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The Last Man on Earth
starkaos
Member Posts: 11,556 Arc User
Just watched the Last Man on Earth series premiere and it brought up a few interesting ideas. The premise is the year is 2021 and everyone, but one man died due to a virus. Of course, the series would get boring after a while with only one character in the entire series so they introduce a woman.
The whole concept of laws doesn't make sense if there is only a couple of people on earth. After all, why stop at a stop sign when there is absolutely no chance of any traffic happening. Marriage is also pointless since there is no need for a social contract that states hands off my woman or man.
Although the most interesting concept is how long can the human race survive if there is only one man. Assuming the last man is competent at survival and there is one female, then the grandchildren will be a bunch of inbreds. How long can the human race survive if everyone is inbred? Of course, the series is the Last Man on Earth and if the creators keep true to that premise, then they could keep on bringing in more women. So how many women are required for the human race to survive provided all forms of advanced technology like cryobanks and advanced medical equipment are inoperational.
The whole concept of laws doesn't make sense if there is only a couple of people on earth. After all, why stop at a stop sign when there is absolutely no chance of any traffic happening. Marriage is also pointless since there is no need for a social contract that states hands off my woman or man.
Although the most interesting concept is how long can the human race survive if there is only one man. Assuming the last man is competent at survival and there is one female, then the grandchildren will be a bunch of inbreds. How long can the human race survive if everyone is inbred? Of course, the series is the Last Man on Earth and if the creators keep true to that premise, then they could keep on bringing in more women. So how many women are required for the human race to survive provided all forms of advanced technology like cryobanks and advanced medical equipment are inoperational.
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1 man 1 woman probably no more that 3 generations before serious anomalies start to show up.
1 man 5 women
Of we assume 2 kids per female and one of each gender then you end up with 10 breeding pairs.
Since they are all half siblings then their kids would share 1/4 of the same DNA. This means you could possibly go on indefinitely as long as you made sure any future pairings were no closer than 1st cousins.
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Occidere populo et effercio confractus
Not so sure about that. It is possible that each generation would contain 50% of the original male's DNA. Better than the 1 man 1 woman scenario, but it will likely cause some problems down the road.
Playing the devil's advocate (God's advocate?) for a moment, if Adam and Eve were genetically pure and perfect in every way (God looked and saw that it was good) you could get several generations down the line before mutations start to set in. By then you'd have a broad enough genetic stock (they were fruitful and multiplied) that inbreeding would no longer be a serious issue.
To answer the OP, humanity will survive until the show gets cancelled. (Probably after the first season.)
...Oh, baby, you know, I've really got to leave you / Oh, I can hear it callin 'me / I said don't you hear it callin' me the way it used to do?...
- Anne Bredon
Been around since Dec 2010 on STO and bought LTS in Apr 2013 for STO.
Trust you Crash to come up with the post that makes me LOL!
Back to the topic, I read an article a few years ago when they found the skeleton of one of the earliest forms of human kind that they postulated that, at the time, the entire human race we have today came from 2 males and 5 females.
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The series title might be deliberately misleading. How does he know he is the last man standing? He physically cannot cover the whole planet in a search to verify. So he believes he is the last. This assumes the writers have not come up with some crazy plot point to "confirm" beyond doubt he is the last. Or they might just surprise him and the audience at some point with a few other survivors.
So why hold to the stoplight? I'd probably do the "California Crawl" as we jokingly refer to it around here. Keep moving slowly through the interchange, just in the happenstance that any human I've not learned was still alive suddenly was driving the other road. There's no ambulance for that accident.
The scenario presented would necessitate that any humans born would, in addition to being farmers/survivalists need to become geneticists using whatever training materials handy so that they could hopefully someday fix genetic code. Also keep in mind that there's a possibility of previously harvested reproductive cells still cryogenically viable in labs somewhere. If they could be kept viable and the processes rediscovered through writings and such, surviving women could carry children of different genetic ancestry.
This is something most apocalypse scenarios wipe away either by destroying the infrastructure or creating some major background threat so that every action becomes one of necessity, norms and rules go away.
But here there's no particular danger. And society wasn't violently wiped out around him, it just kind of faded away - fast enough that everything's still intact, but slow enough that he's not surrounded by gruesome unburied death. You don't stop obeying stop lights because 50% of the other drivers are dead, or when it's 75%, and even when it's 90% there's still other cars on the road. Without a sudden all/nothing transition, his automatic habits are just still in effect.
I always took the sections in the Qu'ran which say about taking multiple wives (but no more than five) was referring to taking them as additional advisors/guidance, and given the prohibition on certain women (which I think first cousins are excluded from) then that 1:5 ratio makes sense on another level :cool: Awesome when learning new about one's faith in unexpected ways :cool: