The largest issue is in making sure that the specifications for 2010 knowledge remain in place. If there’s a central computer at each starting village with instructions for how to build things at each stage, you might be able to get there within a few generations. If they have to start out by figuring out how to make paper and ink and then get all of their trained experts doing as much of a brain dump as they can before they die, then things might take a lot longer since some important information might not make it down on paper.
I guess another thing that I didn’t consider in the OP is what religion, if any, and what political system will the new colony have or develop in the future?
It’s possible that some religions and some political systems will not be as conducive to scientific and technological growth.
But, we can leave that aside for now, since, in the worst case, the above can really stop progress in its tracks (e.g. a “hippie” attitude takes over and people actively do not want to get to 2010-type technology or society)
For the purposes of this thread, we can assume that the colony has a religion, political system, and attitude that enables the technology to move ahead as fast as the colonists can move it. The only barrier is nature.
A functional flint or obsidian knife, I have no trouble at all believing. But steel? Where are you going to find the iron? Places where iron is found very close to the surface are very rare, and it’d probably take you longer than a year to find one. Heck, a year’s travel might not even bring you near any such places.
Papyrus is pretty easy. It grows, you unroll it and dry it out, and write right on it, I think.
And let’s not forget: How are you going to build a kiln that will be capable of smelting the iron into steel? With what tools will you process the iron into steel? With what tools will you dig up the iron? And, how are you going to do all this with no food? (not that this is an exhaustive list of all the reasons why it’s a ridiculous claim that someone could forge a steel knife in such a scenario as asserted by the OP).
It’s not hard at all to make paper or ink (a pen would probably take a bit of work). Here’s the thing though…you need tools and you need other materials to build the stuff you need to build the stuff to make paper. Plus you will need time…and food. How am I going to eat while I make the tools to make the things I need to make the paper? Why would I bother making those things when my very survival is on the line and my skills at crafting stuff would be better used to help at least some of the group survive?
Your OP is, simply put, impossible. You would need to give these people something. A years worth of food. Medicines. Rudimentary tools of some kind at the very least. Given THAT, they MIGHT be able to, eventually, build something. My guess is that even given the above the best they could do would be to build something along a bronze-age/iron-age level, though with superior knowledge in many vertical areas. A couple of generations and perhaps we are talking industrial age or better, depending on how things play out and how many key people die from all the stuff that we live through these days. After that it will be more a matter of population growth and whatever disaster setbacks occur.
But given no tools, no food, nothing? They are (as a group) doomed…maybe (if they were really lucky) a couple of people or even a band or two would survive and, perhaps, eventually flourish sometime down the road. But any hope of retaining technology or science would be gone, since much of it wouldn’t be necessary to core survival.
-XT
Probably not that long. Many countries in Asia, as well as Israel, industrialized to developed world levels in a few decades. However they had large export markets and could buy finished products on the international market, neither of which would be realistic.
I assume the first thing they’d do is build multi-purpose factories that can churn out tons of different tools and objects. Something like a fab-lab.
I’m guessing a century or two. But I really don’t know for sure.
Why do you keep harping on the “no food” issue?
There are plenty of places on earth where there is enough stuff growing on trees to feed a decent number of people.
Maybe not millions, but maybe a small enough group to survive on the available food, and big enough to start producing rudimentary things like paper and ink, to write down stuff for future generations.
Nah pen would be easy too, assuming there’s birds. Getting the pen would be easy.
didn’t the Egyptians make weak batteries out of clay pots?
The reason ‘many countries in Asia’ and ‘Israel’ could develop industrialization is because they had thousands of years of agricultural development and an existing infrastructure of trade and logistics, they had communities and tens of thousands of people who, already fed, clothed and supported at least minimally, had enough extra time to build up such capacity. Plus, in every one of those cases, they also had outside sources of capital and materials in order to create that capacity.
