ok, so lets say in the first two weeks they find an iron ore deposit in a partially collapsed mineshaft which can be worked with wooden and stone tools.
How soon to be making steel axes, knives and ploughs at a rate of of a couple of dozen a day? Assume they have 5 or 6 skilled blacksmiths. Possible within two months?
I think that people are stunningly incredibly naive about this. So this 100,000 people has scientists and engineers. Who cares. Their knowledge is useless. The skills that you need to survive starting with absolutely nothing are incredibly rare in modern society. Let’s consider the steam engine. Sure you and I have a vague idea of how it works, kinda. But how many of us actually really honestly know? And suppose one of us studied steam power as a hobby and can sketch out a picture of a fully functional steam engine with all the meaningful parts of it that took its actual inventors decades of trial and error to perfect. So, what does it need?
Metal. How do we get metal? Who here can recognize metal deposits in the soil? Who here knows how to make furnaces of the appropriate type to make iron and steel? And how are we going to construct those furnaces?
So we have our metal. We also need a chain of ever-improving blacksmithing techniques and technologies, starting with nothing, and working our way up to bellows, and then someone has to build a stamping machine to make the sheet metal we need for the steam engine, etc.
Do we also need lubricating oil? Rubber gaskets? How the hell are we going to get rubber?
And then there are all the tools you need for all of the above. And probably paper and ink to draft plans, etc. Who here actually knows how to make paper? Soap? Etc?
Sure, a reasonably scientifically knowledgeable person from modern times who went back to 1600 or so would have an OFF chance of jump starting the industrial revolution, if they could get someone to take them seriously, but much as we might mock the year 1600 it had an enormous infrastructure already in place for gathering and processing raw materials from all across the globe via trade. Each of the steps up to that infrastructure requires incredible amounts of very specialized knowledge that modern average people, even average scientists and engineers, just don’t have.
And how are you going to be spending time performing all those experiments when you have to be surviving? That means food, water, shelter, protection from hostile animals, protection from germs, not eating poisonous things, and protection from harsh winters. Oh, and protection from the other 8 billion humans on earth who are starving to death. Each one of those things, starting from absolute zero, requires knowledge and techniques that we just. Don’t. Have.
No pots. No knives. No string. No metal hooks. No sewing needles. No clay unless you can figure out how to get it and process it and use it, etc…
It’s bloody close to impossible without an absolute perfect storm of circumstances involving:
-A whole bunch of young fit people with very specialized survival and primitive technology knowledge
-Who all live in a place with easy access to the necessary raw materials
-With a nice climate
-And no predators
-And plentiful food, or access to the necessary prerequisites
-And they all avoid dying of disease or in childbirth
-And leadership somehow capable of bringing these people together, protecting them, and driving them to work unbelievably hard to use and pass on these skills
I would tend to agree. The knowledge would be lost faster than people could make use of it.
Like for example an army base in in a river valley in southern california or say western australia ranges?
Young fit population trained in survival? Check
mild climate? check
disciplined leadership? check
lack of predators? check
plenty of game? check (in australia kangaroos are epidemic and are damn good eating)
access to resources close to surface? check
Sure in my scenario 98 percent plus of the population will die of disease / exposure or starvation within two months, but somewhere on the planet of 8 billion people the perfect storm of circumstances you describe would exist.
Survival skills are very very different from rebuild-civilization-from-the-ground-up skills. Why would such an army base have people who knew how to smelt metals or make paper? That would be a fine place for an organized group of people to survive with some remnant of order, but that’s very different from starting back up the technology chain just with what’s in their brains.
Read the OP and my additional assumptions. There are a subculture of re-enacters who do period faithful blacksmithing, clothmaking and pottery and there are metallurgists and archeologists who specialize in studying ancient techniques. We are assuming that the population includes people who know those skills and can teach others, and that the isolated community has scouting groups who are rescuing those from people from the wider outside population with useful skills.
Not to be snarky, but how many re-enactors specialise in stone age technology?
Your assuming that while natural resources are easily available, any form of technology has been removes, correct? That means that your survivors will be starting out with a lot of knowledge that they can’t immediately use and nothing to work with but wood and rocks. Knowing how to do something using ancient techniques does not mean that your specialists knows how to make the tools needed to make the tools that can be used to make the tools that they do know how to use.
No, but some archeologists do specialize in this. Then the re-enacters specialise in the renaissance, and so on etc etc turtles all the way up. The OP is pretty clear, skills are not a shortage but just to make it perfectly bloody obvious, assume that ANY skill on the planet that anyone alive today knows is available to the community.
