How many years would it take to go from nothing to 2010 technology?

Great Debates
1

Assume that we transport as many humans and experts as we want to a planet that is identical to Earth, but has nothing built by anyone. That is, it is the earth before homo sapiens.

How long would it take these people to build the things we have today?

Assume they have experts in everything, but zero tools.

For example, to make a modern shovel, you need to cut down a tree for the handle, and need to extract some metal from the ground for the blade. But to cut down the tree or extract the metal, you need other tools, etc.

This gets even more hairy when considering a modern computer. To make the CPU, you need a fab, which needs a whole boatload of other stuff to be built first.

An so on.

Basically, how do you bootstrap civilization, and how long does it take, assuming you have the knowledge?

2

Complicating the question is the fact that a large part of the technology of 2010 is dependent upon the economies of scale we’ve achieved with a global marketplace with billions of consumers. The investment in the chip fab is a lot easier when the marketplace is hundreds of millions, rather than the 1,000 or so colonists left tool-less. There’s minimal levels of people involved in producing certain things–the processes don’t scale down. You can’t send one or two guys to mine the couple ounces of beryllium you need

I would guess a couple centuries. I suspect the industrial age would be reached within a couple decades, perhaps up through WWII level tech, but electronics would be the big hurdle for a small number of people. Recall that after WWII, quality control (which is crucial in advanced electronics) was about controlling an industrial process to achieve uniform results–and for that you need large scale industry.

3

It would require a large population, a lot of tech grows proportionately to population.
Edit: Beaten to it by hansel.

4

Recall that I said in the OP: “Assume that we transport as many humans and experts as we want”, i.e. population size will not be a problem

5

But you can’t support that many people without either stock supplies or infrastructure. They’re mutually exclusive.

You need infrastructure to link groups together, or they might as well not be together at all. Without some form of transit infrastructure, LA and NY might as well be on different continents, they need to be entirely self sufficient, which limits the amount of specialization each city can achieve. Without infrastructure, you also can’t transport food. You have sanitation problems, which lead to disease, and without medicines (also a product of infrastructure) that goes unchecked.

Farming, in itself, is an infrastructure-dependent business. You can’t have an isolated farm, in Iowa growing corn for 1,000 people. It needs tractors, oil, gasoline, spare parts, fertilizer, etc. And without that farm in Iowa, New York can’t feed itself.

Neither can exist without the other, they’re mutually dependent. So they have to grow in proportion to each other, they can’t just “start out.”

6

I assumed a practical upper limit on population that was significantly smaller than the world’s population, because otherwise your question is “say we wake up and all technology, tools and infrastructure are gone; how long until we’re back where we are?”

Well, first, you’d have a die off of about 98% of the Earth’s population because 6 billion+ can’t go foraging for food to support themselves the next day. Then you’d be right back to a small starting number. I can imagine spaceships landing and disgorging thousands into an Eden like paradise with enough plentiful available food and water to buy them the time to start farming, but even starting with hundreds of thousands of people, you’re still far, far away from the kind of scale we exist in now.

7

The first example of an industrial scale problem that came to mind was the sort of rare earths that are crucial to the manufacturing of computer components. For example, terbium occurs as a fraction of cerite and gadolomite, which need to be reduced by sulfuric acid in large quantities in order to harvest any significant amount. China, the major producer of most hi-tech rare earths, recently scared the world with announcements that it was limiting its export of them to ensure a sufficient supply for its own domestic market.

8

You guys bring up excellent points about population size and the state of our modern technology.

However, let’s not get bogged down by that for now. If population size is a problem for reaching modern technology levels, let’s focus on getting to the early stages of the industrial revolution (engines, trains, etc)

I guess one of the first steps is to be able to dig up ore and turn that into metal. With this you can make tools, and eventually, make an engine, e.g. a steam engine.

And assuming you can find a magnet, using the steam engine and some wire you manufacture from your metal, you could create a generator, and thus have electricity. Which means light, if you can make a primitive light-bulb. How hard is it to make one of those?

So, would it take our band of castaways only a couple of years to build an engine, assuming they were at a place with the proper type of ore?

And would it take them a couple more years to generate electricity and have the first light bulb? (How widespread/accessible are magnets around the earth?)

Are my above estimates too optimistic?

9

My wild-ass guess would be around a thousand years, to first bootstrap agriculture and mining as well as knowledge preservation, and then build an industrial base on top of that.

The biggest problem I see is degradation of the knowledge base over time - by the time you’re ready to build the first PCs, the people with the knowledge will be long dead. So preserving that knowledge base will be almost as important as subsistence.

But the cause is helped by the fact that the goal is known - this avoids replicating dead ends like Aether Theory or Lamarckism. If you know modern metallurgy, you can go from ore to small blast furnace directly, for instance, bypassing a lot of steps.

