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

Great Debates
161

There are a lot of naturally occurring seed crops that have been overlooked in favour of the ones that have become most common (rice, wheat, corn). For example, it wouldn’t take much effort to cultivate varieties of amaranth, which is a common weed. It has the added benefit that the leaves, shoots and roots can be edible as well as the seeds. It’s even beneficial to other plants because of the ability of its large taproot to bring up nutrients from lower levels of the soil. The irony is that it’s considered a harmful weed in modern monoculture grain farming, but in itself it’s a valuable plant and can be used as a “mother” plant for other vegetable crops.

Many, many extremely nutritious food plants have been abandoned or ignored by modern agriculture and food distribution systems because they are not quite as easy to transport and store in large quantities as wheat, rice, corn, potatoes, etc., but they are still readily abundant in the wild and relatively easy to cultivate. Some may involve a bit of processing to reduce toxins because they haven’t had their chemical defenses bred out of them like our common food crops, but that will also make them less susceptible to pests and blights.

Many extremely common garden weeds like goosefoot and purslane are more nutritious than the crops they compete with, and have the added advantage of being hardier and more tolerant of poor soil conditions than most of our relatively delicate and fussy garden veggies.

As far as chemical fertilizers go, I hope we don’t make that mistake again. It’s better to maintain and enhance the natural fertility of arable land by fostering the soil ecosystem than by destroying and replacing it with chemicals upon which we then become utterly dependent. Natural fertilizers such as manure, ash, compost, nitrogen-fixing crops, rock dust and mulch will add nutrients without destroying the soil ecosystem. In this way, it’s possible to raise abundant crops of grain and other foods without plowing or use of chemicals.

I’d much rather see us adopting a Permaculture way of doing things. The advantage is that by designing and building an agricultural system that reflects natural systems, cycles and processes, it is largely self-sustaining and requires less input of energy and resources from the farmer on an ongoing basis. A Permaculture landscape includes not only self-sustaining plant and animal agriculture, but energy-efficient housing design, alternative fuel sources and building materials, and nature-based water purification systems. It would be a huge benefit to our colonists to start out with this sort of design in mind, because they wouldn’t be wasting a lot of time and effort maintaining unsustainable systems like those found in much of the Western way of life.

Oops, how’d this soapbox get under me? :wink:

162

Not to perpetuate a stereotype, but I’d be looking for a suitable cave to start with. :wink: It would have the advantage of earth insulation, sturdiness and the ability of stone to absorb and reflect heat, whether from the sun (if you have a good south-facing rock wall) or from well-placed fires. A good cave would provide shelter during the early days while stocks of food and tools were built up, and once other housing was built it could be used as storage, workshop space, or whatever.

163

Speaking as someone whose favorite food is dandelion salad, and who’s had some mighty tasty purslane, I have to say you’re off-base here. Yes, those “weeds” can pack quite a lot of vitamins and other nutrients per pound, but they’re also awfully low-yield compared to anything domesticated. And there’s also a tendency here to overlook the most important nutrient of all: Calories. You’re not going to get anywhere remotely near the Calories per acre from edible weeds as you will from domesticated grains or potatoes.

And Jeneva, caves are great if you have them, but caves large enough and sheltered enough to be practical aren’t all that common. We’re most likely to end up someplace where we won’t be able to find and reach suitable caves in time.

164

In fact, caves are generally one of the poorest forms of shelter if for no other reason than that they are typically formed (over millions of years) by water flows, and therefore tend to be wet and cold, as any splelunker can tell you. Caves also tie you to a particular location, so unless there are sufficient natural resources to support your burgenoning population you are going to find yourself stuck with diminishing resources.

Building shelter isn’t all that hard, and in fact there exist plenty of information about how to build effective shelters in nearly every terrestrial climate and geography in the world from subarctic tundra to tropical rainforest, from local resources such as compacted earth, thatched vegetation, and insulating grasses. Building shelter that is moveable is more tricky, and requires significant technology (e.g. tanning, yarn spinning, flint knapping, et cetera), and so if you have not already developed these tools and methods you’ll have to keep rebuilding shelter every time you migrate, which is do-able but takes much effort, which detracts from all of the other survival efforts (foraging for food, building tools, et cetera). And of course, you can only take with you as much as you can carry until you can breed beasts of burden or perfect the wheel and axle to a usable form. It appears as though many posters are under the assumption that because they can drive a car, type on a keyboard, and make a computer go “bing!”, they can of course master the “primitive” skills of outdoor survival. The reality is that these skills are highly sophisticated, requiring considerable knowledge and experience before they can be effectively used under even the best of conditions, and that trying to develop them ad hoc, without prior art or fallback reserves is a good way to die but quick, as demonstrated by the many people who have depended on technology in the wilderness which failed.

