Our of curiosity, when you grew it at school, did you attract wild penicillium, or did you start with isolated spores? And was it penicillium notatum (the type used for penicillin), or one of the other varieties? Are the other varieties useful as human antibiotics?
And also out of curiosity, using your bare hands, what would be your ETA on providing sterile agar to use for a culture?
Wild, of the “innoculate the cuts in the orange peel with damp soil” variety.
P. notatum is a deprecated name. It’s P. chrysogenum nowadays. And yes, it was.
I wouldn’t know. But all you have to do is culture as many varieties as occur, and test them for antibiotic activity.
Around 4 days, 3.75 to make the pot and dishes, 3 hours to collect and boil the algae.
I disagree. Iron is vital for farming tools, like ploughs. With that many mouths to feed, I don’t think digging sticks are really going to cut it, and stone tools need constant attention.
The OP specified a coal source is available. That, and the ores of iron are much, much more abundant than those of copper and tin. Plus you only have to mine and transport one deposit, not two. And bronze doesn’t keep an edge as well as iron.
West Africa had no Bronze Age - it went from Stone to Iron directly. The old 3-Age System is both outdated and descriptive, not deterministic.
For example, Japan got bronze and iron at the same time. So why did they make all their tools and weapons of iron and save the bronze for religious stuff?
100k people in a small area without agriculture sounds like a really big problem.
What about vaccines? The original group will still have their immunities, but the next generation will be vulnerable to diseases we take for granted. How complicated would it be to make the needed laboratory equipment?
I would say a lot longer then we expect because the base is not there and we will try to step too far ahead too fast. Supply of raw materials and the processing of them will not be up to the task, causing a failure and collapse, then a restart. Either that or very few will enjoy the modern stuff.
The problem with the OP is that he/she puts forth the premise that automobiles, skyscrapers, and steam engines are the mark of a ‘civilized’ people.
Great Og some of you are sheltered. Given some level of organization, you have a massive, educated, and varied labor pool to draw from. Working together, you could build sturdy adobe/ mud/ wattle/ stacked stone, or primitive wooden shelters within a few months to shelter everyone. Utilize human chains, assembly line techniques and specialization. It would be communal at first, then building out as people have more time. Assign the hunters to hunting, the fisherman to fishing, etc and do your best to feed everyone. Accomplish this by breaking up into smaller village units, spreading out the knowledge and labor pool evenly. Those who have valuable intellectual skills (scientists, architects, doctors, etc) should take apprentices immediately and begin training them. Farmland, crops, and domesticated animals still exist so there is no issue there. Simply build some brushwood bomas and gather up the livestock. Laborers without more useful skills split their time between building and farming. Ceramics can be easily made by anyone who took a few classes in college. They can teach others, and a small workshop of 50 people could turn out a massive amount of pottery quite quickly. The same goes for basic tools, etc. Your geologist leads a crew to find ore, laborers bring it back, those with blacksmithing knowledge work the forges. The few teach apprentices, who double then quadruple the output. Paper is nothing more than pounded plant fibers made into a slurry and set to dry flat. better paper goods come with time.
Actually, early Colonial Americans dug iron ore out of bogs, not hills.
So what do you do with this ore once you find it? How long would it take you to make a functional blast furnace? A week? Six months? It would take a few weeks or months just to build your blacksmith shop (depending on how nice you want it).
Sorry. It’s one of the side effects of being born in a post-industrial information-age society. I didn’t realize you had grown up in Colonial Williamsburg.
There’s a lot of handwaving going on here
I have two degrees in sculpture and fabrication. A furnace capable of melting iron can be constructed from clay and stone in a few days by a single person; I know because I’ve built one myself. Larger, more functional furnaces, ovens and kilns take longer, but are easy to construct. You can make simple iron tools by making an open mold from a clay blank and just filling them from ceramic vessels you previously made in your kiln. Those tools will let you make far more complex tools etc.
