:smack:
I think it would take hundreds of years. Just to get the raw materials required to build a computer would require increasingly larger mining equipment built from previously inaccessible raw materials. It’s turtles all the way down.
Yeah, I’m thinking that waterwheels would be extremely handy for both electro power and also various pre-electric power needs (like milling and such).
It probably wouldn’t be worth our while to burn coal for power, once we’d gotten past the point of needing it for our smithys. Leaving an unpolluted paradise for our wealthy lizardman overlords to move into and take over is the whole point, after all.
(Can lizardmen go through the portal?)
Well sure - but there are certainly quite a few turtles that we can skip this time around, and possibly some that would be better replaced by the odd armadillo. My question is who would be the right people to task to the job of coming up with a game plan here? Clearly, the SDMB isn’t well-suited - we’re too prone to fighting the premise than anything else. I’m imagining an odd mix of historians and engineers. What type of each?
I’m thinking the initial industrial focus should be on mining iron. Looking at this map of worldwide iron deposits and considering relatively temperate climates with currently stable Earth I governments, the ideal location is probably southern Appalachians or possibly Germany.
Now now, don’t be snippy.
The first person you hire is somebody with a ton of money, and ungodly patience. This is going to be an endeavor of decades with no discernible return, well, ever. The outlay here is going to eclipse whatever you’re going to take in from people paying you to go to your private vacation spot, and even then it’ll be decades before you see a cent. (Though you could recoup some costs early by renting out the portal for hazardous materials disposal.)
After that I’d probably look for a bunch of engineers that go to ren faires, and shortly after that a bunch of miners. Lots of underpaid workmen for cheap labor. Oh, and a few big guys who can kill bears with their bare hands while naked, because it might come to that. At some point you’ll need weavers and people who know what it takes to make paper and ink, but that’ll be a ways off.
Build a complex around the portal with eateries and dormitory housing, and start sending in the stone-tool-makers.
Actually, you can’t. Unless those materials are in the form of a naked human. 
Unless I misread your OP, the things that don’t go through the hole simply cease to exist. This would be a nifty way to get rid of our nuclear waste, among other things.
If disallowed things simply are stopped at the door, bouncing off an invisible forcefield, then passing through with a full stomach would be a problematic experience.
You will need shelter unless you happen to be in some ideal climate that is not too hot, not too cold, not too sunny but not rainy at all. Otherwise, even in shifts you aren’t going to get much accomplished. You will need a base camp immediately just to support your efforts to explore and scout for resources, unless everything you need happens to be only a couple of feet from the portal site and you never have to worry about people wandering off and/or being eaten by wild animals or falling off cliffs or the like.
It’s going to be a lot harder than I think people think it will be, even with the magic going home to eat and rest part. Maybe I’m over complicating things, but just your list is going to be pretty tough. Hell, setting up the local infrastructure and supply just to make stone tools and keep them supplied to the workers is not going to be a walk in the park. Making a stone tool, if you have the skills and material isn’t that challenging to someone who has those skills…making enough to keep a team supplied so they can go forth and find more stuff is going to be a bit more.
It wasn’t my OP. But I think (hope?) we can guess that in the spirit of the OP, that’s not what happens. Because the premise is really interesting. And we don’t want to shit on something interesting, right?
But the point is, yes, academics doing research and survival hobbyists are going to be the main people going through at first. Yeah, they can build grass huts and tan leather and make stone tools, and find clay for pottery, and build kilns, and make charcoal, and so on.
And why would they share the shit they built with the newbies who stumble through the portal naked? What’s in it for them?
The problem here is the utter impossibility of trade between Earth I and Earth II. Nothing on Earth I can be used to improve life on Earth II, and nothing on Earth II can be used to improve life on Earth I.
I guess there’s one sort of trade that might work. You have rich bastards here on Earth I who hate the rabble, and want to move to a pristine new world. But that would mean arriving on Earth II naked, not as a rich bastard. Yes, there are people who go out into the woods and build shelters out of native materials and stuff, because that’s fun for them. But most rich bastards are not survival hobbyists, the point of being a rich bastard is that you don’t have to scratch in the dirt to make a living, you pay other people to do that for you.
So you’re a rich bastard. You pay teams of survival hobbyists to head over to Earth II to set things up for you. Those survival hobbyists are the lukewarm sort, they like doing that shit but also like going back to civilization. The full-on survivalists just head to Earth II and never look back. But the ones who want to come back can do work on Earth II, building houses and stockpiling firewood and shit, and then come back to Earth I to get handsomely paid. The rich bastard then hands over large amounts of money and gets a premade home base over on Earth II.
