Smallest population necessary to maintain current technology

[Mayabird]

I think there may have been a thread about this a long time ago but my searches haven't found it if there were. But anyway, we have had discussions about maintaining civilization after, say, a nuclear war and the issues with that and the interconnectedness of everything, etc etc. It takes a lot of people doing a lot of different things to maintain our current level of technology. So, what is the minimum number necessary to do that? I don't mean just to keep the machines running until they're unfixable subsistence level stuff; I mean maintaining our current level of civilization, preferably still with the ability and extra resources to keep innovating and researching new stuff.

I imagine the number is fairly high, probably in the tens of millions at least, but I don't know how I'd go about making an estimate, and (maybe my Google-fu is just weak this morning, but) when I try to do a search online I just find a lot of crank pages of doubtful trustworthiness.

[The Grim Squeaker]

Via a gradual, managed decline or after a catastrophic drop?

[Broomstick]

Does it really matter, if what we're talking about is long-term maintenance of the tech? Say.. what would be needed 100 years after the population drop, regardless of cause?

[Sea Skimmer]

Israel would suggest that a population of five million or so should be able to sustain a high tech industrial and research base, but you’d need maybe another 5 million to provide all the menial stuff too. Tens of millions seems excessively high. However if you rip apart an old civilization with nukes, and then have to rebuild you’d need far more people because everything would be far far less efficient and not collocated in a nice neat area. So yeah… planning would help absurdly to get the number down. We also could simply employ a much higher level of automation for many tasks then we currently do. Lots of automation is feasible but simply isn’t done because it’s not yet actually cheaper then employing flesh bags.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

I think there may have been a thread about this a long time ago but my searches haven't found it if there were. But anyway, we have had discussions about maintaining civilization after, say, a nuclear war and the issues with that and the interconnectedness of everything, etc etc. It takes a lot of people doing a lot of different things to maintain our current level of technology. So, what is the minimum number necessary to do that? I don't mean just to keep the machines running until they're unfixable subsistence level stuff; I mean maintaining our current level of civilization, preferably still with the ability and extra resources to keep innovating and researching new stuff.

I imagine the number is fairly high, probably in the tens of millions at least, but I don't know how I'd go about making an estimate, and (maybe my Google-fu is just weak this morning, but) when I try to do a search online I just find a lot of crank pages of doubtful trustworthiness.

How sophisticated do you mean by modern technology? North Korea is a wholly internally sustained high-technology society, after a fashion, so it provides some sort of baseline, if it was better managed, it could probably do a lot more. Like Sea Skimmer said, probably around ~10 million.

[Jeremy]

Doesn't Israel import goods?

We must account for the lack of export, everything produced must be consumed internally. Lower demand drops the work required but that also lowers employment and commerce. A small population may not be capable of maintaining the industry which makes high technology.

Do you want the current plurality of available products or are you willing to skimp on some things? Is it enough for the University to have a Particle Accelerator while children use cloth diapers and play with hand me down Raggedy Anns? Can we settle for each school house having computers while Grandma cooks over a woodburner? Can Dad look forward to denim pants or can he have fast drying synthetic fiber blends?

Are the numbers you are asking for just working age adults or the entire population?

[Mayabird]

How about a range, from the previously mentioned 10 million-ish minimally functioning society to one with a Western European standard of living, including pensioners and so on? I'm not looking for an exact number here for a story or anything, just some kind of feel for the numbers. And yes, assume self-sustainable to some degree - doesn't have to be until the end of time but for at least some generations when stuff breaks they can replace it with something new and equivalent, if not better.

[wolveraptor]

For a lower limit, consider Tasmania. With an extremely low native population, what little technology (stone tools, spears, boomerangs, etc.) the Australian mainlanders developed was lost. Native tasmanians were literally some of the most technologically primitive people on the planet, living in a way humans had not for hundreds of thousands of years.

Of course, this is only a lower limit when the level of tech you're dealing with is Stone Age, rather than Information Age. Still, it's an interesting real-life example of technological devolution.

[Sea Skimmer]

Doesn't Israel import goods?

Yeah, thats why I very roughly doubled the number to 10 million to account for the stuff they don’t currently make but would still need. Actual Israeli population is like 7.5 million now, but because of the religious/culture/land wars going on they don’t utilize that population to its fullest.

Israel is a good baseline because it’s a small country that none the less has the ability to do complete raw materials to high tech computer chip level of manufacturing. Its also somewhat new and ‘planned’ compared to most industrial countries. They have computers, advanced chemicals and the ability to make high missiles and jet fighters, as well as a complete nuclear fuel cycle in operation. Everything else is easy.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

It probably also helped that immigration has brought in some very highly qualified people who bring the know-how to set up industries from scratch indigenously. A major problem with many up and coming developing industries is a lack of know-how to set up a lot of industries, and foreign investment has often been a touch and go and leaving no lasting impression.

[tim31]

Regarding the Israel thing, how would they have fared without 1.) American assistance and 2.) motivation of being surrounded by regional players whom have in the past conspired to annihilate the jewish state?

Native tasmanians were literally some of the most technologically primitive people on the planet, living in a way humans had not for hundreds of thousands of years.

And now of course they are genetically extinct. European colonization pretty much steamrolled everything it ever touched in the anitpodes in the same way the Allies ruined Hell's shit in the Salvoverse.

[Sea Skimmer]

Regarding the Israel thing, how would they have fared without 1.) American assistance and 2.) motivation of being surrounded by regional players whom have in the past conspired to annihilate the jewish state?

Lots better. Being surrounded by enemies is good motivation, but it also kept away many potential immigrants and much of the motivation turned into making otherwise unnecessary military products. Without the military threat they’d have been able to spend about 1/10th as much on military equipment, they wouldn’t have to train the whole population for war, wouldn’t have to waste money putting bomb shelters in every building, no mobilizations shutting down the economy for weeks at a time ect… Meanwhile the general desire for high technology would not go away at all.

The US meanwhile only began backing Israel in late 1967 and the vast majority of US aid is military, with the economic aid mainly being intended as a direct counter to losses from military activities. It really does not work out to be much of a net gain for Israel, and a peaceful Israel would have far better international trade arrangements and be much more open to foreign investment.

By 1967 Israel already had nuclear power (reactor bought from France, but the mastery of the fuel cycle and the nukes is domestic work), and by 1969 it was building copies of Mirage III jet fighters without any US assistance being involved. By the 1970s Israeli was also building its own guided missiles of completely domestic design (they cloned French missiles in the 1960s) as well.