How Long to Restart Civilization?

Great Debates
21

Maybe I’m a pessimist, but my feeling is that they would all be dead in a generation, from starvation, disease, and internal warfare.

The key to it is the NO TECHNOLOGY clause. You cannot build a civilization with your bare hands, and the clause reduces our intrepid group of explorers back to the stone age. What good is iron ore if you have no shovels to dig it up with, or carts to haul it with? But wait, you say - surely they can build the carts? In which case you need axes and saws to cut the trees, and nails, bolts, a whole host of little things.

Any group of intentional colonists (as opposed to castaways) is incredibly careful to bring these things along. Knowledge is great, but tools are necessary.

The second factor working against them is the human one. Several thousand people, no matter how motivated, will not work together for long as one happy Utopian community. Disaffection with others will set in. There will be groups of “haves” (those successful at securing food/water/shelter) and "have nots (those less so). Factionism, quarreling - pretty soon you will have semi-isolated groups unwilling or unable to cooperate with each other.

Must be all that Mark Twain I read as a kid.

22

I am going to show my pessimism here and make a few observations.

In either scenario, our modern day innoculated heroes may or may not be ravaged my some strange and never before seen epidemic, but regardless, they are still carriers of many viruses and parasites that may very well reduce local flora and fauna alike to compost before they can even think about restarting society.

In keeping with the spirit of pessimism, I’ll add some cynicism and offer that a large group of intelligent people such as this one of engineers and architects and mechanics and whomever else might be included, would quickly de-evolve into a Lord of the Flies-ian society.

Assuming that this group did not dissolve into mush from disease, or die off after reducing everything else to mush, and were able to come up with a system of leadership that was agreed upon and obeyed…it would be a simple matter of prioritizing the communities needs and acting on them.

The basics of human survival are food, water and shelter. Everything else is a luxury and would have to be put off until the basics were secured.

With some basic tools and cooperation, these basics could be procured relatively easily. Farming, though a commercial art now is, in premise, a very simple concept and would not be difficult with some forethought and elbow grease. The same goes for fishing, herding, food and water gathering, and house building.

From there, it would all depend upon how this little society wanted to go about developing what. If they wanted an exact replica of modern day earth technologies, complete with it’s downsides, they have the tremendous advantage of knowing how it works and how it was originally arrived at and could skip over many steps. As for the mining of ores and such, that could be arrived at within a matter of years.

The only problem arriving at such quick development as such would be the population. Several thousand people is not alot to go around, and depending on how many are children or otherwise incapable of manual labor, it could take alot longer. Generations even.

Assuming they are all fully capable, healthy adults, I could see no reason that they would not be back to a modern day equivalent Earth within 50 years.

Should they decide that modern day technology stinks and want to go about things differently, they’d have to start over on alot of things, but would still hold the huge advantage of prior knowledge, so even that would not take very long at all.

23

Moderator’s note:

Much as I hate to admit it, being a technology-bearing troglodyte, this discussion is evolving beyond simple (HA!) opinion. The issues and nuances are carrying it into genuine debate territory.

Great discussion, folks, but this one deserves a new home.

Off to GD…

TVeblen
for IMHO

24

Does this Alternate Earth onto which our intrepid adverturers are being deposited have the same abundances of natural resources (timber, metal ore, petroleum, etc.) as our current Earth does? That’ll play a biiiiiiig part in their fates.

25

Sheesh, guys…It only takes me a few seconds. Just double-click the shortcut on the desktop, then accept the defaults and you’re off! I don’t even need the CD since the entire game is on my hard drive :D:D

26

I think we need to know more about the initial colonists - are these all college-educated people, or is this a random sampling of our current population? What percentage have military training, or knowledge of hunting and farming?

I’m thinking 3000 people or so would be too many to live in one settlement, even if they settle in a fertile river valley and have plenty of knowledgeable farmers and outdoorsmen in the group and a government is created that is able to force the majority of people to work 12 hours a day in the fields producing food. Last time we had to start from scratch like this the majority of the population were slaves, and we would have to have people who at least worked like slaves to keep from starving. It’s going to be hard to force these people into backbreaking labor when they can run away - they are the only people on Earth, they don’t have to worry about being enslaved or killed by some other group of people who perhaps speak another language, and they won’t be ignorant people who don’t know how to make it on their own (that is, unless a bunch of poorly-educated laborers are brought for this purpose).

