How Long to Restart Civilization?

Great Debates
1

I’m not sure if this belongs in General Questions or IMHO. I’ll try IMHO and have faith in the mods it’ll be moved if necessary.

Let’s say a population of several thousand humans was thrown back in time ten million years, or taken to another Earth-like planet in the present day. All the mineral and organic resources we currently have access to, but no technology.

The population can include doctors, civil engineers, metallurgists, petroleum geologists, agricultural whizzes, people who do whatever it is Anthracite does…as many of each useful profession as you like. They can even bring all the textbooks, charts and reference materials they want. They’re completely up-to-date with 21st century knowledge, experience and skill.

But NO TECHNOLOGY. No calculators, no guns, no guitars. Not even hammers, bows and arrows or matches.

How long would it take to recreate modern society, with steel-frame buildings, computers, central air conditioning, airplanes, drywall, television? Could they do it in ten years? A generation? Two?

Philip Jose Farmer depicted this in his Riverworld books, and I always thought he made it look easier than it would be.

Discuss.

2

This sounds like a great question. And I can’t wait for what some of the great minds of SDMB will come up with.

What I think would be fasinating about the situation you suggest is the longer it takes to rebuild, the more unlike current technology things would be. Durring the reconstruction, for example, short cuts could be made that might lead to new technology. Or maybe new civilization would think about the enviroment when recreating industry (yea, I know. I’m usally much more of a pessimist).

Well, thanks Fiver. Great question.

3

Fascinating question. First of all, it doesn’t really matter whether they have hammers, bows and arrows, and other prehistoric technology, because it probably wouldn’t take long for them to make such things. Assuming that you had some architects, engineers, and people with experience at manual construction, you could start making buildings and such in a matter of days, and agriculture would also happen really quickly.

One important factor would be how easily they could get metal. As soon as they have some copper wire and a magnet, they could set up a water wheel or a windmill and get electricity, but it would probably be two or three years before they actually had working electric appliances. However, they would need a substantial workforce before they could start manufacturing cars, airplanes, etc… I’m going to say 50 years before they get back to our stage of developement.

4

[ul][li]First generation- Their time is going to be mostly consumed with production of food and clothing, not a simple task if you’re starting from scratch. (Just watch Survivor. If they master food production quickly, they could begin mining metals. They might be able to achieve 17th century frontier living standards. I don’t think the first generation would get much beyond that.[/li][li]Second generation- Time to put those raw materials to work. The industrial revolution begins, unhindered by the trial-and-error that characterized the original. On the other hand, since we’re in the second generation now, we’re talking about people who have never seen factories or machines themselves. How good a job could the first generation do in passing information along? I’m guessing the second generation could get us up to early to mid-19th century standards.[/li][li]Third generation- Should get us back up to mid-20th century standards, or beyond (depending again on how good a job has been done passing the received learning of the original settlers along).[/li][li]Fourth generation- Uh oh, human nature strikes, and wars break out. Go back two spaces.[/li]Fifth Generation. Might be able to get us close to late 20th century standards.[/ul]

5

I really can’t emphasize food production enough. The more I think about it, the more I think that factor alone could set these folks back by several generations.

Do they get to bring seeds and livestock along? Or are they going to have to begin anew the process of domesticating animals and crops. If the latter, it’s possible that the entire first generation could perish.

I’m thinking of the early European settlers in America. Many died of starvation. The Pilgrims would have perished but for the assistance of Indians, and these folks you’re talking about don’t have any Indians to fall back on. Worse, if you’re really making them start from scratch, they don’t even have agriculture.

I think it’s easy to forget about the thousands of years of agricultural advances to which we are heir.

If these “settlers” of yours are forced to start from a hunter-gatherer scratch, the knowledge they brought with them might be lost by the next generation. Many of the words in the textbooks and manuals would be meaningless outside the context of an already-industrial society. Would the second generation be able to master those texts, or would the knowledge be lost?

6

I actually think it would be a lot less than “multiple generations”. I should point out, however, that I’m only considering development of the ability to develop modern or equivalent technology, not necessarily the actual point-for-point physical replication of our whole technological base. A population of several thousand has no need (yet) for a massive interstate highway system, for example, and I think that a lot of large-scale engineering is going to be that way- they could develop the ability to build large-scale manufacturing plants without needing the capacity to produce 300 cars a day, for instance.

