[bmcusick]

Interesting discussion, but not very forward-thinking on the biology side. As a simple critique, they claim that 32 crew would result in too much inbreeding, but what about IVF? There's no reason all the children have to be the full children of the crew. They could put sperm and egg cells from thousands of donors into deep freeze before leaving.

There's also no discussion of life extension, which seems more near term than interstellar starcraft.

Anyway, we will probably have good data on the optimal size of asteroid colonies long before interstellar colonization is a live issue.

[drb91]

> There's also no discussion of life extension, which seems more near term than interstellar starcraft.

So long as we’re comparing unknown unknowns, we might as well throw fusion and GAI in there.