With respect to an extinction event that removes a substantial quota of the world population.
That’s not the kind of threat, that’s magnitude of the consequences.
But anyway, hard to tell. No data. Theoretically speaking, you have to trade-off greater interconnectedness (all our eggs are now in one basket because all the baskets merged) against greater technical capability (we will deal better with, say, a supervolcano erupting than people a few centuries ago).
Ballpark-y less than a million
I think you’re off by several orders of magnitude.
do you think that the complexity of today society can be sustained by a population that is much lower than what it is today?
Yes, of course. Imagine, say, that all continents except for North America suddenly sunk beneath the waves. After the initial period of adjustment, exactly which complexity will North America be unable to produce because it doesn’t have enough people?
Survivalists sometimes discuss the issue of the minimum viable population (for a high-tech civilization), but I think the numbers are in the millions, not billions. Besides, it depends on the IQ distribution—the right tail is vastly more important for your ability to keep the tech running than the left tail.
And “After the initial period of adjustment” does all the work of carry out your argument
No, it doesn’t. Are we talking about the minimum size of a more-or-less steady-state high-tech (hyphen-love!) civilization? or are we talking about the minimum size of a seed population from which a high-tech civilization can reconstruct itself while, presumably, growing in the process?
That’s not the kind of threat, that’s magnitude of the consequences.
But anyway, hard to tell. No data. Theoretically speaking, you have to trade-off greater interconnectedness (all our eggs are now in one basket because all the baskets merged) against greater technical capability (we will deal better with, say, a supervolcano erupting than people a few centuries ago).
I think you’re off by several orders of magnitude.
Yes, of course. Imagine, say, that all continents except for North America suddenly sunk beneath the waves. After the initial period of adjustment, exactly which complexity will North America be unable to produce because it doesn’t have enough people?
Survivalists sometimes discuss the issue of the minimum viable population (for a high-tech civilization), but I think the numbers are in the millions, not billions. Besides, it depends on the IQ distribution—the right tail is vastly more important for your ability to keep the tech running than the left tail.
With some caveat, it turns out I was :-O
That’s exactly the question I was asking. And “After the initial period of adjustment” does all the work of carry out your argument, so...
Well then, the answer is “none”.
No, it doesn’t. Are we talking about the minimum size of a more-or-less steady-state high-tech (hyphen-love!) civilization? or are we talking about the minimum size of a seed population from which a high-tech civilization can reconstruct itself while, presumably, growing in the process?