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

[Mangetout]

@Regallag_The_Axe

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.

In that scenario, we’d most likely be screwed - the whole system could be built on entirely different metabolic pathways, and made of stuff that we can no more digest than plastic. We can’t even digest all of the non-poisonous stuff on our own planet (cellulose, for example)

Also humans would have no immunity to diseases on the alien planet.

That might be less of a problem - if we’ve nothing in common with the local life, the local diseases probably wouldn’t be interested in us, so we could starve to death in relative good health. The local predators might chew us to pieces before they decide we’re not good to eat though.

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.

Some of this would depend on the locality, and the subject’s familiarity with it. Drop me in the alternate version of Brazil and I’m probably done for. Drop me back in the alternate version of southern England and I’ll survive - because I know what’s edible and where to find it - I know the local nuts, berries, roots, leaves, seeds and fauna - plenty of shellfish around here - not really safe to eat because of the human activity, but that would be different in alternative Earth.

A coastal location would probably be best, IMO - there’s food in the sea and on shore, the beach is easier to travel along than trying to hack through forest, coastal erosion will expose useful things such as flints, boulders (for building) and iron ore nodules - coal too, if you’re lucky, the sea salt and onshore breezes are useful for preserving foods.

Some vegetables are relatively easy to cultivate from wild. Beetroot can be selected from sea beet (local) in only a few generations of growth, carrots likewise. A large enough population of wild crab apples will yield a tree or two with larger, sweeter fruit all by itself - and I know how to bud graft (never done it, let alone with a flint knife, but I know the principles)

Then there’s the issue of rats and other small furry critters eating you partially grown crops and food stores.

This is a problem, but these pests are also a source of protein. Rats can be snared. Mice and birds can be trapped. Or the storehouse built on staddle stones to exclude most of the pests.

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.

No idea on this one, but we have the advantage of knowing it’s possible - might be a case of capturing some weaned young specimens (not at all simple, I’m sure), as these could most likely be somewhat tamed before they’re big and strong enough to be very dangerous.

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.

If you don’t get as far as metal tools, the wheel, the waterwheel etc within the lifetimes of the original generation, I think you’re no better off than starting from scratch.

[Tom_Scud]

@Regallag_The_Axe

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.

The flip side of this is that the local wildlife would not have learned that humans are To Be Avoided. Even with nothing but sticks and stones, there would be a lot of really easy hunting for a while.

[Mangetout]

@Tom_Scud

The flip side of this is that the local wildlife would not have learned that humans are To Be Avoided. Even with nothing but sticks and stones, there would be a lot of really easy hunting for a while.

That only really applies if there are no natural predators.

[Damuri_Ajashi]

Assuking away biological incompatibility with teh food on the planet and assuming away some superpredator that would eat us all, we would need:

Basic biology, chemistry, physics

Advanced math

You’re pretty good to go up until you hit the electronic age, which you can achieve pretty quickly as long as resources are available.

Most of your spare time will be spent building tools so you can build other tools.

You could probably get to the radio age within a generation.

[SlackerInc]

@ch4rl3s

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.

This is an angle I’ve seen mentioned a couple times that I find really intriguing: that we wouldn’t actually have to follow the same order as technology has taken in our history. I had not realised that the electronics of the early 20th century would be easier to produce in some ways than, as you say, heavy industry. Interesting to imagine then what some of the transitional points would look like, and what types of technology might ultimately be skipped altogether.

@hansel

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.

Ooh, I like that. Stone probably would be safer than hoping no disaster befells the books you leave behind. What is that monument in Georgia or somewhere that someone built to try to leave lessons for some future post-apocalyptic society?

@Pine_Fresh_Scent

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.

Great point.

@Zyanthia

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.

Oh man, I hadn’t even thought of that. You might be right! I guess this is similar to Marx’s belief that you had to let capitalism develop for a certain period of time in a really soul-crushingly exploitive way and build up the means of production, before you have the proletariat take over those means.

