77
How many people would a generation ship need to have for inbreeding to not be an issue?
(lemmy.blahaj.zone)
this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2025
77 points (100.0% liked)
No Stupid Questions
44085 readers
1698 users here now
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here. This includes using AI responses and summaries.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
This has been modeled. Though I don't have any references at hand, this is what I remember.
If you want to allow people to choose mates and breed normally, you'd need at least 3000 people, 4 to 5000 would be better.
If you are strictly controlling genomes and breeding pairs, ignoring monogamy and social norms. You might be able to get away with 100 if you selected for maximum initial genetic diversity. But 200 would be easier.
In a Sci fi context where we have generation ships, I would add frozen sperm/eggs to the equation and even artificial womb. In like a 100kg package you can store a lot of genetic material. That's pretty fucked up (and a nice writing prompt) but definitely doable.
At this point the question is also cultural what is the minimum amount of person to keep a population able to maintain a large ship over centuries and produce enough food
i don't think it's that fucked up to have everyone with a womb be a surrogate mother, you'd just have to select people who are okay with it. There's nothing wrong with being a surrogate, it's basically just adoption except you get to give birth to the child.
Now kith
You can read that as the meme reference and the dictionary meaning of relations.
What if you went full eugenics and started out with a bunch of hot chicks?
That low end of 100 would be with full eugenics. Selecting for genetic diversity, not for "hotness".
If you were selecting for that, it would mean less genetic diversity, you might start seeing problems within 5 generations. But that's just me speculating.
Look, I'm not a doctor, I just need to know if there's gonna be hot space chicks.
Duh. Why else go to space?
Thanks that's useful. My guess (WAG), on orders of magnitude was that 1000 would be too small, but 10,000 might be enough.