How long to rebuild civilization only from knowledge in people's heads?

An alien race visits us and without any communication they simultaneously destroy all human Artifacts. All machines , factories , buildings , tools , electronics, books etc just vanish. Farmland is left as farmland but all fences are gone. Domestic animals are still there . The alien race then departs again without a word.

Ok there would be mass starvation , banditry and anarchy buts let’s assume that there’s a well organized pocket of 100,000 people in an area with access to coal and iron reserves and other natural resources.
They also have abundant engineers and scientists in all relevant fields.

How long until they can reach steam age with railroads and telegraphs? How long to have gun powder weapons? How long to have diesel cars and trucks? How long to have computers and get back to where we are now?

Assume there is enough grunts to protect perimeters that the lawless situation outside the pocket is not slowing down progress.

I’ve often wondered a similar question:

A space ship with 1000 people of various occupations lands on a planet similar to earth, circa one million years ago, with animals, water, etc. After they remove a one-month supply of food, the ship is destroyed by a volcano. These people have nothing but the clothes on their back (which will smell shortly) and one months supply of food. They have no tools, no specific knowledge of what flora and fauna surround them, etc.

Will they survive? Will they be able to retain (or write down) their knowledge of how-to-bake-a-cake in the several years it takes them to find/grow the ingredients? Will they be able to teach their children mathematics, chemistry, physics, etc, by writing the textbooks after they learn how to make paper?

Unless they can eat the local flora and fauna and it supplies all the necessary vitamins, amino acids, etc. (which I’d presume is incredibly unlikely) they won’t be able to grow enough food in the month they have.

Since a nice, definitive answer is unlikely, let’s move this from General Questions to Great Debates.

samclem, Moderator

Gunpowder weapons? Assuming it’s a high priority, ideally under a month (wood cannons wouldn’t be good weapons, but they’d be better than nothing), IF a good source of, say, natural potassium nitrate and sulfur is immediately available and known.

It could take a year or several, allowing time to locate, harvest, extract and purify nitrate; and local conditions (drier is better for extraction and preparation, since your scenario suggests ample water for survival) – dnd your luck with finding local base materials [ceramics, glass or metal] to make useful tools/adjuncts to the process. That’d be the first vaguely cannon-capable batch. I’d expect the quality to improve over the following years

Metal smelting can be done in earthen pit furnaces. The first usable samples could be done in weeks, given a suitable nearby ore, but it would take quite a bit of time, development and substantial use of local wood -> charcoal before it could be produced in significant amounts, and I wouldn’t take an ample local wood supply for granted if I had to depend my perimeter

Similar concerns and issues arise with glass and ceramics, though you should be able to get crude clay pots in weeks, assuming the season is suitable.

I’ve made both gunpowder and metal from ore in small amounts, for the heck of it, but I’ve never prospected for ore or synthesized suitable nitrates from nature. I’ve extracted and synthesized other nitrates, but not sodium or potassium, though I understand potassium nitrate can be (and was) extracted from natural guano, and have some idea of the chemistry to extract it, I have no idea how many of the intermediates would be independent challenges

Potassium hydroxide [once known as caustic potash] is easily produced by boiling wood ash. This or sodium hydroxide (lye from burned seaweed) was then boiled with rendered fats to produce homemade soaps well into the 20th century. It should be good enough to be a base material for crude potassium nitrate extraction or synthesis. As far as my limited knowledge goes, Sulfur would have to be mined to acquire sufficient quantities with suitable effort.

The real limiting factor to many advances would be immediately available local materials.

For example, many early cultures were able to purify (often by heat and beat) meteoric or bog iron, but couldn’t or didn’t smelt it. They may have made a few iron artifacts, but not many. We could shortcut a lot of development time by with simple undergraduate chemistry and geology knowledge of magnetism, smelting, copper, tin (hence bronze) and their ores etc. but ultimately I would be surprised if it took years to develop the skills to prospect and assess surface ores. I don’t think a substantial body of people still have those skills today.