I have thought about something along these lines when marvelling at the beautiful details to woodwork, tile, etc. in older houses and other buildings. The high school I went to, built early in the 20th century, had amazing amounts of such loving detail, that would be inconceivable to put in a school building in the post-WWII era. Not coincidentally, that’s also the era when manual labourers started being paid and generally treated much better. Only a fabulously rich person could afford to pay for all that craftsmanship these days (even if you could find people who know how to do it any more).

LOL, just read Mangetout’s reply: “No, but their slaves would.” Nice! Well played, sir (or madam).

@Buck_Godot

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.

Ha, great point Buck. Do you think, ironically, some freethinking types might start getting sceptical about this? (I say “ironically” because I think of those who were sceptical of religion in the Enlightenment as moving scientific progress forward, rather than derailing it.)

@Great_Antibob

Maybe an external threat, in the form of a rival nation, is also necessary to spur innovation.

Another great point. Who knows if fission, fusion, or voyage to the moon would have happened without such pressures.

I should then perhaps note that in the Stargate: Universe scenario, there did end up being a kind of Cold War that developed from the two nations that formed, all based on an essential difference of opinion between two of the members of the first group that landed, with people choosing to follow one or the other.

[Bryan_Ekers]

@SlackerInc

I should then perhaps note that in the Stargate: Universe scenario, there did end up being a kind of Cold War that developed from the two nations that formed, all based on an essential difference of opinion between two of the members of the first group that landed, with people choosing to follow one or the other.

Was it about marrying one’s cousin?

[Chronos]

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.

Actually, the optimum is probably something pretty close to 50-50. The advantage to skewing female is only going to last for the first generation, anyway, but the genetic diversity is going to be an issue for the entire foreseeable future. And there’s also a limit to what proportion of your society can productively be pregnant at once, and anyone who’s not pregnant, their gender doesn’t matter, so having a whole bunch of women might not even help much in the first generation.

On the question as a whole: I think that, most likely, if they can last a full local year or maybe two, they’re probably good for the long haul. Decent shelter can last for centuries, but you need to build enough shelter to protect your population before the first winter strikes. You also need to build up a good stockpile of food before then, and build up your hunting and gathering technology, and so on. A stable population will always have to be rebuilding some portion of their technology (replacing broken spears, repairing roofs, etc.), but in any given year, most of it you just keep on using. That first year, though, you need to build all of your houses, and make all of your spears, and so on. It’s a lot of work that all needs to be done at once.

If they can get past that, then in the second year, they can start taking some of that time they spent building houses, and use it on making paper and writing books or whatever. But that first year will be a killer.

[kevlaw]

I’m interpreting place like Northern California to imply the presence of familiar plants and animals and diseases plus the same distribution of minerals that would’ve existed before america was colonized. If the planet is completely new and unfamiliar I think we all die in the first month. Game over.

With such a small group of people, I think you’d want a strategy that shoots for getting through the stone age/bronze age/iron age as fast as possible can while cherry-picking some advanced technology to document so they could be fast-tracked by future generations if our civilization survives that long.

I’d divide my colony into a few small groups that would each specialize in a technology. Here are my groups:

1. Hunter-gatherers. I’ve read that it took a while before agriculture caught up with hunter-gathering in terms of efficiency and that even modern hunter-gatherers are relatively efficient getting most of their “work” done in a fraction of the time required by more “advanced” cultures. Hunter-gatherers are my insurance policy against society collapsing before we climb back up through the ages. I think I’d put about half my folks on this.

2. Farmers. These guys would balance their time between trying to cultivate some of the “gathered” crops for near term efficiency and a few longer-shot projects like cultivating grain and maize and domesticating cats, dogs and food animals before these crucial skills are forgotten. I imagine things like fish farms or oyster farms might be a better bet for early success than more traditional grain crops but I’d want them to work on both kinds anyway. Let’s say a quarter of the folks are farmers to start with. Eventually we’d know enough about farming to slack off on the hunter-gathering and allocate more resources to engineering and the academy. I expect that’d take about 10 years.

The last 25% would be divided between engineering and “the academy”.

