A team of computational social scientists at George Mason University has found via simulations that 22 people is the minimum number needed to start a human colony on Mars. The group has posted a paper describing their simulation on the arXiv preprint server.
I can’t help but imagine the university took the “how many engineers, managers, etc. does it take to change a lightbulb” joke and turned it into a practical computer science problem for space colonization.
That’s a cool simulation tool and research like this will definitely help accelerate technology for habitating Mars.