The question I’m asking is effectively, assume the perfect storm that they have any skill they need that can be done with no tools and doesn’t 100 percent rely on written tables or massive databases that can’t be memorized.
Are we clear now?
They’ll need to make tools. Can they construct some sort of rudimentary lathe?
I’m sure it could be done eventually. But I think you vastly understimate how long any of this stuff takes to do. It could take a good year or more to find iron ore deposits and set up a working blacksmith shop. And 100,000 people is not enough people to rebuild modern civilization.
Do you honestly think it would take a modern trained geologist a year to find an iron ore deposit? How about they already know where they are? nowhere in my OP does it say that the trained geologists magically have their memories wiped. So the geologists alive remember the satellite scans and other mapping we have now which gives a bloody good indication where iron ore is. Or they know, “hey there’s an iron mine in the hills over that way and it still had deposits left before those pesky aliens came”.
Watch Apollo 13, for a good example of ingenuity and then think about if a group of the smartest most motivated people on the planet could construct a lathe using no tools within 2 years. I think they could, but modern nano-scale electronics would obviously take a lot longer.
Me
Again, me.
The same way they were made in the past? Clay and dirt.
Bellows are hardly high tech. Hell, a dead goat and some reeds and you have a bellows right there.
Obviously. But power hammers are easy tech too, and can run off water power quite nicely.
The stuff that…grows on trees? Yes, I’m sure it will be hard to get. And why do we need rubber, anyway? Gaskets can as well be made out of leather or cork.
Again, me.
Guess what? Done that too.
The OP was postulating people with those specialized skills (like re-enactors, although possibly you’re as well-off just grabbing some African subsistence villagers for this), so you’re just attacking the hypothetical here.
What experiments? That wasn’t the OP’s scenario. Re-read it and the followup clarification in post #6. All you’re doing is picking holes in the starting scenario, but that’s really not the OP’s question.
The SCA has quite a large military membership.
If it takes a knowledgeable person more than a day to find an iron ore deposit, they are in Antarctica, Greenland or similar. Iron is everywhere.
Oh, no! Re-enactors are only allowed one hobby!
Many re-enactors are just the kind of folks who like knowing crap. Not all re-enactors do the medieval period. Some do primitive re-enactment or just practice a larger skillset than others. Flintknapping is quite a popular hobby, for example.
So you’re assuming that basically the perfect storm has already gone perfectly?
So, your geologist who knows how to find iron ore deposits… when he finds them, how does he dig them out of the ground? How does he carry them back down to the river that they will need to power the water wheel that is being built (somehow) which will power the lathe (that someone else somehow built)? I’m certainly not an expert on any of this stuff, but I continue to believe that there is an incredible amount of stuff that has to happen first before what we can view as real technology starts to emerge.
There’s also the question of motivation. So this mysterious event happens, this perfect storm of people end up absolutely comically well situated to survive and rebuild… but what motivates them to build a steam engine? I feel like it’s vastly more important for them to build a stable and survivable civilization with blacksmithing and agriculture than it is for them to start dedicating the entire resources of their entire burgeoning but fragile civilization to building a steam engine that, all by itself, doesn’t really do much for them.
I suspect that what you’re really curious about is “if survival were not an issue, and people with all the necessary knowledge were present, what’s the fastest time that it would take to build up increasing layers of technology and tools and arrive at (some level of technology)” as opposed to “some magical event happens that changes the rules and wipes out technology and leaves 100,000 perfectly situated people… what happens next?” Because the people in the second hypothetical probably aren’t going to start planning their 50 year plan for re-engineering the internal combustion engine.
Well, you’re obviously an extremely valuable person to have around in this hypothetical. Let’s hope that you’re not randomly eaten by cannibals a week after the event happens (as 99% of us will be), and that you don’t get an infection while walking around without any shoes on which there are no antibiotics. Oh, and you don’t wear glass or contacts, do you, because that would decrease your utilty…
The OP specified a defensible location with people to defend it. And like I said in that previous thread, I know how to make many, many weapons from scratch.
Am I somehow incapable of making grass rope, now?
Did the aliens kill all the Penicillium chrysogenum in the world too?
I wear glasses, but I see well enough to do everything but read. Not that that matters, in the OP’s scenario it’s more likely I’d spend my time with a small team, not wandering on my ace.
beats me, are you? Does your location, in addition to all the access to fish and fruit and iron ore and being defensible, also have whatever types of grass is necessary to make them? And of course there’s a tradeoff of time and effort. All the time you spend making grass rope and making shoes out of it and teaching other people to make it and make shoes out of it is time that you’re not gathering food or digging up ore or breeding cultures of mold on bread (not hat you have bread) so you can isolate penicillin, etc.