The only problem with this is that the best premade home base over on Earth II is going to be pretty crappy compared to the luxuries available to rich bastards here on Earth I. And how do you handle the would-be Kings over there? Oh, you’re gonna be one of them? You and what army?
Thing is, rich bastard colonists here on Earth I could bring over soldiers and weapons and tools to the colonies they established, and wring a profit out of the place, and then either become an even richer colonial bastard, or go back home as a retired rich bastard. That sort of thing just can’t happen given this setup.
Yes, if you could somehow motivate people to work like dogs to set up an industrial infrastructure for future generations to exploit, things could progress fairly quickly. How how will that work? The people that go through aren’t going to be interested in that, they’re going to be survivalist types who want to head out and live a paleolithic lifestyle, because anybody who doesn’t embrace the paleolithic lifestyle is going to end up dead.
And the people who do decide to build shit aren’t going to be building it to benefit newcomers. The bootstrapping needed just won’t work.
Sure, in a couple of generations there’s going to be some civilization going on over there, and in a hundred years or so it might be a much nicer place to live than Earth I. Except you can’t visit Earth II except as a naked charity case. How does the tourist trade work when the tourists don’t have any money, food, clothing, or valuables? When things get set up comfortably on Earth II the only way they’re going to let you stay is if you sign a contract of indenture. That could be a for-real term of service in exchange for startup capital, or chattel slavery in all but name. Walk through the gate naked, and take your chances.
I think the point of the setup is to just disallow the inevitable rules-lawyering. Nothing gets through except naked humans. Getting one of those professional hot-dog eating contest winners to smuggle gold nuggets or heroin or apple pies via the stomach isn’t allowed. You don’t wanna annoy the Alien Space Bats with your rules lawyering, do you?
I think I did say this would take years. (Just not decades.)
As with all bootstrapping, there are chicken-egg issues to be considered. Until you have axes you’re not going to make a shelter worth spit. Making nails will take much, much longer. Fabric will take probably a few years to get in place, so good luck making umbrellas.
Honestly, the thing I most obviously overlooked is hunters; I gather you can get a fair bit of mileage out of a fully and carefully disassembled animal. (The meat would be the least useful part.) You’ll want to round up some hunters who can use extremely crude weapons - it’ll be a bit before you can make even a longbow, since you need sinew or something for the bowstring. I hope this doesn’t sound racist, but you might want to go looking for native americans or native anybodyans who might be for some reason clinging to traditional tool-making methods. Can’t pick just anybody of course - a pacific islander who can work miracles with a coconut won’t be worth much if there aren’t any coconuts around.
Campers who can make fires from rubbing sticks together would be handy too of course.
It just occurred to me you might need the animals’ meat after all - if your stomachs are cleaned out when you walk through, your workers will get hungry pretty freaking quick.
Honestly before you send any team through, you should drop them in the woods somewhere on Earth I and see how long they last, sending only successful teams through. And also you film it (from afar) and broadcast it as a reality show. We’ll need all the advertising revenue we can get.
Sorry 'bout that. My memory for names is measured in seconds.
And it’s the writer in me - you can use whatever magic you want, but it needs to be consistent. If radioactive waste would disappear from your stomach if you ate it, it should also disappear from the fanny pack you’re wearing without stopping you from walking through.
You send them in, have them work for a while, and then they come back, get paid, buy TVs, and retire in comfort on Earth I.
The real question is who the organizing force will be, hiring all these people and engineers and specialists, and how they’re paying for them all.
And that’s exactly my point. You’re going to have to rely on altruists to pay these guys, because the only payment we get on Earth I is a humane way to get rid of unwanted people.
The alternative to altruists is some sort of religious or ideological movement, which is likely to result in some kind of dystopia or another over on Earth II. The good news is that people who are prepared to live as paleolithic hunter-gatherers can escape the dystopia by heading out into the bush.
But that creates some stratification.
The core, centered around the portal, powered by the enslavement of the naked serfs sent through the portal. A ring around that of people who make their living by raiding and/or trading with the core, as well as enslaving the people who escape slavery in the core. Then a ring around that of people making a living as hunter-gatherers, who alternately welcome escaped slaves as new recruits, or kill the escaped slaves, or tell them to keep moving on, depending on their manpower needs this week. Then a wide open area where you can live as a hunter-gatherer if you’ve got the chops but the population density is so low there’s almost no competition with other bands of hunter-gatherers, as long as you tend to move steadily away from the core.
I posited the illuminati. Presuming they can (somehow) keep control of the Earth II colony, they could in theory be working on building a retirement home. One that won’t be ready for them for like forty-sixty years, of course, but then again I posited lizard people too, and maybe they live longer.
