How Long to Restart Civilization?

Great Debates
81

Just for perspective:

There were only 14,000 Scots and English in New England in 1640. Fewer ships were coming from England and iron products became increasingly scarce. It took interest/curiosity, legislative action, and money from England to get an iron works going. A few skilled men came from England for skilled labor and locals were hired for the unskilled labor. (Local court records show a fairly high incidence of ironworkers, and a few of their women, appearing before justices for infractions of the Puritan moral strictures (non-attendance at church, drunkenness, wife-beating, foul speech and a few others.))

Rather than mining, the raw materials for iron making came from local bog areas and ponds. Flux was shipped in from Nahant, local hardwood trees were cut and made into charcoal. Within 3 days of the firing up of the furnace (hand cut trees and logs turned into charcoal and then kept the furnace running 3 days) the molten iron began to be collected in the crucible. I love this stuff!

The Saugus River was used for transportation and dammed up for water power. It was tidal. Sluice gates were used to regulate the speed of the wheel. They had a rolling mill, too.

They made nails, pots, kettles, firebacks, and of course, tools.

I can’t remember if the removal of the trees silted up the river or if they ran out of bog ore but eventually the thing closed, might have been that the investors were not being repaid.

Women had pregnancies every 10-12 months and the death rates for mothers and babies were very high. A woman who survived the primitives conditions and lived to nurse as many as 12 babies into childhood might live to see only two or three reach adulthood.

http://www.google.com has several sites with info on Saugus Iron Works.

That was faster than I thought it would be. Might be because they had qualified workers from England to get the thing going. Even through the American Civil War, temperatures for iron and copper were eyeballed by an expert, the sole way of determining temperature.

Jois

82

tsunamisurfer:

To cite just one example offhand, the 5th-century BCE Greek playwright Sophocles lived to be 90.

Benjamin Franklin and many other Founding Fathers, with access to not-much-better medical care than Sophocles, lived into their 80s.

I just realized something no one’s mentioned: standards. Our adventurers aren’t taking any rulers, yardsticks, thermometers or pedometers with them. How will they re-establish standard measurements? They’ll know the importance of assembly-line standardization, but how can they make sure every nail’s the same size or every sheet of drywall the same thickness?

83

One question that keeps popping into my head is what the people back on Earth are doing. The conditions of this scenario as stated is obviously some bizarre social experiment (in fact, this whole thread reads like an episode of Survivor taken to its most sadistic extreme), which obviously suggests that the experimenters who remain on Earth must have some way of observing the colonists’ progress. A collection of geostationary satellites with high-resolution cameras ain’t gonna cut it.

Of course, this experiment pre-supposes the existence of interplanetary and/or time travel, so perhaps some form of nanotechnology is possible, by implanting microscopic transmitters inside each individual’s skull. This is only possible for the first generation, however, so future generations would have to be directly observed by placing other humans (or androids) on the planet’s surface, close enough to take notes and report back the colony’s progress without being discovered by the colonists themselves. Complicating this procedure is the fact that no such method can remain 100% undetected forever – imagine if one of the future colonists stumbles across one of the cameramen, which would spark anything from a brand new religion to a fringe UFO cult.

Alternatively, the experimenters back on Earth could just send off the test subjects and wait for them to invent a deep-space radio antenna to report back what happened, but what if the colony never reached that level of technology? The Earth-bound would never know if they all died in the first year, or prospered but levelled off at some pre-industrial civilization.

Regarding the disease/medicine question, a lot depends on whether this takes place on an alien, Earth-like planet, or Earth itself. In the latter situation, tracking down the ingredients for penicillin, aspirin, and morphine would be a simple endeavor of knowing what to look for – on the alien world, finding adequate substitutes for even the most basic drugs would be entirely a hit-and-miss endeavor. (Producing alcohol would be fairly easy, though, if I’m right to assume that alcohol can be processed from just about any type of vegetable material.)

A source of clean water would be another requirement for survival. If the colony was near enough to the mountains, finding a natural spring might be all that’s needed. Locating the colony in a tropical delta would make the availability of clean water much more inaccessible, and time and resources would have to be invested into boiling water prior to consumption.

J.E.T.

