Kicked off Earth! What do you take?

Great Debates
1

Okay, so here’s the premise - you and 3000 people are starting from scratch. Choose the scenario of your choice: Kicked off Earth for being a pain, sent to exile in the past on earth, whatever.

You’re landing on the equivalent of Earth about 20,000 years ago, minus the hominids. Roughly the same flora and fauna.

You’ve been given the equivalent of a few empty railroad cars, that you can stuff with anything you wish. Your goal: To build a civilization equivalent to what we have today.

So, what are you going to take along to make sure that your civilization survives and rises again to worldwide, technological prominance?

As a sub-topic, if you had to choose the type of people you’d bring, who would you pick?

2

Well, I’d stuff at least one railroad car full of books; fiction and non-fiction, that would preserve at least some of the knowledge snd culture we have so we can get a jumpstart with technology.

I’d bring a few guns and lots of ammo for hunting things and killing people who annoy me.

I’d bring a lot of matches.

3

A few empty railroad cars worth?

Hmmm… one railroad card stuffed full with the equivalent of a solar electic plant… Next car several laptops with solar panel power source, a couple boxes containing the entire library of congress in CD form (heck, make it DVDs) (4 or 5 copies of everything), the equippage for a blacksmith, tannery, electric powered hand tools, I doubt that electric tiller’s exist so somebody’s have to make some before we left…

Seeds, basic mining equipment, Satelite phones and a full satelite system to be dropped into geosynchronis orbit when we’re dropped off.

That’s all the comes to mind to start with.

-Doug

4

Well, you want to be sure you have plenty of telephone sanitizers, of course.

5

Remember, this is forever. You need to plan to build a civilization over a period of thousands of years.

So I’d scrap anything that requires an advanced civilization to maintain. No laptops, no solar power stations. Remember, your laptop has a real lifespan of only a few years assuming it doesn’t break down. After that, the batteries will no longer hold a charge, the CPU will break down, etc.

How about something a little more renewable? Like horses? Something that might last a couple of hundred years and be useful the whole time, like a wheelbarrow with solid wheels, pickaxes and shovels, etc.

How about dogs? Trained dogs are invaluable in watching for predators, flushing game, herding animals, etc.

If you’re going to take an electric generator, I’d suggest a thermonuclear generator similar to the one on Cassini. Pick the right isotopes,and you might have a reliable source of electrical power for a couple hundred years.

An interesting thing here is the odd mix of technologies you might haul with you. A horse-pulled plow packed in beside a nuclear reactor…

6

Prada, definitely Prada.

7

Picks, shovels, axes, and a wood-fired smelting furnace. Plus books containing the important metallurgical knowledge we’ve acquired up to this point. Oh, and claymaking accessories so’s we can build the moulds for the metal objects we’re going to make.

All else can be made from these.

8

Another point to keep in mind, not only are your choices limited by how long the stuff you choose will last, they are going to create limits on what your society must do to survive. If you bring laptops and cd’s you are going to have to aim to produce electronic technology as a priority, to keep pace with repairs and replacements for your social group. That won’t help feed anyone, or keep anyone healthy, so it will represent a big cost to your social system.

That same thing applies to auto engines, or even steam power. Once you get into supporting them, you have to keep dedicating a lot of time to getting fuel, repair parts, and replacements, as well as people to do those things. Those people won’t be farming, or hunting. They probably will be eating. Five thousand people are going to have a lot of stuff to accomplish, to make themselves comfortable enough to have spare time to educate their children in enough widely diverse matters to retain a culture capable of sustained growth, and development.

I want literate people. Every single person over ten years of age to be functionally literate. Nothing will matter more in the very long term than the success with which that level of literacy is maintained. For lots of reasons, I suspect a single language in common for all the “colonists” is a good plan. I would choose only multi-racial or multi-national origin second generation former immigrants for the colonist group. This represents the best chance for genetic diversity, without segregationalism. Also a good chance to preserve some cultural elements from a broader base, as well.

I want people to have to accomplish something difficult to get to the door. Difficult enough to eliminate at least half those otherwise qualified. I would also like the preliminary task to be sufficiently large and complex to guarantee that no one can do it on their own, but will have to have cooperated with someone else, and at least half of that cooperative group have not made it.

Animals: Horses, dogs, chickens, cows, sheep, silk worms, honeybees.

Lots of different seeds. Whole bunches of them. Including mulberries for those silk worms.

Stills. Alcohol fired engines, yeast culture equipment. Solar Wheel Equipment. Wire drawing tools. Glass fiber drawing tools. Steel tools, mostly just the metal parts. Plastic sheeting in multiple thickness. Aluminized Mylar in rolls, and sheets. Small scale cracking plant. Metal prefab parts for looms, spinning jenny.

Many items designed to be the high tech material portion of a device made on site out of wood. (axles, and bearings, bushings, and such.) Optical elements of survey equipment.

I also want lists prepared by a number of different groups, without communication. The final list will have to be selected on the basis of the community itself, and will be a test exercise to determine if this group has what it takes to stay together long enough to build a society.

If the group doesn’t agree almost unanimously that the survival and education of children is the primary and overriding priority of the colony, I don’t see much reason to even try. Might as well just go camping, and die in the wilderness.