I’d like to think that if we had a pristine Earth to live in that we could do better than to repeat the Industrial Revolution and its dependence on fossil fuels. Perhaps we could use a pebble-bed fission plant to produce relatively clean electricity from nuclear energy? Perhaps we’d have access to working fusion power?
Sounds like someone’s been reading The Long Earth, by Pratchett and Baxter.
Sounds like someone’s not been reading this thread.
Really big animals, including great cats and cave bears, seem to have been gone from Britain for forty thousand years - I’m unsure that humanity had the population density or means to have driven them to extinction. And tbh, if the parallel-earth Britain has them, I’ve no idea where you’d find anywhere safer, except for some small island somewhere with negligible resources and little possibility of ever getting off it.
I rather suspect that, especially in the second situation I posited where the portal is permanent, a new Earth full of pristine fossil fuel reserves would be seen as the whole point of colonising.
I think you have an exaggerated perception of the population pure H/G can support - it can support a lot of people if those people are mostly engaged in H/G activities. Possibly a few non-H/G elites too (shamans, etc) but I personally doubt it can sustain entire classes of non-subsistence-gathering workers. Even in the pre-contact PNW, no-one was a full-time totem maker or soapstone carver - they did these things in addition to H/G activities, AFAICT.
True, but for a much smaller population. Are you prepared to re-introduce infanticide, the usual historic H/G method of population control? Because without an industrial base, that’s the only reliable population control method you have, rubber not being native to the PNW.
I think simply modern knowledge of agriculture combined with modern seeds, modern ploughs and modern draught animals would go a long way to reducing the labour requirements. Just remembering what mouldboards and horse collars are remove you from pure serf labour to more like the 19th Century - and those farmers sustained populous cities like Victorian London, Paris and New York…
Is it an on/off portal (like a stargate), or a permanent gate i.e. can I run a pipeline through it?
Just a follow-up - basically, what I’m saying is that you’d be starting out with all the advantages of theBritish Agricultural Revolution, which historically freed up labour for the Industrial one.
Just producing the fuel for this would require an industrial base way beyond that for antibiotics. You can’t make precision ultracentifuges in a smithy. And the having to be near uranium sources is going to restrict your location much more than other options.
Don’t get me wrong, I’d be all for the new colony to work as sustainably as possible. I’d assume all the tech brought through would include solar and wind-power options. But you’re not going to smelt iron for tools without some form of carbon for reduction. Just not going to happen.
That was kind of the point I was making 
However even animals with no knowledge or fear of humans, when faced with a choice of two targets, one that at the least throws things, and makes startling unpredictable noises, and something that reacts by going “baaaaaa” and running away, will tend to attack the sheep. Unlike in the movies, where predators get determined that human this Shall Be Theirs, real predators want dinner that isn’t going to injure them if at all possible.
It would be extremely interesting to find out what animals had survived. I think we make a lot of assumptions about what wiped stuff out really.
From my understanding, H/Gs spend less than 20 hours per week gathering food – with modern methods (and modern food preparation and preservation), this leaves a ton of leisure time even if nearly everyone is engaged in H/G.
We’ll have a whole planet sans people. We don’t need population control – we can just expand.
You might be right – I’m just exploring alternatives… and especially, more environmentally friendly alternatives.
Skilled trades like metallurgy and the like aren’t leisure time activities, they’re full-time occupations.
You can’t expand out of the PNW without agriculture, it’s a very specific set of conditions that allow a large-population HG culture to live there (or all of NAm would have been HG-only, with PNW-levels of culture, no?)
And critters attacking the sheep or raiding the orchards is also significantly detrimental to the new colony. Indigenous megafauna is going to be a significant problem whichever way you cut it.
I wonder if that average time figure includes the amount of time people spend going hungry during bad winters or dry seasons when there is no food to find. :eek:
ETA: though iiandyiiii raises an interesting point: knowing what we know now, would a low-intensity mode of agriculture work? One where you primarily rely on gathering nuts and fruit from perennials and “hunt” (more like round up) semi-feral livestock?
That’s sort of what I’m trying to get at – that we may not need to replicate the intensive, environment-altering agriculture of our past to thrive.
If the goal is to keep the population very small, hunting and gathering might work. But if the goal is to expand the population over time, agriculture will be necessary. And either way, putting humans on this planet is going to alter the environment.
True, but our colonists would be starting out with a knowledge of what unbridled breeding can do; and how to avoid it- birth control, plus reducing infant mortality so one can be reasonably sure one’s 2+ children will survive. An interesting question: what would we limit the population to? I’d guess a billion or so as the number needed to support our current technology’s economy of scale, while not unduly burdening the planet. Probably the single most important thing our colonists should pass to their descendants would be that big does not equal infinite, and that you can hunt and fish the planet bare.
“Unbridled breeding”? There are only two thousand people on the entire (hypothetical) planet. A natural disaster, animal attack or infectious disease could practically wipe out the colony. We should be encouraging unbridled breeding. It will be many generations before birth control should even be allowed.
Only 19 generations to get to a population of a billion if you assume a doubling every generation (4 surviving children), about 4-500 years.
That seems unlikely; I doubt most people will have four or more children (given the limited resources) and there will be deaths due to epidemics, disasters and so forth.
Again, I must ask, are you going to re-introduce infanticide?