Well, that was part of the point…it failed because they didn’t know that much about the environment they were trying to start a colony in. Whether it was hostile natives or disease or starvation (probably a combination of factors), they failed even though technologically superior to the natives because they didn’t know much about the environment they were in.
What if the portal happens to be in a flood plain or exposed to some other natural disaster? Presumably if no one comes back through after their 4 hour shift that will ring alarm bells, to be sure, but what if you send folks through and they don’t come back either? What if you spend several years building up a long house and it’s hit by a 100 year storm that wipes it out, or your settlement is in an idyllic location right by the banks of a beautiful lake…that just happens to be the equivalent of the Black Sea just before the ice dam breaks?
Human progression has been in fits and starts because, even with the advantages of knowing their world pretty well and having the tools and techniques they learned from generations of ancestors, shit still happened. And real explorers to something like what the OP is talking about are going to be wary of Murphy, not rushing into building steam engines and WiFi hotspots…or starting on centuries long quests to make corn on the cob.
I’m just trying to keep things real and grounded. Plus, I really am taken with the idea of the OP and the discussion. But my IT engineering side knows…the evil god Murphy and his demons are always ready to catch the unwary and take them to their doom!
I did aready. As I said, we already know what plants are good for mass production. We already know what those plants will look like after years of selection. We already know about recessive and dominant genes. We already know what makes good fertilizer. We already know how to build an irrigation system. And further, we know how to build up test systems and greenhouses. We can keep better records. There’s a a tonne of things that give us a logrithmic advantage getting a new (Earth like) planet up to scale.
We’ll have no idea whether there will be any crop precursors around, and I wouldn’t reasonably expect to have any useful grain products for years. However we’re not going completely blind - Earth II is laid out just like Earth I except for the people, so we can know before we arrive (and more importantly, before we place the portal) where some of the major metal and mineral deposits are. Given careful research on earth before placing the portal you could probably find an ideal starting location, with fresh water and minable metals at known locations close at hand. You could probably make a decent guess as to available lumber supplies as well (though that would be a hair less certain).
The real kicker starting out will be just starting the base camp. Because you can get any real done you need a landing area cleared of trees and with no dangerous animals right in your face - and, lets face it, a stock of clothes waiting there for your experts and laborers to don upon arrival. You’re not going to get much of anything done as long as everyone walking through the door lands naked in a den of bears.
Once we build a paper mill and find a good ink source, anyway - though I suppose you could just have people communicate through the portal via sign language and have all your records kept on the Earth I side.
(I assume that light passes through, so you won’t be diving blind when you jump through naked into a den of bears, but I’m not sure there’s any reason to expect sound to pass through the portal - that involves air molecules passing back and forth, and most air molecules aren’t humans or electromagnetic waves.)
Most of the plants we use today have been heavily modified for thousands of years…and selected for. Most of them are also from a huge range of geographical locations in their initial unmodified form. They were brought, over thousands of years by migrating humans moving across a world that they knew pretty well. You are going to be starting in one spot somewhere on the planet…and your botanists will have a very limited selection to start the process of finding something usable. In many cases, the wild variety before humans started domesticating them had very limited utility. Before any of that you’ll have to build up the infrastructure to even farm and till the land…which is all going to be a totally labor intensive system depending completely on human muscle power alone unless you are equally lucky to have domesticate-able animals conveniently near your portal.
Certainly we keep better records. But to set up the infrastructure for records you have to do a bunch of other things…and then you have to hope there isn’t a fire or something else that wipes them out. You won’t be able to bring there here, after all, except whatever you can memorize and transcribe. Taking it back to do a disaster recover, say, is going to equally be a bear.
To make just your green house is going to require some fairly advanced manufacturing. Do you have sand suitable for glass nearby? How are you going to create glass panels? Do you have wood suitable nearby for making the structure? Is there water near by that you can use for irrigation?
The thing is, to do much of what people are saying in this thread means you’d have to have a huge number of happy coincidences and just vast amounts of luck. You have animals near, but not too dangerous, just the right size that a naked and weaponless human could take them down. You have flint or some other stone nearby in the proper configuration that you can work it and sufficient to make all the stuff you guys want to make. We have the precursors to domesticate-able agriculture nearby, and it’s the best kind that is initially growing in the wild in a plentiful way and useful. We have metals nearby in sufficient quantity and ease of access so we can exploit it. We have water nearby in sufficient quantity, but not too much, and in the right configuration we can easily exploit it. There are horses AND goats, as well as jungle fowl we can domesticate. And there don’t seem to be any lions, tigers or bears, oh my! Where we are starting isn’t too hot, or too cold, doesn’t get hit by large scale storms or volcanoes or massive floods or droughts and give easy walking access to the surrounding area, which is easy to map out and which we know all about from our own records and archaeological data. It’s perfect!