For this not to go completely out of control you pretty much have to completely control access to the portal. You won’t have a ring of survivalist-rebels because you won’t let any non-employees in - and the employees all at the end of the day want to go back through the portal and collect their paychecks. That’s the only form of control the people in Earth I have: holding the promise of paychecks over the people on the other side.
Of course at some point you’re going to actually want there to be people to stay on Earth II permanently, to serve as manservants for the rich/lizards after the Earth I nukes drop. Transitioning from a ‘come home and get paid’ model to a ‘stay there and get paid (in something)’ could be tricky. Best make sure that the superintendants over there are loyal, or that could go badly regardless.
Another, unrelated thought: the firsty-first first groups sent across need to be hunters, specifically hunters who are really comfortable being naked. Followed closely by people who can tan leather, followed by people who can use sharp rocks and animal-derived materials to sew crude clothes! Because if you have to populate your colony of workers, specialists and experts with only nudists you’re going to have a much smaller pool of labor to pull from.
Having recently been back to Kansas, I can report that the land is already being used for agriculture. Wheat is being grown, cattle are grazing, and so forth. Kansas is rather arid, so it’s a tough place to be a Neolithic farmer, so the land’s already being put to its highest and best use in all likelihood. Anyone who wanted to play at Neolithic farming would almost surely prefer a more verdant environment.
You’ve got an admirably dim view of humanity, I can respect that. But to read your thoughts suggests Earth II would be little more than a remote Denali State Park–just fuggin wild wilderness with a few madmen roaming around in rabbit skins and happily subsisting on fresh salmon & blackberries, and of absolutely no use to anyone else. Please correct me if I’m way off base.
Because I, for one, would be happy to donate my time and effort to whatever tasks I can do. I have a decent job on Earth I and I get 3-4 weeks of paid vacation each year so it’s not like I’d be losing anything apart from a few unwanted office pounds. My kids are useless during summer vacation (and most of the rest of the year, let’s be honest) and a little labor and hard living would do them some good. I’d be willing to bet someone could even set up a lucrative business on Earth I selling the vacation gig to donate time & muscle to the development of Earth II. I just don’t think a lack of muscle power is going to be a problem.
So people donate their time to napping axes, lopping down trees, building longhouses & getting to work selectively cultivating food & medicine crops. Squeezing a thousand years’ trial and error into a few years of intensive directed breeding.
In the meantime, other people are scrounging up native iron & copper ores and smelting them–again, stuff that took thousands of years to figure out on Earth I happens in as much time as it takes to pile the rocks into a kiln, then bricks into a furnace. There is no need to be accidentally making crude steel for 2,000 years until someone invents the already primitive Bessemer process. You just start making steel right.
Absent hundreds of thousands of years of hit or miss survival, such a jump-started culture could develop vastly different values from those we have here, today. So who runs things? Maybe the best person to do so whether they want to or not?
You know what the portal would be good for? Weight loss. Eat that big, calorie-rich meal, then go through the portal, and it’s gone from your digestive system, without having to upchuck it!
Try to match that, Nutri-System! 
Immediately be hungry, eat another giant meal, hop through portal, feel like you haven’t eaten in days, eat another giant meal, hop through the portal…
At least you get exercise pacing back and forth through the portal. Food bill could be prohibitive, though.
I’m just saying that people don’t have enough appreciation for the centuries of backbreaking labor that went into creating our modern society.
Sure, we’ll be able to bypass all sorts of nonsense in the new Earth. So we can get straight to smelting iron with some clay kilns and charcoal mounds and hematite and skip over the bronze age.
But it’s still a whole lot of work to build all this stuff by hand. Like, a whole lot of work.
I’m sure that altruistic vacationers can give things a boost. But if you’re visiting Earth II, are you really going to be spending 12 hours a day digging in a clay pit, or are you going to want to see some passenger pigeons and carolina parakeets and such?
I guess we could set up a system where you spend a week digging naked in the clay pits with a wooden shovel, while going home every night to eat and sleep, then a couple months later when you’ve rested up the hunters over there will feed and house you for a week and show you some mammoths. But you’re really going to have to put in some labor over there.
Or, I guess pay a Mexican guy to go over and work in the clay pits for weeks naked with a wooden shovel, and pay him Earth I dollars when he gets back every night, and when your Mexican guest-worker has accumulated enough credits for you then you get your guided tour experience with long-timers who know how to keep you from getting eaten by a smilodon.
Oh, and I think possibly the best place for the portal might be Chesapeake Bay? Because that estuary is going to be swarming with seafood, pretty easy to harvest. And I’m also projecting that without hominids, most of the Pleistocene Megafauna would have survived over there.