– but what’s a few years, really? Realistically, it would be hard for me to assure too much in under a year (except survival basics) because nature has her own schedule. You won’t be able to effectively prospect for ore under thick snow; you may have to wait for dry or warm weather to tan leather; You’ll only have fairly green wood at first (it can take years to dry by storage) etc.

Here’s how I see the relevant classes of technology, but where a given technology falls on this scale may be heavily location-dependent

“Class 0” would be woodcraft and other basic survival skills – which would include a LOT of things, if you want to feed, clothe and shelter your ample supply of grunts through the winter (assuming your winters are anything like ours) The population of your community is a huge liability that human communities didn’t have historically. You’d almost inevitably die down to whatever level you can sustain, though our knowledge of hygiene would help a lot.

“Class I” would be mostly resource limited, because basic science would suffice, and should be achievable in a year, maybe two, in demonstration quantities, if local resources are found. If you don’t have a decent local source of (probably mined) sulfur, you can forget gunpowder; without iron ore, you might only find enough iron for compasses or iron-harvesting magnets (there’s reasonably pure iron dust on the ground all around us, but even with very good magnets, it would take a lot of time and manpower to gather an axe-worth)

“Class II” would require redevelopment of basic skills and might be resource-dependent as well. This could take up to a decade to be produced in useful qualities or properties. You can learn to “flint knap” in weeks, if you have sufficient local flint, but it takes years to be good. You can produce crude clay ceramics in weeks, but your products would continue to improve for many years or even decades, as you experiment with techniques and local materials.

Class III? That might be “requires infrastructure” – e.g. a water-driven mill for flour. Without metal, this could be built with wood-peg technology, but it’d take time to develop the needed tools and skills, Ultimately, that project may not be suitable until metals are available, because you have better ways to use your time (and develop the needed skills/resources)

Class IV might be “fit and finish” – using tools and materials to make better tools and materials. I guess that’s a sort of infrastructure and skill problem, but I perceive it differently, because a knowledge of historical techniques might not help that much with gruntwork infrastructure like digging canals or felling trees without adequate metal, but it could help you zip to the Enlightenment or even the late Victorian era in a single human lifetime

To clarify the OP, lets say that they do have access to close to surface iron, coal and sulphur deposits as well as copper/tin/lead etc and it’s a mild climate similar to southern california. And lets say it’s a nice easily defendable river valley with a river that would be fine for watermills and hydropower.

Let’s also assume that the population includes enough “live history” re-enacters and SCA types that have knowledge of blacksmithing etc and can immediately start to pass their skills to others. Same goes with woodcraft, animal hunsbandry, survival skills etc. Let’s say they send teams out into the badlands to find people with useful skills and bring them back so there’s no shortage of skills whatsoever.

I’d imagine you could reach steam age within 15 years? Any bottlenecks that might prevent that?

If you mean “could we build a demonstrator steam engine?” I’d vote definitely yes.

If you mean “could some key community functions” be steam powered? Yeah, I could buy that, but watermills can do what a steam engine can, such as generating electricity – except in transportation (a locomotive firebox is far more portable than a river). Steam-powered factories were more expensive to run, but for some purposes (e.g. refining ore), running a fueled factory near a resource was more economical than transporting the raw resource.

If you mean a “steam powered society”, with the creature comforts of that era, and an equal rate of per capita resource consumption: most folks didn’t live that well, and the Steam engine mostly impacted daily life via the goods it made possible to produce/transport, and its impact on employment and population distribution. In the Twentieth century, steam drives most of our electrical generators, but that’s turbines, not engines. Steam-driven presses, and the like, might be useful, for small scale fabrication, but what are you seeing them mass-producing? The more I think about it, the less central steam engines (and other modern tech) might be when you don’t have places to go, goods to transport, wars to fight etc.

The resulting world may be different from ours, but not because of technological capacity

A very similar recent thread

There are several crucial assumptions different in my question which make it quite different.

