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?