Right, but that’s where we could head History at the pass, so to speak: we (assuming a 100% preservation of knowledge from one generation to the next for a sec) already know that mechanization, automation and production chains are feasible - seems to me we’d get those going before we even got to advanced materials. Once you’ve got a wind or watermill and a stamping press, even with flint the sky’s the limit.
True - and I think there would be a significant element of luck in the early stages - depending on situation, available resources and the abilities and social dynamics of the pioneer team.
I’m not sure what the optimum team size would be for immediate survival - two will usually fare better than one, but when you scale up to 100, that’s a lot of mouths to feed and it starts being a problem that you’re all in the same geographic place.
But even assuming reasonably favourable starting conditions, I’d say the chances of developing an industrial culture in the initial generation are poor - maybe less than 5% (It’s still what I’d be trying to do though - at least to iron age/mediaeval levels of tech). The chances of the group dying of startvation within a month is maybe 30% or more - and the chances of the group starving or dying of exposure in the first winter (or the following spring, when food is scarcest) is very significant.
You have valid points. They brought iron tools, brought their own crops and livestock, and had a hard time staying at that level. Other colonies didn’t survive.
Wildly varying conditions can be proposed that make it either impossible or confer no advantage, (it would take the same amount of time as all knowledge would be lost,) and other conditions that some of us think it would be possible to shorten the time to our tech level.
Now, I’m not interested in a situation where you’re dropped naked into a blizzard and die. Sure, it’s possible, but what fun is that to speculate on? I’m not interested in any situation where dropping prehistoric man naked would not be survivable. (non-survival is a non-starter as I’ve said before.)
I’m also not interested in any starting condition where survival is so hard, there will never be time for anything else, because civilization could never develop in the first place. The question of the op isn’t even interesting anywhere civilization is impossible through death or harsh conditions. The answer would be, “well, civilization is an impossibility.” How can that be? We know civilization is possible.
from the op:
[QUOTE=SlackerInc]
So let’s say before you left you knew what you’d be facing.
[/QUOTE]
I’m not going to go to ANY of the places where civilization can’t develop.
[QUOTE=smiling bandit]
I do love how some people blithely assume all resources are located right at hand, energy and fuel are freely available, and we’ll have all the food and comforts to survive quite nicely.
[/QUOTE]
I’m mildly interested in places and conditions that prehistoric man wasn’t able to develop civilization. We can ask, “could we create civilization in those conditions and in what time frame.” All of those places have food and water, usually running water, and running water is a source of energy. (If it doesn’t have running water, it’s likely one of those civilization isn’t possible places.) All of those immediately survivable places have some type of fuel, humans used fire extensively after all. Wood was a prevelant resource. It provides fuel and building material. You give me food, running water, stone and wood and I’m going to make a water wheel to make my life easier. And if there isn’t iron ore somewhere, our current civilization, once again, isn’t possible. And I’m not interesting in the time spent twiddling our thumbs waiting to find it. That time doesn’t actually factor into “how long does it take for civilization to develop.” Prehistoric man found it laying around and used it to draw pictures.
I’m most interested in places where civilization did develop. How much time could we shave off if any.
But, even given no cereal crops or beasts of burden in an environment like Northern California, food is rich enough to provide free time, there are lots of cedar trees for fuel and material, (cedar splits straight with even crude tools.) There are mountains where ores could be found. There are still crops in our world that weren’t developed but could have been if we didn’t already have good ones that we focused on. There would still be mastodons in California 10,000 years ago. (Elephants are not domesticatible, but they can be tamed and used to do work.) I would be willing to give it a try there, though it isn’t optimum.
also from the op:
[QUOTE=SlackerInc]
Is it perhaps true that there’s only so much you can speed it up?
[/QUOTE]
That really sounds like he was suggesting we have the same starting point for civilization that prehistoric man did. Asking the same question I have been, how much time can you shave off.
Y’know, with a couple of sticks you could always make a slide rule.
