Monetarily, it would be as cheap or expensive as you wanted it to be, depending on how many meals you wanted to eat without any cost to you in calories.
One possible bootstrap I see would be fractional distillation. It might just be doable if we can mix a good heat-resistant clay. Then if we portal next to a tar pit we can maybe skip coal by using some primitive blowtorch to make glass and iron.
Another consideration: Do local weather patterns and volcanic activity follow Earth 1, i.e. are they predictable? That would help a lot later when it’s time to build the first power generators.
At first and for several years, hunting animals will be fairly easy, since they won’t have developed the instinct to avoid humans. Instead, I suggest going to the place with the most domesticable plants. Assuming that that place on Earth I is not undesirable for political reasons.
Horses should be present in North America. They could probably be caught and trained, although they’ll be smaller than horses on Earth I.
The real problem with establishing civilization on Earth II is agriculture. Yes, there’ll be the plants that were domesticated on Earth over there, but there’s two issues.
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They’re scattered all over the world, so getting to them will be no picnic.
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Plants in the wild produce very small grains and fruit, so breeding them to be worth the while of actually cultivating them will take decades, if not centuries. I don’t think there are any significant shortcuts that can be taken to speed that process up.
Well if you find something radioactive and set the seeds next to it for a bit…
…in a few thousand years you will probably be able to have…CORN! All of the agriculture stuff, even the animal husbandry stuff is going to take a long, long time to get going. Centuries if not longer. That was my first show stopper before I realized folks could just cross back and forth through this portal pretty much at will. So, since they can eat on our side, I think that’s one of the projects that’s kind of put on hold, or maybe just studied and analyzed on the back burner while more important projects are pushed.
I think it would be a resort planet eventually.
Is this like the US/Chinese government going through and trying to get the internet, or just whoever wants to go through and see how long it takes organically?
ninja’ed
I couldn’t have said it better myself.
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How about fillings? Does the portal know not to disappear my fillings from my teeth? Ditto the one tooth of mine that’s an implant.
And you’d be screwed if you had a pacemaker or insulin pump! I just wonder what happens to the stuff…does it just drop on the floor as you go through? Would be a bit gross in many cases I can think of. :eek:
The portal works in mysterious ways…
Let’s just say that it knows what your intentions are. If you intend on circumventing the premise of not having any tools to aid you, then it gets removed and deposited at the entrance.
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Most of that backbreaking labor went into surviving into modernity, though.
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The reason it took so much labor to get from hand tools to hovercraft is:
- 90+% of humanity was involved in food production.
- We didn’t already know the path to take
- Social and governmental structures (like feudalism) were not conducive to it.
Those things don’t apply to our new world. Yes, there’s still some amount of digging in the dirt with stone tools. But not very much. Not generations and generations of it. Probably not even years of it. Just enough to bootstrap better tools.
We have tremendous knowledge with which to take short cuts.
It won’t, as another poster suggested, take a few thousand years to get corn, because it will take a lot less time to develop genetic engineering.
So now it’s a sentient portal? Move the goalposts much? 
I think I’d be a little scared to walk through a portal that’s that sentient. Though if it elects not to make everybody that walks through it instantly rapaciously hungry it’s going to be a lot easier to bootstrap a society, given that food production will be pretty much the last thing developed over there and it’s hard to get a workforce to dig a mine on an empty stomach.
It’s so weird to think of a society developing gene sequencing before corn, but by gum that could possibly happen. It’s possible to fasttrack mining and manufacturing, but there’s no way to breed faster.
We’re still going to have to get rope somewhere, though - and pretty quickly, too.
It was always sentient, at least enough to tell the difference between a human and a shaved monkey. It’s just now it reads minds.
A wizard did it.
I think it’s still an interesting question if you don’t try to get around the technicalities.
Given a narrowish portal through which humans but no other tools or raw materials can travel through, how quickly can one bootstrap to a roughly 1960s level of technology (I’m assuming a teletype connected to a radio counts as “connected to the internet”.
The answer is definitely not thousands of years. I expect it’s well under 100 years, and I’d be willing to bet on under 30, given sufficient funding. And think the funding would be there, given the obvious (to me, less so to others) economic value of a whole extra planet.
Also, on the subject of a warlord taking over the other side of the portal, I don’t think they’re going to be able to do so with spears. Because the Earth I side of the portal has energy weapons. Lasers can be targeted and fired through the portal, which is going to make it pretty hard for someone to control the other side with low tech.
People are so eager to break a hypothetical. Lol.
You can definitely fast track breeding, at least compared to how greatX30 grandpa did it. You have a better idea of the goal species, for one. And we have a better understanding of how to keep seeds and sperm viable for another. A rudimentary humidity and refrigeration system is hardly rocket science. Suddenly a fluke awesome specimen can super influence future generations.
And I didn’t include proper cross referenced record keeping.
Tell me how you’d fast track genetic breeding with, say, corn. First off, is the precursor species just growing right by your portal? If so, cool…how do you go from that to corn on the fast track? How are you planning to even get started? Going to, by hand, strip all of the seeds on your luckily close pre-corn, and…what? Get your pre-horse or pre-ox hooked up to your wooden plow and get your tree trunk irrigation in place and start planting? How long is the growing season where you are at? How many generations do you think you can fast track things to get from what corn started off as to anything usable? Even assuming you don’t get pests, disease, drought or wrath of god stuff, I don’t see how using pre-stone age infrastructure or maybe early stone age technology you are going to be able to do it faster than the folks who actually did it. Sure, you know more about what’s happening, but they knew more about farming and agriculture using the technology of their day (which will far outstrip anything you could make in decades) than we do today. Hell, you won’t even be able to bring samples back to test what you COULD do with the stuff. Is it even the precursor to corn or is it something else? How will you test that? Well, you will have to have someone eat it and see what happens. If they have convulsions or whatever, you can sent them back through the portal…but none of the material will come back with them, so you still won’t know why or even what was happening.
People in this thread are seriously underestimating the challenges to do even the simplest things. Even just building the tools and structures needed to build the infrastructure to scout for potential grains and other plants that maybe come be domesticated and be edible is going to take a lot of time and effort. Years, probably decades. To change something like marginally edible grass with a few kernels to corn is going to be a monumental challenge.