Here is a simple exercise for all swivel-chair survivalists: Select a somewhat complicated book (not a simple novel) that you could ordinarily read in no less than three or four days; say, something in the 400 page range, such as Doug Hofstadter’s I Am A Strange Loop. Now, in a fair weather season, take it with you into a nearby wilderness (someplace not too far off the beaten path, as we don’t want you to die foolishly). You can take any clothing you can wear, including insulating synthetics and weathershells, a portable water filter, and all the food you can stuff in your pockets, but no other modern conveniences (backpack, knife or other cutitng implement, matches or lighter, twine or rope, flashlight, et cetera). In the course of the next week, you have two tasks; stay alive and relatively comfortable, including procuring shelter, supplementary food, building tools for long term survival, et cetera, and finish your book. Remember, you can’t read (or do anything else complicated or that requires travel) after dark, and you can’t just sit around during the day munching on trail mix and reading; you have to make a sincere effort to build durable shelter and make tools.

Sound easy enough? I do this once every two or three years (well, I do bring a sleeping bag and bivy sack so I don’t disrupt the local environment by building shelter) and at the end of the day it leaves little time or energy left for reading, much less developing new skills or methods beyond what I’ve already learned, and I know how to forage, knap flint and make other stone and bone tools, build a firebow, et cetera.

Before you have any business expressing a qualified opinion on the ease of surviving in the wilderness, much less rebuilding agricultural and industrial technology from scratch, you should at least be able to satisfy the above exercise.

Stranger

165

Brilliant debate. Just to add a little twist, can we consider that it’s the prior knowledge we have getting in the way of the advancement? ie, focusing on what we know and getting back to where we were, rather than survival. We had to start from scratch somewhere - look where we are now.

166

My point about food was twofold: First, that there are wild grain and other seeds available, so we don’t have to go without them entirely while selectively breeding a grain crop from whatever plants are available. Agriculture didn’t develop because someone said “I wonder if we can turn this inedible grass into something we can eat”, it came about from cultivation of something which was already known, gathered in the wild and eaten to begin with, and they simply wanted more of it.

My second point was that we currently throw out a lot of plants that are perfectly edible just because they compete with our preferred crops, a mistake we shouldn’t make in a situation where we’re starting from scratch. There’s no point in going to the effort of developing greens like spinach and lettuce when things like goosefoot and purslane are more nutritious and grow quite well enough on their own without any significant effort from us. If they grow so well in our gardens even when we fight them, there’s no reason we can’t actively cultivate them and breed more size into them, ideally being careful not to lose their superior nutritional value in the process. A lot of our current vegetable crops are only preferred through habitual use and the logistics of modern distribution, not because the plants themselves are so much better than all others. In the absence of already-cultivated crops, there are many others available in the wild with which we should become familiar and whose potential for cultivation we should explore. We don’t have to limit ourselves to rice, wheat, maize or potatoes just because those are the most familiar ones.

Until we have a reliable source of starch, the bulk of our calories will probably have to come from animal fat and whatever seeds we do manage to gather (which can be quite a lot in the right environment), but once we start cultivating, we’ll still need other nutrients as well. We don’t want to suffer the same mineral and Vitamin B deficiencies that the Native North Americans experienced when they moved from a varied diet including a wide variety of wild grains to one based mostly on maize; deficiencies which appear in the archaeological record as weakened bones and dental caries. Eating the weeds that grow amongst our crops is one way to get those nutrients without having to go to the extra effort of developing new types of greens as well as grains.

167

I think it would indeed get in the way to some extent, as things like our preconceptions of what constitutes appropriate food, etc. interfere with fully exploring our available options. Most people here probably wouldn’t immediately think to bash apart a rotten log and eat the grubs they find within, but primitive man would have had no qualms about doing so, and would eat them with relish – if he could find any relish. :wink: We might pass up the possibility of frog fricassee or turtle soup while trying to catch fish, or expend precious energy trying to catch rabbits when mice are readily available. I imagine a few hungry nights would make us less squeamish about some of modern man’s less popular food items, but our prehistoric forebears wouldn’t have that mental barrier to overcome in the first place.

