical strength aside, if men are actually better at making “shit” than women. We know that right now, that’s clear…but we don’t know if that is because little girls are taught by their mothers that the workshop is a dangerous place or if it really is instincts and inherent skills.
It’s probably a bit of both, and, realistically, if you were searching the world for the best craftsmen, the best engineers, the best technicians, most likely you will find almost all men in the pool of the “best” at this field…but that may just be because very few women have even tried to do those jobs.
Anyways, you can imagine a massive pool of cosmonaut trainees kept in isolation from normal family structures, and all of them are women, and all of them are taught technical skills from an early age. Maybe that would work.
Are we setting up a colony on Mars, or a gulag?
If you’re selecting a group specifically to be genetically viable, I think the more important thing would be overall diversity, instead of looking for known bad genes. Even if you screen for all of the genetic diseases we know of, that won’t do anything for the ones we don’t know of. Most of them never come to light, because they’re not widespread enough for anyone to get two copies of the gene, but in a small isolated population, that’ll change quickly.
Damn. Kubrick really did have this all figured out years ago. 
Turgidson: Doctor, you mentioned the ratio of ten women to each man. Now, wouldn’t that necessitate the abandonment of the so called monogamous sexual relationship, I mean, as far as men were concerned?
Strangelove: Regrettably, yes. But it is, you know, a sacrifice required for the future of the human race. I hasten to add that since each man will be required to do prodigious… service along these lines, the women will have to be selected for their sexual characteristics which will have to be of a highly stimulating nature.
Yup. If you really want to do this the men are in the form of frozen sperm. That population has to grow fast to survive. If sexual selection of offspring is possible they should only produce daughters for several generations. That is assuming they survive, which seems unlikely in a time where only a limited number of colonists can be sent. If this is going to be done there should be steady of flow of colonists to Mars over time so how many you start with wouldn’t matter, and a smaller number will work better initially to keep them fed and breathing.
I also think it’d be advantageous to include a diverse racial mix…I’d want to have the new Martians resemble the diversity of Earth. Also, mixing up the gene pool would probably lead to less chance of genetic diseases. Thank you for thinking to include some of da gayz…someone has to decorate that planet when it’s terra formed!
Assuming we developed the technology to exist on Mars, what would we do for diversion? Someone mentioned that it’d be like a penal colony…I can see that. Also, assuming we can’t return May not be true, if we develop the technology to get there and build, and terraform, what would preclude a return trip to Earth. I think a Mars Earth exchange would be more appealing to the average human being
The key difference between a Mars settlement and a penal colony would be that all of the people on Mars would be volunteers, and probably quite enthusiastic volunteers, at that.
I think we can all agree that there could be no less impeachable a source than Rod Serling, in the (real) Planet of the Apes. Three men. And one woman, who will be the “Eve” of a new planet, unless her sleeping compartment gets damaged mid-flight.
It’s not clear if one of the men *has *to be Charlton Heston, or if it’s just highly recommended.
Well, people here are quite cavalier about raising the colonists in isolation from a young age, and teaching them their role in Mars society, so that they won’t complain when they get sent to Mars and are expected to function without romantic attachments, and be pregnant all the time to breed the next generation of colonists.
So are they volunteers, or slaves?
And I’m tired of the assumption that the limitation in colony growth is how fast a certain number of women can expel babies out their vaginas. No, the limiting factor in colony growth is how fast the economy of the colony can grow to support a given number of people.
The infrastructure for a colony on Mars won’t build itself. Or rather, if it will build itself, then it’s silly to worry about the colony having to grow by natural means, because if we have colony pods that can just sprout in the Martian desert by themselves, that technology makes it possible for us to do anything we like, including sending as many people back and forth to Mars as we like.
The limiting factor in the colony growth is not the biological limits of the human body, but the economic limits of how many people a colony of a given starting size can support. And it seems to me that given the difficultly of surviving on Mars, and the small size of the industrial base that a given number of colonists can carry with them to Mars, the economy of the Mars base will grow very very slowly.
If people are eating food from a hydroponic farm they brought with them from Earth, how hard will it be to build another hydroponic farm? If they’re living in a habitation module they brought from Earth, how hard will it be to build another habitation module? If they have a machine to crack oxygen and nitrogen from Martian rocks so they can breathe, how hard is it to build another? If they have a nuclear power plant to provide the energy needed, how hard is it to build another? How much water can they add to the biosphere? How much carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium do the crops need? If a computer breaks, are you going to be manufacturing new chips? If not, how many computer components can you carry with you from Earth, and how long is that supply supposed to last, especially if you’re trying to increase your industrial base? If some of the people who have critical skills drop dead–something that’s going to happen a lot on Mars–how hard will it be to train their replacement, and who’s going to be doing the job the replacement used to do? If everyone is working like crazy to increase the industrial base of the colony, who’s raising the kids? What happens when the kids grow up on a colony filled with crazy workaholic parents who were willing to risk their lives to travel to Mars?
You can start with motivated colonists very easily–anyone who isn’t highly motivated to colonize Mars doesn’t get selected to go on the trip. Except the kids can’t be selected this way, unless your plan is to toss anyone out the airlock if they show any signs of rebellion.
Thing is, a one-way trip to Mars sounds exciting–you’re exploring the solar system! Except the reality is that you’re trapped in a can for the rest of your life, with a few trips outside wearing a pressure suit. You can screen the colonists to find people who would accept that in return for getting a trip to Mars, but you can’t screen the kids.
If you want to simulate a trip to Mars, imagine loading an airplane with anything you want, and you and some of your buddies land the airplane on a flat place on Baffin Island. And from now on, everything you need you either have to have with you on that airplane, or you have to build it with tools you carried with you on the airplane. And you can never go home. Except on Baffin Island you can breathe the air and drink the water and the temperatures don’t get much colder than -60C.