For the record, were I placed in such a situation, my first thought after food and shelter would be building a functional tool-and-die shop. This would only be feasible if I could procure the raw materials to build both the initial equipment and the intended products, so the first aim is going to be geting a bunch of industrial chemists and engineers (Hi, Anthracite!)together to organize exploratory mining everywhere in the immediate area that isn’t covered by potential food. Assuming I get a source of metal fairly quickly, I could arrange crude smelting, which could be used to build finishing tools whith which to build the tools to build a better tool shop (whew). You get the point- with a focus specifically on advancing fabrication techniques, and later on developing large-scale crafting, you could advance very quickly- much more so than trying to reinvent all the little stuff from every discipline (that can come later).

With luck, food, and at least some available resources to start, I’d say 20 years at the most before my civilization would have the capacity (but not yet the need) to produce most modern technology. Specialized manufaturing, like silicon wafer fabrication or nuclear power, might take a bit longer, but only because they would need very specific raw materials, which my civilization would have to locate (and would need the inclination to.

Of course, like spoke- says, that all is assuming we don’t starve to death in the first month or so.

7

The problem, as I see it, is that you won’t have enough spare time to create the tool and die shop in a purely hunter-gatherer scenario. All your time and energy will be devoted to finding food.

Also, there’s no point in building masonry or concrete structures. You’re gonna have to be mobile so you can follow the game you’ll be hunting. What happens when you build your nice brick house only to find that you’ve exausted the game in that area? Will that tool-and-die shop be mobile?

Also, I don’t think a group of several thousand could live in a single area as hunter-gatherers. Not enough game in one area for that. They’ll have to split up into smaller “tribes,” making it that much more difficult to coordinate any efforts to rebuild society.

Once they split into isolated tribes, it begins to become difficult to maintain a standard language.

This gets messier and messier…

8

My take on the question is like so…

Once food production is a going concern, and I believe that this might take a while, you would have to FIND the right type of ore deposits to make the tools that make the tools that make the tools, ad nauseum. What I mean is that not only would you need the right type of ores but also the ability to smelt them properly and create the alloys needed to increase the ability to advance to the next level of production. It’s no good knowing HOW to make a computer from scratch if you can’t make the parts in the first place.

Now that I think about it just a bit more, I agree that food production would be a MAJOR undertaking. If you have several THOUSAND people, you’re gonna need a LOT of food sources. Subsistence farming is extremely labor intensive and you would still need to provide hunters to get the needed proteins in order to stay healthy. I can’t recall how many acres of farmland are needed to sustain one person and can’t seem to find it on the net so I’ll leave that one alone. You’re gonna need to clear the land to plant the farms AFTER identifying and gathering seeds to do so.

I don’t see any real difficulty in providing shelter to start with. That would be the easiest thing. Providing safety from predators would also be a significant problem IMHO so you had better re-invent the bow and arrow as well as the atlatl quickly. Fishing would be a good way to provide food but, there again, you need either nets or lines.

Granted that all these things can be overcome but, in the first place, how are you going to protect the books and whatnot that you’ve been allowed to bring from the weather? Second, in a survive or die situation, creating steel reinforced buildings is NOT going to be high on the priority list. Again, that’s just MHO-YMMV.

The question is rather vague in that there really isn’t a set time that you could state things would be just like they are today. Unless, of course, you postulate perfect conditions while trying to re-create society the way it is now.

9

Here’s a plan. Divvy the group into tribes. The tribes must split up, as I said before, to be able to find enough food. Make plans for all the tribes (or representatives) to gather in a designated spot (say a particular bend in a river) in exactly one year. Each tribe is to use that year to scout out mineral deposits, potential domesticated plants, etc., and to map such areas as they can. (D’oh! There’s no paper! Well, perhaps they can make maps on animal skin parchment or something.)

Each year, they accumulate more knowledge, and more plants, and compare notes on what they have learned. At some point, they should have enough potential crops to leave a group permanently by my hypothetical river to work on agriculture. Once they get agriculture off the ground (may take several years) then metallurgists and craftsmen can move in with the farmers and focus on their trades.

