What if we had to restart technology from scratch, but with all the knowledge we have?

My thread about a robot takeover turned out great, so I’ve got another sci-fi scenario for you, albeit a more fanciful one.

Not a lot of people watched the show Stargate: Universe, but those who did saw an intriguing scenario play out. Essentially, a group of people found themselves stranded on a planet much like Earth, but which had no intelligent life. They were not expecting to be stranded, and did not have much else with them except the clothes on their backs. Plus, of course, the knowledge in their heads: and several of them were scientists and engineers.

In a sort of montage sequence, the show portrayed vignettes of them and their descendants over the years (they had also been stranded two thousand years in the past, in addition to being on a different planet). After they had been there a few years, they were shown in rough-hewn log cabins with some basic iron tools. A couple decades after that, it was more like 19th century buildings and implements. And after a couple thousand years, they had technology beyond that of Earth today.

(More recently, on the show Terra Nova, a group of colonists found themselves in a dinosaur era, cut off from the year 2149 that they had come from. In their case, they already had brought back quite a bit of technology, but they would not be able to make any more. However, the level they already have probably means they can handwave explanations of being able to do small scale high-tech manufacturing, so the scenario is less interesting.)

The thought experiment I’m interested in exploring is: if a group of a few dozen people found themselves in a place that was like, say, Northern California but without human habitants, what steps would you take to work your way back up the technological ladder? On the one hand, you have the advantage (especially if you have knowledgeable people) of not having to do trial and error and knowing what is achievable. That’s a great advantage. On the other hand, most engineers and scientists probably never have to confront the problem of not having the tools and infrastructure they take for granted.

So let’s say before you left you knew what you’d be facing. And let’s also say you don’t get to take anything with you, not even clothes. Just what you can carry in your brain. What type of group do you put together? You would need at least a few tough guys as workers/soldiers, right? And that guy from the British show Connections might help with how to work the intermediary steps to develop technology.

But so I’m thinking that aside from basic shelter and hunting/gathering tools, one of the early things you’d want to try to develop would be a way to write down the stuff people have been carrying in their brains. Then what? I’m at a loss to think of how you even begin to work your way toward making more than rudimentary wood and rock tools. We going to need a lot of archaeologists? The task of working from nothing back to the high tech society of today seems so daunting even with all that knowledge. Is it perhaps true that there’s only so much you can speed it up? What’s the over/under on making it back to iPhone level? I’m going to say at least 500 years–is that too pessimistic?

You are going to need horny farmers. I suggest taking Chinese, they start with extra villagers.

My WAG is at least 1000 years if not longer, and that assumes that nothing sets your colony back to square one (earthquake, forest fire, drought, flood, idiot leader…).

We’ve done a thread like this before, and there was consensus on a few points:

  1. It’s hard to write down enough of what you know to avoid losing a ton of it when the first generation dies off (or the doctor falls off a cliff). There’s also simply forgetting a lot of the finer points of building cyclotrons in the ten years you’re restarting industrial age agriculture.
  2. At a certain point, you’re limited by your small numbers. Starting a colony with a few dozen people means that you’re at least centuries away from having enough people around to usefully mine rare earths that only occur in small concentrations and require massive mining operations to create them as byproducts. Essentially, anything computer age is just right out until your population is back into the millions.
  3. But you can’t take large numbers of people back either, because until you’ve got technology back to a point where you can sustain a high density in a small area, you’re very likely to risk going over the carrying capacity of your environment, and crashing your colony (see point one about loss of knowledge).

So overall, your group of five dozen naked Californians could plausibly get things to a Roman level of subsistence if they studied up on bronze and iron age technology beforehand, and were dropped into the fertile crescent, and suffered no natural disasters. Past that point, their descendants would likely have to rediscover science and technology for themselves, perhaps aided by a political and social order that favoured fast development and lots of fucking… just constant rutting, banging, humping, nailing anything that moved in order to rebuild the population quickly.