What you see as handwaving, I see as a given necessity for survival. Prioritize, organize, work, survive.
That’s fine. I just don’t think it is as easy as you think to keep crafting generations of more and more detailed and precise tools.
My degrees are in structural engineering and management though. So call me when your new society needs something built.
Addressing the issue of losing knowledge when the first generation dies, the key issue in my mind would be having one place where some prototypes were built and displayed even if they are wildly inefficient in resources and time to make them.
As long as you can build very simple electronics before everyone dies from the first generation the next generation will have motivation to keep going, as they can see some concrete results. An electric generator is just copper wire wound round some magnets and spun by the wooden water wheel or by a coal powered steam turbine. It doesn’t require precision tooling as far as I know. Would you even need a lathe to make one?
Primitive electric lights are just carbon between two wires with current going through them, again no precision tooling. I’m betting the first generation could build crystal radios and low power transmitters.
If they didn’t manage to build a printing press in the first generation (seems feasible to me but hey ok lets say they don’t for some reason), then they can still write down everything by hand.
With those items as demonstrations that “hey this stuff the oldtimers keep talking about is actually real”, I don’t see too much knowledge being lost.
My personal gut feeling is that the first generation could get to 1940’s level electronics, complex circuitry would be possible but no IC’s in 60 years or maybe even quicker and so effectively nothing would be lost.
Wow. You are, in my opinion, an optimist. For example, are you including the amount of time it takes you to collect fuel for the fire? What about the time it takes you to find the seaweed? How about the time it takes to find appropriate clay for making pots and pans? Are you counting on finding seaweed on land in sufficient fresh quantities, or are you swimming out into unfamiliar deep waters, or are you building a boat? Are you sterilizing the pots and dishes? How are you maintaining sterile conditions with those pots and dishes? How are you eating during this time? How does the weather affect your endeavor–if it starts to rain at any point, does that throw off your effort? Are you sure those waters are safe to swim in?
There are a lot of little details, many of which I’m sure aren’t occurring to either of us?
I think some people are vastly underestimating the difficulty of making tools without an existing set of tools to use.
They’re waving their hand and claiming they’ll be making steel within a month. Really? You’re going to be digging iron ore out of the ground by hand with sticks and rocks? And build a forge the same way?
I’d like to see people do something a lot simpler than making steel. I want to see them build a shelter with no tools. Just build it with your hands and the stuff you find lying around in nature.
I also want to know what people are eating the first few days. I’m assuming all your canned goods and so forth went away. Or was this covered in the hypothetical? How many people can hunt/gather enough even to support themselves? And with 100,000 people in a close area doing so, how quickly is anything locally hunted/gathered going to be exhausted?
And remember, even those of you who have experience hunting with bows and stuff, unless you’ve hunted with homemade-with-just-your-hands bows, your experience might not be as relevant as you think.
The OP said crops and livestock would be untouched. Obviously, with no ready means of distribution, many people are not going to be in the right place. But there will certainly be some areas where people have enough food for the first few weeks.
Are the fences still there? Slaughtering and preparing a cow, even a domesticated cow, when your buildings, tools and weapons are all gone is probably somewhat non-trivial all by itself. Some crops (grapes? tomatoes? apples?) you can presumably eat right off the plant with no processing needed, others not so much. There might also be issues where modern crops are so engineered and bred that they can’t survive and reproduce themselves, but have to be replanted by the farmer from purchased seed each year. (Although they have big advantages over “original” species in that they grow bigger and better and are more blight resistant and so forth…)
Too much knowledge would be lost. You can’t start making steel again by trying to rebuild a modern steel plant. You have start with hand forging techniques in order to make the tools that are used to make moden machinery, that is used to build a steel plant. That could easily take generations since there would be no means of collecting those people who have that knowledge in one place or communicating over long distance, and the problem isn’t simply knowledge. From rudimentary origins, it took centuries to develop modern machine tools with the required accuracy to build modern machinery. If wasn’t a lack of knowledge that held things up, it’s the time it takes to develop more accurate and effiicient tools. Seriously folks, do you think the Professor actually made a working radio out of coconuts?
