Results 61 to 90 of 137
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2020-07-04, 10:37 AM (ISO 8601)
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2020-07-04, 11:58 AM (ISO 8601)
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2020-07-04, 04:14 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Feb 2013
Re: Absolute smallest viable size for a colony.
You are not going to sustain thousands of work hours of labor intensive mining, smelting, refining, transport etc on hunter-gatherer level food production. You will lose substantial portions of your population to malnutrition and disease, though.
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2020-07-04, 04:32 PM (ISO 8601)
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2020-07-04, 05:08 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Nov 2006
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Re: Absolute smallest viable size for a colony.
Okay, so hunter/gatherers can sustain themselves while working half to full time. How many man-hours of labor are needed to produce a steam engine from nothing but some picks, assuming that you know where the coal and the iron are (to a general "this rock layer in that mountain")? We can make whatever assumptions about the quality of the iron and coal we want.
Alternatively, could we build a steam engine that could start things going out of good bronze? Or is that too much different to be useful?
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2020-07-04, 06:21 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Feb 2014
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Re: Absolute smallest viable size for a colony.
In the shower this morning I found myself wondering whether you could make some sort of steam device out of leather. Obviously, the steam pressure wouldn't go nearly as high. Like ... the good old 'atmospheric engine' - just with a large leather bladder which inflates/deflates. Making valves and so on would be tricky without iron, but .. oh, I dunno =)
The reason I'm advocating rushing the steam engine is the potential loss of knowledge and time. The aztecs and mayans are a perfect example: They managed to survive for a long, long time. Survive.
We don't want to survive. We want to thrive.
Get a steam engine, and you have artificial irrigation, you can pump water out of mines, you have mechanical production - you have all you need to feed your population, and to build better tools, to make better machines. The motion you're capable of with hunter/gatherers is circular - with machines, you move upwards.
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2020-07-04, 10:32 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Feb 2013
Re: Absolute smallest viable size for a colony.
You need to remove tons of material just to get to the ore. Coal mining has found it to be more economical to just remove the mountain to get to the coal. You need hundreds of essentially disposable workers, who will consume thousands of extra calories per week (EACH) to fuel their bodies. You can't do that on a hunter-gatherer base, because they're a couple bad days from starting to starve. You need large scale agriculture, which again requires lots of workers. And because of the hardness of the iron ore, you'll need bronze tools rather than copper or stone to do the mining.
So you must first leave the Neolithic for the Copper Age for the food production, then advance to the Bronze Age for the tools. And by this point, your knowledge of how to do anything is lost, because your original colonists are long dead, anything written down has disintegrated with time, and even if you saved some of it the combination of language drift and no schooling in advanced scientific concepts means it is unintelligible.
Alternatively, could we build a steam engine that could start things going out of good bronze? Or is that too much different to be useful?
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2020-07-04, 11:53 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Feb 2013
Re: Absolute smallest viable size for a colony.
Real life historical people did that by having a few literate supported by the labor of thousands of serfs and slaves. And even the literati were often more rote copying things they couldn't understand than reading it, let alone grasping anything. Paracelsus was nearly burned at the stake twice for pointing out significant copyist errors, simply because he actually figured out the grammar while in hiding.
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2020-07-05, 12:06 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Nov 2006
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Re: Absolute smallest viable size for a colony.
Okay, since Rogar seems dead set that no group of people can go from hand tools in a benign environment to a functioning industrial society in a single generation, what supplies (of tools or information) would you need to allow a group of 500 to go get to an industrial society within 40 years?
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2020-07-05, 12:31 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Feb 2013
Re: Absolute smallest viable size for a colony.
Same things we used. Domesticated animals for muscle power. Substantial experience using the support technologies (primarily everything involved in blacksmithing). Well-developed mining techniques to get the ores and avoid cave-ins (even more necessary with only a few hundred people). Robust transportation networks to bring all the pieces together, some from half a continent away most likely. And the food production made possible by several agricultural revolutions so you can feed everybody (which includes some form of preserving, probably in glass jars).
Note that's just the physical side, nothing about social structure, experimental mentality, etc. As stated before, this is all horribly complicated, and you need pretty much everything to fall into place at the right time.
There's a joke that goes something like this: God and a scientist meet, and the scientist points out that now we can create life too, so we're equals of God. And God tells him to go ahead and try. The scientist reaches down for a handful of dirt and God says no, stop. First, before you create life from the dirt, you have to make the dirt.
You can't create your technological world without first creating the components that go into that.
