(May 13, 2013 at 5:54 pm)Rhythm Wrote: It's actually a tough number to pin down and depends upon the genetics of the people involved. Better distribution- less people required. We got interested in it again as we considered "space colonies".
On a related note, taking the american indians and their genetics into account - some reserachers have suggested that it could have been as low as 70 in their case..
http://www.livescience.com/289-north-ame...ludes.html
It makes more sense to ship large consignment of frozen eggs and sperms, or embryos, along with very few live astronauts to the space colonie to ensure proper genetic variation in the next generation, rather than laboriously shipping large numbers of hungry, oxygen and water consuming, disease carrying breeding pairs to do the same.