10

[QUOTE=Polerius]
If population size is a problem for reaching modern technology levels, let’s focus on getting to the early stages of the industrial revolution (engines, trains, etc)
[/QUOTE]

Your first priority and largest resource drain is going to be figuring out how to feed and shelter people. There is just not going to be any way around this if you are dropping off these folks without any tools or supplies. If you are going to drop them off WITH tools and supplies then the equation will change, somewhat, depending on what you give them initially. Without anything, though, even dropping off a relatively small population of experts you are going to have a fairly large percentage of them dying off, or being so focused on simple survival that they aren’t going to be developing much of anything, technology wise, until they get the basics in place.

We can afford to have large percentages of our population doing other things than scrounging for snacks because we have a highly developed and automated agricultural system that doesn’t require very many people to produce huge amounts of food. We have specialized seeds and highly domesticated animals coupled with sophisticated drugs and other enhancers. If these folks had nothing to start with they would be back to some kind of initial hunter/gatherer subsistence level. Even if they could put in the massive amount of work to gather grains and seeds, clear fields, and plant, the yields would be horrible compared to even 3rd world countries today. And it would be a highly labor intensive affair, without stuff like disease resistant plants or pesticides.

I seriously doubt they would get around to digging up ore and figuring out how to smelt it in the first couple generations. And by then much would be lost.

Yes, hugely optimistic. I doubt the colony would survive at all, to be honest, unless you sent specialists in hunting and gathering. Certainly they wouldn’t survive as a coherent whole, and certainly they would be unable to move forward technologically with nothing. They would probably know precisely what was killing them, unlike our ancestors, but that would be cold comfort in the end.

Now, if you wanted to send these guys in with some supplies, tools, medicines, seed crops and initial stocks of animals, etc…well, then they MIGHT be able to eventually build something. As you seem to be saying in the OP, however, they would all be dead in a fairly short order, IMHO.

-XT

11

I, personally, can go from no tools whatsoever to a functional steel knife in under a month, using just what I find in the wild. Give me a year and you’ll have a rudimentary steam engine (but why would you want one? What’s wrong with wind or water?)

If you can make iron, you can make magnets. All it takes is heat and hammering. Natural magnets aren’t that common, but they’re not vanishingly rare.

12

Figure at least 10 years to do the environmental impact study, then another 5 years of lobbying to get it thru the Colonist Council, then figure it gets shut down for 10 years by the first generation of Colonist eco-Hippy Teenagers.

Sheesh, we’ll be stuck in the stone age forever! :smiley:

13

Assuming the colonists are in a rich area that presents no immediate survival problems, and that natural resources for “the next step” are always reasonably obvious, then I would guess that they’d be smelting iron within a matter of days or weeks–iron mining started by digging horizontal shafts into hillsides where iron ore was present almost at the surface. So we’re at metal tools within days or weeks.

You can make magnets simply by rubbing two pieces of ferric metal together. That gets you a weak magnet. With sufficient magnets you can create a turbine to generate electricity, which allows you to create electromagnets, which are much stronger. So bootstrapping to readily available electricity doesn’t seem all that hard, and would likely be available within the first couple years. A primitive light bulb is more difficult because you need something for a filament, and that requires some more refined metalworking, and possibly more difficult to find metals. But since we’re positing an obviously abundant environment, we can keep this on the scale of a couple years, I think. If there’s a convenient waterfall nearby, hydropower would have streetlamps on within five years.

Here’s where the first barrier comes up, though: combustion engines (providing much more power than steam engines). You’d need to start drilling for oil, which is 19th century technology at the start, so it’s do-able once you’re working metal competently. Call it 10-15 years to readily available combustion engines that can do real work for you. From there it’s a short race, I think, from 1850-1950 because we know how to do everything and can take shortcuts or skip steps altogether. So I think a reasonably safe estimate is 30 years to get 1950 level technology readily available, assuming no problems with availability of resources or labour.

You can optimize the scenario to shorten that–the right group of people are in the right place, with all the raw materials they need, and they’re familiar with the old technologies so they know how to do things as medieval peasants did so they can get to the point where they’re using familiar tools. And all this assumes that the socio-political environment is optimal for racing back to modern day technology, which is where the magic wand of hypotheticals really comes in.

14

Another way to approach the problem is this.

Even in an Eden, there are going to be finite and relatively small number of people that the ecosystem can support.

On the other end, its seems fairly obvious you need many people to support our current modern culture.

Take a stab at what those two numbers are, then decide how fast you can grow the population to get from the small number to the large number.

That process may be more of a limiting factor than knowledge or process/technological bootstraping.

Lets assume the low number for the Eden hippy first shift is a whopping million. And the magic number for our modern society is a billion. You have to grow the population by a factor of a thousand. If you can double the population every 20 years, its going to take about 200 years to get that factor of a thousand growth.

15

In the OP’s scenario, I’d guess about 800 years, making the hugely qualifying assumption that the initial explorers spent some time recording their knowledge on stone tablets, papyrus scrolls, or some similar permanent medium before they were all but wiped out by disease, accident, exposure, and starvation. Humanity would be reduced to a few thousand survivors and have to rebuild, but we’ve come back from worse before, and having “cheat sheets” around would help us progress quickly once we became self-sustaining.

