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Notes -
One of the biggest problems you're going to run into is inbreeding in a few generations. Four men and four women means people will have to start mating with their second cousins after three generations. This won't be a serious problem right away, but repeating this for several generations is not good. Eight people is well below the required effective population size for repopulating the earth.
You don't want an imbalance between men and women because that would result in a more inbred population. You also want everyone to have as many children as possible, especially in the first few generations.
You definitely want the pregnant woman, because that's an extra person. But that means you don't want the woman's husband, because that would be a huge hit to the effective population size.
The gay man could have children, but that seems like a risk. He may not want to sleep with any woman.
The 33 year old woman is at risk of being infertile and is not likely to have very many children.
We don't know the sex of the 60 year old, but even if it is a man, the sperm quality will be low.
I'd probably lose those four, but the Hispanic clergyman could be a problem if he is Catholic and refuses to have children. The famous novelist might also be a middle aged or older woman, and the disability could be something that interferes with reproduction. So, it might be a good idea to replace one or both of them with the gay man or the 33 year old woman.
Hmmm... I wonder whether you could also make use of time to enforce genetic diversity. Let's say you start with seven men and one women, and all seven men (including the one who "marries" the woman) use sperm donation to preserve their sperm indefinitely.
You could instead have a bunch of kids between the first couple, then the 2nd generation of women all have kids using the 2nd man's sperm, and so on for seven generations. Then the 8th generation returns to using the first guy's DNA, which at that point is 7 generations removed and so I don't think liable to cause problems.
Of course this is unworkable for all sorts of other reasons but I thiiink it would lead to more genetic diversity, right?
If you can preserve sperm, why not bring eight women and take the sperm for hundreds of men?
...Yeah good point.
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