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

Great Debates
41

Ok…so, magic food and shelter but nothing else. Then the first thing you’d need to do is start building tools. You don’t have to hunt or anything like that, so you can devote everyone to the basic technology projects. I’d say, first thing you do is produce stone cutting tools that will allow you to work wood. Cut wood to allow you to build the infrastructure to create a mill of some kind (this would be a major task without tools, mind, you could devote a lot of resources to it). Once you have the mill in place you can use it as a power source for all sorts of things. At the same time, you will probably need to start looking around for minerals in the area (unless you are giving a magic map as well, detailing where things are). Assuming the area you are settled in has all the stuff you need, I think the first order of business would be to find some copper and tin deposits and produce a low order smelter. Since bronze can be cast, and since it doesn’t take as much technology or heat to produce, I’d start there…start producing bronze tools to replace the stone ones, and start integrating bronze tools into the mill (saws, hammers, etc).

Once you got a good base of bronze tools, you can probably expand the mill to provide more power, and start thinking about…iron. Cast iron isn’t that difficult to make either, and you should be able to build out a better, more efficient smelting and forge system by now. In addition, some resources need to be committed to pottery and ceramics. Since you have magic food and water (and medicine?), you can break people up into their specialties. I’m not sure WHY you would do all this, though if it’s a game to try and get to 21’s century tech then I guess that’s the end point. So…bronze to iron. Develop pottery and ceramics. Power from increasingly more sophisticated water wheels. Possibly develop a glass industry as you will need that later as well. Paper and leather manufactures (when the magic food is given, will they give the brains and skins too? If not you are still going to have to hunt). As you build out the tools to build the tools to build the devices, you can think about things like printing presses and such. Unless this group is plunked down right smack in the middle of all the necessary resources they are going to have to go out and find stuff (coal and coke would probably be next).

Bottom line is, it’s going to take this group longer than their lifetimes to build up to even 19th or 20th century tech levels. Oh, they could probably build some vertical tech that is more advanced (electricity, for instance, could be developed fairly easy, and I suppose they could use it for electro-plating or even telegraphs and such), but overall it’s just not something you could jump right into. You would need to develop a chemicals industry and all the tools associated with that. You would need to develop tools to do machining for things like steam engines. You’d need to develop transport and logistics systems to go out and get all the stuff that you will need to build the stuff to build the stuff to build the devices that will let you build the stuff that finally gets you to whatever goal you were actually after. I suppose with magic food and such you could potentially have millions of people involve, which would hurry things along somewhat (and lessen the risk of key people dying…though maybe if it’s a game people won’t die either), but assuming a couple of thousand people involved I think it would take several generations to get even in the ball park of 2010 tech…or, as I said, even in the ballpark of 20th century tech. Or 19th century tech.

JMHO though.

-XT

42

Good grief. It would take ONE person the better part of a year just to build a house with everthing already made and modern tools. And you have them starting with nothing and making everthing from scratch.

43

I don’t have them doing anything.

I have a community, working together, with nothing else to do and the magical motivation to do it, building a house. Not a mansion, not a palatial estate, but a home. It takes maybe a few months per house, once the tools are made, and the tools could be made after 6 or 8 months.

You have one group making the beams/cutting the wood/etc, you have one group putting them up, you have another group finishing the house itself. Groups of 2-5, it gets done relatively quickly.

44

Have you ever actually built anything significant? Much less making stuff from scatch? Tried sawing by hand? Felled a tree with an axe? Built a kiln? Dug a well or a mine? As someone pointed out, it could easily take you years just to FIND an ore deposit, much less do anything with it.

45

Yes.

Nothing significant from scratch, no. Insignificant things from scratch, yes.

Yes.

Not a big tree, but a couple of small ones (nothing bigger than maybe three inches in diameter? But that was a mistake… I stuck to smaller ones after that.

No.

Again, no.

We are positing ideal circumstance here, are we not?

46

Well, there you have it then.

Again, IMO, unless you a talking a log cabin short term you are just engaging in wishful thinking.

47

I’m talking about skipping the log cabin phase.