168

Instead of writing a lengthy response this late in the discussion, I just comment that Stranger On A Train has it. Primitive tech is much harder to implement than it’s superficial simplicity suggests, and basic survival would in any case consume the time and energy of would-be-starters-from-scratch. Prehistoric peoples didn’t start from scratch, they invariably stood on the shoulders of ancestral giants, and even then often didn’t make it.

As Chronos noted, while some wild plants are excellent sources of vitamins and minerals, almost all wild plants are a lousy source of energy compared to cultivated species. And many of the most-energy-dense wild plant parts (such as acorns or Calla and water lily roots) are more or less poisonous, needing elaborate processing before consumption. Seeds of most any plant are energy-dense, but very few wild species’ seeds can be effectively gathered in sufficient amounts for human survival. Agriculture has made huge leaps forward in the past 12 000 years in turning the best few wild plants from everywhere on Earth into immeasurably more efficient, benign sources of human energy (while arguably losing out in terms of micronutrient content).

Humans are lousy machines in terms of fuel economy. In a “mild” outdoors scenario, it takes around 15 MJ of energy per day for an average-sized person to sustain oneself. That’s a huge load of wild food. One would need to find, gather, process and down literally a bucketful of the best wild plant parts every day to retain energy balance in an optimal environment. As most plants have very little fat and even less essential fatty acids, incomplete and insufficient essential amino acid profiles, little digestable iron or zinc, a person could easily die of starvation while eating wild plants day in, day out.

169

I agree. Hunter gatherer will keep us going for a long time until our population gets so big that nature’s ability to feed us grows thin. This is going to take generations and by that time we will have working farms.

I posited earliet that we MUST assume fairly ideal locale otherwise we would all jsut be guessing how long it would take us to find such a locale if we could find one at all before we all perished.

Between hunting, fishing and gatehring. I’m not sure why 100 people would deplete local resources. I would think that local resources would replenish faster than that. I am also assuming taht we find a good place to settle and don’t just settle whereever we happen to land.

I do this with some regularity (with the caveat that I bring along a tarp, a knife, a lighter, a flashlight and chlorine drops, oh and we generally go out during good weather).

It gets a lot easier when you have 5 or 6 other people.

I think the hypothesis is that with sufficient knowledge we can fast forward through several stages of development.

+1

Once you make the right tools, things get a lot easier.

Not really. My grandmother made a sort of jello out of acorn for most of my childhood. she used to leech it in water overnight.

Hence the hunter part of the hunter/gatherer combo. You can also fish.

170

That’s a heck of a caveat. How can you claim to be able to do without tools if you get to use tools?

In fact, it pretty much voids the entire exercise. It’s still a useful exercise in basic survival, but it does very little to address the OP or to address Stranger’s scenario.

The point of the exercise, as stated, is to not only survive but also find time to read WITHOUT the knife, tarp, lighter, flashlight, and chlorine drops. Remember the OP states you don’t even get the clothes on your back, much less any of the gear.

Stranger actually gives a slightly easier scenario. You get clothes and as much food as you can fit in your pockets, and you only have to survive for a few days while finding time to read. No need to rebuild human civilization.

I’ll grant the good weather, though, as that was explicitly mentioned by Stranger.

171

I don’t think anyone has been suggesting that we could bootstrap civilization while living entirely on wild foods. My post above, which Chronos referred to as “way off base”, was merely a response to the suggestion that we would have to do without grains completely until we had advanced agriculture. There are many different kinds of edible wild grains and seeds, although as pointed out, they often require more processing to deal with the toxin load and are not as high in starch calories as our commonly cultivated cereal crops. But they are out there, so we won’t have to subsist entirely on greens and roots while we’re getting the cultivation up and running.

My second point was that we shouldn’t waste time trying to recover some of the less worthwhile common foodstuffs we’re familiar with now (iceberg lettuce, for example), when there are more nutritious alternatives already out there that we could be cultivating instead and getting more nutritional return on the investment.

172

I had come to the same conclusion a while after I posted this. I agree, small wheel first.

173

I think I already said both these things. thanks for the confirmation.
(Or I may have said wiring tubes was easier than mechanical gears. Well, they’re both true.)

174

How about aquaducts? :wink:
(joking, because it would take decades to build that too. And for the first while, we’re not going to have two cities to build a road between. Cart paths out to the fields, yes.