Here’s the earlier thread

A few dozen people is probably not enough to be genetically viable, and is certainly not enough for manufacture of complex equipment or systems, even with modern tools. Modern technology rests on a vast array of technical materials - gases, metals, fibers, inorganic and organic compounds - and a hierarchy of machines to make the machines to make the machines to make the. . . This variety can only be produced, even in sample quantities, with a correspondingly large population (or a very, very long time with everyone wearing too many hats). Think of a city of half a million. Ignoring mortality, beginning with 25 men and 25 women who each had 6 kids in 20 years, I calculate it would take you 153 years to reach the target. With half that population you might achieve a 1950s level of technology, less the military hardware. Essentially, technology recovery is a materials and human resource problem. Preserving the initial knowledge base until it is needed 100 years later would be a challenge, indeed.

Which itself is kind of a big deal. Joe Farmer might be aces at working his Patented Crop Rotator ™, might even know how to maintain it and fix it when it starts Rotating counterclockwise ; but not how to build it, never mind how to build the stuff required to build a Patented Crop Rotator ™ at all. I mean, I know a bit about using computers, I know even more about building them like giant electrical lego setpieces, but damn if I could assemble a motherboard from scratch components or even just hammer out a simple resistor.

Most people have extensive knowledge in a narrow field, when what you’d need to reboot civilization would be cursory knowledge in a large number of broad fields (and the time to pursue them deeper when need arises - it’s easier to relearn stuff that you know for a fact is possible and kinda works this or that way than it is to come up with them in the first place). Even the simplest stuff like growing food from the ground is actually pretty darn hard to get down from scratch, as hippie communes learned the hard way back in the seventies.
I really doubt a couple dozen blokes could cover the breadth of human knowledge. Or even just how to make more than 5 different kinds of booze, which is like the bare minimum to even call yourself a civilization.

Just pass on the Scientific Method and literacy and you’re good to go.

A lovely question by the OP. I agree with the comments above: there is a threshold number of people necessary to retain and reinforce the knowledge gained over 5000 years of human development. No idea how many people but at least a hundred and even more importantly they’d need our store of knowledge.

I sort of understand electricity but generating and using the stuff? Antibiotics - fuggedaboutit. Smelting iron? Even finding mineral ore isn’t easy. Consider the wonder of threads and looms to make comfortable clothes. Not to mention the work required.

So I’m afraid that a small group of humans would lose technological knowledge and revert to primitive stone age life. As indeed is the life lived today by some Papua New Guineans and Africans.

Cool that you’ve already had such a thread! My apologies for thinking it was a novel question.

You really don’t think the descendants could be helped any by preserving some modern engineering knowledge at least in book form? Even if there was a period during which people didn’t really “get” what the books were describing, surely they would become useful in speeding things up when the development of technology had developed past a certain level.

Alternate versions of the question are also fun to ponder. Like, what if you did increase the numbers to a few hundred to solve some of the issues raised, but they were just randomly selected with no preparation? Likely that everyone dies? If you reran the experiment over and over (think of a bored alien doing a science experiment with humans as “ants”) with 500 randomly selected people each time, what percentage of the time do you get a good enough group (with a few experts maybe, plus some more plucky/hardy folks with good leadership skills in the mix) that the colony “takes” and lasts over the long run? What about if out of the 500, one person gets to study up? Or maybe you can bring along a single “cheat sheet” spiral notebook filled with as much info as you can pack into it? The permutations abound.

Farming would be a major problem. The loss of technology would be trivial compared to the loss of the genetic stock. Not only have you lost the thousands of years of selective breeding that has given us highly productive grasses, fruits and vegetables but you’ve also got to domesticate animals to pull your plows from scratch too.

So basically the first generation would be forced to become hunter gatherers while they attempted to get farming started, and even if the planet was identical to earth I don’t think many modern humans would have the knowledge and abilities to survive that sort of life. Unless you happen to have Ray Mears along with you you’re going to starve in the first winter.

And then you have the problem of how to pass on advanced knowledge to subsequent generations. Making paper and ink would be pretty difficult I think, not to mention the difficulty of teaching reading and writing to children who will spend their whole lives as subsistence farmers.

So basically I think they’d be fucked. They’d have to be very, very lucky just to survive and even if they did 3 generations on the society would be indistinguishable from any other prehistoric society.

There’s a reason that they used to use clay tablets, you know.