I don’t think things would progress very fast. A lot of the people will starve, many will desert and form splinter colonies, knowing people I imagine that in a few generations the majority of the population will be living in scattered nomadic groups of less than a 100 in a mostly hunger-gatherer lifestyle - spending 4 or 6 hours a day finding food is going to be preferable to spending all day working on a farm so you can feed other people. They won’t want to settle down and farm one area because eventually someone will come and take it from them. There will be a lot of warfare, and eventually one or two groups will gain enough power that they can get back to rebuilding civilization, but the majority of their manpower is going to be used in farming, keeping the farmers farming, and protecting the farms from others - not much time (or incentive) to work in the mines.

I’d say a hundred years or so before true cities are built. After that, things will progress faster than they did historically because the knowledge will be retained, it’s just that most of it won’t be used, people will be instead working on designing a better bow, domesticating the wildlife, building fortresses to protect those in power. Maybe a thousand years before they reach our level of technology.

27

I actually think things might progress faster with a smaller group. With a carefully controlled breeding program, you could start with a population of 300 people without worrying about inbreeding, but you and your children aren’t going to have much choice in who you have children with, and women will HAVE to have a different father for every child - you can’t afford to have true brothers and sisters starting from such a small population. But the advantage of starting with such a small population is that it will be easier to govern them and they will have to spend less time on food production. For a while it would be a civilization unlike any before - using hunting, gathering, and limited agriculture of the ‘plant and forget’ type for food production, but the hunters and gatherers will be using their spare time to locate resources and build infrastructure for their descendents, because the population will grow in a few generations to the point where they will have to abandon hunting and gathering.

With this scenario, 50 years or so to the first city, another couple of hundred until they have the capability of building near-modern technology.

28

BTW, I am assuming they are transported to Earth 10 million years ago, or to an alternate Earth where hominids never evolved. If it’s to an alien planet, even if the atmosphere and crust composition is the same as ours and life has evolved using DNA and the same chemistry, it could take a LOT longer. We are going to have to find out all over again how the ecosystem works, what plants are useful, which are poisionous, etc. If it’s to a more recent time in our history, like the 200-400,000 BP time mentioned above, things could move a lot faster as there will be people to enslave and have do the grunt work, even if they are not homo sapiens sapiens - I figure anything from genus homo could be easily trained to do most labor necessary, and even the more primitive hominids could probably be trained to do a lot.

29

Several thousand years at minimium.

(1) the OP presumes going back w/o aids.
(2) regardless of optimistic scenarios in re specialists and preparation, 2nd generation will be without immunities or modern medicine. Mortality rates will skyrocket, and in fact w/o modern medicine mortality for first generation folks will also increase dramatically.
(3) optimists completely underestimate the problem of knowledge transmission.
(a) no books, either have to recreate --from what and with what time
(b) or alternately spend substantial time orally transmitting, again with what time
© problem of investment of time into teaching.
(4) Process of domestication, even with modern knowledge, will not suffice for a quick transition, above all plant domestication.

Clearly, thrown into a pure wild scenario w/o tools, references etc., modern knowledge will largely be stripped away in a matter of a generation or two.

30

Oops, misread OP, but I still maintain knowledge transmission would be a serious problem, above all given mortality issues.

31

Wow. What a response. This thread has careened off my original intent, but that’s okay; there’ve been some great responses. Thanks.

tracer, I said in the OP that our colonists have the same mineral and organic resources we have, so yes, yellow pine, coal, petroleum…it’s all there.