[QUOTE=kevlaw]
I can’t speak for DA, but I said there’s no need to rush agriculture and that hunter gathering could easily keep us ticking over for a generation at least until farming kicks in.
[/QUOTE]

[QUOTE=slowlearner]
don’t underestimate the difficulty of surviving as hunter/gatherer, 100 people will deplete your local resources in a few months (with some exceptions, such as the old happy hunting grounds of the Mandan along the upper missouri) and you’ll have to keep moving.
[/QUOTE]

Yes, the problem with H/G is having to move around. Unless you have a ready supply of fish.

[QUOTE=Chronos]
Speaking as someone whose favorite food is dandelion salad, and who’s had some mighty tasty purslane, I have to say you’re off-base here. Yes, those “weeds” can pack quite a lot of vitamins and other nutrients per pound, but they’re also awfully low-yield compared to anything domesticated. And there’s also a tendency here to overlook the most important nutrient of all: Calories. You’re not going to get anywhere remotely near the Calories per acre from edible weeds as you will from domesticated grains or potatoes.

[/QUOTE]

This is absolutely one of the most important points of the thread. A major problem with H/G is calories. Agriculture supplanted it for two reasons. Sticking in one place and calories. And these allowed tribes to get bigger than H/G could support.

175

Herding sheep, goats, pigs, cattle. Whatever livestock there may be would be a very important first step.

176

That’s a heck of a caveat. How can you claim to be able to do without tools if you get to use tools?

In fact, it pretty much voids the entire exercise. It’s still a useful exercise in basic survival, but it does very little to address the OP or to address Stranger’s scenario.

The point of the exercise, as stated, is to not only survive but also find time to read WITHOUT the knife, tarp, lighter, flashlight, and chlorine drops. Remember the OP states you don’t even get the clothes on your back, much less any of the gear.
[/QUOTE]

What is the point of the exercise to the OP? I’m not planning on trying to rebuild civilization without knives, fire, shelter, spears, etc. What you’re doing in the first few weeks is building tools, shelter, fire, clothing. And I previously stated that going naked is a severe detriment as the first humans didn’t start from naked either. They had a base of tools and clothing and were trained by their parents in H/G. We’ll have to be trained before we go too.

177

A lot of the objection to the notion that this whole endeavor could successfully be accomplished has to do with surviving the initial period and THAT is largely contingent on settling in a hospitable environment that not only has nearby running water, gmae and edible plants, but also has easily harvested mineral resources. So I have just been assuming that we landed in such a place or we find such a place to settle before we all die of starvation or exposure.

I can create flint knife pretty quickly (better if I have access to obsidian), a lighter is a huge convenience but I can build a fire with dry wood (better if i have flint and/or pyrite), chlorine drops are a convenience but one that we can live without if we dig a well soon enough. A tarp would be nice but assuming good weather, we would want to build more permanent shelter pretty soon. The flashlight is entirely unnecessary if I can create torches.

I think we could. Between fishing, hunting and gathering, I think a third of the population could feed the other two thirds adequately for quite a while and we would probably continue engaging in hunting, fishing and gathering long after we have started farming.

I agree. We don’t need a steel mill to produce steel.

I think what it comes down to is that if we get lucky with climate adn natural resources, we could thrive and rebuild civilization pretty quickly or we don’t survive our first winter.

178

You’re hired. If we have fire, and why wouldn’t we, we can boil water, make light, etc.

Good point.

The OP itself says we know what we’re getting into. So, several of us have been assuming we can plan for what we’re going to face, and decide not to go if it’s decidedly unsurvivable. (No crop plants, domesticatable animals, running water, minerals, etc.)

179

I agree. That will provide not only calories and nutriments but lots of other materials for making clothing, tools, household appliances, houses, etc.

180

For a while at first, but not for the entire length of the project all the way up to whatever passes for civilization in this scenario, or we’d literally eat ourselves out of house and home. We’d need some sort of easily replenishable local food source before too long, and we’d want to get started on it before we were in dire need of it, especially if we want to include any long-term crops like orchard fruits.

By which point we would no longer be “living entirely on wild foods”. As soon as we start farming them, they’re no longer “wild”. :wink: But of course we’d still want to include the products of hunting/fishing and gathering in our larder. There will always be desirable foodstuffs that don’t lend themselves readily to cultivation.