They do have rocks. Hopefully some are small enough in size to be used to bang against the larger ones.
I can think of several better ways to go in this scenario. Radiation poisoning would not be on my list. As has been said already, they have a Russian Roulette option.
If the seeds included bamboo or kudzu, those might get a decent start on the river bank. Especially with a little boost from strategic elimination.
What about a choir? They have everything they need for that. There might even be some music int he library. And out of 1,000 people surely some will have some musical training, and others will have traditional songs. How many songs does the average person know all the way through, I wonder?
Even bamboo and kudzu need nutrients. That river won’t bring them any, it’s sterile.
@Reply, what sort of answers were you expecting?
That’s brilliant!
So sorry, I’ve been out of town for the holiday, and posted this early one morning while everyone else was asleep. I thought I’d be able to check in regularly, but it’s been non-stop busyness since then and I haven’t had a chance to catch up yet! Will read through this once I’m home later this week.
I do want to say, though, that I had meant to mention that the aliens would’ve given everyone a magic pill to make everyone fluent in each other’s languages so that mutual intelligibility wouldn’t be an issue. It’s an important bit of detail that was in the first few drafts, but I edited this so many times (in an effort to make it shorter, believe it or not…) and forgot to add it back into the final draft, whoops! 
It would’ve made a big difference. My bad…
Still, I look forward to all the serious and silly replies. I’ll read through them as soon as I’m back.
I’m pretty pragmatic about this whole thing.
By the end of the first day the ones with fair skin will be getting sun poisoning. By the first night they will discover that 70 degrees is too cold unless they snuggle together. It will be years before there is clothing unless they skin the dead people and use brain tanning. By the 3rd day some of the women will be trading sexual favors with the strongest, good looking men so the creepy fat guy can’t snuggle with them.
Nothing to grow crops in. Trying to use the human waste is a bad idea by all experiences and those food pills are not going to have any bulk to provide much crap anyway. 1000 seeds of one plant? WTF? Everybody gets one ear of corn if you could grow it? If they can get plants to grow it will take several successive years of crops to build up any volume.
Bright spot: you can get iron, you can get carbon to burn. If you can light a fire, even. You don’t just bang two rocks together and get a spark. If you can build a kiln out of rocks you can make a hammer, then use the hammer to make tongs, etc. It’[s the standard blacksmith startup routine. Not sure what you need the tools for anyway. Maybe break up rocks with a sledge hammer to build shelters. The first guy with a sword is going to rule. And this all depends on how the elements are provided? Granular material would probably be best. You aren’t going to do much with a giant chunk of iron.
Lathe?? You won’t need anything perfectly round. You can build from sticks and branches if you had any.
You have sulphur and carbon. If you can make potassium nitrate you can make gun powder and build a gun. Fuck that guy with the sword.
With what? Their teeth?
The OP said “occasional rock formation” but said nothing about usable tool rocks, and based on the aliens’ deliberate stingy shittiness towards the victims implicit in the rest of their setup, I wouldn’t count on that being the case.
The research library seems really overlooked here. Not so much for its information as for its
Modern research libraries are full of paper. They are full of metal shelves. They are full of plastic book covers. They are full of desks made of metal, wood, and plastic.
Your average library would have many tons of these materials. In addition, they have roofs that protect from the rain, and construction materials that could be repurposed. Significant sections of the research library will contain information that is not helpful, such as contract law regarding homeowners associations.
What happens if the society dismantles these sections of the library and uses the materials therein to bootstrap other processes?
Among the random sampling of those kidnapped, there will be some very intelligent people. These captives will ask for certain materials they can (secretly) use to make a weapon to blast out of the force field. Assuming eventual success, two possibilities ensue:
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The area outside is inhospitable to human life and all the humans die. This is the “give me liberty or give me death” option, effectively telling the aliens all they need to know about human priorities.
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The area outside does support human life. This could give those pesky humans a chance to turn on their a-hole alien captors - teaching them a valuable lesson about respecting other worlds/other life and keeping their judgments to themselves – by driving them off with custom-designed anal probes also secretly manufactured. This is the “fuck off, alien scum” option, variations of which have played out successfully in numerous fantasy stories.