3. Engineers. Again, balance their time between short term projects like tool-making (initially, stone tools) and wood-working and pottery to meet society’s basic needs and longer-term projects like metallurgy and mills for energy production. Like some other posters, I think I have the basic knowledge to smelt metal but, until my society is sufficiently advanced and distributed, I doubt we’d just stumble across the right kinds of minerals in quantities to be useful for a couple of generations. So, metallurgy would be a background project until I was confident that we had the basic survival stuff down.

4. Academics. Just like the modern academy, these folks divide their time between three distinct functions: a) History: Keep the good ideas alive so they are not lost to future generations. b). Research: Find more efficient ways to get stuff done c). Teaching. Make sure the following generations continue to improve and don’t backslide.

The first job of the academics will be to prepare a TODO list of scientific facts and technologies that we aim to rediscover/reinvent. The actual inventing might be done by the other three groups but the activity will be coordinated and organized by the academics. I’m not as optimistic as some other posters that we’d clamber our way back up to modern technology quickly. I’d shoot for early renaissance technology and I think we can get there in a couple of generations. Anything later than the renaissance - apart from a few cherry-picked technologies from later ages that I’ll mention in a moment - I’d write off as out of reach.

My TODO list would be divided across three time horizons:

1. Need this stuff now. This section would include the technologies we could be reasonable successful at within a year or two: medicine, sanitation, some basic mechanics, maths, chemistry, physics and biology. Stuff the engineers won’t get to right away.

We need to document what we know now and keep alive the practical application of our knowledge. Some kind of technology for writing all this stuff down will be important. Papyrus, maybe.

A few examples of “technologies” that we won’t want to forget: fire-making, wheels, textiles, algebra, geometry, mechanics, trigonometry, germ theory, civil engineering, democracy, rhetoric, anatomy. Within a year or two, my society will have enough understanding of these topics that there’ll be no risk of losing them. I don’t want to regress past, say, high school chemistry, physics and biology.

2. We expect to get to this stuff in the first generation. I think once the first generation has passed on and living memory is - er - dead, we will inevitably forget a ton of important stuff so we’ll put a priority on the technology that we have a shot at reinventing before the initial population dies off. I expect we’d get back to the iron age in a generation. We’ll inevitably lose some important ideas that the Greeks and Romans knew but we’d fast-track some later technologies like electricity, steam engines, gunpowder, printing presses, crop rotation, antibiotics, genetics, evolution and political science so they are not lost.

3. Roadmap for the future. Items on this list are unlikely to be rediscovered any time soon, but we’ll write down enough information to give our descendants a fighting change of recreating them. Stuff like internal combustion engines, bicycles, gas and electric lighting, calculus, indoor plumbing, advanced construction. For each item on this list, we’d document the basic principles and describe (with diagrams!) how to recreate them.

I don’t think my society would recover fast enough to recreate any technology from the twentieth century so I wouldn’t even bother with stuff like electronics, software or quantum physics. My goal is to get them through the middle ages. They’ll have to figure out the rest on their own.

I haven’t allocated any resources to perpetuating the arts. I think society will remember the important parts of drama, music, painting and creative writing without any special intervention from the academy.

tl;dr Stone age within a couple of years. Iron age before the first generation is dead. Early renaissance (plus a handful of goodies from later eras) in a couple of generations. After that, they’ll be sufficiently advanced to find their way back to modernity on their own. Good luck!

[Bryan_Ekers]

At the very least, do the time-tossed humans have paper, or some other means of recording and compiling their wisdom? Oral tradition works on basic survival stuff (“leave of three, leave it be”) but it’s inadequate for complex knowledge (“There’s antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium, and hydrogen, and oxygen, and nitrogen and rhenium…”)

[kevlaw]

@ch4rl3s

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.

Hadn’t thought of telephones. Good one! But vacuum tubes?

In my list, I try to keep a balance between stuff that’s essential now for survival and stuff that we have a shot at rediscovering before the original founders are all gone.

I think there are enough practical applications of electricity for heating, lighting and motors that it’s worth trying to fast track it. At the very least, let’s make sure we can still make batteries and generators (and telephones!) before the first generation is dead. I imagine making wire will be a huge challenge for a long time unless we stumble across a copper mine. No wait! Northern California? We can skip straight to gold! Making wire will still be hard though.

