Stone age to space age in record time

Factual Questions
1

In the Star Trek episode where Kirk has to push an annoying Salvation Army woman in front of a Mac truck (You may be a schmuck, Harlan Ellison, but they did ruin that script.) Spock complains about having to “construct a mnemonic circuit using stone knives and bearskins.” Ever since I saw that I’ve wondered whether such a thing would be possible. In that light, here is a scenario:

I am a chrononaut studying the birth of Neolithic culture in the late 10th millenium BCE. As my Timepod orbits the Earth, a sudden shockwave of narrativum particles causes the onboard systems to crash. I just have time to punch in the coordinates to the pod’s emergency escape mechanism before the pod explodes in five dimentions…

I awake dazed but unharmed on the soft ground of the riverbank. I have only my simple cotton jumpsuit and the contents of my pockets: an egg of glow-in-the-dark Silly Putty I promised my kid I’d pick up in the late 20th century, and an Encyclopedia Galactica, containing the complete historical and scientific, and technical knowledge (including detailed geological, topographical, and biological maps of every timeperiod) of my 22nd century civilization in a simple display module.

The Silly Putty can be molded into a Venus of Willendorf, or other mystical shape, and used to impress primative people with it’s eerie glow and uncanny ability to stretch when pulled but break when snapped. With it, I can convince any person or group I encounter that I am a god who should be obeyed unquestioningly. It has no other use.

The Encyclopedia Galactica can be used to obtain any information I might need and will retain power indefinitely. Unfortunately, due to complex trans-temporal copyright issues, it only contains the fifth season of The Simpsons in a bad Czech dub, so I must return to my own time, as quickly as possible. I can do this by transmiting a complex coded radio signal to the Emergency Temporal Beacon in geosynchronous orbit overhead. The code is contained in the Encylopedia, but to send it, I must build a device that can interface with the USB port of the Encyclopedia, convert the code into radio waves and transmit it with enough power to be detected by the satelite overhead, about .5 W, for at least 15 seconds with its own power supply. The Encyclopedia is shoddily made and cannot be opened or tampered with in any way without damaging it.

Bob the Hunter-Gatherer is coming up the riverbank now. He has just returned from the spot by the river where he spilled all the grain seeds the tribe had gathered that day last year, and he has a new idea that he wants to present to the tribe. I see him coming. I reach for my Silly Putty…

Assuming single-minded cooperation from Bob’s tribe and any others I encounter, and that I have chosen the best possible location to begin from, how long will my task take? Can it be done in a single generation? What about two? Ten? Presumably, interfacing with the USB port will require at least a simple integrated circuit and all the technology it takes to produce one, but any shortcuts possible can be used.

2

You’re in big trouble. :slight_smile:

Vacuum tube technology isn’t that bad, but it is still going to require metallurgy, some chemistry, and the ability to fabricate a vacuum pump, which requires machining parts to very fine tolerances.

Semiconductor technology would be much more of a problem. Lots of weird elements that have to be mined, refined and purified to extreme levels. I’d like to see you explain semiconductor physics to Ogg.

3

Jeez, didn’t you read the OP? BOB is the smart one; I’m putting him in charge of semiconductor production! Ogg is going straight in the neodymium mines!

4

The OP is a talented if not imaginative writter!! I was almost sad to see his post end.

Also, I happen to work in the semicondutor industry myself. So the thought of having Ogg as one of my coworkers, makes me smile. :smiley:

“What? You say Og has to work overtime this week?! Og SMASH 30-thousand dollar silicone wafer!!”

5

As a fellow semiconductor guy, I can guarantee you that the first ten earthen ovens that you convert into diffusion furnaces will be ruined when Og’s buddies shoot rubber bands (neolithic rubber bands, mind you) into them to watch them burn up in midair.

I’d just scratch the code into the earth in 100-foot characters. Someone would see it sooner or later.

6

Alan Smithee writes:

> In the Star Trek episode where Kirk has to push an annoying Salvation Army
> woman in front of a Mac truck . . .

He doesn’t push her toward the truck; rather, he just has to not attempt to save her and to prevent Spock from saving her either.

7

Your big problem is going to be metallurgy, even if you don’t use semiconductors. In order to make the vacuum tubes for your computer/radio transmitter, you’re going to need to be able to work tungsten, and you’ll need to make steel for all the tools you’ll need.

