[nhnifong]

How many people does it take to maintain out current level of technological civilization? Well I think the size and grandeur of a civilization depends on how abundant the resources are (mostly). An then on how efficiently we extract and use those resources. Improving efficiency is a problem of controlling a complex network of causality, which requires... I'm guessing... a even more complex network to model it. I would say "how densely connected would our civilization have to be.." A large number of people can tackle the control problem better than a small number of people, and people with telecommunications devices can tackle it even better. However, I think that our current level of technological development requires a lot of overhead, because it takes so many engineer to make all those telecommunications devices work, but the payoff is that we can educate ourselves on how to do just about anything, better than we could by hard trial and error, and the occasional face-to-face conversation.