I’m not sure electronics will be making a come back any time soon though. I fear that anything involving silicon or triodes is out of reach for my society.

[kevlaw]

@Bryan_Ekers

At the very least, do the time-tossed humans have paper, or some other means of recording and compiling their wisdom? Oral tradition works on basic survival stuff (“leave of three, leave it be”) but it’s inadequate for complex knowledge (“There’s antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium, and hydrogen, and oxygen, and nitrogen and rhenium…”)

Wouldn’t writing on cave walls work for that? At least until we figure out pottery and papyrus.

[Bryan_Ekers]

That doesn’t really lend itself to compiling a lot of information, though - how many cave walls would you need for a chemistry text, for example?

I daresay papyrus (and ink) production could nearly as important as agriculture, if the goal is to get back to the industrial age as quickly as possible. There’d be a massive amount of knowledge lost when the first generation starts to die off, unless recorded in some reasonably durable (and hopefully portable and copy-able) fashion.

[Danger_Man]

@Bryan_Ekers

That doesn’t really lend itself to compiling a lot of information, though - how many cave walls would you need for a chemistry text, for example?

I daresay papyrus (and ink) production could nearly as important as agriculture, if the goal is to get back to the industrial age as quickly as possible. There’d be a massive amount of knowledge lost when the first generation starts to die off, unless recorded in some reasonably durable (and hopefully portable and copy-able) fashion.

You just need to find someplace with lots or cliffs, where you can start writing down your road-map and make it the center of the religion of science. We don’t know how the religion would develop, but as long as you can get a prediction from the wall now and then, you can be reasonably sure it will be followed.

[Stranger_On_A_Train]

@Damuri_Ajashi

Basic biology, chemistry, physics

Advanced math

You’re pretty good to go up until you hit the electronic age, which you can achieve pretty quickly as long as resources are available.

Most of your spare time will be spent building tools so you can build other tools.

You could probably get to the radio age within a generation.

Ever notice that most engineers and scientists have very limited practical knowledge outside their particular field of endeavor? (As I am a practicing engineering and studied in the natural sciences I can say this without prejudice, or at least ignorance.) It is not simply enough to have abstract knowledge about how things work; in order to recreate complex devices and sophisticated materials from scratch, you have to have practical, hands-on experience with the fundamential production processes. Most of what we think of today as “technology”, even simple things like plate glass, plastic bottles, and plywood, are the result of not only a series of extremely complex and precise operations based upon a broad skill set of knowledge that even the people who are involved in the manufacturing of these today are ignorant of. To make flat plate glass, for instance, requires not only the ability to select and melt sand, but also to acquire coal and processes into coke, built and operate an overn, acquire lead or tuin for a Pilkington float bed, et cetera. Personally, I am very familiar with most of the steps and precorsors to manufacturing glass, and I couldn’t recreate this technology from scratch on my own in a just a few years.

This is all setting aside the fact that, as a hunter-gatherer or farmer you will be spending the bulk of daylight hours foraging, hunting, cropping, sourcing fresh water and materials, tanning hides, weaving rope and textiles, et cetera. At night, it will be too dark to do anything practical aside from some light weaving, and besides, you’ll be beat from spending your day just trying to stay alive. If you have a large community then they can support a handful of people performing research-type activities, but obviously they’re going to want some benefit from this, as well, so even if you can devote your waking hours to the “leisure” of developing technology from rudimentary elements, you are still going to be spending a fair portion of that time building practical implements and teaching useful processes rather than a pure devotion to new development.

I don’t know how many of you have spent any amont of time “living off the land”, so to speak, but I have and it takes an incredible amount of effort just to stay fed, warm, and safe in the best of circumstances, even baring injury or sickness. This notion that you can walk into the wilds with an armful of science texts, or “use the scientific method” in some abstract way to create technological society in the span of decades is obtuse. And anything not devoloped in that time will be at least partially lost even with records, just as information about past technologies that we no long use or build is also difficult to recover.