That alone will kill the population. You deliberately included the possibility of some diseases making it into the dome, nor did you exclude things like cancer. Any bacteria and viruses will evolve, eventually creating serious epidemics. With a 1% chance of dying, most will wait until very late before taking the miracle pill. Result: Everyone infected, around 10 dead from pill alone. More dead from disease itself. Rinse and repeat for the next wave.
Yeah. It would make a lot of difference if one of those rock formations is a pile of loose pieces of flint. Though the chances that out of a random thousand modern people there’s anybody who knows how to knapp it are slim, the chances that somebody’s at least heard of the idea and can figure out how to get a basic edge are fairly good.
I think somebody upthread pointed out that we might not have the right microorganisms in/on us, but if we do, our shit and piss and bodies might eventually get some patch of sand alive enough to grow something; not enough to sustain us in twenty years, but maybe a bit of variety in the diet. If we don’t, though, all that mess will do is sit there and probably dehydrate.
The paper would be useful for composting, again if we’ve got the right microorganisms. Shit and bodies don’t have the right balance on their own. Though I’d worry that we’d tear up some of the books we’d need.
But do we get all the shelves and roofs and so on? Or just a pile of books? We weren’t told that it ever rains, and the description implies to me that it doesn’t.
The OP’s scenario reminds me a lot of the Riverworld series by Philip José Farmer.
To answer your broader idea without getting hung up on the details:
If you are an idealist, you could image 1000 people uniting for a noble purpose without any distractions from their goals. They’d build a new pyramid to rival those of Gizeh, recreate all major milestones of technical progress and launch a rocket to see how far they get. They’d write operas and poems and train themselves in every dance there is on Earth.
If you want a more realistic answer, imagine 1000 or more people in Rome during the height of the Roman Republic that were well off and free to spend their days as they wanted. What did they create? Some impressive architecture, some notable writings and pieces of art. Not bad at all, but also not likely to be impressive enough for the aliens.
Add in that your 1000 people have lost everybody they loved - parents, spouses, children, friends - with no hope of ever seeing them again. They have also lost their society and their place in it.
To add insult to injury, the largest part of your 1000 come from traditional and conservative backgrounds and have been bereft of all dignity by forcing them to live naked from now on.
I expect a sizeable number of suicides, along with lots of violence caused by looking at someone the wrong way within the first days. You didn’t say whether your magic pill would heal injuries.
After that, the main effort would be to just get back to a basic level of decency and comfort: Clothing, shelter, furniture, soft bedding. Since you deliberately exclude any kind of natural material, that alone will require massive work. How do you make a fiber from which to spin a yarn to weave a cloth to wrap around you, if all you have are the elements of the periodic table? Either wrap yourself in tinfoil, if you can order that, or rebuild the entire heavy and chemical industries so that you can have reaction vessels so you can synthesise the raw ingredients for creating synthetic fibers.
Honestly, expecting these 1000 to create something even half as impressive as what the entire race has created within the last twenty years is wishful thinking.
A pile of loose flint is not a “rock formation”. “Rock formation” means an exposed surface outcrop of solid rock. It could be really soft rock around flint nodules, I guess, but like I said, the OP’s aliens don’t appear to be that charitable.
We’re just told it’s a faithful book-for-book copy. So the only thing we can be certain of are the book parts. But even assuming all the resources you say are there, how are our humans going to dismantle the shelves and building without other tools?
Incidentally, the seed vault, should include 1000 coconuts per the wording of the seed description, if that helps at all, with husk and shell, presumably.
We definitely could use some clarification on this point. Here’s the exact wording:
The word “faithful,” and the mention of things that aren’t included (internet, computers, electronics) makes me think that the Dorg just used a copy/paste function on their spaceship to grab an existing research library and plunk it down in their terrarium. @Reply, is that a fair reading?
If so, there’s a lot we can do with that library. If not, I think I’m out of ideas.
I mean, what research library on earth doesn’t have a maintenance closet?
If there’s dirty wool carpeting we can shred that into usable growth medium for the compost. Lots of good nutrients and bacteria in there.
I take this to mean 1,000 each of every major crop. And it doesn’t say food, so it would also include things like rubber and bamboo. What else would be in there? What are the >weediest< things? The ones that would get biggest in plain water before they died, to start a composting project.