But we discuss the above question a lot. Allow me to suggest a variant hijack. Things are as proposed by the OP, with the following modifications:

  • The population moved is everybody on Earth (potentially)
  • Not everyone transfers at once, and enough people remain on Earth at any given time to maintain it’s infrastructure (or assume that everyone goes, but they’re cloned in the process and the clone left behind).
  • Each person has an embedded “magic” nanochip that can teleport them back and forth to Earth for meals, which automatically teleports them back to an Earth emergency room in the case of serious injury (no consciousness necessary), and bolsters their immune system against ancient diseases to the level of someone who lived in that era.
  • Only knowledge possessed on the first trip is retained in detail. Subsequent trips back to Earth are remembered (on the New Earth side) as if in a dream: indistinct and unintelligable. So you can’t pop back to “look something up,” – only knowledge in your head at the start is OK.

This is all wanking with the intention of eliminating the problem of day-to-day survival. Food and medical attention is just magically provided for at current levels. In that case, I’d guess we’re talking about maybe ten years to get to the point where anything we want to build, we can. Recreating the infrastructure (buildings, roads, rural power grids, the Internet as a global phenomenon) would probably take a half century or more, depending on how many people we could put to the task. Most of our modern infrastructure was created since 1850 or so, we ought to be able to do it a lot faster this time around. I imagine the children among the explorers would live to see a near-modern society.

16

[QUOTE=hansel]
Assuming the colonists are in a rich area that presents no immediate survival problems, and that natural resources for “the next step” are always reasonably obvious,
[/QUOTE]

Set them down where ever you like. There isn’t going to be any place that aren’t going to have immediate survival problems. The first one I can think of off the top of my head is going to be locating food and water and some kind of shelter. How will you get the food? You’ll have to forage (presumably you have some kind of experts along who will know which plants are edible, and which are good for medicines and such). That’s going to take a lot of time and the participation of a lot of people to get up and running, unless they are all specialists in foraging (in which case they aren’t going to know much about, say, iron smelting). Hunting would probably be next…how will you do that? You have no tools or weapons (hopefully no large predictors about). You’ll need to make some tools (and some fire) that will let you start hunting. Hopefully you brought some hunting experts along, but, again, it’s going to take more than just a guy or two to feed everyone, so it’s going to be a resource draw. And you better move quickly or people will start to starve. Then you have to find shelter, construct some means of holding, processing and storing whatever food you find, some means of dealing with waste and…woops! Your steam engine specialist just fell off a cliff. Too bad! And…oops! One of your metallurgists just broke his leg hunting a rabbit! The steam engine guy is toast (maybe he should be buried, but then again we have a lot of hungry people here…), but the metallurgist is going to be a problem…how do we care for someone with a broken leg? Presumably we have medical experts, but no materials, nothing to prevent infection or aid in healing (let along pain killers). And…damn…one of the medical guys just ate a bad bit of iguana! She’s got food poisoning…bad. And…and…and…

At any rate, I seriously doubt you are going to have anyone extra just moping around to go dig up ore or really do anything else. You are going to be in a total race between starvation and bare survival, and no matter what you do some folks are going to die off. Even if you double or triple up on specialties, you are going to start losing core knowledge, as the real experts die off and the backups are less knowledgeable in secondary or tertiary fields. Since you will have to go with a foraging hunter/gatherer approach you are going to have a pretty limited number of people. Even if you spread out your groups well (which means they won’t be in mutual support or even contact), I’d say the odds are going to be hugely against them even surviving the first winter, let alone going out and starting to forge metals or starting to build a technology base.

-XT

17

So there are two basic problems with the OP: first, you have to start with a small number of people at the beginning to avoid overloading the initial carrying capacity of the environment, but then you lack the large number of people necessary for later technology; second, you need more than just all contemporary knowledge, you need deep historical knowledge as well that’s been long forgotten.

Even assuming a garden of Eden environment, you’re going to be seriously delayed by population and basic survival issues.

18

There’s only one basic bit of information that needs to be retained: the Scientific Method. Beyond that, the more you can record for future generations, the better. Rather than sending a gamut of experts, you’re better off sending farmers, explorers, doctors, and the like. And textbooks. Real acid-free, leather-bound paper too, not solar-powered laptops and DVDs. You want that information to be readable in hundreds of years.

19

Cool!

Quick, someone alert Mark Burnett. This would make a cool “Surivor” spin off. Teams are put on some tropical paradise, with abundant fruit, start with absolutely no tools, and the first team to build a steam engine and generate electricity wins :slight_smile:

20

Why not both?

You can’t send books, since they are modern inventions.

How hard is it for someone with the appropriate knowledge to create rudimentary paper, ink, and pen, so people can start writing down things as soon as they get there?

Well, pen is easy, it can just be the feather of a bird. What about ink and paper?