Also, as an aside, just making a steam engine won't get you anything except a different mouth to feed. You need to build a whole different set of machines to harness that power. It's probably easier to build a waterwheel; all you'd need for that is timber.
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2020-07-05, 03:18 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Feb 2014
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Re: Absolute smallest viable size for a colony.
Neither the mayans, nor the hunter/gatherers survived. So there were not only not thriving, they were not even surviving (long term).
Of course, you could argue that we're the survivable society the hunter/gatherers built. But that's not true. Most hunter/gatherers died out, and a select few found a better way of doing things, and stopped being hunter/gatherers. Most specifically, all the other strains of homo are gone, because they were hunter/gatherers, and that's not viable in the long term.
A steam engine will drive a forge hammer, or an irrigation pump, or mining lift. Those aren't some form of advanced super science to our colonists.
And you seem to have built your pyramid upside down. You assume mining ore out of the mountains to get steel. I don't, I assume getting iron tools from other sources so I can mine the mountains. Basically, my best bet would be bog iron. Requires an iron rich bog to be possible, of course. But if the vikings could do it - so can we.
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2020-07-05, 06:50 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Feb 2007
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- Manchester, UK
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Re: Absolute smallest viable size for a colony.
The Mayans were flourishing just fine while they were left alone. They only stopped flourishing because a more technically advanced civilisation (namely the Spanish) decided they wanted what the Mayans had and weren't going to ask nicely for it. So they're a really, really bad example of a low-tech civilisation failing. to be honest.
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2020-07-05, 07:00 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Aug 2017
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- France
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Re: Absolute smallest viable size for a colony.
Homo sapiens as a species was comprised of hunter gatherers for around 150, 000 years (and strictly speaking some remote tribes might still actually be hunter gatherers) whil agriculture is roughly 9, 000 years old. The industrial revolution happened a couple centuries ago and is on a fast track to collapse due to environmental pressure. When it comes to long term viability, one of these lifestyles has a better track record than the others.
Forum Wisdom
Mage avatar by smutmulch & linklele.
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2020-07-05, 08:04 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Sep 2013
Re: Absolute smallest viable size for a colony.
A combined library containing everything from university medical, agriculture, mining, engineering, geology and chemistry departments, a centuries worth of medical supplies and food, prefabricated living quarters for 1000 people (to account for births), a medical facility, a sewage treatment plant, a blast furnace, foundry, oil refinery and heavy plant equipment.
And I've probably missed a load of stuff there as well.
A water wheel will power them as well, and is a heck of a lot easier to make. Although you are limited by geography as to where you site your mill. Windmills may also work, although prevailing wind conditions would limit their usefulness.
Irrigation pump? Diverting fresh waterways from higher ground, bucket lifts and archmedian screws to lift water would suffice.
But a forge hammer? Well, now you're back to needing a blast furnace to smelt the ore, and a foundry to melt the produced ingots and cast the parts.
And a mining lift - well, aside from the fact that you're not digging down very far with basic tools (horizontal mining into a cliff or mountain and following the ore veins would be much more practical), you're going to need rope. Which is a massively labour intensive production process.
If you have power source you can automate parts of it, but if you're relying on a steam engine, you're now in the catch 22 that you need iron ore and coal which don't tend to be close to the surface (and bog iron won't really produce enough material to make heavy machinery). You could burn wood, but that's starting to risk deforestation, destruction of building resources (you'll be making your houses from it) and possibly a food source, and affecting the local climate, soil erosion and other environmental effects.
There will be some deforestation for construction, cooking and heating, but using wood as an industrial power source is many times more destructive.
For a mine, ladders, ramps and mine carts would be a reasonable medium term solution.
As for a leather steam engine - no, sorry. Leather will lose any strength long before you get the water boiling, let alone to be at a suitable pressure to do anything useful with the steam.
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2020-07-05, 08:15 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Feb 2014
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Re: Absolute smallest viable size for a colony.
The mayans were collapsing for a long time before the spanish gave them the coup-de-grace. At least that's the story I heard: Crop rotation wasn't a thing, so they farmed themselves out of a biome, and were basically living in the ruins of their own former greatness when people with muskets arrived.
Not getting into a discussion about the mayans. Let's assume I'm wrong and they were doing absolutely fantastic when europeans arrived. Doesn't matter to the point I'm making: They were at the end of their arch.
Yes. 150.000 years of not going anywhere. That's not what we want to strive for, for our colony. Or so I'm guessing.
Any hunter/gatherer people is forever just one natural disaster away from extinction. Sure, our industrialised world is also making a mess of things, but we have a decent shot at fixing it. Hunter/gatherers have no option but to wait for one bad dice roll to end them.