“Look around! Can you constuct some kind of rudimentary lathe…”

Seriously, as Arthur C. Clarke once noted, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. What he failed to elucidate, however, is that the point of technology being “sufficiently advanced” started around the time of the Industrial Revolution. Specifically, the ability of people not only to specialize in a particular field of technical endeavor, but to do so in nearly complete ignorance of the necessities of the precursors–say, a pipefitter did not need to have knowlege of smelting ore or extruding tube–and the degree of complexity of discipline knowledge to create said technology made unnecessary and in fact essentially impossible for anyone to create industrial level technology in a vacuum. By the time you get to something like semiconductor electronics, the necessary amount of man-years of time to develop not only the functional principles of the device itself but all of the manufacturing technology that supports it would dwarf a single human lifetime by many orders of magnitude. A population of a given size, along with sufficient natural resources of both common metals and (for advanced electronics) rare earths, is necessary to support the manufacturing infrastructure to support this technological innovation.

Stranger

I was fairly willing to see the possibility of this most pessimistic angle, until I read the other thread. If we had a few like Mr. Dibble in the group, plus a few warrior types to protect the Dibbles while they bootstrapped up technology, I think we’d be in pretty great shape. That guy’s posts really impressed me, and you could just tell he wasn’t talking out of his ass.

With the right people, you might be able to get as far as early 19th-century technology. But you’d need the right people, with the right skills, and the right resources all located right next door. Good luck - you’ll need it.

There’s no guarrantee you’ll be able to find deposits of any metals in the small area you’re dropped in. Or you might have poor stone deposits for your first, most basic tools. Dropped into an alien wilderness? You can kiss the possibility of farming good-bye, for many generations of selective breeding.

The plain fact is, that you end up limited not by the raw scientific and engineering knowledge, but by practical skills no team can possibly possess all on their lonesome. You can have all the scientists and engineers you want, but probably none fo them know a damn thing about farming in practice. That’s what farmers do, and they go to colleges and study and practice it all their lives. Repeat as nauseum for blacksmithing, smelting, stonework, etc. These are not easy tasks for the uninitiated.

Now, if you get to pre-select your colonists and send them over with a suitable array of basic tools and enough people to spread out and deal with the numerous needed skills, you have better options.

So…

What say we send a Renaissance Faire on ‘Farmer’s Get in Free Day!’.

Would that work?

Surely it’s got to take a lot less time than it did the first time around - because we already know the shape of what’s possible - I’ve never done it before, but if I can get access to granite, flint, clay and mixed woodland, I’m fairly sure I could make a rudimentary set of tools in a couple of days - a pole lathe in a couple of weeks, and assuming we can find iron ore (I know what it looks like), metal tools in a couple of months - and I’m only one person.

Once you’ve got metal tools, it all starts to snowball. Steam engines within a decade, and (assuming there are fossil fuels) plastics, electronics and heavy industry within a century - maybe two.

…as long as there’s food and shelter at the beginning. The biggest risk of failure is right at the start - dying of exposure or malnutrition/starvation.

Have not read that thread, yet. But, I was going to say that the time it took between stone tools and metal, or iron and steel was largely one of knowing what’s possible. I’m quite certain that I could, by myself if necessary, make a water wheel using only wood for material and stone tools. with that you can quickly have irrigated crops and a stone grinding wheel. i would need someone to identify ores for me to get iron tools…

See, metal tools. Furnaces are not hard, (at least for simple metal ores.) They can be made with earth, clay, stone, or brick. Cement and concrete are simple once you have lime.

once you have furnaces, glass isn’t too hard, (unless you want to get fancy.) Then you can have a greenhouse. And with a greenhouse and genetic knowledge, even as limited as Gregor Mendel, 1880’s,) you can cross pollinate with purpose, and obtain better grains and fruits in a fraction of the time.

I say pre-industrial in years to decades.
Once you have copper wire and glass, you can have lights and even vacuum tubes. Telephones, switch boards, and 1940’s era computers even before you have heavy industry up and running. I can imagine having a vacuum tube computer up and running in my lifetime. And if industrialization happened quicker than I expected, we would skip straight to silicon transistors. Knowing what is possible and how it was already done would make it much, much faster the next time. You can skip a few steps in many ramp-up processes if you already know where you are going.

The big stumbling block would really be population growth. To that end, you need to maximize your reproductive rate. And that means taking only a few males… just enough for genetic diversity, and as many females as possible.

This seems really optimistic. Bare survival doesn’t take a lot of resources, but it isn’t like your “day job” would be advancing the species and your “hobby” would be acquiring food and maintaining shelter.

This is not a problem that is solved once and moved on, I’m afraid.