Well, XT, if you’re going to be like that, I’ll just declare that the portal randomly ends up bisecting a large tree on the other side and everyone who jumps through is instantly telefragged.
As far as where the portal goes, we’ve got one free move of the portal to anywhere on Earth. No backsies, though. The portal links one spot on Earth I to the corresponding spot in Earth II. So then the choice is whether we want to aim for a place with easy hunting/gathering for a good early start, or a place with the best potential for for an Industrial Revolution in the later game.
And the difference between Earth I and Earth II is that there are no hominins on Earth II. At best we have australopithecus types that have chimpanzee grade intelligence and social organization.
So I’m thinking that means a parallel Earth where a bolt of lighting hits Lucy back in the Pliocene at the exact same time a butterfly flaps its wing in South Africa and Hominin evolution collapses with a sad trombone noise. Earth II has developed independently since then. So depending on how chaotic the onset of glacials and interglacials would be, Earth II could be in either. But the good news is that the only geological differences would be those caused by different butterfly flaps in the last couple million years, so it won’t be hard to pick a spot with excellent coal and iron ore prospects.
Assuming that you can get technology bootstrapped far enough, the other side would have immense economic value, because one thing you can send through the portal is information. Build server farms on the other side, put fiber optic junctions right up against the edge of the portal on either side, and run all of your information technology needs there, using Earth II energy resources. Computing is actually a major fraction of Earth I’s current electricity needs, and that’s only going to go up.
As for the expertise of the people you send through, remember that you can mount a big screen TV on the Earth I side, right in front of the portal, and show tutorial videos.
For location, my first thought is the Pacific Northwest, because (assuming that Earth II’s geology and ecology is similar to I’s) there’s abundant food there for humans, and it’s good land for hydro power. But I don’t know where the closest iron is; that’d be useful. And it might be nice to have bamboo, too.
Come to think of it, one early stage in the bootstrapping process might be biodiversity expeditions: You have a workforce employed in gathering and preserving Earth II food, and who make basic tools like flint knives, atlatls, and boats, but who come home to eat, so they can stock up quicker in the II side. Once you have enough supplies stocked up, you have explorers who you send through who use those supplies to travel afield and bring back seeds/breeding stock of useful plants and animals.
Ever watch primitive technology? That dude builds clay kilns all the time.
You get iron from surface deposits such as bog iron.
Yes, there is a stream. We can put the portal anywhere. It would be put in the most advantageous place possible after consulting geologists, mechanical engineers, metallurgists, etc.
Trouble is, we’d need to know pretty precisely when this is all happening because the ideal spot is going to depend on what the climate is doing at the time and in the period we’d be setting up shop. I suppose since it’s a magic portal that also knows intent and has all sorts of other convenient powers that shift as arguments crop up, and we can move it once, the best thing would be to try and nail down when this is all happening. Maybe send through some astronomers and other scientist types to see if they can figure out what the latitude is and perhaps based on the star configurations when this is happening, then consult with the archeologist types to see if they can determine what might have been happening and where at this approximate time period. From that you MIGHT be able to figure out what the optimal place would be, but it’s going to be pretty imprecise if we are talking millions of years ago.
Personally, given my druthers I’d go for somewhere with good access to surface flint, obsidian and copper, with descent water access and good visibility but in a very sheltered location…maybe a large natural cave (one we know never did collapse would be ideal :p) and in a geologically stable region. I think, realistically, that would be the best you could hope for. Iron? Man, that would be ambitious to try and utilize that any time in the foreseeable future of this project.
Just to make sure there isn’t some new power here, this portal doesn’t follow everyone sent through along so they can just jump back whenever they want, right? They actually have to travel back to the portal, correct? If so, then I’d explore the ramifications of that more. Sure, it would be great and all, but like I mentioned earlier, what if you are 10 miles away exploring? You’d need to get back to the portal before you could be magically saved and 10 miles in terms of human power alone is a huge distance in unmodified terrain. I don’t think this is going to be quite the magic get out of jail free card some seem to be assuming, not once you actually try and start doing some of the stuff folks here are talking about.
Is he naked with no access to anything other than his two hands? Is there bog iron close to this portal? Is there a bog close…or trees suitable for making charcoal? Is there a stream nearby?
No, I haven’t seen it, but I have done some forging as well as done some practical archeology exploring how things were made or done. I’m going to guess that your guy here doesn’t do any of this without any tools at all, including the one that told him where the clay was and where the bog iron was. At a guess, if I dropped this guy, no matter how great he is somewhere randomly on the earth a million or so years ago, he wouldn’t be making bog iron any time soon, even if he could go back through a magic portal whenever he walked back to it.
You can consult who you want, but you’ve only got two weeks reset your spawn point, so start moving fast.
As I said above, the location choice falls into one of two broad categories. Either close to a river estuary with lots of free food, or on top of a place with both coal and iron deposits.
