Scott Solomon

I think what I try to argue is that's sort of the default that we should expect is that

If we're living for many generations in this kind of an extreme environment, natural selection will do its thing.

Mutation rates would be higher because of that radiation exposure.

And so basically the process that we normally think of as being generally pretty slow would actually happen faster.

Yeah, the idea of bottlenecks, I think this is an important concept that we have to think about if what we're trying to do is to create a long-term settlement.

Because we know that any time you take a large number of individuals and then you take a small number of them and put them somewhere else –

right you've gone through a population bottleneck that's you know basically it's like pouring i do this simulation in my classes sometimes where you take like a a bottle that's filled with like different colored gumballs right and you know how many different colors there are then you pour out a few of them and then you ask okay is the proportion of different colored gumballs the same as it was in the bottle at the starting point or is it different and of course it's going to be different it's never going to be exactly the same

So you take a small number of individuals from a large group, it's not going to be representative.

So that kind of reduction in population size that happens when you found a new population, it leads to rapid evolutionary change.

And we call that the founder effect.

in evolutionary biology because it's a well-known phenomenon.

Anytime, you know, a new population is founded, you tend to get a reduction of genetic diversity.

And whoever the individuals are that are the founders have this, like, really disproportionate effect on what happens later.

Like, they're really influential.

Oh, there's so many examples of how, you know, a science fiction author has already thought through a lot of the real challenges and the real consequences.

That's right.

Yeah.

I mean, you are in an island, right?

I mean, you're in a place where you can live, but you're surrounded by an inhospitable environment.

And so, yeah, I mean, that's an island.