84

If they go back to 500,000 BP, where are they going? If it’s the middle east, they aren’t THAT far from a source of slave labor. How long before some wandering tribe of modern hunter gatherers comes across some form of archaic homo sapiens?

85

tsunamisurfer: I actually thought that didn’t need a citation. Obviously, it’s hard to find data for average people who lived thousands of years ago, so you have to look at the lives of the famous. Isaac Newton lived to be 84, and died in 1727, long before we had anything resembling modern medicine. Earlier, Louis XIV lived to be 77, And Galileo lived to be 78. Going farther back, we can look at the ages of the Pharoahs - Ramses II lived to be 84, for example. Buddha lived to be about 80.

It certainly wasn’t the norm, but I think that had a lot more to do with the general risk of living at the time, rather than some genetic change or major advances in geriatrics. Rather, it was more likely that you’d die from appendicitis, infected wounds, etc.

I’m 37, and I just decided to think about how many of my friends would be alive if it were not for modern medicine. The answer - not many. My wife would have died in childbirth (if she survived the appendicitis she had as a teenager). One of my friends had a ruptured appendix. He’d be gone. Another friend fell off a ladder and ruptured his spleen. He’d be gone. That’s the kind of stuff that plays havoc with the expected lifespan. But assuming something like that doesn’t get you, and you actually die of old age, it was probably going to be roughly the same age people die at now, give or take a few years.

86

There is data on average lifespans --derived from estimates based on skeletal remains in the aggregate. I don’t have a cite on hand, but I believe we’re looking at an adult life expectancy in the 40-50 range, on average, for pre-industrial folks. With much variation.

Looking at the famous is an error, by the way, since you’re looking at an elite sample with presumably better differential access --on average-- to food, care etc.

80-90 year old, even 60 year olds will be very, very rare.

Precisely, let me clarify prior disease comments, I was somewhat inaccurately collapsing the entire range of health problems into the word disease, which incorrectly implies the problem is small pox. Rather it’s the whole panalopy of deadly health issues, from appendicitus --and other infections which may be provoked by, for example parasitic infestation-- to simple items such as an infected cut. Even things which don’t kill will reduce efficiency of members of the community and may impose an absolute burden. Indeed dying rather being crippled/impaired might be better for the community as a whole.

I don’t know about that, and of course it’s hard to abstract away these risks which are fundamental to lifespan issues.

87

I still see a couple of language problems rearing their heads:[list][li]At first, the group will have to split into tribes small enough to maintain themselves in a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. They may meet periodically to compare notes and make plans.[/li]
Unfortunately, when they split up, language divergence will begin almost immediately. Let’s say Tribe A has a member who is bitten by a poisonous snake. They decide to call this variety of snake an “onk.” Meanwhile, tribe B loses a member to the same snake. They decide to call the snake a “bartak.”

And so on. When the tribes merge (heh heh), they’ll wind up spending a considerable amount of time arguing about what name to use for what critter, mountain, ore, plant, etc. Big problem.

[li]Fast forward to the second generation. They have lived entirely in the context of a hunter-gatherer lifestyle (or perhaps a primitive agricultural lifestyle). Now they are poring over their parents’ textbooks:[/li]
“Huh? A ‘wrench’? What is a ‘wrench’? What is ‘Celsius’? ‘Flange’??? What is the meaning of ‘electronic’?”

I think it is going to be very difficult to transfer scientific knowledge to children who are raised in a pre-industrial environment. Damn near impossible.

88

Well, darn! It took me so long to remember what who calculates mortality rates that Collounsbury beat me to it! So please regard as a footnote to above comments:

The anthro-anything people seem to toss: life expectancy, average life expectancy, maximum life expectancy, mean age of death around that it is sometimes hard to follow which exact one they mean or, even better, what the figures should mean to me.

It’s only when you see one of the fancier terms like “population structure” or “mortality and average age-at-death structure” that you might be able to suspect that the adjustments to the count of skeletal remains might reflect the subtraction of the individuals under five years of age. A Harpending and Sxxxxxxxx (I can’t find his/her name right now.) reference in the footnotes would be the mark of a sure thing.