It’s easily possible we could be smelting iron fairly quickly, in the first hear, if we send in people who know what they’re doing. But iron only gets you so far. The problem is building everything by hand, from scratch. Agriculture is decades away, so forget that until you’ve got your industrial base going. You’re going to have to feed everyone from hunting and gathering and fishing. The good news is that hunting and fishing are going to be much more productive on Earth II than on Earth I, since Earth I’s richest hunting and gathering and fishing grounds have been replaced by cities.
Guys like this are going to be the only people worth sending through for the first few years. If we plunk the portal down on a place where we know there are hematite deposits then smelting iron isn’t that hard. The backbreaking part is collecting the charcoal.
I was under the distinct impression that the time on the other side of the portal is “now, but without humans”. So you only have to worry about human-caused alterations to the climate. Which could be significant, admittedly - among other things we’ve cut down and burned a lot of trees in our time. But in any case you don’t have to worry about landing among T-Rexes or whatever.
I was also under the impression that the portal didn’t follow people around - if you want to go back to Earth I you have to hoof it back to base camp first. And yeah, I figure that exploration will be way more perilous than some people around here are suggesting, and that nobody’s going to get further than about three miles from the base camp for several months - not until you’ve figured got a well-supplied group of hunters with locally-created weapons out there to hunt for food while on longer expeditions.
Ah, well, that makes a huge difference if it’s literally today on the other planet, just without humans. In that case, yeah…we could probably find a pretty ideal location to start. We know where ancient man exploited, say, copper, for instance and could cross reference that with the other desired attributes.
As with the other magically convenient powers, this one will certainly help. We could probably even adjust for the fact that, presumably the climate on this other world wouldn’t have been changing due to mans influence in the last few thousand years, especially in the last 200 or so.
He does it without any tools he didn’t make himself.
The portal placement isn’t random, we can put it where we want.
Earth2 isn’t millions of years ago? It’s Earth, but without humans. We can use our maps of streams, mineral deposits, etc. Anything that wasn’t changed by man.
The idea that thousands of people working 18 or 24 hours a day in shifts can’t make log shelters, leather belts, wooden wheels, and rudimentary metal tools with access to all human knowledge, in a couple years, is weird to me.
Since we can send electromagnetic radiation through, what would be the most useful thing to send? We can do laser cutting. You could make a rock and clay furnace right up to the side of it to help smelting.
It’s weird to you because you are thinking in terms of a human with a support structure. Granted, this aspect that I apparently missed that makes this the Earth exactly as it is today just without humans is going to make things a lot easier than I was portraying. Many of the problems I was talking about get magicked away if you know exactly what resources and terrain you are going into. But not all of them.
I watched the video above. Very cool. Let me ask you something though…what do you suppose that guy does in the event of a major storm? What does he do if his shelter there is completely destroyed, flooded out and all that stuff he has built is washed away? I’ll tell you…he goes back to his house, shrugs and starts again, getting everything he needs set up for his next video. Maybe drives home in his truck with his tools stashed in back. And that’s sort of what the humans who go to this place will do, if they can…they will just teleport home. However, when they return, they could have to start essentially from scratch all over again. We won’t know what the actual weather and climate might be on this other world, but even on our world we have lots of natural disasters that strike all the time.
In order to build up to be able to do 18-24 hour shifts you are going to have to build the support system first…what this guy doing the video isn’t showing you. You are going to need bathroom facilities, clean water and food, probably shelter and clothing as well. But first you will need to build all those tools he has built in previous episodes to build the support infrastructure so you can go out and start getting the clay and iron or copper or whatever.
I do admit that this thread is less fun with all of the special powers and stuff, however, and I also admit that with them piling up it makes it easier than I was thinking. Still, I think it’s going to take longer, even with the magically convenient powers, than folks think. I’d guess that we are still talking centuries if not longer before you could spread out and build up sufficiently for the higher tech folks are positing, if nothing else than because even if the humans can portal back when bad shit happens their stuff can’t and shit is going to happen repeatedly to set things back. If we went my way then it would be more protected initially but wouldn’t be optimal for expansion later. If you made it more vulnerable initially then you might have a better site for later expansion.
I foresee a lot of folks dying though in this venture, though, even with the magic portal. And I think it will take a lot longer to build up to computers and WiFi connections than folks seem to realize, even with all of this.
Just to be clear, “magic powers” means “we know very, very roughly what we’re getting into, and we don’t have to live there full-time (presuming we all file through the portal to leave, which could be problematic with thousands of people).” That’s the full extent of the “special powers”, as I understand them.
One side-effect of these “special powers” is we don’t have to build in the middle of a flood plain on the san andreas fault. It should be trivial to find a location where a civilization can build up without constantly being destroyed by natural disasters. Step one: find any existing city. Step 2: build there. One of the preconditions for most cities is they aren’t getting wiped out every couple of years.
