I am not under any illusions on either of these matters.
Certainly, a lot of core knowledge could be written down, and perhaps a technology tree described with the key insights or formulas recorded, carved into stone somewhere, with the definition of the scientific method inscribed at the top.
Perhaps you are a metallurgist. I am not, so it would take me a lifetime to make a functional boiler that didn’t kill everyone. (And if it did, it would take me a “lifetime” to fail 
)
“A lathe? Guy, get off the line!”
Agreed. My $0.02: I’d make sure to sustain the germ theory of disease. Simple things like disinfecting surgical tools and controlling vermin would greatly increase average lifespans if they remain fixed in the community’s practices over generations.
Germ theory, gun powder and metallurgy get you into the 19th century, right?
I’m not a metallurgist, but I’m confident I could make charcoal and smelt and work iron to make hand tools - initially, this would be best applied to implementation in farming, timber processing and other immediately-productive labour-saving uses. I don’t expect I could make a steam engine all on my own, starting from dirt - but I can definitely start the snowball rolling.
It can’t really be harder than it was the first time around - and it ought to be easier - because we know at least some of the dead ends, and some of the more productive areas of inquiry.
Paper is easy - smash up a load of dry plant material in water, skim it off, press and dry it. Hardest part of the process is probably manufacturing some sort of mesh frame to skim the pulp. Or you could make parchment
Ink is really simple. Squash and strain some dark-coloured berries, and you’re away.
I think what a lot of people gloss over is how much of our current infrastructure was built on slavery or exploitation of the physical laborers: from mining and crop production to the laying of the rail roads. I don’t think the people would have the fortitude necessary to rebuild.
If there was ever a society that would turn science into a religion this would be it.
You would have the great holy book that would say things like the fact that disease is caused by little bugs that no-one can see but which you should take on faith exist so you don’t get sick. It would say that matter was made of little discrete bits called atoms with the prophesy that one day they would be split to produce great power.
The biggest problem with setting people down on an alien planet is the NO ONE would know what is safe to eat. Fruits, grains, game, no one has ever seen any of this stuff before, no one knows what going to be poisonous. Also humans would have no immunity to diseases on the alien planet.
But if we side step that problem some how (let’s say we send the colonists to some alternate earth where humans never existed) we’d still have problems getting agriculture started. Wild fruits, root, and vegetables are not like the things you get in the supermarket. They’re smaller, less nutritious, and less resistant to pests. It would take a lot of selective breeding to get your food to a point where a few people can feed many people, which is necessary for industrial society. Another problem is that you cant save food to plant when your starving. A lot of what you find you’d have to eat to survive, leaving only a little for planting.
Then there’s the issue of rats and other small furry critters eating you partially grown crops and food stores. Without domesticated or semi-domesticated cats you’d need a hell of a lot of mouse traps. On the subject of domestication, I don’t know of any agricultural society that lacks draft animals. I don’t know anything about taming wild beasts, but it can’t be easy to go from wild aurochs to plow animals. Without such animals you probably wouldn’t be able to do more primitive horticulture, as you’d need lots of people to pull plows.
In short it would probably be at least three generations before the settlers had neolithic agricultural society going. only then would people be able to go out and look for iron and copper deposits, build crude smelting furnaces, etc. Granted, once you got there it could go really fast, but you’d have to get there. As other have said, focus on literacy and the scientific method, and write down everything that will be useful for your grand kids and great grand kids to know.
On preview:
Eh, you could get around that by writing as a preface to the book that saying that it’s just a set of instructions.
Something else to consider: trade existed long before civilisation. Your early farmers ca 10000 BC may well have traded for flint or pottery or whatever.
No, but their slaves would.
I think people are forgetting that sometimes the biggest impediments to scientific and engineering progress are social and political.
The Greeks (or at least one of them) had a rudimentary steam engine 1700 years before we managed it in the Industrial Revolution.
The Romans, had the Empire not collapsed, was sufficiently advanced to achieve many of Industrial Revolution era technologies.
Likewise, the Chinese in the 15th-16th centuries had enough sailing knowledge to have made it to the new world.
The invention of the wheel doesn’t appear to have taken hold in the Americas, but what if it had? Or if they had found domesticable animals?
