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

[Damuri_Ajashi]

@Great_Antibob

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.

Well it would HAVE to be hunter gatherer until you found a place with good weather, good resources and good food supplies. Then a few more seasons while you got farming up and running. You can probably get reasonably reliable seedstock in 5 or 10 years. You can use organic fertilizer while you cet up a system for creating chemical fertilizer. You can set up an irrigation system almsot right away.

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.

Sure we could assume you get dropped off in the middle of the Sahara but lets assume that you get dropped off someplace more like Greece or Italy. good seedstock is important for yield per acre, not so important when you have unlimited acreage. You can grind corn into a meal.

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?

Domesticating animals takes a few generations but they don’t have to be totally domesticated to be used as beasts of burden.

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.

I’m assuming you pick raparian land with lots of water, its why some people live in relatively cold climates because it rains more often and the spring thaw brings lots of water.

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.

If you want to assume that virtually everyone dies in the first year, then this is going to be a short discussion but I am assuming that our toast falls buttered side up. That we make it through the first few years.

Well, if we’re adjusting the scenario to be ultimately favorable, it becomes meaningless.

no I just want to assume that we don’t have to worry about starving out the first few years that we achieve viability otherwise this entire discussion will be about whether or not we make it to year ten or twnety. Once we achieve that I think we are within a generation or three of the industrial age.

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?

Your point seems to be that getting a viable farming operation and a few domesticated animals and some iron is really what will make or break this settlement. At that point you are simply saying “it depends on whether or not they can get to this very very low level of subsistence before everyo9ne starvs to death, but if theyn make it that far then…” what?

No arguments here. But instead of short-cutting 10000 years into 10, I’m envisioning 10000 years into 200 (if you get extremely lucky).

I think its probably closer to 100 years but ymmv. Certainly not 500 years.

[kevlaw]

@Damuri_Ajashi

You can probably get reasonably reliable seedstock in 5 or 10 years.

Where does this seedstock come from? How long does it take to domesticate wild grasses and turn them into maize & wheat? More than 10 years, I’ll wager.

I think we’d have to concentrate on naturally occuring fruits and root vegetables. Grains and such will have to go on the TODO list for future development.

@Damuri_Ajashi

You can probably get reasonably reliable seedstock in 5 or 10 years.
I think its probably closer to 100 years but ymmv. Certainly not 500 years.

The more we talk this through, the more pessimistic I am about recreating most modern technology. I think we can get back to the middle ages (plus a few cherry-picked technologies like genetics, germ theory & printing) in about 100 years. Getting from 1000AD to 2000AD will be a tough slog. It won’t be as hard as it was first time around but it won’t be a cakewalk either. 500 years seems reasonable to me.

[Chronos]

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.

I was using the word “house” very broadly. Any sort of structure or set of structures capable of sheltering our population through the winter is going to take an awful lot of labor, right away, at a time when a lot of other hard work will also be critically necessary: You have more things you need to get done, and less tools available to make it easier.

[Stranger_On_A_Train]

@Damuri_Ajashi

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.

These statements alone indicate that you are entirely missing the point. It isn’t just enough to be able to figure out how to design a machine that uses pulleys and levers to significantly increase mechanical advantage, or built a refinery. You also have to be able to build all of the elements for those machines which are strong enough and durable enough for use. A pulley system, for instance, is only as strong as the axles, mounts, and fiber used in the construction of it. You may design a block and tackle system that will allow a single man to lift several tons, but if the system itself cannot support that kind of weight is it so much noodling.

For “cracking towers” you will need to be able to build metallic piping, glass or ceramic vessels, insulation, temperature-controlled furnace, heat measurement systems, et cetera, and all of the attendant technologies (metal forming, mechanical fastening, welding, glass forming, et cetera) all of which would take a team of dedicated “experts” who have the conceptual knowledge but lack practical experience years if not decades to develop to a suitable applicability, and all of that assuming that they have access to natural resources (metals, ceramics, and of course raw petroleum) to experiment with.

Our distant ancestors of Homo sapiens sapiens didn’t lack technological innovation because they were stupid or incurious; indeed, many of the precursor solutions to present technologies were ingenous given the limitations in which they were developed. They were stuck with the technology they had because they lacked the necessary materials, tools, and methods for improvement, which have been developed incrementally. Even a practical knowledge of current technology does not give an assured understanding of how to build the necessary precursors, and certainly not to locate and extract raw materials using only primitive methods.