In discussing the Amatomically Modern Humans’ life spans (AMH) in Paleolithic, Klein in Human Career says that the common mortality pattern resembled that of most later pre-historic and historic hunter-gatherers: child mortality was high, women rarely reached 40 years of age and men probably rarely reached 60 or even 50 years of age. However, the AMH probably exceeded the maximum life expectancy of Neanderthals by perhaps as much as 20%.

Jois

89

My what a fascinating topic! :slight_smile: Great responses by all, but I think I’m just going to have to go out on a limb here and be an ultimate pessimist. Even if the group devises a plan, it still will bring its 21st Century socio-political and ethical/moral structures that I believe wouldn’t readily apply to prehistoric phenomena that we certainly can’t accurately predict well enough to plan for anyway.

I’ll be generous and say that that group wouldn’t last a year. I say this because the 21st Century psychological baggage they will carry with them will ultimately hinder any progress they could make. The first deterrent to survival is the type of person who would self-select to participate in this venture. I’d have to question the sanity of anyone who opts to go, for their personalities would have to be either very aggressive, arrogant, overconfident of their abilities, and/or suicidal. Once in the past, these people would compete against each other to see who could dominate. If it’s a group of mixed races/cultures, then most likely they’ll gang up on each other and fight because the underlying irrational prejudices (that we currently haven’t ironed out) that color our perceptions of people now will induce them to do so. Even if it’s a homogenous group of one race/culture, they’ll still fight; they’ll just use some other prejudice (e.g. only those who have 20/20 vision are best equipped to lead) to dominate the others and force them to do the more unpleasant tasks.

If the group’s not self-selected, then it’ll probably take even less time for them to die. I mean, how do they deal with the staggering reality that they will never see their homes and loved ones again? Not much would be familiar. They’d have to be constantly on their guard against any unknown thing that could leap out and do them harm. Too much stress. And it would be self-defeating to try to recreate 21st Century technology when that’s what was responsible for uprooting the group in the first place. Once people who aren’t used to going without 3 square meals a day; some form of entertainment (e.g. the internet); or seeing excessively high mortality rates either due to pathogens, accidents, or childbirth complications are exposed to these situations, it won’t take long for despair to set in. It wouldn’t take a genius to figure out that the odds are high that the majority of the group will most likely die a painful death.

If the group does decide to cooperate, then there’s the question of order. Who will enforce laws to ensure smooth operation and the well being of the group, and what should those laws be? For example, I believe rape is illegal in most countries now. But what if a woman working under the 21st Century first world notion that her body is her own and she can choose the time she wants to reproduce and with whom, refuses to have kids to help replenish the rapidly diminishing numbers of the group? How long do you think it’ll take for some man to overpower her and rape her until she conceived, excusing the act by saying it was for the preservation of the group? The group may decide he was correct or they may not have the time or energy to care enough to punish the (by 21st Century standards) rapist because they’ll need every available pair of hands they can get.

Even if a handful survive, what will be their motivation for going on without other people who know and understand the 21st Century time frame they came from to support them?

I can’t even begin to imagine the impact that a group from the 21st Century would have on the existing (pre?)humans of the time. A likely possibility providing this group survives long enough to interact with pre-humans either through war or peaceful co-existence is that whatever 21st Century germs/prejudices . . . that group brings with it aren’t going to set too well with pre-humans. In effect, this 21st Century group may do considerable damage to the development of humans as we know them now.

Of course all of this is wild speculation on my part. I’d be interested in your responses.

90

In some 21st century African nations, the mean life expectancy is lower than this.

91

Celestina has touched upon the one issue I was abstracting away from, and that is the ability of our colonists to psychologically support the endeavor over the long term. Further the appropriateness of their sociological norms.

Here our assumptions make the world of difference. If we assume a less-than-rigorous selection, I agree with Ex Tanks comments previously, most of these folks will go insane and probably commit suicide, either deliberate or indirectly.

However, I believe that our optimists and the OP have posited some kind of active selection and training. In the last rounds, I have been working with the assumption that they have all had some kind of military like survival training, albeit focused on using neolithic techniques. I assumed further that they would be trained as best one could for the application of such in new environments. And of course, all the prior presumes a high degree of selectivity, as in military elite teams. Having no first hand experience here, I defer to any military folks in re observations about the appropriateness of this model.