And so on…

Gonna be tough, though. Just clearing a field to farm it will be an incredibly labor-intensive task without metal tools. Imagine clearing a forest using only stone tools. Yikes.

10

But it wouldn’t be just the problems of clearing field space with stone tools. How about mining ore with stone tools??? After all, you have to have the ore before you can make the metal tools to mine the ore more efficiently. As for paper, if they DO have boopks that were brought with them, they can always use what blank pages there are. Now they just have to invent something to use for ink.

What about salt? Without it, they’re REALLY gonna be hurting. Also, it’s kind of hard to preserve meat without it.

My point is that there are literally THOUSANDS of things that are needed in order to advance from one stage of civilization to the next and the people wouldn’t necessarily be able to provide them.

11

Well, first of all, they’re going to need to develop agriculture so they will be able to make cities. Second, they’ll need to locate various metals, such as silicon, iron, and copper. Next, they’ll need a good government.

12

Ink’s easy. You can use poke berries. (Hey, do I get selected for this project because I know stuff like that?)

Salt’s easy too, so long as you get dropped near a seashore.

13

Other variables that need to be considered before this question can even be answered:
(1) Are they going back with the specific objective of “recreating 20th century technology”? Or are they just going back and we’re watching curiously to see how long it takes them to end up with 20th century technology?

(2) How long do they have in the present day to prepare and practice and plan?

(3) If they can bring back books with them, can that include multiple copies of each key book, waterproofed, along with as many introductory and preparatory works as possible? Can that include custom-written books with exactly the information they need?

(4) There’s a huge difference between being inserted into Earth (with recognizable and learnable species of Flora and Fauna, not to mention premapped mineral deposits) and a theoretical Earth-like planet

(5) What time of year they arrive in could make an enormous difference, as could the precise year (Dinosaurs? Ice ages?)

Off the top of my head, I’d give this answer:
If the team is allowed a relatively long period of time (10 years say) to plan, prepare, practice, and train, and if they can choose the precise time and place of their insertion (ie, anywhere on earth between 400 and 200 thousand years ago, of their choice), then the insertion process could probably be relatively easily survived, by picking somewhere with as many gatherable plants as possible, caves for shelter, flint for the first steps of toolmaking, easily accessible deposits of the necessary minerals, as few nasty predators as possible (although I don’t really think that should be an issue), and water for water power. As many people have pointed out, the toughest part (by far) is getting from nothing up to a functioning and stable prehistoric economy. From there to pre-industrial (ie, middle ages) technology is probably the work of a generation. However, you then start running into real stumbling blocks, because the materials that are needed to build high technology are widely dispersed around the globe… rubber, for instance… so I think what you have to do is build your plan into several phases:
(1) Initial shock and survival
(2) Quick ramp-up to easy preindustrial society with water wheels, limited metallurgy, and (most important), farming.
(3) Maintenance of precious knowledge from books brought along on trip by establishing several universities whose purpose is to maintain the ability to read and understand the plan through the next several steps
(4) Spread new human culture across globe, increasing size of economy as you go (probably many generations just to increase population sufficiently)
(5) Eventually have access to all that is necessary to kick off industrial revolution

(I’m sure I’m leaving out several important steps… the most important point, it just occurrs to me, is that even with EVERYTHING going the right way, the population base that is going to be necessary to support a worldwide system of trade which can assemble all the necessary raw materials in the right place is ENORMOUS… probably into the tens of millions…)

14

(This is IMHO, isn’t it?)

My opinion is that it would take a population of aroung 100 million people to produce and maintain an advanced technological society. If we started with 10,000 people and doubled every generation, we are talking 12 or 13 generations to reach a suitable population. This leaves a heck of a lot of time for knowledge and expertise to be lost . . .

It is no chance event that our technological civilization took thousands of years to develop.

15

Wel the op states 10 million years so if we go with THAT, then how would they properly prepare in the first place? I don’t recall that we know all the in’s and out’s of the world as it was 10 million years in the past.

I’ll have to agree with both MaxTheVool and So Far So Good in that it would take a VERY long time and most likely, quite a bit of knowledge would be lost along the way.

Now if we’re talking about starting them off on a different planet then the question is unanswerable as stated.