150 seems like the magic number for hunter-gatherers so 100 might be a fine start. It’s just big enough to allow specialization with 20 years of breathing room before we need to split off into separate bands.
I don’t think industry or agriculture in the first generation is likely or even a desirable goal. My goal would be to stabilize quickly as efficient hunter-gatherers and focus on the a-historical technologies like writing, printing, metallurgy, medicine, science, genetics, etc that would give us a bonus that early humans did not have. I’d continue to dabble with more advanced technologies as a side project to keep the traditions alive so that subsequent generations could make better progress than Humans 1.0.
Assuming Northern California, I think hunter-gathering would be plenty sufficient - and more efficient than farming - for the couple of generations it might take to get up to speed on agriculture. At that point you could send explorers out to bring back some reindeer or wolves. You could even start new colonies in a diversity of climates to accelerate the learning and distribute the risks.
I don’t farming 2.0 needs to be the same as the original version. Fish farms might be easier to start than maize cultivation, for example.
Bronze age pasturalists before the first generation is gone.
Iron age farmers by the next generation.
Middle ages by the third generation.
After that, progress is about the same as it was the first time around. It just happens about twice as fast.
I agree we must assume a favorable environment. Most of the objections here seem to be based on concerns that we might find ourselves on Easter Island or something. Lets just assume away all those problems because if we are all living hand to mouth or if there are insufficient resources to achieve what we need to achieve then it is no longer a matter of whether we achieve technological advancement and a question of whether we survive at all and whether our little group will be lucky enough to find that ideal spot before we all starve to death. An entirely different thought experiment.
Lets assume we all start in the Nile river valley or between the Tigris and Euphrates. Water and fertile land is abundant. Fish and game are abundant. Fruits and edible plants are abundant. You can find outcroppings of copper, tin, coal and iron without having to dig deep into the earth. What you lack are any tools that you cannot make with your own two hands.
Well, we would be able to support much larger populations far more quickly because conepts of fishing and farming would be familiar to us. Our people would live longer and have significantly longer producitve useful lives, we would have lower infant mortality and our population would grow far more quickly (having lots and lots of kids would be a moral imperitive).
I think it might be interesting to consider what sort of social systems would develop in that case. Who studies, who works, who attends to my needs? Who gets to be my second in command? Who gets to breed with the women I am not interesting in taking as a wife?
North America had horses and buffalo.
Early man had a lot of free time. It wasn’t until we started fishing and farming that we started working ourselves to the bone but the more predictable food source made population growth possible.
We would make dynamite pretty early on and we would need spears for a really long time for self defense because frankly making a gun that is reliable enough for hunting is going to take a bit of precision tooling that is goig to get you to the industrial age anyways.
Swords will only be useful for clearing brush, axes are better tools.
Ye[p pretty much. We had this discussion. If you assume otherwise then you are no longer talking about the advantage of knowledge but the luck of finding a good palce to start.
Yeah and they didn’t have the knowledge we do today. If you dropped a bunch of us off in colonial times, we would get to the industrial age pretty damn quickly and the eletronic age pretty soon after that.
Yeah, that is why we are awssuming near idyllic circumstances to begin with. Noone builds their Starcraft homebase in the middle of the map they build it ac close as they can to resources.
I’d put it at closer to 50/50. Barring some disaster we would go from Bronze Age to Iron Age in a matter of weeks or months. We would have steel within a few years and then we would be off to the races.
A paleolithic man by definition would not have a bow and arrows. Paleolithic (Old Stone Age) means that humans were using tools made of unworked stone. If you’re using worked stone, like a knapped flint arrowhead, that’s neolithic.
And how do you figure out how to find for instance an antibiotic substance in a new environment? Even after penicillin was found (inadvertantly) to have antibiotic properties, it took a lot of time and a large scale effort to find one variant of it productive enough to be of any use.
But anyway, put me in the camp thinking we won’t even be able to start agriculture for lack of nutritious, high yield plants. In fact there’s no guarantee there will be any plant being a good candidate for selective breeding and much latter actual cultivation wherever we happen to be.