If a few things had gone differently, it is quite possible humans would have had modern era technology a couple thousand years ago.
It wasn’t simply resource availability, or lack of knowledge, or anything like that. Social and political pressures had their effect. There are a lot of assumptions that this budding colony won’t make many of the same errors societies have made in the past.
They would need to stay politically, socially, and culturally unified through the entire time period while also not simply resting on their laurels when life got ‘comfortable enough’. Maybe an external threat, in the form of a rival nation, is also necessary to spur innovation.
Sure but it would still share with religion that there are a bunch of facts that you can’t observe directly with the current level of technology but which you have to take on faith. The difference of course is that unlike with current religion, the more the society advances the more the evidence supports the belief.
Buck Godot touches on it here, but if you can get past the “initial survival state”, I think the biggest problem you’re going to run into over time (especially as the first generation dies off) is that language changes over time.
So germ theory, smelting iron, etc - what if the word for “iron” isn’t “iron” any longer, but has mutated into something different? Or someone discovers the wheel, but since they didn’t realize it was a rediscovery, they call it “hvantin” - and thus no one links it to the word “wheel” that was inscribed on clay tablets 100 years ago, and thus your chain of technological advances is broken - and we’re back to spending centuries rediscovering pieces of science at a “natural” pace - my opinion, it’ll be around the same amount of time it took us the first time (+/- a couple centuries to allow for Great Antibob’s point on social change).
If one searches online under the topic “bootstrapping” you can often find writings and practical examples of folks creating rather complicated machines from almost scratch, so long as they have some basic tools and the knowledge to do it.
Finding a suitable ore source for most metals would be incredibly challenging. Ancient humans had plenty of time to accumulate bog iron, meteoric iron, and surface iron-rich ores, eventually learning where major sources were. But I imagine that could still take decades or longer before you can accumulate enough raw materials to even start bootstrapping.
Energy resources are going to also be a problem. Wood may be around, sure, but it’ll take a while before you find enough surface coal to do anything with. Oil/bitumen deposits on the surface may be available - they certainly existed in antiquity in numerous countries here. Gas is a different matter, but the ancient Chinese had some luck with primitive gas wells. I imagine water wheels and windmills would be the first major mechanical power sources.
This is an interesting thought experiment, and I suspect that it would end in disaster due to the problems of food and clothing, not to mention medicine.
This. What you do now won’t mean much if your great-grandchildren fall into superstition and refuse to participate in that “bizarre sci-fi religion of ‘computers’ and ‘cars’ that nobody born in the past 60 years has ever seen but great-grandpappy in his senility keeps insisting is real. Most people nowadays don’t believe they ever existed.”
For examples in fiction, I give Pern as well as Arthur. C. Clarke’s Against the Fall of Night, both of which concern future societies that are descendants of high-tech spacefaring societies that have fallen into superstition and ignorance.
Heron of Alexandria, iirc.
And I believe that it was treated as a toy because nobody saw such a thing as having any real USE in society. Ancient Greek industry was driven by cheap slave labor en masse. A hundred slaves? No problem! Some machine you say could do the work of a hundred slaves? Have you been drinking too much oenos again?
I was just thinking about something like this a few days ago. A place I work at sometimes just happens to have a working 1810 water powered machine shop. (you mean your workplace doesn’t?)
While I am not very mechanically inclined, with a couple of Mangetout’s hand tools, I could rough out a working waterpower system given a decent sized stream. The first part would be all stone and wood, with leather or rope drive belts. The first goal would be to get a grist mill/saw mill going and then a forge with trip hammer and bellows. Then you could start building more advanced stuff with that as an industrial base.
Wouldn’t be easy mind you, but knowing that things like water power, spinning wheels and gear ratios are possible would save a few thousand years of evolution.
Wow, it really sounds desperate, doesn’t it? I pity those poor, rutting, humping-anything-that-moves bastards. Who would want to be in that situation? When we in the 21st century have iPhones and what-not.
I’d add to this writing down as much math as possible, i.e. compiling detailed textbooks so future generations can get from arithmetic to multivariate calculus without having to rediscover anything along the way. It’ll take a few generations before the industrial base needs anything beyond basic trigonometry and you don’t want important math skills to be lost in the interim while you’re waiting for a new Isaac Newton to be born.