Gene Pool

ok, I understand, and that would be the probable outcome.
However, in my scenerio, the asian woman only has children with 1/2 the men.
Her daughters have children with the other half of the men.
Their daughters (asian's grandkids) are 1/4 asian, and each one has a different father.
If they bred with the son's of the first generation, well that would be adding back in more asian, but at least you could get the male diversity from a area that hadn't been mixed yet.

Yeah, we need more wimmin.

I'm making a note to read that book (white plague)

In my never humble opinion, all post-apocalyptic novels suffer from the author's failure to consider just how interdependent modern technological society is. The Postsman is one of the better ones because it assumes that those who survive do so by abandoning most modern technology. Guns and ammo "keep" for a long time, so those become extremely valuable artifacts, but nearly everything else has to literally revert to horse and buggy days technology. The only really mobile folks are those who ride horses or hitch them to wagons. You're just not going to be able to keep automobiles running, gasoline or diesel, because they're high maintenance, and you can't just wing it on the maintenance. When parts break down, how do you replace them? After all the auto parts stores have been looted, where do you get a new water pump? A lot of heavy equipment needs ball and roller bearing and lubricating oil. Where do you get that? Machine tools for making precision parts like ball and roller bearings are very sensitive machines, very high maintenance, and built to very fine tolerances. When the USAAF bombed Schweinfurt in WWII, they grossly underestimated the damage they had done. Machine tools in buildings which were not hit by the bombs were damaged by concussion from bombs hitting other buildings, or the sprinkler systems going off from small fires which started nearby. So, even if you had a tool and die man, what does he work with? How long before all the machine tool makers are out of business? Essentially, no matter the technological sophistication of the survivors, they're going to have to revert to horse power, actual, literal horse power, and that creates a whole new class of problems. You need cartwrights or wainwrights, and those are specialized skills which few people possess these days. Your going to need people who can fabricate parts from iron and from leather, and those are also skills which few people possess. The steel we use is made in large quantities using huge amounts of electricity and interdependent divisions of labor, so you can figure that steel is going to have to be replaced by cruder examples of iron technology. If you're making iron from iron ore, or from reclaiming scrap, and the electrical grid is broken down, then you'll nead coke or charcoal to get the high temperatures needed. So, if you don't have someone who is expert in charcoal burning (making coke is essentially the same process, except that you start with coal instead of wood), how do you get that? If you don't have anyone expert in charcoal burning, somebody is going to have to learn how to do it, and you'll have to hope that they don't burn down the woods learning how to do it.

Even to drop back just a few centuries will still require a very knowledgeable, highly interdependent, division of labor social structure. Blacksmiths we got--but, once again, they're dependent on electricity or propane, and would have to replace it with charcoal or coke, which leads right back to the problem of producing those without burning down the woods. (Since coke is made from coal, you'll have the added problem of mining coal, which ain't no walk in the park, while most of the easily available surface coal has already been gobbled up.)

Any truly realistic post apocalyptic novel is going to have to be able to imagine a society limping along, trying to catch up the the eighteenth century. You're going to have to assume no electrical generation (except small local affairs, maintained at great social and material cost), no steel, no plastic, no rubber or synthetic substitute, no good lubricating oils, absolutely no synthetic fibers (that's right folks, it's back to sweaty, scratchy, ugly wool garments badly woven on clumsy hand looms) or even good quality cotton. Many inventions we take for granted will have to be re-invented, and stoop labor will reign supreme once more. Who's going to pick the cotton? Who's going to gin it? Who's going to spin and who's going to weave it?

Questions, questions, questions.

Im concerned about the genetic viability of the foundation colony but I think that learning(or relearning) the technology would make the really great story or at least some of the back stories. I thin that a diesel economy is actually simpler than keeping livestock and re learning horsey tech. Horses are tricky and if you change their diets quickly they DIE on you. They are subject to foot rot, worms, other nasty diseases and trauma (often self inflicted) Horses will eat a fence and develop bowel lacerations.
A diesel economy involves mechanical skills that are either in the core group or must be learned by one of the "Foundies" Learning to make diesel is a sub plot that can be quite readable and something to anticipate the outcome of. Diesel donkey engines and mid sized trucks as well as big rigs could act as areinstitution of an electric grid, or even air conditioning and industrial regrigeration. Refrigeration could revert back to AMMONIA base rather than freons and organics. Its easy to learn and not out of any groups skill set.
As far as iron manufacture, wed be relearning the technique of making "Iron bloomery" just like the dawn of the iron age. Wood fired Iron bloomeries were quite common to produce masses of crappy iron which could then be refired and accidentally (or purposely) made into steel by all the carbon. ALL the book resources will be available (unless all the structures are detroyed). SO relearning higher tech skills will be interesting to the whole story line.