Definitely not. Stone was worked during most of the paleolithic that covers most of human (and proto-human) history. The neolithic only began very recently, 10 000-15 000 years ago.
Assuming we are in, say, Europe would it be practical to attempt to cultivate 20 or 30 wild grasses and hope that one of them grows up to be wheat?
small print
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I’ve already acknowledged that we’ll be hunter-gathering for a while. If it takes 30 years to find the grass that turns out to be wheat or barley or whatever - great! Plenty of berries and root vegetables in the meanwhile.
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Assuming there is not a botanist in our party.
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Same principle for maize in the new world.
Depends on the scenario - if this is Alternate-Earth, we already know where to start looking - moulds - and although I haven’t worked on culturing microbes since school, the principles aren’t that hard to work out. It will be hard, sure, but it won’t be harder than it was the first time around, because we know what we’re looking for.
If this is the alien Earth-analogue scenario, then all bets are off - there might not even be anything in the biota that we can exploit for medicine, let alone food. If I had to guess though, I’d go along with the same scenario as on Earth - some of the simplest organisms, likely the ones that have been around longest, will be doing battle with some of the next-most old. Maybe we can steal their weapons.
Those technologies are industry.
Nest that 50/50 chance within the 10% chance of survival for more than 6 months and we’re in agreement anyway. If we can stay alive, the chances are as good as not that we’ll get our tools, machines and industry rebooted, but I think it’s extremely likely that we’d just die of starvation. Many of us here seem to have first or second hand experience of foraging, hunting, etc, but few, if any, have considered what it takes to forage for our full immediate needs at the same time as storing sufficient supplies to see us right the way through a lean winter and spring.
It was my understanding that according to the OP we were on an alien world?
Besides, I don’t think that wheat was native to Europe. My understanding is that most cereals, etc… spread everywhere after they began to be cultivated. So, even on a carbon-copy of Earth, we wouldn’t find any in most places.
North America STILL has buffalo. They aren’t domesticable. They can’t be used for farming. You can raise them for meat, but you can’t use them to help with farm labor. There’s a good reason Americans overwhelmingly raise cattle instead of buffalo.
North American horses died out around 12000 years ago. They didn’t come back until the Europeans brought them (cite).
If our posited starting point is basically 5000 years ago in California, we’re SOL on domesticable farming animals.
Hah! Maybe we go straight to the Iron Age, but getting sufficient caloric intake to the people to go “off to the races” ain’t happening for a bit longer.
Let’s posit the “perfect” starting location in the Fertile Crescent or some place similar.
You are NOT going to develop a decent strain of wheat for several years or even decades. It’s not like our ancestors simply found the right plant and it worked for them. Developing a more or less modern form of wheat was the work of centuries. Modern knowledge shaves time off of that, but with the original stock, we’d be lucky to get even Middle Age yields per acre for quite a while. I’m guessing decades. Remember, even with knowledge of genetics, you basically still have to basically just grow the plants and hope the next year’s crop has more of the traits you want (and also hope that maybe a beneficial mutation does the work in a single generation).
Likewise, our fruits come from basically finding the few mutant plants that produced good tasting fruit. Even with all our modern knowledge, we basically can’t just produce decent fruit from scratch. It requires patience and quite a bit of luck.
Also, sufficient numbers of animals will not be domesticated for some number of years. It’s not a matter of knowledge but of just doing the work. Maybe it wouldn’t be the most difficult work in the world (though I imagine it would still be painstaking and difficult), but it’s still going to be a while before you build up a supply and breed the right strains of animals (which also requires a bit of luck in passing on the right traits from the seed animals to produce our expected domestic strains of animals).
And that still doesn’t take weather into account. Even in mild climates, you get the occasional flood or drought or something else. Even in the most ideal starting point imaginable, you have to get lucky with the weather for enough years to build up a surplus of acreage for food.