Asia or Israel weren’t populated by a bunch of folks with no tools, no food, and no infrastructure, no trade and no external sources of, well, anything. They weren’t barely scratching by for survival, even if they were doing subsistence level farming. These folks would be the equivalent of a stone age hunter gatherer tribe without the stone or the age.
-XT
Well, it was implied in your OP. Unless you are going to start them off with a stock of food? Did I miss that part?
Name some. There are places on earth where a small group of wandering people can forage for food, to be sure, but you’d be moving around. Kind of hard to build anything if you have to constantly be on the move so as not to completely deplete the area you are in. And you’d have to build tools and other materials from scratch (since you say you aren’t giving them anything).
So…we have a small number of people (probably less than 100…more like 10-20) who have to be moving around from the start because they have no stocks of food or tools, having to create the tools and other materials (baskets, containers, carriers, eventually clothing, etc) that they need to survive. They won’t have any time at all to do all this marvelous stuff you guys are speculating about because they will have to spend a large percentage of their time initially gathering food and building the things they need to survive. Along the way there is going to be attrition in this small group as accidents and other mischances occur.
How? How will they make the paper? Assuming they get past this part, how will they store and move it? They aren’t going to have trucks or even domesticated animals to help out, at least not initially. By the time they might get to the point where they have the leisure and ability to make something like paper and ink and the ability to actually cart it around after creating the books simple attrition is going to put down many if not most of your experts, and after years of survival type living will the survivors see the need to put in this kind of effort that is beyond their simple survival needs.
-XT
Any group small enough to survive by foraging will not be nearly large enough to encompass sufficient human knowledge to get to 2010 levels of development. Even hundreds is difficult unless you’re positing an extremely rich environment.
Why don’t you bend a little and specify some basic material starting conditions that allow the colonists to get over the initial hump? Because as things stand now, no one would survive long enough to get to the industrial age.
The problem, of course, is that with no tools and no supplies, the colonists are going to be spending most of their time trying to find enough food. And even if they have no problem finding food most of the time, what happens when winter sets in?
People will have no axes, no knives, no fishhooks, no seeds, no nothing. If you drop people naked into many parts of the world large numbers of them could be dead within a few weeks, from exposure, which is the real killer in survival situations. Hypothermia or heat stroke.
But you can build shelter from branches even if you don’t have a multitool like Les Stroud, you can make crude stone axes, you can build yourself a crude house. How will you do when winter comes around, though? But if you can survive the winter, you’ll probably do OK.
But most people who survive will turn into homesteaders and villagers. Farming and animal husbandry won’t be very productive, because you won’t have improved varieties of plants and animals. So agriculture will have to be a sideline for generations, most food will have to come from hunting and gathering. On the upside, there were parts of the world that were incredibly productive for hunters and gatherers back in the days before we built cities and farms on those sites. Go back to the San Francisco Bay before humans arrived, and you’ve got all kinds of marine food for the gathering. And most of the wildlife won’t be afraid of humans.
But once your colonists set up shelters and villages and make hunting tools and so on, are they going to bee-line to iron smelting? What for? People are going to be working hard to survive, and just because they know metal working is possible, how much effort are they going to make to recreate it? They’re going to work on things that make their current lives better, not things that will help their great-great-great-great-great grandchildren build computers. Oh, they’ll make an effort to pass some things on to their kids, but they aren’t going to spend extraordinary efforts for things that won’t make any difference for generations.
In order to get to the point where you have large scale mining, road building, engineering, and so on, you need a large population of farmers to support the cities. Except that will take generations, by which time most of the specialized knowledge of the first generation will be lost. At least they can start off with a good foundation, but they’ll have to recreate almost everything from scratch.
And to really have a 2010 technology world, you’d have to live on a planet with billions of people. Even 300 million people isn’t enough, that’s the population of the United States, but scientific, engineering, cultural, and technologica advances come from all over the world.
No…Iranian’s (well, the folks who inhabited the area where Iran is today, anyway). And no one knows what it was really for. The key thing though is, to make that weak battery you needed: grapes, pottery and the ability (and time) to create the iron and copper rods. Again, this isn’t an exhaustive list here…and each of the things on the short list require a lot of materials and support to do, let alone the community support needed to give some guy the time and a place to sit down and build the thing.
