How long until this new world gets connected to the internet?

In My Humble Opinion
101

Sure, though major settlements and even cities in the past have been destroyed, some repeatedly until finally it was one plague or disaster too many and the place was abandoned. Certainly we can look back on where ancient man got easy to access resources like copper, tin, flint and the like…and presumably it should still be there in it’s unmined state, ready for us to exploit. Like I said, you’d definitely want geologically stable regions with a moderate climate and access to abundant resources that are also geologically close…close enough to get to after, oh, say a days travel would be best.

I’m sure there are plenty of planetary geologists, climate science folks and paleontologists and archeologists who could come up with many viable candidates to settle. I’m not sure if picking one that a city is in today or even in the past is going to be a great idea for an initial colony, though. Few places on this planet are completely immune from any sort of natural disaster, and most cities are situated as they are because they have a support infrastructure already, and they are there to take advantage of their location, usually for trade and the like. That’s not going to be a thing with the initial colony, and probably not for quite a while. At that point you are talking about folks permanently on this new planet and spread out geographically enough that using the portal is no longer really an option to get out of jail free.

102

I figure that you’ll see some reasonably sturdy (though nail-less log cabins built within a couple months. Those should handle most storms and such, well enough to establish a reasonably permanent base camp, even given inclement weather. (For obvious reasons one of those cabins should be build right on top of the portal.)

Personally I think it will be a hell of a long time before any sort of geographic spread occurs, simply because I think it will be a hell of a long time before any kind of food production occurs, simply because there’s little incentive to set up any sort of large-scale food production. People will all simply go back to Earth I to eat. It’s so easy, and comfortable, so of course they will.

So what you’re going to have is, essentially, a bunch of shift workers, entering the Earth I portal building, stripping, stepping through into the Earth II portal building, putting on their leather tunacs, and heading out to work. Which means that pretty much everything is going to be limited to, not a day’s walk, but an hour’s walk, so that people can get to where they’re working and get back home for dinner. You’ll get small groups of ‘local’ teams, that live off the land as they range further (and also hunt/gather food for the workforce’s lunches), but they will only be a fraction of the sort of teams you’ll want to have doing things like digging out and working in mines. Most people will stay close to the portal and go home constantly.

It’s the only way to kick things off to a quick start without waiting the decades it’ll take to develop local crops or domesticate local animals to ride, move cargo, or plow fields. So you’d better know exactly where you’ll want to dig, because you’ll want to put the portal damn near right on top of it.

103

One question I’d ask is…who would control this thing? I don’t know if the OP is an American, but let’s say it’s in America. Would America control the portal? Certainly anything that would be built here as support infrastructure would be on American soil, but would/should the US control this to the exclusion of other countries? What if the OP is Chinese, and his or her backyard is in China? Certainly China would try and control it and heavily restrict other countries from accessing it. What should the rest of the world do, in either case? Should the UN control access and the ground around the portal be declared some sort of embassy or neutral territory?

I still think that nation states would be highly regulator of this thing, so much of this speculation is way off base, regardless of the magical properties. I imagine it would be something like Antarctica, at best…something for small groups of international scientists to study, with highly regulated access and probably a ton of treaties about not exploiting or spoiling the new world.

104

My understanding from the OP is that it’s an exact copy of our earth, with the portal in corresponding locations. So pick a place *here *that you know had the resources you want there.

ETA: I see this has been already addressed. But anyway, I’d pick the Levant for this.

105

Problem with that idea is that the entrance would be in the Levant in current Earth I! :eek:

106

Y’know, on thinking about it, the fact that EM radiation can pass through the portal is going to give us some huge shortcuts. For starters: Fire is a pretty basic human tool, but it’s hard to make it if you don’t already have fire. But we can just start all of our fires from the near side of the portal, with intense light.