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2020-07-05, 01:55 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Absolute smallest viable size for a colony.
I have high hopes for us. Humanity as a species truly needs this era to succeed.
I don't think the mayans ever thrived. There was a niche, which they filled and expanded until they had exploited it, and then they died. It was never going to last.
What I'm calling long term? Forever. That's what I'm calling long term. Until the heat death of the universe - or barring that, until the death of Sol.
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2020-07-05, 03:25 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Nov 2006
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Re: Absolute smallest viable size for a colony.
I am fairly confident that I could build a house for myself and 3 other people (with their help) in a couple days with nothing but axes and hand saws. It would be small and probably would leak, but then I haven't ever done it before; I just know the theory. If we were in a mild climate, I don't think it would matter that the houses were drafty and small. Likewise, I could survive a fair bit of time using a pit latrine (though I would rather not). Synthesizing either penicillin or aspirin with rudimentary tools is probably beyond anyone's capabilities, but simple soaps take lye, which is fairly easy to get if you know what you are doing.
I think the only real stumbling block to getting a self-sufficient colony set up within a year (and getting Kaptin Keen's industrial base within 5) is having good crops. Modern food crops are from (almost literally) all over the world. The cereal grains (rice, wheat, corn, oats, etc.) have been domesticated for several thousand years. If we dropped on an alien planet, we would need to know which plants weren't poisonous and what conditions they needed to grow.
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2020-07-05, 04:52 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Feb 2014
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Re: Absolute smallest viable size for a colony.
No, no no ... it's a time perspective. And maybe a question of what type of wager you're willing to take.
If you put your money on a slow, steady climb - hunter/gatherer, then farming, then small towns, then cities and industrialisation .. my point is that it's slow, and you risk losing the tech knowledge you had originally, making it not just slow, but a glacial, millennial crawl. A risk, by no means a certainty.
If you place your money on a rocket jump from neolithic to industrial in one generation, you suffer no risk of losing tech knowledge. Admittedly, you have a greater risk of failing entirely. But I'd argue, if your initial high wager fails, you can always fall back on neolithic hunter/gatherer if you must.
So .. basically, I'm just all in on the latter wager. Because I feel it's also the better wager, the greater chance of succes. Even if we imagine some unpleasant cost, like losing half our colonists to starvation. It'll be nothing compared to all the lives lost if the neolithic phase turns out to be 15000 years long (or whatever).
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2020-07-05, 07:13 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Nov 2006
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Re: Absolute smallest viable size for a colony.
Maya were an agricultural society who grew the plants local to their region (corn, tomatoes, etc.). I think the biggest problem with living at their level is that we don't know what sort of staple foods we will have available. If it is something like modern corn which produces 3 million calories per acre per year, then we are probably fine. If it is closer to cucumbers, then feeding anyone with agriculture is going to be a problem.
I imagine that our society will, once they have some sort of staple crop figured out, have everyone go help with the planting in the spring and the harvest in the fall. Without any mechanization or beasts of burden, planting will be significantly more resource intensive than modern farming counts on. Modeling your stuff on various american societies will probably help make sure that you at least aren't misjudging based on farmers using animals to pull their plows.
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2020-07-05, 11:22 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Feb 2013
Re: Absolute smallest viable size for a colony.
It isn't just planting and reaping. You will need to invest significant time weeding to remove competitors, irrigating and pruning, chasing out any animals trying to graze on your crop, any predators trying to get to the grazers and the rodents and other vermin infesting the crops (and your storage bins). And that's the general stuff, not even getting into the specifics of what that particular crop needs. There's a reason farmers either have lots of kids or lots of serfs (or both) to do the work.
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2020-07-06, 01:08 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Feb 2007
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Re: Absolute smallest viable size for a colony.
Certainly the Mayans weren't at their height when the Spanish arrived, but they most definitely still existed--in fact, they lasted a bit longer than the Aztecs did, with the latter's capital of Tenochtitlan being captured in 1521 but the final independent Mayan city lasting until 1697.
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2020-07-06, 01:49 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Jan 2007
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Re: Absolute smallest viable size for a colony.
And fertilizing. IF we want modern industrial grains, we need modern industrial fertilizers. And no one is going to set up Haber-Bosch with hand tools.
Resident Vancian Apologist
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2020-07-06, 10:09 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Feb 2014
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Re: Absolute smallest viable size for a colony.
