Trying to come up with some real answers to this impossible situation.
First, everyone has to move next to the river until they figure out how to move and store water.
There are only two available resources besides the gifted elements and the terrain -. people, and the books. If they are indeed real books. I wasn’t kidding when I stated that bones will be the first tools. And stomachs could act as water bags, it’s been done before. Dissecting the dead? Well to begin with you will have to rip them apart after they soften a bit. Yuck.
To grow anything you need soil. We mentioned poop and although food grown in it might just kill people from fecal problems at least you could grow non-food crops. So tear up all the unnecessary books to provide carbon mulch along with the poop. Also, they need to pee into the suedo-soil as that adds nitrogen after it composts. Wherever my dog pees grow like crazy the next year.
I’m not sure if the phosphorous and potassium in usable form can be made from pure elements and nothing else. And crops need many trace elements as well - all in soluble forms.
Plant things that will aid in making shelter, clothing and provide more soil. Food is not a priority. Bamboo for building materials. Fast growing trees. Rye grass to plow under. Not sure about the clothing part I mean you could grow cotton but it will be years before there is enough to make anything much and they have to figure out how to card and spin it. Use book covers for umbrellas.
There is iron to make tools and carbon to burn to provide heat You don’t have to smelt the impurities but it is not going to get hot enough to pour unless you can provide lots of forced air. Perhaps use book covers to make bellows.
Better off to start with bronze from copper and tin as it has a lower melt temperature and can be cast into hammers, handles and crude bent hooks for tongs. Maybe aluminum would be better. Use your bronze hammer to make an iron hammer. Use that with an aluminum handle to make a better hammer, then tongs and punches.. Then make shovels to help in the fields and dig shelters.
I’m not even sure how to make a fire. Pure carbon burns great (that’s basically what coke is) but it is damn hard to light. I guess start a fire with phosphorus? Should be exiting.
That might do it, but potassium metal is an even better bet. One difficulty with both of them is storage in the meantime. They needed to be completely isolated from air and moisture. This is typically done with them completely submerged in mineral oil.
And depending on the form of the carbon, it might be difficult to get it to combust.
A big block of graphite will likely just fizzle out. Whereas powdered graphite will likely conflagrate or even explode. So you need some happy medium.
There is the Gingery series of books on building your own machinery. Many people have built their own lathe following his guide. You don’t start with much but it has been a long time since I have read about it. It does use your own cast aluminum pieces.
Assuming we could get the sodium or potassium to light the carbon and make it burn controllably in our sand-only dakota fire hole furnace . . . could we possibly make blown glass? Is there any element that would lend itself to becoming a decent pipe shape and not melt in the heat of molten sand?
Also, what could we use to shore up the walls of the furnace? What do you add to silicon to create ceramic/clay?
The natural isotope abundance of uranium will not go boom. It’s why uranium needs to be enriched for bombs. And also why I specified plutonium, although that probably also won’t go boom. But it’ll kill off all life with radiation poisoning, just not quite as quick as a boom.
Probably not. By coincidence I had just watched several YouTube videos about making primitive glass. You need soda ash and limestone or other flux. They lower the melt temperature and increase fluidity. And glass is not made from beach sand, it is mined from deposits. Although any good silica sand will make something. In at least one video they give up. And they had real crucibles.
I think the odds are that they would end up building pretty much nothing of consequence. On the other hand, they could beat the odds and, out of the 1,000, end up with a handful of doctors, slcientists, and engineers. I base this on my belief that the very large majority of the human race is NOT responsible for human advancement.
As others mentioned, I don’t think the group would survive very long. But assuming the group is unselfishly focused on saving humanity, I think their best strategy would be to create an art project to impress the aliens.
Creative people tend to be creative even without an education and with a population of 1000 you’ll have perhaps 10 or 20 of them. I could see some sort of huge art project being possible in the time they have available.