That is, if we even need fire on the other side at all. As soon as you can make bricks (which are pretty low on the tech tree), build a half-dome of bricks right up against the portal, with a corresponding half-dome and heat source on the near side: Now you’ve got an oven, or a kiln, or a forge, that doesn’t require any far-side fuel.

Someone upthread said that we couldn’t speed up plant breeding, but we can: Put grow lights on the near side of the portal, and we can grow crops 24 hours a day, 12 months a year. And it gets better: Bring a gamma-ray source to the near side of the portal, and use it to irradiate seeds on the far side: We’ve just given evolution a kick in the pants.

As soon as we’ve got copper (the easiest metal to work from its natural state), we’d have electrical power: Make coils of copper wire, and put them right up against near-side coils and iron cores (you wouldn’t even need iron on the far side: It’d improve efficiency, but we can tolerate inefficiency).

A lot of machining needs can be served via laser cutting. It’d be slower than spinning carbide bits, but much quicker to set up, if the laser is on the near side.

And a thought I had just now: What does happen to non-human material that tries to go through the portal? If it just gets cut off, then the portal itself is going to make for an amazing tool.

107

It would be interesting to go through the tech tree in a bit more detail and see if there are any precursors to 20th century tech that just can’t be found anywhere near each other. We’d need rubber at some point, for instance, to make valves and other parts of steam engines (I assume?).

I think the most key factor is initial portal placement. The following constraints exist:
-stable location in terms of weather and natural disasters
-access to flint and lumber for initial bootstrapping
-access to raw materials and ore for production of kilns/metals
-readily available food for people-start-to-live-there phase
-no predators that would kill and eat us before bootstrapping can occur
-useful overall geographical location for the future (ie, not on Hawaii)

We should also put some thought into the micro-level placement of the portal. For instance, if after 20 years we have a little work community spread out in the new world, it would be very convenient if it was arranged in such a fashion that it could all be seen from the portal, so that the management/admin/scheduling could all be done from our world. So as much useful geography as possible visible through the portal. In fact, suppose you were working a day shift on the portal side assembling canoes. You’d be in the canoe assembly hut, and when you finish one, you go out front and move a pointer on a painted sign. That’s recognized by a computer on the Earth 1 side of the portal which then uses lasers to flash the message “please take your completed canoe to hut 14” onto a little flat area next to the pointer, etc.
A factor that has been touched on briefly is the motivation of those on Earth 1. Is this a top priority of a national government? A top priority of the world as a whole? Being funded by Bill Gates? Or just a bunch of volunteers?

If it’s fully owned and controlled by just a single government (assuming it’s publicly known) then it’s something that hasn’t existed since the days of the Spice Islands, namely, a single unique source of economic value that is arguably worth fighting a war over (assuming it ends up being more than just a curiosity).

Ideally, from a utopian viewpoint, the portal should be controlled by a multinational consortium of some sort.

108

Your first points were things I alluded to earlier that I think would be an extreme help, but your last one is also pretty novel. World’s best saw!

Maybe outside the intent of the OP though?

109

Southern Ukraine, with the iron deposits indicated on your map, the Black Sea, temperate climate and good soil for agriculture might be a good area.

110

It’s nice to go back to Earth 1 when you’re really hungry. You can eat Big Macs and fries until you burst. But you can’t bring much of that nutrition with you because all the food in your tummy vanishes when you cross the portal. Maybe we could do the 3 or 4 hour shifts mentioned earlier. In order to get much done some sort of nutrition would need to be stockpiled on Earth 2 for people to eat soon after they’ve exited the portal with a completely empty stomach.

It’d be worthwhile to periodically return to Earth 1 for a week or two at a time to rest and build strength with proper nutrition and light exercise.

111

[Bolding mine]

I don’t know… where will you get the blood, skin, bones, muscle, and Anabaptist dogma? It’s gonna take weeks, maybe months to build human Creation technology on Earth 2 so you need to factor that into your water-wheel timetable. Unfortunately, coming up with Anabaptist dogma from scratch might take longer.