48

Would the house also have internal plumbing? If not, and assuming you aren’t talking about creating something like sheet-rock, then basically you are talking about a simple wooden house. We’d have to make some additional assumptions, however. Mortise and tenon type construction (i.e. no nails…you COULD have nails, but you aren’t going to have them in 6-8 months), simple plaster and slat interior walls, exterior walls and roof some kind of wooden shingle affair…that kind of thing. Assuming that you have some kind of mill up and running to saw lumber (and further assuming you have resources to devote to cutting down and transporting lumber to the saw mill), you could probably build a rough wooden home along these lines in a couple of months.

That’s a lot of extra assumptions, however, and a lot of skill would be required. And it wouldn’t be anything like a modern house, or even something as sophisticated as a 19th century home with gas lighting, oil light fixtures or even rudimentary plumbing. Plumbing would take extra and require a hell of a lot more up front work (and more assumptions ;)).

Personally, were I in charge of these stalwart folks attempting to win whatever prize they are after, I’d go with simpler long house type construction, with a simple wood and plaster palisade around it all to keep out the nasty critters, then devote my resources to other projects. Maybe devote some effort to the hydro-dynamic aspects (you’d need it for the mill, in any case), to bring in some kind of aqueduct fed municipal type water system a la Rome (with public toilets and charcoal and gravel fed cisterns for city water use and some kind of multi-stage sewer system for disposing of waste), but that would take years of effort alone to get up and running properly.

I don’t think some folks in this thread really grasp how long it takes to build stuff when you are starting with nothing. They look at the Roman’s or Greek’s and think ‘well, if THEY could do it, surly we, who know so much more, could do it better’. And we could…if we have all that technology stuff at our disposal, if we have all of the intricate trade and infrastructure and the diverse and built up skill sets and materials gathering systems that we have…or even that they had in the past. But you’d have to BUILD all that, from scratch. And every project (like the city water system) would take resources devoted to that…and time to build just the tools, techniques, materials and infrastructure to GET the stuff you need.

-XT

49

triple good grief.

You are talking about making frame house construction by hand. You know how much linear board feet of lumber are in such a house?

Go find a log. By hand, with a handsaw you magically happen to have, saw me out some 2 by 4s. Tell me how many board feet you can crank out in a day.

50

What is the saw made out of? You aren’t sawing boards without a saw, and you aren’t smelting iron ore without woodworking tools. You probably aren’t going to get lucky enough to find copper nuggets lying around unless you’ve been searching streams for years.

So that means stone woodworking tools. Which means sawing is impossible. And how are you transporting the logs you hew down with your stone axe? You ain’t got no wagon, nor mules to pull it either. Which means you’re going to have to pull it yourself.

It’s possible to go out into the woods and build yourself a log cabin pretty easily (I mean, Pa Ingalls could do it, not me), if you’ve got a saw and a steel axe and a wagon and horses and about a dozen other steel tools.

If you don’t have that, well, your productivity in getting logs to your building site is going to be a heck of a lot less that Pa Ingalls. And your productivity shaping those logs is going to be a heck of a lot less (You need Bronze Working before you can Chop Forests for shields).

And you’ve got to build everything using stone woodworking tools, including the mines and smithies and kilns and furnaces you need before you can have metal tools. The Aztecs and the Incas managed to build some pretty impressive structures without metal tools, so it can be done. It just takes a fuckload of work. If some Jaguar Warrior is going to cut out your heart if you don’t work, that’s some motivation. Making sure that your descendents achieve steam engines in 200 years rather than 300 isn’t.

People tend to work hard for personal gain, rather than to advance humanity. Personal gain losely defined, including not getting your heart cut out. Once you’ve got your house, and your water supply, and are doing OK hunting and gathering, there’s not much incentive to try to race up the tech tree, especially since everything you can think of that you want requires you to build something else first, and that thing needs something else first too.

51

What you do is you crank up your technology development and go for things like Masonry and Pottery (so you can get the Great Pyramid wonder), then you take a path that gets you to gun powder (but don’t forget to get the Taj mahal wonder, and the Great Light House is a big help too…oh, and the Great Wall wonder as well!)…

Yeah, it’s pretty easy in the game…but the irony is that even THEY start with stuff. They start with all the stuff you need to build that initial settlement, and depending on which race you pick they also start out with at least rudimentary weapons and the ability to farm (presuming tools, seed and the other things you need to start farming away), etc etc.

