https://chatgpt.com/s/t/_6abf28f8dfd88191bf9abad368a8f00b Worked for 11s Yes. If we deliberately model this more like Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey than like a conventional “Mars race,” the result becomes interesting: humanity expands by stable generational nodes, not by planting flags. I’d use Dunbar’s ~150 as the social-unit size, while noting that the exact scientific status of 150 is disputed; some evidence supports layered networks around 5–15–50–150, while other work finds no defensible single hard cognitive limit. Simulation rule: Clan → Settlement → Civilisation Think of 150 humans = one clan/node. But 150 people arriving on Mars doesn’t make Mars a stable civilisation. That’s just an expeditionary settlement. I gave each colony an Ancestors-style progression: Explore → Settle → Survive → Reproduce → Learn → Reinforce → Generation Leap → Expand A settlement has to reach three Dunbar-sized communities ≈ 450 people before I treat it as socially redundant. That means one group can suffer a serious failure without destroying the entire society. Then it must survive another three human generations without becoming dependent on replacement population from Earth. For the generation clock I used 27 years, close to the estimated 26.9-year average human generation interval over the last 250,000 years. So our crucial game mechanic becomes:
You cannot unlock the next planet until the previous settlement can raise its own grandchildren. That’s very different from simply asking how quickly rockets can get there. What counts as “Stable” My simulated colony has to demonstrate: Population 150 → 300 → 450+, organised into semi-autonomous ~150-person communities. Generational continuity Children born there → become adults → have children → train successors. Knowledge continuity Every critical role needs redundancy. You don’t have the doctor, reactor engineer or agronomist. Knowledge survives the death of any individual. Ecological continuity Air, water, food, waste and energy become substantially circular. This is particularly important because NASA already treats regenerative closed-loop life support as necessary for reducing resupply dependence on long-duration missions. Political continuity The settlement must survive leadership transitions without Earth having to impose governance. Industrial continuity Broken equipment increasingly becomes something the colony can diagnose, manufacture and replace locally. Only then: Settlement → Civilisation Node.
Simulation result I ran 200,000 stochastic histories. I allowed permanent lunar settlement to begin roughly 2040–2090 and Mars settlement roughly 2070–2180. Those are assumptions, not predictions. Mars is sufficiently distant that even current efficient trajectories take roughly 6–9 months, making independence substantially more important than for the Moon. Each 27-year generation had variable population growth plus a 5% probability of a significant demographic setback. The point at which both the Moon and Mars became stable multigenerational civilisation nodes came out approximately: Outcome Calendar year Fast but plausible ~2260 25th percentile ~2280 Median simulation ~2307 75th percentile ~2340 Slow/stressed ~2375 So under these assumptions: ≈ 280 years or roughly 10–11 human generations from today is the centre of the simulation. I would therefore put the useful range at approximately 230–350 years, rather than saying “humans become interplanetary in 20 years because somebody landed on Mars.”
The Ancestors interpretation And this produces a much more interesting technology tree. Imagine our present civilisation as the starting settlement. Generation 0 — Earth 🌍 Earth 8+ billion humans ↓ develop reusable space transport closed-loop habitats autonomous energy AI/robotic industry ↓ Generation 1–2 🌍 Earth ↕ 🌕 Lunar Outpost Initially the Moon is still basically an appendage of Earth. Then comes the first major Generation Leap. Children born off Earth inherit knowledge their parents had to discover. The Moon develops: 150 → 300 → 450 → 1,500 Now something profound happens. The Moon isn’t merely inhabited. It contains a human society capable of remembering how to remain lunar. Reinforcement unlocked: Extraterrestrial Civilisation I Then: 🌍 Earth ↕ 🌕 Moon ↕ 🔴 Mars Outpost Mars repeats the process. But it doesn’t have to repeat Earth’s entire technological history because — exactly like Ancestors — knowledge already reinforced by previous generations is inherited. So Mars receives metallurgy, medicine, computing, genetics, robotics and closed-loop ecology immediately. What it has to discover is Martian knowledge. How do Martian children develop? How do settlements respond psychologically to confinement? How do you manufacture using Martian feedstock? What agriculture works best? What social institutions survive a 20-minute communications delay? Those become Mars’s neuronal unlocks. Eventually:
Earth teaches Mars how to survive in space. Mars teaches the next colony how to survive without Earth. And that’s the mechanism that starts accelerating the simulation.
Dunbar’s Number becomes surprisingly powerful here Instead of trying to build one gigantic Martian city, imagine: 5 people — household/support group ↓ 15 — extended social group ↓ 50 — working community ↓ 150 — settlement ↓ 500 — settlement cluster ↓ 1,500 — regional community Those approximate layers actually resemble reported Dunbar-style social-network scaling. Then repeat it fractally: 150 people × 10 settlements = 1,500 1,500 × 10 regions = 15,000 15,000 × 10 territories = 150,000 The civilisation can therefore become enormous without requiring a human to socially comprehend millions of other humans. The higher level is a network of networks. And that changes the endpoint of your simulation.
The target isn’t Mars I think your actual victory condition should be:
Can humanity lose Earth without humanity becoming extinct? That is a far stronger definition of interplanetary civilisation. Imagine that around 2300: 🌍 Earth 🌕 Luna 🔴 Mars are each composed of hundreds or thousands of overlapping Dunbar-scale communities. Earth disappears from the network. Mars doesn’t collapse. The Moon doesn’t collapse. Human knowledge doesn’t collapse. Humans continue having children. Industry continues. The Moon and Mars continue communicating and trading. And, crucially: one of them can independently found another settlement. At that moment the species has crossed a genuine threshold: Planetary species Earth → colonies becomes Interplanetary species Civilisation → civilisation → civilisation That distinction makes the simulation’s ~2300 result much more meaningful than the date of the first Mars landing. And after that point, the Ancestors mechanic predicts something counterintuitive: expansion should accelerate rather than remain linear, because every successful civilisation node contributes discoveries and redundancy to the shared human knowledge network. The first independent world is extraordinarily difficult. The second is easier. The tenth is infrastructure. The hundredth becomes culture. So my first-pass simulation gives ~2307 (about 10–11 generations) as the median point for a genuinely stable Earth–Moon–Mars civilisation under our rules—not merely humans physically reaching other worlds. submitted by /u/SaiyanTurt1e
Originally posted by u/SaiyanTurt1e on r/ArtificialInteligence