So, your critical path will be:

  1. Pottery of some sort.
  2. Refractory brick for the furnaces.
  3. Mining - coal for fuel, ores for metals. Can probably be done with flint tools, although bronze would be better, and you can introduce steel when you get that far.
  4. Identification of iron ore, and other ores as necessary. Some basic chemistry needed here. Develop battery.
  5. Reliable glassmaking and glassblowing techniques.
  6. Smelt and work iron and copper - develop blast furnace or equivalent. Develop basic metalworking tools and copper wire. Develop workable ECW for your inductors.
  7. Steelmaking. Develop more advanced tools. Develop and build steam engine for mechanical power.
  8. Improve precision engineering techniques until you can work to tolerances of 0.1mm or better. Develop and build workable vacuum pump. Develop and build workable dynamo.
  9. Tungsten working. Develop incandescent light as a bonus. First prototype vacuum tubes.
  10. Develop capacitors using whatever engineering or chemical techniques you have at this point.
  11. Reliable vacuum tubes and passive components now available. Build transmitter. Build USB interface from Eccles-Jordan circuits - no silicon needed.
  12. Project complete!

With a dedicated research team working on each part of the process and good access to mineral resources, you could probably get it down to 20 years, if not less.

8

Hm.

Furnaces can be built out of stone, refractory brick isnt a requirement. Basalt has a seriously high melt point.

Battery can be made from a clay jar, with a hand carved wooden plug with 2 holes in the top, one for a ‘pencil’ of river deposit copper nugget and one ‘pencil’ of meteoric iron or iron smelted out of any rich ferric source [look for blue clay … or hematite deposits or even certain red rocks …] and the jar filled with an acid liquid like sour grape juice.

Bagdad battery, crude but effective :smiley:

You can use a water wheel to produce power, and once you have smelted iron and drawn copper you have the basis for quebec hydro … you dont need a steam engine. Many smithys and other fabrication shops used water wheels as motive power. Just because we went with fossile fuels doesnt mean you have to.

9

nit pick a nit pick…He has to prevent Bones from saving her…

10

Well, if you can buy the Da Vinci’s Workshop wonder in the 10th turn…

11

Interesting OP!

Being awkward, I’d like to figure out a way to do it without valves or semiconductors. I kind of wonder whether you could extract the required (presumably binary digital) signal from the Encylopedia, and then fudge it by firing a bunch of Wimshurst-mahine electrostatic spark-gaps in rapid succession to create a broad-spectrum digital radio signal.

E.g. Get as far as smelting copper and panning for gold, just about the earliest, most basic metallurgy achieved. Draw wires through stone dies.

Fashion a gold-wire solenoid which you can hook directly to the USB port. Construct a light-tight hut which admits a single beam of bright, midday sunlight through a small hole. The sunlight reflects off a scrap of hammered gold leaf, suspended vertically between two taut human hairs that act as torsion springs. A grain of magnetite is stuck to the gold leaf with plant gum.

Persuade the USB port to squirt out its digital signal through the gold solenoid, even though it’s got nothing to handshake with. I have no idea how easy or hard this might be.

The teeny tiny USB signal running through the solenoid causes the gold leaf with attached magnetite to quiver, and the distant reflected lightspot blurs back-and-forth a fraction of an inch. So you have an electro-mechanical-optical amplifier! Now you have to capture that signal. Maybe by a photographic method, a layer of silver halide salts on the rim of a rotating wheel? The light-spot traces a wiggly path corresponding to the ones and zeros of the USB signal.

Having captured the binary “word” that the Encyclopedia is putting out of its USB port, you then have to transmit it. I was envisoning a whole bunch of spark-gaps and charged leyden jars (gold leaf and fired clay), one for each bit, and the jars are dicharged in rapid sequence by graphite brushes wiping the gold leaf strips paintstakingly mounted on the edge of your photographic recording wheel…

I’m guessing none of this will be remotely fast enough to actually work, but these are first thoughts. Maybe instead of a solenoid and torsion-spring reflector, a carefully cut quartz crystal could do the same job via piezoelectricity?

12

Read Ralph Milne Farley’s series The Radio Man, The Radio Beasts, The Radio Planwet, etc. (20-40 years ago Ace reprinted the latter two, but for some reason, not the first in the series). Our Hero Cabnot finds himself teleported to Venus, and has to build himself a working radio from raw materials. Interesting book, because Farley actually does describe how to do a lot of this. I’m sure that he was way too optimistic in this. Just building a good enough vaxcuum pump to obtain the needed low pressure would be a real challenge.