What I was looking for by starting this thread is how long would it take to re-do the human panorama if we had the benefit of hindsight. I also wanted to give our people every break. So, please note these refinements of the OP:

Forget the alien planet. It’s either Earth in an interglacial time before hominids evolved, or the present-day Earth of a parallel universe where no sentients ever evolved. So we have access to the current inventory (and then some) of flora and fauna, or its ancestor plants and animals. Everyone arrives fit and disease-free and there are no native pathogens adapted to human hosts.

Locale of arrival is a tropical river delta by an ocean, and there are rocky mountains nearby. So, fresh drinking water, fish, salt for preserving food, snow and potential mines in the mountains, no harsh winters.

You have as many of each kind of expert or specialist as you need. All the books and other references, as esoteric as you like, as you need. This was my most important condition: The colony has access to all 21st century knowledge. Yes, MaxTheVool, the books are waterproof, for cryin’ out loud! Let’s focus on the essential kernel, please!

32

Bzzzt: If there is an indentical environment around, there are pathogens capable of whacking humans.

Tropical diseases, parasites, all kinds of nasties.

I maintain my previous responses. Domestication of plants and animals alone will be an issue, in combination with the issus of disease and parasites.

33

There’s more to “civilization” than technology and modern convenience. There’s also law, civil order, art, architecture, literature, music, philosophy, dance, etc. I agree with Col: if tranmission of modern knowledge is left to oral means, the overwhemling majority of accumulated knowledge would be lost almost immediately. Imagine trying to convey everything within the Library of Congress from one generation to the next. And given the connectivity of invention and manufacturing processes, the resulting loss of information would have a domino effect.

Aside from health questions, another major issue is one of law and order–the political culture of your hypothetical nascent society. Without it, most day-to-day effort will be channeled into just surviving and ensuring personal security. Without sociopolitical stability, technological gains would be thwarted. (You couldn’t import invention.)

If you’re talking a Manhattan Project set in 1,000,000 B.C., where does one even start? Before you can mine on a large scale, you need industrial tools. But the manufacturing of large-scale industrial equipment presupposes industry, which requires huge capital formation, law, order, a healthy population, and much more.

And what would people do without television–and SD?

34

collounsbury…skyrocketing mortality rates? That seems a little exaggerated to me. After all, maintaining human waste properly, cooking and storing food properly, and washing things will have a larger effect on life span than having a doctor around.

I do agree, however, that the time frame we’re discussing here would be at least a good ten generations. I wonder how the relations would be between people…would we make the mistake of wars all over again? Not that wars don’t serve technology well, of course, but they do seem to be a little inefficient with respect to, oh–everything considered a resource.

It wouldn’t be more than, IMO, the time it takes to stabilize the people, maintain a healthy population growth, and get building.

Interesting…where would a good location for this be? the northern part of South America? Central America? Those would be my first guesses.

35

Point taken, however given my experience in tropical environments --and this with modern medical support, disease will be a serious issue. Not just washing hands, preventing infections, many injuries without modern medicine go from being annoying inconveniences to potentially life threatening. True, a book on traditional cures of various sorts adapted to that particular specific environment will be helpful, but mortality will climb.

Then, second generation will not have vaccinated immunities. New round of diseases. Finally, I add that maintaining modern hygene can be a bit more challenging than one might suppose without the infrastructure to support it. Some years down the road for this little group I suspects rigor fails…

Of course, I can also add the issue of the preservation of the books. They will wear out. I find it questionable that the group will be able to achieve paper-making very quickly (if only as an issue of time committments). How to deal with this? Either minimize use of the books – do they over generations become holy texts, untouchable-- or commit to quasi-oral transimission/education schemes. Education itself is time intensive and may be a luxury. See comments in next paragraph.

Finally, in re many of the specialists mentioned. Frankly, for many there specialties will be utterly useless in a hunter gatherer or even subsitance agriculture environment (allowing that seeds are brought along rather than restarting the generations long domestication process). Nor, even in the agricultural environment, will there be much spare time/energy to devote peripheral issues such as education, knowledge maintanance. So, in all probability most of these specialists will be useless and will have to “retrain” for another lifestyle. Mortality rate estimates anyone?