Early agriculture was wildly ineffective (by comparison to modern) for a wide range of reasons. Primarily, proper methods hadn't been discovered yet. We wouldn't be looking at the same numbers as a medieval farming community - we'd be way more effective. Although, admittedly, until the steam engine starts working, we'd really need some oxen- or horse-equivalents to pull the plough.
But ... this is a difficult discussion to carry very far, because so much is guesswork or assumption - or both. For instance, yes, I'm clearly assuming we have the knowledge to 'tame' (or force labor) some sort of draft animal, and that such animals exist on our world. I'm assuming we'll work out a way to make a decent multi-shear plough. And so on.
But all of that doesn't change my most basic stance: We need to get our basic knowledge of industry put to work - or we will lose it. Maybe we won't. But I'm placing my money in accordance with my conviction that we very well might, and come hell and/or high water, we cannot afford to.
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2020-07-06, 10:18 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Absolute smallest viable size for a colony.
My memory is that, aside from possible andean civilizations, nobody in the Americas used draft animals to help with plowing, yet they had massive cities supported by agriculture. Does anybody have any data on how much of the Aztec population was tied up in food production? It would at least be a starting point for how much excess calories you can generate with hand tilling of the soil.
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2020-07-06, 10:58 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Absolute smallest viable size for a colony.
But the aztecs didn't have all the agricultural science we have. And provided suitable draft animals are present, it would be inexcusable to let them wander around being useless. We have a civilisation to build, and the less manpower we need for crops, the more we have for steam engines.
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2020-07-06, 11:49 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Feb 2013
Re: Absolute smallest viable size for a colony.
Yeah, well, bad news for you. You're going to spend years selectively breeding weeds before they become something akin to crops. The archaeological record is fragmented, but it looks like it took about 300 years in the Fertile Crescent once they got serious about it. Nile Valley never did pull it off themselves and had to get seeds from (probably) Uruk. And nobody alive today knows how to do that without a lab equipped with a genetic scanner.
Also, much of 'Aztec' agriculture was done by slave labor by various captive states, plus quite a bit of aquaponics, neither of which are things you come at as entry level farmers.
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2020-07-06, 12:05 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Nov 2006
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Re: Absolute smallest viable size for a colony.
Suitable draft animals take a few dozen generations to domesticate. Domesticating local animals is high on the list of things to do, but we shouldn't assume that we can do it before we start planting crops.
That said, our colonists won't be able to use most of our agricultural science since they won't have artificial fertilizers or deep knowledge of perfect growing conditions of their plants. If the alien overlord gives them a good list of edible plants, their growing season, and how much water and sun they need then the colonists can probably get to work on domestication within the first year.
Hyoi mentioned 30% of produce being taxed away from the farmers. I suspect that even that will be too high until we get some domesticated crops and animals going.
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2020-07-06, 12:43 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Absolute smallest viable size for a colony.
Nonsense ....
And nonsense ....
No, I'm sure you're both right, but since we don't have the time to wait, I propose we don't. I'm quite serious when I say forced labor. If the survival of the species is at stake, I'm not going to take any sort of half-measures. If I need to seriously hurt a few animals in order to make them provide muscle power, I will.
I can't do the same with crops (well, I could try, but for no sensible reason), but I'm reasonably convinced any concerted effort to grow crops will be a massive improvement over going out in nature and hoping to find something edible. Will crop yields increase over time? Without doubt. Does that mean that initial yields will be lower than walking out in the forest with a hope and a smile? Very much not likely.
I'm not trying to claim we'll have industrial era crop yields from day one - nor even any time soon.. But ... we're actually a rather brilliant species. We'll find a way to make it work, quite quick, I have no doubt. After all, we have the ultimate motivation of going extinct if we don't.
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2020-07-06, 02:40 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Feb 2013
Re: Absolute smallest viable size for a colony.
I see you're thinking about the current heavily-engineered for docility animals we have now. You won't have those. What you will be trying to use is the local equivalent of a Cape Buffalo. Which means you will be learning an expensive lesson in the truism that few things on Earth can stand up to a pissed-off grass eater. How expensive? Depends on how fast your under-nourished colonists can run for their lives.
Likewise, 21st Century botany is irrelevant, because we're working with plants we've been altering for thousands of years. You will be starting from scratch and working entirely by trial-and-error, with your bare hands. No computers, no labs, no microscopes, no nothing.
Too be blunt, the scenario we've been handed is less colonization and more survival of a shipwreck. Which means everybody dying even after turning to cannibalism is a distinct possibility.
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2020-07-06, 03:00 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Absolute smallest viable size for a colony.