language doesn’t change really quickly. In English, Shakespeare is still readable if antiquated at more than 400 years on, (even though we can miss some of the sense of it now without a linguist;) Beowulf is unintelligible to the layman at about 1000 years on.
I only neglected to mention a saw mill and trip hammer because Mangetout and I were still looking for iron ore.
I agree. I didn’t think about this initially as I was so busy building a working water power system.
I agree with this too. But, I think that you, me, and WreckingCrew could do that in a couple years. What do you think?
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.
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China and India are pretty much skipping the step of land-line telephones and going straight to cell-phones. No need to build wires everywhere.
I would say I would bypass telephones to start, (with a small population all living in earshot,) because almost as soon as you have wire and telephone tech, you can have radios, which is a far more useful thing for send out scouting parties. “We’ve found iron ore 15km Northwest of you. We’re leaving a beacon and moving on.”
Great point.
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Japan had an intricate set of largely religious rituals set up to make high-quality steel for swords long before anyone knew what the science was.
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.
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Women have historically worked fairly hard physical labour well into their 8th month. (hard labour practically until… labour.) ;):smack:
(edit) the first few years with extra females will massively jump-start the population. (/edit)
We don’t need to build everyone a house right away. We start with shelters. Then a barn raising. We all move into the barn for the first few months while we are setting up agriculture; making tools; building the saw mill; etc. *Then *come individual shelters.
Hadn’t thought of telephones. Good one! But vacuum tubes?.
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Since I’m making electric lights anyway… Why not vacuum tubes and let someone build a computer in there spare time, (under their electric lights?) I know how to make logic gates. The reason for the computer?..
If you don’t want the future generations to dismiss the “legends” of electronic devices as fantasy, have a working computer up and running. I’m sure the calculating power will be helpful for the engineers trying to redesign stuff like steam engines, silicon chips… (Oh, and Pong. How did we survive before video games… But if you make Tetris, or World of Warcraft before society is stable it’s game over.)
I agree. Paper is vitally important. And it’s not too hard when you know how. I’ve made paper in my own home. As I’ve shown in my continuing posts, I believe many of the developments leading up to the industrial age are not that hard when you know how. And we do need to preserve as much knowledge as possible.
That’s why I was focusing on those things I was sure I could actually build with my own hands to start. And just showing what we could make fairly quickly from there. I could build a water wheel or windmill. Wow, we have power, irrigation and grinding. I could build a furnace. I can make charcoal. We could make iron tools. Once you can make copper wire and a water wheel, you can have electricity.
I’m familiar with floating glass on molten tin as well, but I’m not suggesting we go to that length. We don’t need perfectly flat glass to make a greenhouse. We’re not building million dollar mansions with plate glass picture windows that give virtually no distortion. That’s luxury at this point. We do need lenses for telescopes and microscopes, though. And we’ll do it how Galileo did; by grinding them.
That’s why irrigation and directed pollination are vitally important from the start. Water power will give a lot more time for developing the next technology. Of course oxen would be incredibly helpful too, and I have no idea how much effort that would take to domesticate them…
Someone mentioned that the wheel wasn’t invented in the new world. That’s becuase the only domesticated animals were the llama and alpaca. Both in South America in the mountains where a wheel isn’t practical.
I don’t think that’s necessary. I am quite happy to debate the issue entirely without it. I’m planning on having the first computer up and running within 40 years. I’m hoping to still be alive to see it.
I love this thread. I’ve never given this much thought before, but I have to say, after reading through all these responses, I’m pretty impressed by us humans.
When you consider all the difficulties, it really is amazing that we’ve accomplished so much. I do agree that after survival and increasing our numbers, the priority of the original folks has to be preserving all the knowledge. Otherwise, I fear the new generations will do the same thing that our civilization did, make up stuff to explain anything they don’t understand.
I agree that it’s very hard. That’s why all my earliest developments make it easier to survive. But I did gloss over the fact that I would need a stone knife, axe, pickaxe, spear, atlatl (and a net for fishing if there are any,) in the first week.
That’s why we have to have the industrial revolution practically started by the time the grandchildren reach adulthood. Because we will have done all the “easy” stuff; what you can do with your own hands and a moderate amount of trial and error. We will have a list, and they will see that industry continually produces the items on the list in progression. that will go a long way to belief.
Of course, the historian Niall Ferguson gave a list of the “killer aps” of Western Civilization… “competition, scientific revolution, property rights, modern medicine, the consumer society and the (Protestant)* work ethic-- that define and set apart Western culture.” He also discusses whether the West is losing it’s edge to the East… i had worried about that trend until Mr Ferguson said that he thinks it’s because the West is losing sight of the killer aps, but the East is picking them up with gusto. That reassured me for the fate of civilization.
*(The quote from the link didn’t contain the word Protestant, but Niall himself, though not religious, had no problem saying it.)
In threads like this, there’s often a sentiment of “we think we’re so smart, but we’re not”.
People always want to see humans cut down to size.
I would come down on the optimistic side. They have with them the knowledge to avoid the big stumbling blocks that held up the human race for millenia. And the usefulness of this knowledge is readily demonstrable in many cases; enough examples to keep people on the program (e.g. scientific method) for the first couple of centuries. For one thing, people who took the old-world stories seriously would tend to have better weapons and tools.
And that’s all that’s needed before it becomes self-reinforcing.
As a side issue, what about pathogens? It would be quite an advantage if we were unharmed by all local microbes.
I agree. We can’t support pure acedemics. I read quantum physics in my spare time for fun… But I’m building the water mill… We need academics (to preserve knowledge,) who can work practically as well.