Less than ten years. Knowing that something is possible is the key. Reverse engineering is easy given enough manpower to focus on the basics. modern methods would allow us to produce food quickly, housing, sanitation and hygiene are easy to figure out now. You wouldn’t have cars and computers by that time, but you damn sure would have hydro electricity, gunpowder, and the ability to begin production on the infrastructure of more complicated products.

Missed the edit. I want to clarify: Less than ten years to early industrial/steam age. After that perhaps another 10 to 20 to get to the modern age depending heavily upon the thrust of technology. That doesn’t mean that we will have all those things in the amounts that we have now. We won’t but the tech will exist again.

Isn’t one of the problems in such a scenario that easily accessible ores and fuel oils have already been consumed? (It isn’t clear from OP whether we’d still have the metal scraps from the “destroyed artifacts.”)

Yes and no. There’s plenty of near surface coal still available. Ok so lets say that with their magic technology they put all the iron and other minerals from the destroyed artifacts back into the ground near surface (and collapse all our mine shafts).

The pocket probably wouldn’t have oil available near the surface, but we now have biodiesel as an alternative, or coal can be turned to gasoline as well.

Why would they go for the steam age at all. It’s a stopgap - with the resources described, they would go straight to the Electrical age for transport and industry. Steam would be useful only in as much as most electrical power stations (coal, gas and nuclear) are still steam plants. But for your trains, for telecoms etc, you’d go for electrical straight away. And you’d skip telegraphs and go for phones.

And why gunpowder? Electricity gives us plentiful nitric acid and that is one step away from guncotton. Add a source of sulphide for sulphuric acid and nitroglycerin is in play too. Those two give us cordite, but even just guncotton on its own is a good smokeless powder.

I’d say with focused effort, 50 years could bring us up to early modern in some regards - electricity for lighting, heat, telephone etc, a valley-length tram system, bio-diesel for farming tractors and the like (or run them off electricity, not the most efficient but it’s how big mine trucks are run). But you’re not getting valley-wide steam age in 15 years - it’ll take too long just to set up precise-enough toolshops from scratch. And you’re not getting (modern) computers for another 50 at least.

In that other thread, I argued that you can get from scratch to a (single) steel knife in a month. But an entire steam age rests on a pyramid of functioning farms and steel production facilities etc. You have to build that base up, regardless of what people actually know. They may know how to build machines and foundries, but even there, it still takes time to do.

Ah–the collapse of the mine shafts was something I was wondering about. I figured that they weren’t really a human artifact and so they’d remain. With them gone, things just got more difficult.

A related question: what happens to roads? The asphalt and substructure are gone, of course, but is bare earth left in their place, or do the aliens regrow forests in their place? If the farmland is analogous, then you end up with very primitive roads, which greatly facilitates trade and infrastructure; if the mine shafts are analogous, then you have a tremendous work project to do to get even basic roads put back in place.

For that matter, are you sure the aliens treat mine shafts and farmland so differently? It seems to me like the scenario would be more consistent if they were treated the same.

My guess would be thousands of years. 99.9% of humanity dies and the rest are reduced to hunter gatherers if they are lucky. Remember that if the technology is destroyed, then all our food supplies are rotting. People can live on already planted crops in some areas, but how much food can you raise if your most advanced agricultural tool is a pointy stick, assuming you can make a pointy stick.

Most of you can’t wrap your mind starting with no technology at all. There is a huge difference between starting with no technology at all and having a knife.

The interesting question is whether we can reinvent writing before most of our knowledge dies of old age. The best bet is probably papyrus.

well if all the metal and wooden supports suddenly disappear then wouldn’t most mine shafts collapse? If it can survive without any supports then yes the mine shaft would still be there.

Yes, there would be a cleared path with bare dirt left behind.

In that case, it should take less than 200 years, assuming adequate labor supply (i.e., enough people to farm and hunt while the scientists direct the factory workers). The industrial revolution hasn’t been much longer than that, and we have a big knowledge advantage over 19th centuryish people.

Ah, good point. My guess is that they would partially, even mostly, collapse–but recovering them would be far easier than digging them from scratch. That would be a major advantage.

Y’all can count on me. I know all of the porn. All of it.