112

You would want the portal near wood, water, and metal deposits. Sure, the initial tasks would be to create stone axes, shelter, clothing. But I’m guessing that won’t take too long.

I’d put the portal on Iron Mountain, located near Redding, California. It has a variety of metals including iron, copper and zinc. The weather is mild, and I assume wildlife would nearby to be used for clothing and the like.

113

Sure - Israel, or Cyprus, or Greece.

114

I have a modest proposal for a food source that does cross the barrier…

115

And you can tan their hides for clothes…

116

Send this guy, and a couple hundred more like him, if you can find them:

Using Literally just his naked body (pant only to allow video on youtube), this guy will make himself a fire, some shoes, and a basic shelter in the first day.
a week later, and he’s living in a pottery-roofed hut, catching shrimp in a local stream, and finishing the fence around his planted food garden.

This gives us basic survival.
After that, a basic late pottery/early metal culture is possible.
Remember, the first wave of colonists will be carefully picked to minimize medical concerns, no elderly, no kids to take care of… They can be very productive the first decade or two, and they will need to be.

Um, waitaminute. Your portal is two-way? So your settlers can live at home, EAT and heal at home, then do quick day-trips to the Other Side?
10m wide portal? You could quick-march 100 000 workers through in an hour, once you have a suitable clearing to receive them in. You could easily maintain a workforce of 1 million on the other side, and still have no shift longer than 24 hours.

And the two worlds are geologically identical, so you can use survey maps from here?
No need to build houses, farms, livestock. Just transport and industrial infrastructure?

Do all your planning, design, scheduling this side, where you have people and computing resources galore. For scouting, use people with good observational skills, and basic art skills. They go and scout, and draw their info from memory.

You could have a working copper mine, smelter and wiremaker up in a month.
Another month or so timescale for iron smelting, forging, and starting on steam engines.
This puts you at the early 1700’s tech, in the first 6 months. You will have tools, including basic steam and electric tools.
You can do a LOT when food,shelter,medical and knowledge are non-issues, and manpower is virtually unlimited.

Where will you want this, on our world?
Temperate climate, coastal with access to rich mineral and biodiversity.
Must have coal, copper, iron in easy access.
Might I suggest east coast of Australia?
Oz cannot supply the manpower to really do this right and rapidly, but has the infrastructure to support an international effort by joint us/eu/china, and is on suitably amicable terms with all of these to swing it.

117

Nature documentary film makers.

The one resource that this world would have that ours doesn’t is untouched, pristine wilderness. Just the BBC documentary Earth cost $25 million to make, and then they went and made another one. I would see this as a multibillion dollar investment by Disney or some other major media outlet that can afford to drop a couple billion dollars on creating a movie franchise. Add in tourism, with an actual whole “Disney World”, and the project would probably pay for itself in short order.

Once you have enough technology built on the far side, you can build cameras and film, along with a projector, and play your footage through the portal. As long as you have managed to build up basic accommodations, tourism can start.

You would have a number of advantages, as well, in that you would know where all the natural resources are located. You can put the portal wherever you want (moved once), so any concerns about a poor climate or inhospitable area are no worries, unless you for some reason choose very poorly.

118

Never, the people you send through the portal probably die to disease they have no immunity to and they can not take medicine with them to address it and they can not bring any back to study it.

119

Hard to say for certain without having some idea how our immune systems interact with the portal’s rules.

If I go through the portal, then catch alternate-earth-yellow-fever, then come back through the portal before dying, what happens? Are all the viruses/bacteria/whatever in my body zapped into nothingness? What about whatever changes my immune system has been starting to make to fight the disease? Best case, my new antibodies remain, the germs vanish, and I’m both healthy AND immune.

120

Most diseases are specific to the species that they have adapted to, and would not be likely to infect a species they have never seen before. Without humans around for the last million years or so, there would be no reason for them to be adapted at all to modern humans.