So, working on the assumption that these are all (a) volunteers at some level — who think at least that they want to try to recreate civilization (b) selected through rigorous techniques to weed out the obviously too brittle © trained to adapt to the harshness facing them: I still see serious long term problems. Maybe not the first year, maybe not the second year, but in the long run.

I posit the following problems:
Social structure: no matter what the training, the team/group (shall we continue to say 3k or 5k individuals) will still have modern group social structures as their background assumptions. How well will such socialization work — at this scale of at least 500 up to 5k individuals — when they have to break out into roaming hunter gather bands?

Mortality assumptions: how well will the group(s) actually cohere when what I think we have to assume is relatively high mortality begins to kick in? It’s one thing to deal with this in the abstract, but our volunteers are nonetheless psychologically adapted to much lower mortality rates. What happens to group(s) begin to lose members, e.g. Jose and Fernandez get stomped by megafauna? What impacts on subsistence patterns?

Hubris of Science: the group will need to be made up of very proactive, positive people. This contains its own issues. Selection bias in re understanding the new environment and possibly excessive optimism with initial successes may lead to inappropriate choices, including too early fixed or semi-fixed settlement and too high population density.

I foresee the following effects:

(a) Bands will tend regroup for safety and psychological support in numbers environmentally unsustainable in the long term. Further, assuming some attempts at centralized leadership, say on military lines, centralization will impose costs and risks which may outweigh benefits by restricting “roaming area” and imposing communication costs (e.g. runners) which may not be supportable. Inappropriately large h-g bands will raise risk of too rapidly depleting “known” environment/area and raising disease/environmental disaster risk.

A further item in re social structure, and that is tensions in re sex relations. First, women will be much more valuable than men in the long term, insofar as group survival will depend largely on producing a second generation as well as their basic food gathering role. Higher male mortality rates will likely produce a destabilizing gender imbalance. For all the snickering about harems and the like, our group will not likely be really adapted to the idea of multiple mates, which may well be necessary. This will imply tensions and problems in re adjustment which may, at the very least, be presumed to reduce efficiency.

(b) Connected to (a) but also operating independently, there will no doubt be negative reactions to the first wave of mortality. Early mistakes of all kinds, probably when the group(s) initial guard is down — say six months to a year into the project — will produce a wave of fatalities/casualties. I suspect that this will in turn tend to create a risk averse environment. Also note of course the connection with gender imbalance above. When we leave aside fantasy jollies, this could be a non-trivial problem. Effects will probably tend to go in the direction of foregone mobility and a tendency to err in the direction of settlement (already a sub-conscious bias on the part of our folks) which in the long run may be fatal due to issues of resource exhaustion as well as disease issues.

© In regards to Hubris, I see the following issue: on the assumption we are working on some alternate Middle East/ancient pre-man Middle East we are looking at an environment with some serious degree of variability. I believe that the unconscious developed world bias to ignore variability or to assume stability (for we have largely stabilized our environment) is likely to get our group in trouble over the medium term.

Let us presume they arrive at the beginning of a five year wet cycle. They get to know their chosen area fairly well, and suffer only moderate mortality rates. Natural surplus in the wet period is enough to support a quasi-settled life. After the first year or two, our 5k group has colonized the area, and their guard slips. Whether with centralized control or not, they slip into a quasi-settled lifestyle living more or less at the border of the wet-cycle environment’s capacity with supportable but only in this cycle population density. But this seems fine, they believe they have mastered their environment, marginal progress is being made to domestication of some plants and animals (say goat precursors). Their goal is, after all, settlement.

Then year six, severe dry season hits, taking them unawares. Moderate storage from prior years takes them through to year seven w/o elevated mortality, but group is weakened. Drought continues (perhaps a three or four year cycle). Spreading out is difficult as they have not adequately come to know their out-region environment and they now face severe competition with wild-life, including predatation from pressed predators such as lions, perhaps mega-predators. Fish and other caloric income plunges and river/coastal predators also step up pressure. We could see an absolute population collapse right here. At the very least, they lose their hard won gains, much time and energy lost, and the groups will have to make an emergency dispersal, possibly permanently losing contact or dying out in new stressed environments.