Stranger

[Great_Antibob]

@Damuri_Ajashi

Sure we could assume you get dropped off in the middle of the Sahara but lets assume that you get dropped off someplace more like Greece or Italy.

Is it actually Greece or Italy? Even so, unless there are already wheat fields, you have to develop the local grasses into crops, which may not be possible.

By “corn”, I assume you mean some local staple crop. Maize took a lot longer to develop than wheat. And not due to a lack of technology but because it was simply a harder plant to tame.

Likewise, the Americas had few domesticable animals. Are we to assume we find easy to domesticate animals in this new land? If not, farming becomes much, much harder.

Even with our knowledge, if we were dropped in a foreign, though comfortable land, we’d need to be lucky enough to find a local plant that could eventually be made into a good crop plant, much less animals that could be domesticated to serve as beasts of burden. Basically, we’d have to stumble on actual modern type wheat (or maize or millet or rice) and/or hope there are cows (but not buffalo) about.

[BMalion]

@ch4rl3s

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.)

So who’s going to be providing you food while you’re playing with logic gates?

[SwamiTommy]

A few dozen people is probably not enough to be genetically viable,

Actually it probably is. It is now thought that all of the American Indian population may have descended from just one family that crossed into Alaska. Also, Pitcairn island was populated by a total of 48 people, mutineers from the Bounty and woman from Tahiti, and there were no big genetic problems 100 years later.

[GargoyleWB]

I think that the largest hurdle would be that the “easy” access to the raw materials needed for industrial age are no longer easily accessible. There are no oil gushers soaking the plains, rivers filled with gold, veins of silver gleaming in the sunlight, piles of coal just waiting in your backyard…

It’s possible that the sweet spot of raw material accessibility may be beyond the tipping point to enable another industrial age.

[ch4rl3s]

@Damuri_Ajashi

[QUOTE=Great Antibob]
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

Sure we could assume you get dropped off in the middle of the Sahara but lets assume that you get dropped off someplace more like Greece or Italy. good seedstock is important for yield per acre, not so important when you have unlimited acreage. You can grind corn into a meal.

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.

If you want to assume that virtually everyone dies in the first year, then this is going to be a short discussion but I am assuming that our toast falls buttered side up. That we make it through the first few years.

[/QUOTE]

If we drop naked into a blizzard, or at the base of an erupting volcano, or on the shore as the tsunami hits it’s a non-starter.

The question is to compare the time it took us to reach this tech the first time vs *starting again *with advanced knowledge. (and possibly a discussion of which knowledge would be most important.) But to compare the two fairly… You start with the same conditions. So, either Africa where humanity developed, or the Fertile Crecent where we first started civilization.

i.e. what if you replaced a tribe of paleolithic modern humans with knowledgable people from today. Same brain power, same starting conditions, etc. The idea of what those conditions actual are varies, but… anything that would have killed off early humans dropped naked into the situation would seem to me to be out of the question. Humans didn’t start with harsh winters. We started with nearby animals and foods to domesticate. It’s arguable that humans developed near fish resources, etc. I believe we started near plentiful resources and expanded into every harsh environment on the planet.

that said, we aren’t guaranteed copper or iron ore just sitting out in the open visible to start. But… it needs to be somewhere. If the question is, “what would present humans do with the same circumstances?” then you can’t say we don’t find copper or iron ore for a thousand years… If they had it laying around but didn’t know what to do with it, it isn’t a fair comparison to say it’s a years walk, hidden 100 feet below ground for us.

For instance, wikipedia says copper has been in use at least 10,000 years. I think that’s basically our starting point, isn’t it? Finding copper… no, using copper was the starting point. And that iron has been in production for 5000 years; (they knew about meteoric iron much earlier.) And that iron ores have been used as pigments since prehistoric times.

I say we have to find both of them in the first couple months. And if prehistoric people were using iron and copper as pigments thousands of years before they used them as metals… Then it was just lack of the knowledge of what to do with them. And that is the question before us.

Apparently, gold and meteoric iron were used as metals before copper was.

[Johanna]

An excellent example of this is in the Nantucket Trilogy by S. M. Stirling. The author just plops Nantucket with a town of late-20th century people into the year 1150 BC. The end of the Bronze Age. With a considerable head start from the technological apparatus already on the island, and a luckily-present Coast Guard ship, they pool their technical knowledge to recreate 20th-century technology and establish colonies and trade routes around the world and fight wars ‘n’ shit. They had with them a blacksmith who was able to recreate 19th-century technology first, then they used that as a basis to upgrade to a 20th-century level.