Starting out with nothing more than a magic food supply, however, it’s going to take time…lots and lots of it…in order to build anything. The food will help, no doubt (one less thing to worry about, to paraphrase Forrest Gump), but that is only going to go so far.

It’s like the recipe for rabbit stew. Step one, assume a rabbit…

-XT

52

Errrm, no. Ironis ridiculously abundant on the earth’s surface. One third of the Earth’s land surface is potentially iron ore. Very low grade ore, but that only matters from an economic standpoint, not a survival one. And anyway, I’m not very far from a high-grade source where I live, and know how to find other ores, like copper and tin, wherever they may be, too.

Did I mention I used to be a geologist?

53

The same way our ancestors did - clay, sand, charcoal. Making steel doesn’t need a blast furnace. The bloomery process will work as well to yield small amounts.

Well, first you process the iron with stone, then you make a hammer, tongs and anvil of the iron, first off. Then you use those to make other tools.

Like I said, iron ore is there for the picking over most of the world. Any orange-yellow dirt is a low-grade iron ore.

I’m perfectly capable of foraging for myself. Simple tools like digging sticks, stone knives, snares, fish traps and bows and arrows are only a couple of days work to make (I know, I’ve made all of these). Then, as the first crude bloomery iron is made (say, two weeks), saws and knives and shovels become possible. After that month, steel tools like ploughs and good axes are ready.

You seem to be under the notion that the hunter-gatherer lifestyle is hard. It isn’t, some H-Gs work a lot less than agriculturalists to make a living.

I think you misunderstood me - I didn’t say “I guess” or “I think I could” make steel in a month, I said “I can”, because I have - well, close enough. That is, I have made an iron blade from raw ore and charcoal that I also made myself. Neither of these projects required any special tools - yes, I used a hammer and files to shape the blade, but a couple rocks would serve for the first one, and then you use that to make a better one, etc.Steel from iron is a matter of smithing, is all.

54

All the time.

It’s the only way I saw.

Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

Like I said, that’s rubbish. If someone who knew what they were doing, took more than a week to find an iron ore deposit on Earth, my only conclusion would be that they were in the middle of Antarctica or some such.

xtisme, why start with bronze when you could go straight to iron? Like I said yesterday, there’s no need to repeat all the steps of tech development when you know where you want to end up.

55

You can make perfectly serviceable boards with an adze, and you can make an adze from stone.

Stone - not that you need woodworking tools to smelt iron. Why would you?

But axes and adzes aren’t.

Why not process them in-place?

Iron ore *really *doesn’t need to be mined in any labourious way. It’s really as simple as picking it up off the ground. And iron can be processed in a clay-lined pit, it’s how they did it for millennia in Africa.

And why build a wooden house, anyway. Wattle-and-daub is a great, easy construction method.

56

Okay, A GOOD iron ore deposit then. I’ll take your word on being able to use any old crappy ore deposit to make some useable amounts of iron.

But the premise you can build a modern like frame and construction house, with electric wiring, making EVERYTHING from scratch, in no time at all is a bit much. It took me MAN MONTHS just to REFURB a rental destroyed by crackheads. AND I had all the right modern tools and I could just run down to the store and buy shit.

There is a reason houses cost good money. There is a lot of manpower involved. And not just the construction, the manpower in making all the materials. And as a society we have it down to a science, can greatly leverage off of economies of scale, and have modern/industrial tools to do it all with.

If houses were easy, I could hire a illegal alien to build one from scratch using only local resources on my property in the mountains for 10 to 20 thousand dollars in compensation for a few months to a years worth of his time. As I said before, he might be able to swing a decent log cabin, or an adobe/rock house, but he aint doing a frame construction house with glass windows, wiring, plumbing, sheetrock, paint, and I guess even aluminum siding with an HDTV just starting with his bare hands.

57

Oh, gods, listen to me - I sound like Guy from Galaxy Quest - “Can you construct some sort of rudimentary lathe?” (I can, BTW).