16

Xploder wrote:

Not necessarily. You can build funnel traps out of wood, place the traps in a narrow part of a stream, and drive the fish into them.

'Round these parts, it is even possible to catch river catfish with your bare hands, if you know the trick. (It’s easy to grab a cottonmouth by mistake, though…)

Fish would be a good supplement for the first farming colony. Put the colony by a river, where they can take advantage of the rich soil of the flood plain, and they can fish until the crops start coming in.

Somebody needs to track down some hemp.

For the fibers, I mean…

17

even with the proper texts, I think it would take a long time… several hundred years, at best.

The important thing to know is that something CAN be done. That’s half the battle. After that, it’s just stepping up to get it done.

I think it would be one generation after the landing for things to get started… folks would drop like flies the first winter, and then feeding would get easier, as that first season would be spend gathering wild grains and whatnot to plant.

After that, it’s just a gradual slope, that would get higher as we went along.

Record keeping would be important. If the descendants loose sight of what the point was, it would take much much longer.

18

Another thing required besides technological progress is the
integrity of the culture. Every attempt must be made to adhere to the scientific method, to record information accurately, to maintain an oral and written language, and to intitute reason and logic as opposed to unquestioning beliefs and dictates. Can you imagine the progress we would have made if we didn’t have the dark ages? Grecco-Roman culture going straight into the Renaissance. We’d be a good 500 to 1000 years ahead of where we are now!

19

A few points:

  1. I think I So Far So Good is on the same page I am as far as technology levels being related to population size. With a smaller number of people. food is less of a problem, but labor is a big one. With a larger population, there’s a much bigger risk of depleting the food supply, but there’s more labor available for specialization into task groups - like the mining/exploration that we seem to all agree is a necessary step before we get anywhere near modern (or even medieval) technology. Can we all agree that :

A.) The population size given in the OP (a few thousand) is going to be one of the major, perhaps unintended, stumbling blocks in the way of a quickly advancing society?

B). That the optimum model is actually a larger group of people who immediately distance them selves from one another, but remain in contact?

  1. Something that’s been implied in a few posts, which I’d like to state explicitly: One of the most valuable specialties to have along for the ride is going to be, not engineers, but outdoorsmen and survivalists. They (and their body of knowledge) would be invaluable for the earliest stages of survival, without which the rest is basically academic.

  2. The “ancient earth” scenario is much more inteesting than the “alien planet” one for a very simple reason: fossil fuels. We take them for granted in modern times, and they underlie a lot of fundamental technology we use. A hypothetical alien planet might well not have a similar resource; in this case, some earth technology is either going to be impossible to duplicate, or will have to be very, very different, at least as far as power is concerned.
    Either one makes the numbers pretty much worthless.

I think there are some prety nice points here, but I stand by my short period numbers- part of the reason, which hasn’t really been addressed, is that I’m thinking of a sort of engineers’ dictatorship, in which everyone is assumed to be working their asses off specifically to get back to parity with modern technology in the shortest time possible. With enough explicit direction, I think that at least the theoretical means could be developed very quickly, even if deployment on a large scale wasn’t quite feasible as quickly. The best knowledge is working knowledge- if you’ve had to build a steam boiler, for example, you are also explicitly preserving the knowledge of such things against future loss.

20

Fascinating question! Though it’s verging on GD territory I’m assuring myself it’s still legitimate IMHO fodder.

Great points, all, but…to what degree is technology synomous with civilization? As often happens, I’m probably paraphrasing an author (Bujold?) but are we talking about civilization as things or concepts? I have the fuzzy idea they’re separable even though they’re often used synomymously, i.e. technology as a tool to supply basic–or advanced–needs of people. Is there a difference between using the technological trappings of civilization and internalizing the forces that made technology possible in the first place?

I’m musing whether civilization resides tools themselves or their makers. In the most pragmatic terms, there are very few features of everyday life I could reconstruct on my own. I’d have no realistic idea how to grow cotton, spin it and weave it; find–then smelt and refine–metals; even identify clay deposits before making leaky mud pies instead of pottery. (The list is endless and daunting.)

I have the idea that civilization must reside on the inside first, i.e. the willingness, self control and gritty altruism/pragmatism to cooperate and co-exist while muddling toward ease, i.e. better tools.

Veb