[ch4rl3s]

@ch4rl3s

I say we have to find both of them in the first couple months. And if prehistoric people were using iron and copper as pigments thousands of years before they used them as metals… Then it was just lack of the knowledge of what to do with them. And that is the question before us.

I missed the edit window. i had meant to say that I had to revise my thinking on finding them in the open after reading about the early uses. We do have to practically find them laying in the open from the start. i.e. first couple months.

[Johanna]

@Johanna

the Nantucket Trilogy

Basically, Massachusetts Yankees in King Kashtiliash’s court.

[Great_Antibob]

@ch4rl3s

i.e. what if you replaced a tribe of paleolithic modern humans with knowledgable people from today. Same brain power, same starting conditions, etc. The idea of what those conditions actual are varies, but… anything that would have killed off early humans dropped naked into the situation would seem to me to be out of the question. Humans didn’t start with harsh winters. We started with nearby animals and foods to domesticate. It’s arguable that humans developed near fish resources, etc. I believe we started near plentiful resources and expanded into every harsh environment on the planet.

Well, actually, it’s kind of apparent humans DID start in a non-ideal environments for the advance of civilization and eventually moved to exactly those places where local conditions were good for the development of civilization, the Fertile Crescent among them.

So, you’ve got it backwards. There are ancient homo sapien remains in lots of places about Africa, Europe, and Asia, many with non-ideal climates. But civilization itself really started in a few places with good local climate/geography and spread from there. Historically, early humans were lots of places while civilization began in only a few of those places. It’s no accident those places had good climate/geography and typically had good local plants and animals for agriculture.

So, yes, humans often “started” with harsh conditions and had to find milder environments in order to thrive.

The same thing is true for this experiment. If you are starting over, you need not just a “good” starting point but a damned excellent one or need to have random bits of your tribe (or whatever you want to call it) set out at various intervals to find better places to live.

And that’s going to be the hardest part. Unless the starting point is one of the few, nearly ideal points where civilization can skyrocket, you’re going to be in hunter/gatherer mode until you find such a place.

[ch4rl3s]

@kevlaw

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.

I am conversant with the work of Jared Diamond. And I find his argument compelling.
This is also the reason that the flu today usually comes to us from China… A billion people living closely with pigs and fowl.

We will have that advantage over paleolithic humans. just because we don’t currently live with animals doesn’t negate the 10,000 year advantage bequeathed to us from just a couple hundred years ago.

the advantage doesn’t only come if you are currently living on a farm. It came because for thousands of years pigs and fowl and humans living together were a massive mixing bowl for the infectious disease battle between microbes and us. And we have inherited many resistances.

[Great_Antibob]

@SwamiTommy

Actually it probably is. It is now thought that all of the American Indian population may have descended from just one family that crossed into Alaska. Also, Pitcairn island was populated by a total of 48 people, mutineers from the Bounty and woman from Tahiti, and there were no big genetic problems 100 years later.

They weren’t there continuously for 100 years, nor was the gene pool completely isolated in that time. Also helps that the starting population was mixed European and Polynesian.

Pitcairn Islands Study Center

Note that there are several congenital diseases among the Amish, who had a much larger starting pool than 48. Not enough to make the population unviable but enough to create a few problems.

[ch4rl3s]

@Great_Antibob

So, you’ve got it backwards. There are ancient homo sapien remains in lots of places about Africa, Europe, and Asia, many with non-ideal climates. But civilization itself really started in a few places with good local climate/geography and spread from there. Historically, early humans were lots of places while civilization began in only a few of those places. It’s no accident those places had good climate/geography and typically had good local plants and animals for agriculture.

the fact that you are proposing “lots of places” as starting points shows that they aren’t actually starting points. We had to move to most of those places. Probably with clothes on our backs and tools in our hands. i.e. moving into harsher environments once we could survive them.

Civilization began in a few good places. Once humans found a good place, it took them this long to reach this level. The question, to my mind, is, could we do it quicker? I wasn’t thinking of the question as, how long until present day humans find the good place? Although that is a good interesting question that we should be discussing as well. But, I still say that anything a paleolithic human could not survive dropped in naked is a non-starter.