Is our group of founders gonna be fixed in their location or nomadic? If fixed, they wopuld send out "scrounge trucks" based upon basic needs . I think the adaptation to the new conditions wont be as traumatic as we may think. Im willing to say that , given any group of say ten or more, we have many of the tech skills that can be invaluable to re establ;ishing a more modern civilization.

Too bad that, as the population dwindles, some of the key technology skills may be lost so, maybe, there has to be a general "toolkit" of which everyone becomes familiarized.

Fun Exercise, Im a terrible writer but a hell of an idea guy so Ill help out as a researcher. Good fun chai

One thing which occured to me after i had submited my last post was that what you'd want is a special forces team to raid university libraries before "acts of god" burned them down. Then you'd need to build a good stockade as place to preserve your library. The Pacific Northwest would be a good locale--lots of timber. Maybe that's why Brin set The Postman there.

I concur.
I don't think adaptation would be the biggest problem.

We can't assume the technology we have is one that should be imitated. As is, it was put together piecemeal. Now we'd have a clean slate, plus the know how.

Re the libraries....If we're gonna use them as a base, we better get all those bloated corpses out of there ASAP

Re not knowing where the different books are....I can already tell you where all the gardening, sewing, cooking, building stuff is. I know where books on healthcare and medicine are also.

Don't need no stinkin' card catalogue, I got eyes.

I think early on the group has to decide where to live. They need good access to water, arable land and good housing. It wouldn't be too hard to harness water power for small projects and irrigation. It would be a pretty tough life, but if you could get to the right place you might be able to hold it together. Not really relevant, but Lucifer's Hammer about the impact on society of a large meteor strike covers some of this.

I worry about the social conditions. Young women would become nothing but brood mares. No need to educate them other than in child care or teach them hunting or farming skills since they are too valuable to risk in accidents. They have no say in who their spouses are and become essentially sex workers until they are pregnant. Repeated pregnancies close together devestate their health and complications from pregnancy kill them young. It's not a good picture overall. One way to compensate for that would be to have the young women become the repository of knowledge and the teachers. Their job would be to read the books, build the curriculum and teach the children. That gives them a higher social position than "brood mare". I think there would also be all sorts of rituals that would arise around sex for reproduction purposes (see Handmaid's Tale) - as opposed to the wild and crazy old lady sex you proposed earlier.

Another Stephen King novel - The Stand also fits this sort of premise. Remember a disease escapes the CDC or some such place that kills over 90% of the population - only a very small percentage is immunine thus only allowing a small popluation to survive.

[img]If only the older men can mate with the fertile females, we could keep the younger men happy[/img]

I like the dirty old lady premise. In this case, I think I'd rather be the dirty old lady as it wouldn't be as much fun to reproduce with old guys and they have to be pregnant all the time.

We must use the Dewey decimal system or chaos will ensue.

Unbeknowst to the others, another fertile female (of the best possible height, 5'2"), her ex-marine husband and their 2 young daughters had been in the family restroom when "The Occurence" occured. They had enough clorinated water on them to survive.

the ex-marine immediately starts causing problems by not only keeping the fertile female from doing her part to save the world, but by also announcing "my daughters will never mate with ANYONE! NEVER!"

your question gives me something to think about when I split wood.

you started it in Austin of God's state of Texas, but...

where would the best place be to try and restart civilization?

Surely there would be a better combination of climate and resources...

yeah - I think you got that one down quite well.

Ok, we've found the leader of our special forces library team.
He's just been called in from retirement to serve what's left of his country in their hour of need. Off to K-state with him, to collect agricultural knowledge.

In the US, it would be hard to beat southern California, say around San Diego. Temperate weather year round, no hurricanes, just about everything grows there. Water is a little short but not for a small population.