Now if you limit it to the steam age and gunpowder technology, it could happen at a low level. But consider the time it would take to ramp up to a level of production necessary to produce enough rails for a railroad to travel any significant distance, and how many locomotives and cars could be produced. Remember all the food has to be supplied by farming done with crude implements to start with. It would take years before most farmers were using metal implements again. On top of that, gunpowder won’t take long, and most steel production will be directed towards making weapons anyway, because that makes the farmers more productive. All the wood implements used by farmers and everybody else before metal production starts have to be cut and formed using stone tools. It’s all a very inefficient process.
I doubt a pocket of 100,000 coorperative people working full time could feed, house, and clothe themselves and maintain a rapid pace of technology development. And how many grunts are there? Even if 90% of humanity starves to death within a year, that leaves almost 700 million people who won’t tend to have a liking for the uppity technology cult.
Yes - otherwise you’d have pots in 2 days, not 3.75
Yes - I’d have to be mentally retarded not to find some agarophyte on any rocky temperate shoreline.
Yes - we are in a river valley, no? Clay should not be a problem.
Seaweed is generally found in the…sea.
Not necessary
I’m expecting to find it on the shoreline, which is where I’ve found it before. Gelidium species are widespread and easy to find, if you know what they look like. I do, and I’ve made jelly with them before. To make agar would just be a matter of forgoing the flavourings.
Yes - that’s what the pot is for, to boil things in.
as best I can - boil everything, wash hands with ashes. If I were anal, I’d take half a day (maybe while the pots are drying) to make a small clay oven for dry-heat-sterilizing the dishes. If I had any runup, I’d make soap and alcohol, but you seem to be in some kind of hurry.
Other people will feed me, in the OP’s scenario - all that farmland and animals, remember? Although I’ve never found getting food on an unspoiled shoreline to be a problem, assuming we’re not talking Skeleton Coast here. Shellfish are notorious for their low turn of speed, I’m sure I can sneak up on a couple.
And agar, itself, is fairly tasty with some flavourings.
Only for the 30 mins or so it would take me to find some shelter…Or the 2-3 hours to build it, if I’m in a particularly crappy place (which, per the OP, I’m not). The major way rain would affect things is stretch out the pot drying time.
Pretty sure. I can judge currents and so on OK, not that I’d need to, because agarophytes grow on the rocks right by the shore (when they’re not washed up on the shore itself, which is…all the time). Wading is perhaps the worst I’d have to do.
Then again, I generally swim in a bay that has these in it.
You haven’t raised any I haven’t accounted for, so far.
I’m not claiming to get modern lab-standard cleanroom glass agar plates, here. But a sufficiently-sterile medium to culture antibiotics in? Hell yes. They did this crap in the 1800s, for Pete’s sake.
I think I’d start with a chicken before tackling a cow. But if needs came to it, you can kill a cow with a rock and stick.
I’m not saying things would be peachy keen. Out of seven billion people, I figure you’ll have about seven million left within a year. Which, coincidentally, is around what the world population was back in the stone age.
If you need to dig in the ground for your iron ore, you’re not looking hard enough.
A forge is just a firepit with a draught. You can make it of clay or stone.
Or you can dig a frigging hole in the ground.
Done that. Easy-peasy. Something similar to this, until you can weave decent mats to get this.
Once again, you naysayers seem to be under the impression I’m talking about guesses here. But I’ve actually done this crap - I’ve made straw huts, I’ve smelted iron in a clay furnace, I’ve made clay pots that were just fired in a hole in the ground, I’ve made agar jelly, on the beach, on a driftwood fire in a billy.
There are people and groups where that is considered a good time.