(edit)the question is knowledge. You drop paleolithic human in naked, you drop present day human in naked. GO! (edit)

[ch4rl3s]

@ch4rl3s

(edit)the question is knowledge. You drop paleolithic human in naked, you drop present day human in naked. GO! (edit)

I didn’t mean together… (i.e. Kirk vs the Gorn.) Paleolithic human would beat me in a fight. Unless i had a bow and arrow. Which I could have in a few weeks.

[ch4rl3s]

@ch4rl3s

I didn’t mean together… (i.e. Kirk vs the Gorn.) Paleolithic human would beat me in a fight. Unless i had a bow and arrow. Which I could have in a few weeks.

Hmmm… he might have one too. That development was very early…
wikipedia

The earliest potential arrow heads date from about 64,000 years ago in the South African Sibudu Cave.[1][2] By 16,000 BCE flint points were being bound by sinews to split shafts. Fletching was being practiced, with feathers glued and bound to shafts.

Which would have facilitated his move into harsher conditions…

[Great_Antibob]

@ch4rl3s

Probably with clothes on our backs and tools in our hands. i.e. moving into harsher environments once we could survive them.

Sure, but they got to most of those places before the advent of “civilization”, at least as we’re defining it.

Take the following example, then.

Let’s take Earth as it was in 5,000 BC. Except a wizard mystically removes all human beings and their tools and homes.

Our proposed starting colony is somewhere around Southern California or maybe Northern California (though that might be too cold in the winter). So, comfortable enough and with enough local food for Mr Naked Paleolithic Man to survive (ocean has plenty of food and coastal California has animals aplenty).

Can civilization be rebuilt in any time frame shorter than 500 years? I say no. There are no domesticable animals nearby. There are no food crops. You might shave off a few centuries in getting maize, but you’d need to travel across some desert to find the source plant. Wheat? Forget about it. Local grasses might eventually serve, but you’ll spend decades, if not centuries, getting them to even a crappy form of wheat or rice. Few fruits, too, since most were developed in Asia.

Ok, but Mr NPM can live off the ocean. That’s great, but civilization, rather than merely surviving, requires an agricultural base, as well. Not just for food stuffs but to supplement diet and produce plants useful in industry.

No cattle or horses, either. So, no easy mode of transportation. Even if you had local sources of hydrocarbons and metals, you’re not getting far for a while without animals. And even if you found easy crops, it’ll be that much harder to produce them in quantity relying solely on human power.

Maybe our superior knowledge gives us an advantage in that scenario, but it’s still not going to be a quick thing to rebuild to 21st century level technology.

[ch4rl3s]

@Great_Antibob

Sure, but they got to most of those places before the advent of “civilization”, at least as we’re defining it.

Take the following example, then.

Let’s take Earth as it was in 5,000 BC. Except a wizard mystically removes all human beings and their tools and homes.

Our proposed starting colony is somewhere around Southern California or maybe Northern California (though that might be too cold in the winter). So, comfortable enough and with enough local food for Mr Naked Paleolithic Man to survive (ocean has plenty of food and coastal California has animals aplenty).

Can civilization be rebuilt in any time frame shorter than 500 years? I say no. There are no domesticable animals nearby. There are no food crops. You might shave off a few centuries in getting maize, but you’d need to travel across some desert to find the source plant. Wheat? Forget about it. Local grasses might eventually serve, but you’ll spend decades, if not centuries, getting them to even a crappy form of wheat or rice. Few fruits, too, since most were developed in Asia.

Wow. If you drop us into a place where paleolithic human NEVER invented a civilization with advanced technology it’s going to be immensely hard for us too. Great insight. The question isn’t “where on earth is it easier?” the question is “how long would it take us to recreate the feat?”

But, I can still build a water wheel, and transfer power out to a field with ropes and pulleys to pull a plow, even without oxen. It just means my field is a segment of a circle rather than a rectangle.

So? What is our starting point? What point in human history are we dropping us into? Africa, with domesticable animals? (The crops across the equator are much more labour intensive to farm.) Or the Fertile Cresent, which is the first place, (or one of the first,) we moved to out of Africa, with animals and crops? What point in our past are you going to say is our starting point?

If you drop us somewhere where paleolithic man was using iron ores to make cave paintings and only using stone tools I’m going to have metal tools… etc… oh, wait, that was practically everywhere.