All in all, given no modern supports, this group will likely fail. Even if they do not, and we must assume the rigorous prep with someone else suggested, I see no chances of immediately recreating a technological civilization. I rather suspect within four or five generations, the first generation is quasi-myth.

36

aynrandlover wrote:

Well, my best guess would be the Fertile Crescent, as it existed before man came along and farmed it to death. As Jared Diamond pointed out in Guns, Germs and Steel, there are good reasons civilization sprang up there. The primary reason being access to numerous plants and animals which lent themselves to domestication.

But I’m drifting from the OP.

No matter where our community gets set down, food production has to be the number one priority. You cannot build a civilization until you have sufficient surpluses of food to support non-farming members of society like miners, engineers, etc., etc.

Assuming we don’t get to bring any animals or seeds, it is going to take a loooong time just to establish agriculture. Anyone here ever see what the wild ancestor of corn looks like? It’s tiny, with only a few kernels per ear, on a cob approximately the size of the baby corn you get at a Chinese restaurant. It would take many, many growing seasons to breed such a wild ancestor into the highly productive corn plant we know today.

And the story would be the same for many of the food crops we now use. The wild ancestors of these plants produce tiny amounts of food and fiber in comparison with their domesticated offspring. How long would it take to breed them into high-yield productivity?

37

most of them would die. don’t know how to hunt without rifles. don’t have primitive plows. would degenerate to hunter gatherers if they survived at all.

technological civilization makes people dependent on technological civilization.

Dal Timgar

38

You’re the farmboy, not me,spoke-, but I think you’re overstating the difficulty of food production.

Since we’ve got botanists and horticulturists, edible, farmable plants could quickly be identified, and since we’ve got fishermen and hunters, there should be sufficient food even if true agriculture takes a while to get going. Large animals, perhaps even megafauna, should be in abundance anywhere in the tropics.

And a hunter-gatherer’s life isn’t as difficult as most of us suspect. In my college anthropology class I was taught that hunter-gatherer societies usually spend only 3 hours per day procuring the necessities of life, leaving the rest of the time for culture-building. In this case the culture-building will largely be recreating the technology left behind (not that the guitar, in-line skate and IMAX movie projector won’t also be re-invented).

39

Nah, I’m not a complete pessimist on the food issue. I dothink people might have to be a whole lot less choosy about what they eat. Why, you can turn over any rotting log in the woods and find all manner of tasty grubs and termites! With luck, maybe even a tasty snake!

Also, if we’re talking about setting our colonists down in a pristine area, with no previous human inhabitants, then game is going to be much more plentiful than it is today. Furthermore, the game animals may not yet have a fear of humans. You might be able to get pretty close to them without alarming them. The giant ground sloths were probably easy prey for the first Indians who encountered them.

Of course, this means that predators haven’t yet evolved any fear of man either. How are we gonna fend off lions and leopards and such?

Bows and arrows would be nice, but what are you going to use to string your bow? I think properly cured animal intestines can be used, but that means you have to make a kill before you can make your bow. Also, could anyone here make a straight arrow or a straight spear using only primitive tools?

Our colonists might have to be scavengers at first. Perhaps they could drive predators away from fresh kills?

40

Good point, I was thinking about that. Everything I recall reading was that hunter gatherers didn’t spend all day doing things directly related to survival.

I think that choosing the people to go do this would largely depend on mindset, as well. They would need to be pretty like-minded to avoid power struggles. I don’t know that they would need to be altruistic all the way, but an empathic, cooperative group would be most successful, I think, over just picking people because of careers.

Largely, though, scientists would be out of the mix. There would be little time for theory here. We’d need mechanical and structural engineers, farmers, botonists…a lot of practicing professions. I think we would need (gasp) a politician of some sort or a managerial-type person not to be in charge but to delegate tasks, keep a pace, etc etc.

I don’t think this would be as difficult as everyone makes it out to be, but it would take what WE would think is a long time to accomplish. So long as there was some rudimentary schooling and a supply of books brought there the closer we got to modern technology the faster we would get there. I mean, technology grows exponentially without a clue where we’re going…if we did know?–REALLY exponentially, I guesss, haha.