In essence I see an elevated risk of medium term underestimating environment risk leading to a population crash.

The final issue is group cohesion. Clearly in connection with all these stresses we can not rule out the mega-group breaking up into hostile bands some years down the road, even with military discipline. Tensions of differences in re survival choices, ‘relationship’ driven tensions etc. will have to be dealt with without a real authority super-structure. As such, re- emergence of pre-modern clannishness is highly likely in the long run, further undermining efforts to a quick transition to non-hunter-gatherer life. Put this in the context of the drought scenario described above and I think we can all see the recipe for disaster.

I don’t believe that the above is even particularly pessimistic, for I presume they do survive the scenario, but with a shattered social structure. Future of tech-civ? Thousands of years away.

Added comment in re presence of other hominids:

After some consideration, I believe that we should not assume that this changes the equation very much. Badtz has made the assumption that they could be enslaved and put to work. I see several issues: depending on who they are (I assume at least homo erectus) they may be more dangerous for our group than the reverse. At least, I do not think we can assume there is automatic superiority.

Second, in re enslavement, this presumes (a) ability to use slaves effectively (b) ability to control. In re (a), we should recall that at the hunter gatherer level, we are working with little to no surplus carried over. It is difficult to imagine being able to use slaves economically to produce advantage. They are as likely to be a drain as not, except if a conscious policy of working them to death was adopted. The problem with this is (b) ability to control and whether effort to control yields benefits — in a hunter gatherer context — which exceed costs in terms of time. Further, a policy of working slaves to death implies a degree of de- socialization in re 21st century norms with dangerous implications in re group psychology/in group dynamics.

Per Patterson, Slavery and Social Death pre-settled/agricultural slavery did not show economic use patterns. Rather it seems to have been religious/death substitute, and in large part was “uneconomic” where it existed, unless understood in terms of increasing the group size and eventual assimilation. In the case of our experiment, I believe the latter is impossible, the former irrelevant.

Final analysis:
Odds for the experiment as per OP, and even allowing for rigorous preparation, run towards zero for recreating civilization rapidly. Even survival is something of a crap shoot, but in the context of allowing for a well-selected and trained group, I think slightly better than even in the long run.

My analysis is that a virgin world settlement successfully recreating industrial society requires significant physical capital to go along with the human capital. Even in this case, historical settlement examples, e.g. early English settlement of North America suggest that risks are high.

This would, however, make an interesting if grim novel if written with strict realism.

92

I forgot one line, in re other hominids in the analysis. I think the area of cooperation and learning, at least in early stages, would probably be where advantage would be gained, rather than violence. Rather like early settlers in North America, our group’s position will be fragile early on, even with their advantages.

Depending on communication, or just observation, locally adapted hominids might provide an advantage in re getting to know the environment and its constraints. This might offset the added competition in the niche.

93

The next thread should discuss whether or not we would ever want to re-establish this level on civilization: the nuclear weapons, outstrip our resources, expand so people would ever need or want to live in and eventually cut down rainforests or in coastal India where half a million are killed every other monsoon, killing off nearly every species but our own. With an opportunity, to start over with our current knowledge, shouldn’t we aim to improve rather than just repeat previous mistakes?

Great topic!

Jois

94

** Yes, hardship abounds, but don’t underestimate the human spirit. **

Admittedly, much would be lost, but we would retain our instinct for survival, our cunning, our intelligence, our humanity, our faith, and our knowledge that the monumental tasks that lay ahead can be–and have been–solved before by people who knew far less than us. We would have a blueprint for survival and survive we would.

Thought experiments like this bring our the cynics in us. We focus on the monumental challenges and believe ourselves incapable of measuring up to them. We think of ourselves as weak and nature as all-powerful. Indeed, our modern lifestyles convince us of that. But confronted with these great challenges, we would discover strengths within each of us we thought never existed. Sure we would be fearful at times and, yes, we would watch loved ones die, but instead of going insane, instead of rolling over and quitting, we would move on.