But the fact is, a lot of the objections I’m seeing amount to the argument from incredulity. Just because some of you can’t conceive of someone building something from scratch, doesn’t mean no-one can, or actually has. I’ve built kilns, forges, lathes, bread ovens, smelted ore, made charcoal, brewed mead, knapped stone knives, forged iron ones, snared a guineafowl with home-made bark twine. Woven my own cloth, stitched my own shoes. I’ve dyed with plants, made paper from scratch, made ink from plant galls, cast bronze, tanned leather. Caught fish with my bare hands. And I know other people who’ve done better, and more.

58

You know those japanese katanas that many MA geeks reckon were the ultimate bladed weapon? Made fromiron sand. Iron is iron, it’s all in what you do to it.

It’s not *my *premise. All I said was I could have a steel knife in a month. I could have a house at the same time, too, but it’d be more like this.

59

Yeah, that’s how the Japanese make iron that then has to be processed into steel. Have you actually ever seen it made this way? It’s not nearly as easy as you seem to think or are implying, and you need tools in order to work the nearly every phase of the process. Where are you going to get those tools from? You also need a LOT of wood (since essentially you are slow heating it over a long period of time…several days IIRC how the Japanese do it).

You are going to make stone rakes and stone pokers and all the other stone implements you’d need in order to use this process for iron production?? :dubious: As for the hammer and tongs, you won’t need those until later…you are going to need a bunch of other stuff first.

Oh, it’s fairly easy to find all right. The problem is, it’s more technically challenging to actually process than you seem to think it is. Which is why ancient peoples started with copper and later bronze, since both are easier to work with and require less technical skills and initial materials.

Well, you must be superman is all I can say. You can forage for yourself AND build all this stuff at the same time?

And you seem to be under the impression it’s easy, even without anything to start from. Or that hunters/gatherers are less sophisticated than they actually are. Most hunter gatherer peoples are either in small bands or they move around a lot. Not very many of them set up forges of the type you are talking about, for instance. I have no doubt that you are a superman and can forage at will…what I doubt is that you could forage AND build the type of system and process you are talking about in anything like a short time frame. It would take you and your stalwart band (well, in your case you’d be doing it alone, no doubt) literally years to build up to the point where you could make some trials at iron forging. Unless it’s something you’ve actually done (I’m sure you have one in your backyard and use it weekly), it’s going to take some trial and error as well. I’ll tell you from personal experience (if second hand), it’s not nearly as easy as you think it is. Experts have tried to duplicate the process in ways less sophisticated than those currently used by the Japanese (who’s process is VERY sophisticated), and the results have been less than successful.

Even assuming I believe you (and I have no reason to think you are lying here), I think you misunderstood me as well. Assuming you have indeed forged iron or even made steel, you used TOOLS to do it with. You had materials at your disposal already, or the ability to get them. You already had shelter, clothing and all the other things that make life possible. When you smashed your finger you had a doctor who you could go to to fix it. You didn’t start forging iron from nothing, with nothing, and while also trying to survive, again with nothing. You weren’t foraging for food while trying to build a foundry, shelter, tools and everything else. You HAD all that stuff…and then you made iron.

Next time you make some iron using the process you claim to use, look at all the stuff involved, then consider where it all comes from. Think about the tools you are using and where they all come from. Think about all the materials being used, and where they all come from. Think about where you slept the night before, and ate, and what would happen to you if you burned yourself or your forge got out of control and you were injured, and what you would do at that point.

Because going straight to iron will require tools and materials far in advance of going to copper or bronze, of course, so it will be an easier first step. Once I have bronze or copper tools (which you could get making simple stone vessels, clay and stone tools) you could then use those to make more sophisticated tools and processes…including iron at some point. I don’t believe that one could jump from nothing to iron in any kind of reasonable time frame, even knowing how to process it.

-XT

60

Did a quick google search and for anyone interested, here is the process that MrDibble is talking about. I’ve actually been to Japan and seen how they produce tamahagane (probably spelled that wrong), but they use a much more sophisticated and materials intensive system that wouldn’t be suitable (initially at least…probably not ever, since you wouldn’t need to produce iron for sword steel, presumably). Here is an article on the process MrDibble is (I believe) talking about:

I think that once you have some kind of structured society in place, and once you have built to tools, that iron would definitely be the way to go. But it would be literally years before you’d be ready to start doing this, IMHO, if you had to start from literally nothing.

-XT