Yes, the first things we make make it easier to grow food and increase our productivity beyond our physical strength. that’s why I said water wheel first.
I forgot to mention that we then use the barn for livestock and storing grain, etc.
You, me and WreckingCrew practically have these up and running already at… what do you figure? 6 months? a year?
Can we bring the Mythbusters crew?
Oh, and we need someone who can make acids. I can give you chemical formulas for several, but I wouldn’t know what you need to start them from scratch.
For an online tutorial:
The first thing we do is punch some treesand build some tools.
Then it’s not too long 'til logic gates.
Nice.
I see this as a major problem to survival. We won’t have encountered any bugs out there for 10,000 years. Of course, we may have an advantage, as we’ve been battling their advanced decendants for that long and may have an immunity*… But, we’re helped by knowing about sanitation, and the fact that there aren’t any human specific pathogens around. And as soon as we have glass, we make microscopes, so our children can see the microbes, and don’t have to take the germ theory on faith.
*The Spaniards decimated the Native Americans with disease, and NOT the other way around. So, being practically resistant to native pathogens is a real possibility.
Could you create levers and pulleys in a few years? The plow? There are all sorts of situations where we won’t have to spend nearly as much time engaging in trial and error. I only have a general idea of how cracking towers separate different petrochemicals but I bet a chemist and physicist would make the road to the first crack tower a lot faaster and safer.
Midieval peasants had a lot of free time between planting season and harvest and between harvest and the next planting season. With modern farming techniques (heck with peace corp levels of technology, simple knowledge about irrigation and crop rotation) you work harder and for more hours but your yield is a LOT higher
The first year is going to be rough if there is a winter but lets just assume we get dropped off in San Diego near a bunch of caves near an abundant source of resources, otherwise the first blizzard would kill us all if we didn’t starve to death trying to domesticate local plants for farming.
Noone said pure academics. We are saying that knowledge will accelerate us through and circumvent all sorts of technology. I think the really tough spots will be at the very beginning where get basic farming in place and then we are off to teh races until we hit the electronic age. IANAscientist but I grew up during the cold war have thought about this sort of thing before.
I agree that radio is more useful but until the development of transistors, not particularly portable. long range scouts would still alrgely be on their own unless they could lug around a pretty big radio transmitter. Still, having a network of radios at mining outposts and fishing outposts would be very useful.
Yes but the science would have short circuited many years of trial and error.
I think it’s important to anchor the discussion on somewhere concrete like this otherwise it’s too easy to imagine up handy resources of petrochemicals, iron ore, copper, coal, the right kind of animals for domestication, the right kind of crops for agriculture.
If the natural resources are not within walking distance, they are pretty much fictional until society has recreated transport technologies and a big enough population to exploit them. I don’t think we get to any of those things in the first generation. The best we can hope for is to leave breadcrumbs so that our descendents know what to do with them so they find them.
If we are lucky enough to land near a copper mine, I can imagine making batteries & wires leading to motors, generators, heating, communication and lighting in the first generation. But transistors & vacuum tubes? No chance!
If we don’t have a local source of ductile metal. Electricity is lost for several generations at least.
Guns, germs & steel explains that the spaniards relative immunity advantage over the natives came from several thousand years of living closely with domesticated animals. Our intrepid party of explorers wouldn’t have that advantage and pathogens evolve quicker than hosts.
You’re being dropped off in the middle of nowhere with no equipment. Clothes on the back, remember?
Modern agricultural techniques rely a ton on having good seed stocks and modern fertilization chemicals. I guess it’s easy to dismiss farming, but agriculture relies on a staggering amount of infrastructure, even at subsistence levels. That’s why it’s much easier to be a hunter/gatherer.
If you are lucky, your landing spot has some native plants you can grow. But it will be years (perhaps decades) before you can cultivate reliably good seed stocks that will sustain your colony, much less improve your yields per acre. And that assumes such plants exist. In North America, maize was the closest they came and even it took a while to breed into something useful.
Crop rotation? Really? Unless you are planting the same few things year after year after year in absolutely gigantic quantities (unlikely in the first few years of a colony), this isn’t even an issue.
Middle Age farmers certainly had a pretty good working knowledge base. That level farming tech would be wondrous in the first year of this thought experiment. Unless things go really well for the colonists, even Middle Age tech would be hard to manage - they had domesticated animals for farming, remember?
And even with modern farming techniques and beasts of burden, your season-to-season yield is still heavily dependent on good weather. Check out the cotton crop in Texas this last year. Or any other crop. It’s abysmal due to the drought. Sure, nobody is starving, but that’s because we can now grow much more than subsistence level.
So, not only do you have to get lucky with finding good native plants that will sustain human life, you have to hope you get decent weather for a long stretch.
The example of the Plymouth Bay colonists in their first year is a good example of what happens if you get just a bit unlucky with your colony - and they had much, much more in the way of supplies than this supposed scenario.
Well, if we’re adjusting the scenario to be ultimately favorable, it becomes meaningless.
Why not set them up with a herd of cattle, a couple hundred chickens and pigs, and a herd of horses while we’re at it? And a couple tons of wheat, some processed iron, and a couple hand tools, too?
No arguments here. But instead of short-cutting 10000 years into 10, I’m envisioning 10000 years into 200 (if you get extremely lucky).
The lead-chamber-process for the economic production of sulfuric acid (arguably the most important industrial acid) was used all through the industrial age. If you have someone who knows how to use sulfuric acid extensively, it’s your first huge step in making fertilizers, detergents, batteries and inks.