Folks, let me tell you what each of you would do. Confronted with the challenges outlined, you and I would kick ass from dawn to dusk every blanking day to eek out an existence. Crude, paleolithic tools? Fine. We could feed, clothe, and shelter outselves. Botanists could identify edible berries and roots. We would join hands to construct crude log cabins. Divisions of labor would emerge. Some would become adept at working with primitive metals. Others at practicing herbal medicine. Above all, we would pool our knowledge, muscle, and goodwill to survive.

If we outrun the carrying capacity of the land, some would inevitably strike out on their own. A trading system would emerge. Some type of basic schooling would develop. Domestication of animals and plants would indeed happen, through trial and error. The loss of life by present-day standards would appall us, but not by those of primitive societies–and if they can survive, so can we. We are amazingly adaptive.

If we’re talking about a return to present-day civilization, who cares? We would have the blueprint to achieve anything we wanted, with time and determination and faith.

Go ahead and take you shots at me, but also take a few moments to reflect on your strengths and on the indomitability of the human spirit. We could do it.

Your fearless leader,

tsunamisurfer

95

I think you’re off the mark when you say that the group will break down for sociological reasons. After all, we have plenty of examples of small groups of people who split off from society and managed to maintain a coherent social structure. The pilgrims and the settlers of the west would be two examples from fairly recent history of groups that left with not much more than they could carry and managed to thrive.

So I don’t really think that’s necessarily a problem. It *could be, depending on who winds up in charge and the exact circumstances, but it’s certainly not a given.

Here’s an interesting question: We’ve been talking about a group that leaves with no technology. How about a group that leaves WITH it? Let’s say we allow them to pack two railroad cars with all the technology they want. The sky’s the limit. NOW how long does it take to re-start civilization?

I believe the answer is, ‘about the same as if they had nothing at all’. Sure, the technology they haul will make their immediate lives better, and if they choose well it might help them find some ore and set up some crude manufacturing, but that’s about it. High technology needs a high technology society to maintain it, and within a generation all the original stuff they hauled would be broken, worn, etc.

So then the question is, if they allowed you to haul a couple of RR cars full of stuff, what do you take? high technology, or things like wheelbarrows, plows, seeds, etc? Perhaps a small thermoelectric nuclear generator? No moving parts, generates power for hundreds of years?

Never underestimate the value of a wheelbarrow and a steel shovel. Those two items can make a person rich compared to his counterparts who don’t have it.

96

Start a new thread, Sam. Your idea sounds intriguing and I think we’re near an end with this one.

97

*Originally posted by Sam Stone *

Interesting question - I’d also like to add if we include a minimum level of technology, what would be the minimum number of people necessary? The original discussions estimeted around 3 to 5 thousand which to me was rather small. If a sufficient number of people are sent with some minimum level of technology, then the odds are much better (although in my opinion still quite low) in reducing the time constraints in trying to recreate 21st century technology.

I’ve always been interested in what “critical population level” it took for other civilizations to emerge (e.g Egyptians, Sumerians, Chinese, etc.). Anyone know of any sources/cites regarding the estimated populations of ancient civilizations (re population level when they first emerged)?

My Guess - about 50,000 - 100,000 with two railroad cars of technology.

98

About 10-20k years, if they make it at all, which is unlikely

99

I’ll be sad to see this thread go!

It reminded me of “something” and finally remembered: Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano, 1952, Scribner. (Republished as Utopia 14 1954, Bantam and again as Player Piano with new preface,1966, Holt.) It was anti-everything. Freed from the machines that controlled their lives, humans just simply went about making those same machine workable again. IIRC Vonnegut went bonkers right after writing this one!

Jois

100

I thought I would clarify in regards to the issue of sociological collapse. In fact my position was not that the group would collapse per se, but rather that the group — which I believe we were looking at 3 to 5k individuals. Further, we were looking at this larger group having to operate in the context of hunter gatherer groups.

In this context, I believe the problems noted are likely. I do not see a real connection with the example of frontier society — the situation there is quite different insofar as long term contact is maintained with the “mother” society, either through return or through new blood coming in, or trade ties, etc. However, even within this context, I believe we find issues of group tension and fragmentation. All in all some kind of transformation of social structure is likely. Mostly for the worst in terms of ability to recreate a technological state.