What's the most impressive thing 1,000 random people could build in 20 years, trapped in a terrarium with raw elements and a library?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Imagine there’s a slightly powerful alien species — let’s call them the Dorg —who’s grown bored of their neck of the stars. One cosmic weekend, they make a wrong left turn and stumble upon Earth. Looks like it would make for a fun little ant farm.

The experiment: The Dorg suck up 1,000 random humans, aged 20-60, in reasonably good health, and sampled at random to be an otherwise realistic mix of the global population — personalities, values, education, professions, hobbies, etc. They’re plopped down on an island in the middle of nowhere and surrounded by a giant force field. Imagine a mix between Survivor, The Truman Show, and Mad Max; or maybe a hybrid of the Biodome and the Colosseum.

The humans have 20 years to build something to impress the Dorg with — only they have no idea what. Should it be a machine of some sort? A work of art? A culture? A religion? A new species? A government? All of the above, or something else altogether? If they succeed, the Dorg will leave the planet in peace, and give each survivor a slice of the most delicious cake they’ll ever have. If they fail, Earth will be flushed down the nearest galactic sewer.

The humans start naked, coming in with only their bare hands and whatever docile microbiota happen to live on or in them. The island dome itself is also sterile, just dunes of silica sitting on top of some unknown, impermeable substrate, punctuated by the occasional rock formation, but no trees, living soil, or other life. The surrounding “ocean” between the island and force field is similarly sterile.

But the Dorg aren’t cruel — it’s a fun science project for them, not genocide. To give the humans a fighting chance:

  • Every person is first cleansed of disease-causing bacteria and viruses, so they enter the dome in a relatively clean slate, making infection highly unlikely.
  • The island dome is perfectly climate-controlled and comfortable, a steady 70°F year-round, with 18 hours a day of full-spectrum lighting from a fake sun above. There is an air filtration system that provides perfectly breathable air no matter what the humans do. It even provides a gentle breeze.
  • On the island there is a faithful, book-for-book copy of a modern research university library, containing a reasonable swath of human knowledge up to the year 2020 or so, but with no internet, computers, or electronics.
  • A reasonably large river of pure water runs through the dome, enough to provide unlimited fresh water and perhaps hydropower someday.
  • Once a week, a space-magic barge arrives on that river, carrying a sufficient supply of space-magic food pills that are fully nutritious and almost palatable, along with a miracle medicine pill that has a 90% chance of curing any disease, 9% chance of doing nothing, and a 1% chance of painlessly killing the user immediately.
  • On that barge is also a tablet where a person — whoever happens to hit the “submit” button that day — can order up to 10,000 total kg of raw, 99.90% pure elements, anything from iron to noble gases to radioactive metals, in the isotopic abundance you’d normally find on Earth. The elements will come with the next shipment, in perfectly suitable containers unloaded from the barge onto the shore. The containers dissolve away once opened, leaving only the element behind.
  • Somewhere on the island, buried deep in the sand, is a seed vault, containing 1,000 seeds of every major cultivated crop (major is defined as having been commercially grown for at least 100 years, and harvested for at least a million metric tonnes a year). The vault can read minds and will only open if at least 501 people give their consent in a secret, unfalsifiable vote. The vault doesn’t care what happens to the seeds afterward.
  • At exactly midnight of the start of year 10, the barge will allow one single yes/no question to be submitted (again, by whoever happens to hit the submit button first). The next shipment will arrive with the answer, which will be answered by the Dorg as faithfully as possible, with the possible responses “yes”, “no”, and “dunno”.

1,000 people, 20 years… the clock is ticking. What should they build? How should they decide? Will they even survive that long without breaking down and eating each other?

2

They’d never survive to ask a question. I’d put the over/under on “All dead” at 5 years, max.

3

They either need clothing or bedding. 70F is marginal for a naked sleeping person. Also, is fertility controlled?

4

Most of them will die from homicide in the first several years during the struggle to see who gets to be in charge and press the big button. 1000 random people will be a literal Tower of Babel divided into dozens of tribes with different ideas on how to please (or thwart) their zookeepers. What’s left in 20 years will be as primitive as Pitcairn Island 20 years after the Bounty arrived. There will probably be little more impressive than a few modest garden plots.

5

Grown in what? Crops don’t grow in sand or rock, and that’s all there is.

6

Point taken. Change that to a few modest grave plots.

7

Do the people all share a common language?

8

The most impressive thing they could do would be to survive.

Which the slightly powerful Dorg almost certainly couldn’t.
Photosynthetic life couldn’t survive in the conditions proscribed.

If the only carbon within the dome is the 400ppm in the controlled atmosphere and the rest can be 10,000 total kg of raw, 99.90% pure elemental C in the form of diamonds, graphite or buckminsterfullerene?
…
If the only nitrogen in the dome is atmospheric and the rest is ordered in as a shipment of 10,000 total kg of raw, 99.90% pure elemental N2, what creates the nitrates to make that elemental nitrogen available for life as we conceive it?
…
Or the phosphorous in the dome, existing in microscopic and bio-unavailable amounts in the atmosphere arrives as a shipment of 10,000 total kg of raw, 99.90% pure elemental P and then spontaneously ignites and is oxidized rapidly to phosphorus pentoxide, also bio-unavailable.

The most valuable resource in the dome would be the fecal matter undigested from the “space-magic food pills that are fully nutritious” … and the decomposing bodies.

et al

9

Time Machine. Pretty Impressive.

10

Would they, though? Do the bacteria we carry when we are alive also do the job of breaking us down after death? I suspect some other types would need to evolve from them to do the job well.

I do agree about the human microbiomes being the key to everything. Let’s hope those magic pills swell up to a hefty dose of fiber after swallowing.

The first key would be to get everyone organized to eliminate in organized rows and bury the waste in a shallow trench. That way they could slowly begin to form something resembling soil. But it would be an odd soil, just sand and feces. This challenge has been thoroughly examined in Andy Weir’s documentary “The Martian.” Which is largely the situation we are describing here.

I’m guessing five years to develop a decently sized fertile field. The next challenge would be identifying the food seeds that could be sustained without a cold period. I’ve never done any tropical gardening, but I guess you’d start by opening the seed vault and planting things like bananas and mangos. Stuff that you know can grow and form seeds that will sprout without refrigeration. Bananas are good because they produce a huge amount of compostable material.

Can the elements be provided in fine powdered or even chelated form? That would make soil production even easier.

Bottom line, if in twenty years they have made the whole island fertile, and developed farming that could sustain them, I would call it a win.

11

Just in case somebody out here is thinking “…1,000 seeds … Wowsers … as much as that!!! You could feed the whole world if there were just 1,000 people in it.”

A troy grain is a unit of measure based on the mass of a single seed of either wheat or barley. There are 7,000 grains per avoirdupois pound in the Imperial and U.S. customary units. So 1,000 grains of wheat will give you 1/7th a pound of wheat grain. A pound of wheat will fill about 2.25 cups, which will give you 3-4 cups of flour. If you want to make bread a typical home baked loaf requires about one pound of wheat grain. So from the seed vault with zero wastage you will get 1/7th a loaf of bread. Consequently the population of 1,000 (or the survivors) will need to plant, grow, harvest and store the entire crop for several years to get a usable surplus. And there is no living soil/organic matter in the dome’s environment. And if you tried to do it hydroponically you haven’t got any bioavailable nutrients.

Of course, that’s using wheat. Best of luck with the allowance of 1,000 mustard seeds.

If @silenus is offering overs/unders @ 5 years, I’m putting my dosh on the unders.