Definitely. I think it would require several years of food, several years of medicines, initial shelters, all the initial stuff to get agriculture and animal husbandry up and running, at least a rudimentary metallurgical shop (smelter with bellows if nothing else), and all the tools and other things needed for basic survival. Given that and given a good cross section of experts cross trained in 3-4 disciplines each, and given some very durable text books and reference materials, then it might only take a few centuries (say, 6 or so) to build back up to 20th century technology and population levels. After that it should be a piece of cake, assuming the decedents don’t kill each other off when their populations are low but their potential technology levels are relatively high (say, when someone decides to build a few black powder rifles and go to war with the small enclave in the next valley over, which happens to be the only OTHER enclave on the planet at the time).
-XT
You guys are making excellent points about the need for food and the importance of population size, etc.
I guess I wasn’t considering these in the OP, since what I had in mind was the basic issue of how do you start with no technology and then have something.
Maybe, in order to answer my basic question, the scenario in the OP can be changed to one where it is like a research experiment, or an “X-prize for technology bootstrapping”, or a reality-TV show.
A group of people get put in a place with decent weather year-round (no harsh winters), and are provided food on a daily basis by the research directors, the TV producers, etc. However, they are not provided anything else.
They start with no metal, no tools, no books, etc. What is the first thing they can start building, what is the next? How far can they go in a year or two?
Hopefully this scenario helps answer the core of my question without having to deal with pesky issues like survival 
If you don’t have to worry about survival at all, ignoring the human tendency to slack off when there’s no need to work, you could have relatively modern technology, all of the basis for advanced stuff, within a year. You wouldn’t get stuff like Jet engines, or fine production, because a lack of scale, but a year is sufficient time to build the basis of relatively modern life.
You could have a passable home, like yours or mine probably, within a year. You start off with a hut for shelter, and since you don’t have to farm, your first goal is to get some (hopefully easily accessable) ore. You can have a decent supply line set up in a month. As that’s happening, you’re in the process of building – to the best of your abilities, you’ll have to upgrade it as you get better ores) – smelters, basic refineries, etc. You’re probably 3 months in. At this point, you’ve got tools to cut down trees, en mass, and you can probably even get some basic sanding done (if you’ve found the right stones) to round out some edges.
You can get electricity going within a year, but you wouldn’t want to really use it domestically about a few years, because you’ll want the ability to wrap active wires in something other than cotton.
In response to the previous post. N F W I H. IMO of course. You need a decent industrial base for even the the most simple “modern” technology. That stuff aint easy or fast to build, even if you don’t have to worry about food or disease.
You’re not going to have computers, or microprocessors, but you’ll have, in my opinion;
Housing which is passably modern.
Running water.
There’s not a lot of “modern” stuff, other than that, really, since we’re excluding all microprocessor stuff. You’ll have knives, for cutting – but you wont need to cut since you aren’t having to make your own food. The problem is, if you provide necessary food, you take out a whole branch of development.
No refrigeration necessary, means a lot of technology wont need to be built, so we can skip over that. No farming necessary, means a lot of large-scale mechanic stuff isn’t going to be built, so it’ll be easier to bypass that entire field – no need to invent the car for a small population, and since we don’t need farm equipment or a car, we don’t need the internal combustion engine.
But, you would have a house, with electricity, after 3 years, in my opinion. Whether you’d have anything that could use that electricity (like lightbulbs, because wont need blenders or food processors), would be a question of other types of developments.
So, a windowless log cabin with useless wires?
Even then, I think you are stretching it.
No, I think you could have a house, wood frame and drywall (substitute), painted and with windows. They’re not going to be the perfectly clear glass we have now, but they’ll be glass, and… somewhat see through. You could even manage concealed, relatively safe rubber-coated copper wiring into the frame after a while.