Weird Harold wrote:[Again, the answer is obvious: Every cubic meter used for stealth equipment is a cubic meter that can't be used for a colonist or supplies
But if that was a limit, why did they feel like they needed 8 million colonists? Was it just that that was the highest number of people they thought they could reasonably save given the ships available?
How does that help the chances of survival more than having 80,000 colonists? That would still be enough to scatter across a planet to avoid being wiped out by a local disaster, at a low-infrastructure tech level that doesn't require huge industrial bases or anything (say, 2 cities of ~10000 people, 10 big towns of ~1000 people, 250 villages of ~200 people).
I think 80,000 people would be far more than enough to carry on and support all the skills needed for a pre-industrial society; a few hundred might be enough, and a few thousand almost certainly would be.
And there wouldn't be any genetic issue, given how low-genetic-diversity humans are already; even a few hundred people would probably be plenty, especially if you included people from different regions so local bad recessives were less likely to be shared. (Some suggest that all Native Americans come from a founder population of <100 people.)
In fact, the island of Pingelap repopulated from only 20 people over two centuries ago; they did end up with a high incidence of colorblindness, but nothing really crippling. Still, there might be effects farther down the line... but you wouldn't need anything even remotely on the scale of 8 million.