13

…and “she” was Joan Collins, later of Dynasty fame…

14

You’ll have a much easier time if you can get at the low-level firmware in the Encyclopedia and reprogram the USB port drivers. USB communication is dependant on some very time-critical high-speed handshaking protocols; I’m not sure that you even could build a vacuum tube circuit capable of talking to a USB port. (And forget trying to debug timing problems without a oscilloscope or something similar!) If you can somehow persuade the USB port to act as a dumb low-speed serial port instead, the external hardware you need to build gets much simpler.

15

Hopefully I am not hijacking the thread here, but I was wondering about some ingredients you need for your own industrial revolution. How do you originate and refine a screw. How did Maudsley (sp?) or whoever do it? How do you improve your machining precision?

BTW, you don’t need coal. Charcoal will do.

Thanks for your help,
Rob

16

I think the big limitation would be manpower and food. You’ll have to scout for raw materials and do all of the mining by hand, meaning you need a sizeable dedicated population (maybe a few hundred would do?) of unskilled labor and enough food for everyone. Bob’s hunter-gatherer tribe of perhaps several dozen won’t be nearly enough… everyone is pretty much busy coming up with food. Assuming you can convince all of the tribes in the region to unite to get enough population (maybe several thousand) you’ll then have to come up with agriculture efficient enough that you can spare a large percentage of the population to do the labor-intensive mining and construction.

Developing agriculture is going to be slow. It seems reasonable to me that pretty soon you’ll be able to feed your newly centralized confederation of tribes right away, assuming nice fertile land and bountiful fishing. Still, early crops will be very low yield and still labor intensive, without the benifit of draft animals. Higher yield plants will have to be bred, since simple crops of wild grains won’t give a lot of food, which will take perhaps tens of years. Domesticating animals will take at least a few generations (of each animal). So I’d guess that getting agriculture up to speed will take a few generations. During this time, of course, you can spare progressively more people to start the industry.

So… my projection:

Immediately you could give simple agricultural techniques sufficient to feed the tribe, and start attracting other nearby tribes. Within maybe ten years you could unite and centralize the local tribes in a small settlement. Most everyone at this point would be busy with food production and the basic specialization necessary at this point - stone toolmakers, an organizational heirarchy (perhaps based on the religion of the Mighty Glowing Silly Putty), builders, potters, etc. During this time you could probably spare a few people to start scouting for easy resources, like copper that could simply be picked up off the ground or exposed iron ore.

Over the first generation, you’d steadily improve agricultural technology and attract more tribes to your small city. During this time you could spare more and more people to find and mine resources, and could probably be able to end up with basic iron working.

The next generation, you could get fairly simple. With that, you get significantly better tools for everything else your society needs.

At the third generation you might have more sophisticated metalworking and related technology. Population becomes the limit now, as infrastructure becomes much more complicated as technology advances. If you don’t have adequate population, stop, wait several generations, and then continue.

Assuming population is no problem (those tribes keep flocking to the Temple of the Mighty Glowing Silly Putty), you could probably have a decent industrial base in another generation or two. After that it will probably take only another generation to come up with sufficient electronics technology.

So, my guess would be it takes tens of generation, depending on the available population.

17

This might be too much of a shortcut, but you could skip the technology entirely. Just use your maps to make your way to the site of an archaeological dig that is happening during your 22nd century civilization. Plant a distress message there along with a small amount of your silly putty as “proof”. You should be immediately rescued by fellow time-travelers if this works.

This has the added advantage of not introducing any sticky time paradoxes to the timeline. Any technological advances you introduce to the natives may jeopardize your timeline or cause problems with every new artifact you introduce. But if we say there won’t be a problem with paradoxes, I’d probably stick around and enjoy the life of a god for a while.

18

So what’s the story with Harlan Ellison’s script? How was it ruined?

-FrL-

19

This is all assuming one very important thing: that the common cold has been eradicated by the 22nd century. If not, bob and ogg and their friends are all going to die of future diseases that they have no immunity to long before they grasp the basic concept of metalurgy.

20

Ellison himself has written about this long and lovingly many times. Pick up a copy of his book The City on the Edge of Forever to get both his full vitriol and the original script.
There are a lot of people who don’t care for Ellison, but I agree with him on this – I like a lot of aspects of his sc ript much better than what appeared on the tube (although, even in its adulterated fornm, it was one of the best episodes of Star Trek). If you want to get some Idea of what Ellison was trying to do, look up Aimee Semple McPherson, who was the model for Joan Collins character. She’s a fascinating, utterly weird character from our history, and she’s not at all like the mild character Collins portrays, who preaches Roddenbery’s emasculated future visions.