Or simply deal with being hunter/gatherers for a while. And while that’s not necessarily more difficult than farming (and perhaps less calorie intensive), it still takes large portions of the day to do this, leaving less time to develop technology.
Op says alien world similar to northern California. I’ve interpreted that as basically northern California in a parallel universe with no humans.
If the alien world is truly alien with alien flora and fauna and pathogens, we don’t stand much of a chance at all.
They died out right after the humans showed up. Let’s not make that mistake again.
I know that modern fruit varieties didn’t exist but but California had berries and grapes. I think you are too pessimistic on fruit and vegetables.
Pigs, horses and wolves. Why not?
Nothing bad about hunting and gathering. I’ve read that Paleolithic hunter gatherers actually only spent a couple of hours a day on food production. The really hard work did not kick in until agriculture. Modern h/g societies like the San are atypical because they live on the shittiest land that was left over after civilization booted them out of the good areas.
Concur. If it’s an alien world, and we turn up with nothing more than our clothes, we’re screwed.
Is that definitive? I’m pretty sure there’s still a bit of disagreement about whether climate change had anything to do with it.
No grapes (most N. American varieties are limited to the Eastern seaboard). Some berries, I’ll admit, but nothing like the variety we have now. The vast majority of fruits found in California were introduced in the last 500 years.
That’s hardly ‘pessimistic’. It seems ‘easy’ to us to use California only because of the vast infrastructure laid down over the last few centuries.
Pigs were introduced from Europe, as was the modern horse (look it up - horses are different now than even 2000 years ago, much less 5000 or 10000).
So, maybe, if you are lucky, you have wolves and an early form of horse (certainly not the type of horse re-introduced from Europe in the 16th century).
You still need to breed/domesticate them into modern horses and dogs. If you want this to occur quickly, that means keeping them in pens, enclosures, or some other way of keeping your experiments separate from their wild brethren. Otherwise, you are at the same pace as our ancestors, which rather defeats the point while you hope for lucky mutations to occur.
And certainly, you aren’t going to have them in sufficient numbers for farming for a while.
Large draft animals? Oxen or such? Still no luck on that and that’s a major impediment to large scale food production. Horses are better than nothing (if available), but they aren’t going to come close to cows for work output.
That works fine if EVERYBODY is involved in hunting and gathering. If you want to support an industrial base sufficient to rebuild civilization quickly, most people will necessarily be spending their day time hours working on non-food production.
Each person responsible for food production will then necessarily be responsible for daily production of many times the number of calories a single person would need.
Why do you think agriculture is a key element to civilization at all? A relatively small number of farmers can then work harder than the same number of hunter/gatherers so that all the soldiers, priests, scribes, blacksmiths, etc can concentrate on what they do.
There are no native pigs in California. Only domestic Eurasian pigs,some of which have gone feral.
Whether North Am horses were domesticable is open to debate. They may have been no more domesticable than zebras.
Domestic dogs were brought to California from Asia, and domestication occurred just once worldwide. So it’s at least possible that only one very specific variety of wolf is domesticable, and that strain ain’t found in California.
Huge numbers of things bad about hunting and gathering. It limits group size to at most 20 individuals. It mandates nomadism and consequently makes it all but impossible to acquire any object heavier than about 5 kg. It demands that all members of the group be skilled providers with an intimate knowlegde of the land.
Those concerns alone mean that if you have to resort to a HG lifestyle for more than a few weeks, your society is stuck like that indefinitely and you need to literally re-invent the wheel.
A couple of hours on *gathering *food. Once you take into account the time taken to make tools, to prepare the food, to travel between foraging grounds etc. the figures varies between 8 and 16 hours/day depending on the exact group. Contrary to myth, HGs never had much free time.
If that is true, then why were HG populations so low? If you can feed two children with no hard work in just 4 hours a day, why not have three children? Or four?
Obviously HGs, like all animals, were at the maximal carrying capacity of their environment and incapable of obtaining any more resources regardless of effort. If that were not true then their population would, by definition, have increased.