I’ve actually thought quite a lot about this with a group of friends (yes, we’re those type of nutty people) and the conclusions that we come to are basically this:
IF - you’ve got the right environment
IF - you’ve got the right people (know-how and skill-sets both represented)
IF - there are enough of you to actually constitute a relevant genetic mix to insure species survival
THEN - your main concern is organization. Nothing else is so vital.
Life itself, just the survival parts, is going to be taking a shit-ton more effort than modern people (even SCAdians and re-enactors) are used to. People will be TIRED. Ass-tired, bone-tired. Stupid I can’t remember if I’ve pounded this papyrus or not and my eyes are so fuzzy I can’t tell-tired.
And that’s going to be your biggest problem right there. To me, getting what we would consider a “basic comforts civilization” whether it’s water, steam, or electo-powered (no one’s considering solar yet, which is a surprise) is going to take about the first set of people’s lifetimes.
And there’s the problem. People die. And if that first set of people isn’t organized in such a way that prioritizes getting information and motivation into the next generations, that first generation will be about as far as things will go, because the knowledge base will die with them.
So, because everything takes so bloody long, and is so bloody difficult, things we never think about will have to be mandated or scheduled - you’ll have to decide as a community that having Frank, Johannes, MaryEllen, and Tyler sit out the harvest every year along with half of the children in the community (the half switches each year) is more important than having their physical labor.
In modern society, things come easily enough that knowledge and passing information is taken for granted. In contrast, in this new society, you’d have to carve time out of projects which many people (even you as the leader or organizer) consider equally or more important, and you’d have to do it from the very start, to minimize forgetfulness and accidental death losses.
So there’s that problem first.
Secondly, as soon as your second generation starts up, you have to make sure that they KNOW as sure as snot that everything you know is based on reality - they’ve never seen computers, or high-rises, or giant smelting factories, or nuclear power plants, or airplanes. Nothin. If they have even the slightest doubts, by the time the fourth generation comes along (all the “survivors” being dead), they’ve got (to their minds) a very comfortable society, at a very acceptable tech level, and some really weird and totally crazy legends about how things were better way back when, or in that other place (which if they get curious about and go looking for, they won’t find, which is another strike against the truth of the legends.)
So then you’ve got to take even more time out of your survival and knowedge-passing to try to make model or prototype concepts of everything that you want to be in the future, that you know you won’t be able to get to in your lifetimes. Even a small aircraft is a lot of work, if you’re making every single piece of it from scratch. But if you don’t have a working one (even a small radio-controlled one) then the idea becomes a legend or a myth, and has much less intellectual motivating power. Same for every physical *thing * we can imagine - cell-phones, i-pads, computers and networks, tanks, space-shuttles…
Sure, maybe society would get there eventually. Maybe you’d decide that you don’t want to limit their potential by hashing out everything we’ve done and hoping they do something even better. But that decision has to be made quickly, and in the knowledge that if you DON’T make the examples, your chance is gone with you, and you don’t know how long you’ve got.
So, it all comes down to priorities and organization, and a social order strict enough to enforce that organization (whatever is decided) because that first generation of people is going to be worked to the bone.
I think the focus on iron would be fatal to the first year’s survival. Iron is really really nice, but the effort it would take to make iron tools would probably take away so much from the effort to build up a food supply for the off-season that you’d all starve during the off-season. First year, possibly first decade, you work your way up through the stone age. Only when you’re really really good at the stone age do you consider going for metal, and there are pretty good reasons to go for bronze over iron (if I understand correctly, it’ll take a lot less fuel to produce bronze than iron, and acquiring fuel is very labor intensive).
It seems pretty likely to me that you’ll want to go through essentially the same stages as human history went through, technology-wise, with the exception that producing paper and ink (or some other writing technology) will take a very high priority, to prevent information loss with inevitable deaths.
With enough time dedicated to writing, though, I think pretty huge chunks of information can be preserved, speeding up technology re-acquirement even after the last survivors have died. A transistor probably won’t be built before the last survivor has died, but a diagram of a transistor could be maintained, and it’ll be a lot easier to reinvent if you can look at the diagram when you do so. Same thing with simpler technology, e.g., a printing press.
You can make rope out of most any grass, in addition to other plants
I can make a pair in less than 45mins. They’re practically disposable.
Penicillium can be cultured on fruit (we grew it on oranges in school). But if you have access to the sea, any idiot can make agar.