@Bryan_Ekers

I daresay papyrus (and ink) production could nearly as important as agriculture, if the goal is to get back to the industrial age as quickly as possible. There’d be a massive amount of knowledge lost when the first generation starts to die off, unless recorded in some reasonably durable (and hopefully portable and copy-able) fashion.

In fact, it is no coincidence that the the Rennaisance and then Age of Industry shortly followed the invention of easily produced metallic movable type and the Gutenberg press, which not only allowed for wide dissemination of information and rewarded literacy among the growing mercantile class, but also standardized font and language. The durability of individual books (not to mention language) through centuries is poor, and so republishing and updating to reflect both the language and context in use is critical to maintaining a knowledge base. Just as we do not read Leibniz’s Mathematische Schriften to learn calculus today, future generations may well regard Stewart’s Calculus as equally antiquidated in both approach and notation, even though the fundamental principles remain the same.

Stranger

[SlackerInc]

More fantastic posts.

For the pessimists, let me throw in another twist, a bit of a life preserver if you will. On Terra Nova, they have a computer that’s in an underground cavern, powered by some eternal and stable geothermal process I think, and is basically like the entire Internet and then some (it being 2149). Leaving off the 2149 aspect, what if the colonists had this computer to access, and it was basically equivalent to Google as of December 31, 2011? They still however don’t have any other tools, just this information. Presumably this would give them a much better chance of ramping up technological progress, but how long do the most pessimistic here think it would take? 200 years maybe? Or still think it would be longer?

[Bryan_Ekers]

@Danger_Man

You just need to find someplace with lots or cliffs, where you can start writing down your road-map and make it the center of the religion of science. We don’t know how the religion would develop, but as long as you can get a prediction from the wall now and then, you can be reasonably sure it will be followed.

Or Bender will up as the pharaoh.

[robinson]

It’s still going to take 150 years minimum just to ramp up the population.

[Kobal2]

@SlackerInc

More fantastic posts.

For the pessimists, let me throw in another twist, a bit of a life preserver if you will. On Terra Nova, they have a computer that’s in an underground cavern, powered by some eternal and stable geothermal process I think, and is basically like the entire Internet and then some (it being 2149). Leaving off the 2149 aspect, what if the colonists had this computer to access, and it was basically equivalent to Google as of December 31, 2011? They still however don’t have any other tools, just this information. Presumably this would give them a much better chance of ramping up technological progress, but how long do the most pessimistic here think it would take? 200 years maybe? Or still think it would be longer?

The computer would soon start calling itself President Eden, you mark my words. Or since it has the entire Internet on it, perhaps President Pedobear is more likely.

[Ken001]

This is an excellent discussion. Regrettably I remain a pessimist.

Although I work in a city I grew up on a farm where we grew at least some of our own food. Many of the above posts gloss over sheer survival but IMHO that is a primary problem. Food clothing shelter and safety cannot be taken for granted. The need for food reoccurs daily, it isn’t something you can set aside - and farming is not easy.

But lets imagine our brave colonists establish a stable village and remember the good times back on Earth. As posters above correctly say, the children don’t have those memories. And the grandchildren don’t believe the stories. The odds are stacked against knowledge being retained so there would be a devolution into a primitive society.

[Mangetout]

@Stranger_On_A_Train

Ever notice that most engineers and scientists have very limited practical knowledge outside their particular field of endeavor? (As I am a practicing engineering and studied in the natural sciences I can say this without prejudice, or at least ignorance.) It is not simply enough to have abstract knowledge about how things work; in order to recreate complex devices and sophisticated materials from scratch, you have to have practical, hands-on experience with the fundamential production processes.

I agree with nearly everything you wrote here. The notion that this scenario can support a population of pure academics from the outset is unrealistic.

Although it would be useful to try to write everything down and teach it, in practice, we’d have to focus on the technologies and processes that we can put into practice straight away, for the benefit of our survival.
That’s why I reckon the priority must be to get metalworking, fossil fuels, the wheel, etc up and running again within the lifetimes of the original pioneer population, otherwise, we have to do everything pretty much the hard way all over again.