Planning for Apocalypse: Minimum Viable Population

Basic survival planning for natural disasters is very important. But such disasters are relatively short-lived, with normal services being restored within a week or two at the most, typically. An existential risk--or extinction hazard--is different. When making contingency plans for an existential risk situation, it is important to take as many significant complications of large scale human extinction as possible. First, you must assure immediate survival of the extinction event, plentiful long-term food and water for a minimum of months, defense against ongoing human and environmental hazards, safe disposal and recycling of waste, etc. Consider those first-tier contingencies. Among second tier contingencies to be considered in planning, is minimum viable population (MVP).

MVP is the minimum number of healthy surviving individuals that would maximise long term survival of the population without excessive loss of genetic variability through genetic drift--without losing evolutionary potential. The safest estimate of MVP is approximately 10,000 individuals--roughly the number of humans supposed to survive the Toba catastrophe 75,000 years ago.

While no one can know what human genetic potential may have been lost during that existential bottleneck of human evolution, it is important to recognise that any human survivors of an existential hazard must deal with the founder effect.
When you are planning your large-scale survival bunker, your generation ship, your large underwater habitat, your seastead, your orbiting colony, or your moon colony--how many people should you plan to accommodate, to be sure humanity can perpetuate itself?

If all of the Lifeboat Foundation's preventive efforts to ward off existential risk fail, how many people need to make it through? While 10,000 may be enough, what if your project cannot save 10,000? In this simulation, a population of 500 was enough to prevent more than 1% genetic loss over 100 generations. If your project was allied with several other projects dispersed across a large geographical area, the survival of at least one or more groups would be more likely. In that situation, multiple groups of 50 to 100 individuals might be viable in the long term, should at least a few groups survive. Geographic dispersal into small groups should guarantee a greater genetic variety--making the entire set of survivors more genetically viable for a larger number of generations.Ideally, each survival location should contain a nucleus of trained individuals with sufficient knowledge to form a small university. In contrast to most modern universities and secondary schools, the post-survival university would emphasize practical knowledge and skills. Medical, surgical, agricultural, construction, machine fabrication and maintenance skills, air and water purification skills, and skills for defense against animals (including human), microbes, and natural disasters would be paramount. It is clear that in a practical survival situation, 90+ per cent of modern university professors would be worse than useless.

Location of your project should take into account the likely hazards as well as resources remaining in that location, after the extinction risk passes. Is there a natural barrier between your location and the most likely post-existential risk hazards? Will your water supply be clean or polluted by fallout, biohazard, etc? You will have to custom design your recovery supplies and equipment for what you are most likely to face on emergence.

If you are planning a modular project design, perfecting your modules will be a top priority. With such a perfected design, you have a greater ability to expand your project to meet your eventual personnel needs. If you are planning a single large or medium-sized project, you will need to begin immediately to size, and further specify the qualifications of your prospective list of projectees.

Technology for autonomous land vehicles, ships, and planes is developing rapidly. A forward planning apocalyptologist would provide for UAV scouting capability--perhaps using land and aerial UAVs to check if "the coast is clear" before committing to leave the relative safety of the project.

Farther in the future, iff you find yourself in the position of planning a generation ship, you might consider styling it after the O'Neill space colony:

The most common vision for generation ship design is to model it after an O'Neill colony, first proposed by Gerard O'Neill in the 1970s. This is basically a gigantic rotating cylinder or disk with an interstellar propulsion system attached. The cylinder may be from several hundred meters to several hundred kilometers in diameter, and rotated on its long axis to provide artificial gravity along its inner curved surface. The interior is sculpted and pressurized to provide an Earth-like environment, complete with forests, hills, streams, lakes, and so on. The inner environment is usually envisioned as being large enough to generate its own weather, supplemented and/or controlled by the ship's systems. On an orbiting O'Neill colony, light would be provided by gimbaled mirrors and enormous transparent sections of the hull. On an interstellar generation ship, illumination would have to be provided by large strips or nodes of lighting equipment recessed into the inner surface.

An O'Neill style generation ship could ultimately hold from 10,000 to several hundred thousand inhabitants, depending on its exact size and design. Source

With such a ship, you could easily accomodate an MVP. Otherwise, you might want to consider an embryo ship, with a large number (10,000+) of genetically healthy and diverse embryos. An alternative approach, to save resources, is the hibernations ship--where all but a skeleton crew are kept in suspended animation.

The number of issues that must be considered when facing an apocalypse is quite large. Some existential risks are simply not survivable, no matter your resources or planning. We are not concerned about those. We continue to develop our plans for the coming Society for Creative Apocalyptology (SCA), but we will be taking note of important issues in the meantime here at Al Fin.