How fast can a civilization evolve?
 

A quick thought experiment...

Think of the 10000 most intelligent and capable people and leave them naked on a desert island, with nothing but their acquired skills and brains, how long would it take for them to build a civilization equal to modern day USA (given that all the natural resources are abundant and readily availible and only work and knowlage are required)

Re: How fast can a civilization evolve?
 

Some things that we have would just be skipped/ignored. I'll have to put more thought into how it would all turn out, but to think that they'd end up where we are right now would betray that they're not really the 10,000 most intelligent people.

It's like when you're coding, and at one point you start building this huge system based on small pieces that you hack together over time. Later on, someone comes along and re-engineers the whole thing, but with better foresight. It won't operate the same, and some of the hacks are then unnecessary.

For instance, who'd need stop lights if all transit was fully automated. Things like cameras at intersections wouldn't exist, various laws an so on that were tacked on over time to fix problems wouldn't ever be, and various technologies that were once important and are now obsolete, but forced other things still around into being would never enter the game.

If they were trying to rebuild everything that we have in terms of technology, well, maybe 20 years? If they were trying to advance in one area, like computing/networking/whatever they might be able to go from nothing to now in 10 years (assuming that some chip designers make it into the top 10,000).

Re: How fast can a civilization evolve?
 

[ QUOTE ]
Some things that we have would just be skipped/ignored. I'll have to put more thought into how it would all turn out, but to think that they'd end up where we are right now would betray that they're not really the 10,000 most intelligent people.

It's like when you're coding, and at one point you start building this huge system based on small pieces that you hack together over time. Later on, someone comes along and re-engineers the whole thing, but with better foresight. It won't operate the same, and some of the hacks are then unnecessary.

For instance, who'd need stop lights if all transit was fully automated. Things like cameras at intersections wouldn't exist, various laws an so on that were tacked on over time to fix problems wouldn't ever be, and various technologies that were once important and are now obsolete, but forced other things still around into being would never enter the game.

If they were trying to rebuild everything that we have in terms of technology, well, maybe 20 years? If they were trying to advance in one area, like computing/networking/whatever they might be able to go from nothing to now in 10 years (assuming that some chip designers make it into the top 10,000).

[/ QUOTE ]

I see alot of problems this group of people will face. They will have no written refrences or guides. Think of the medicine they will not have. If they are 10,000 of the smartest people on earth who is going to be the farmers, the miners, the labor? I might rethink this later after hearing other replies but a thousand years sounds good to me now.

Re: How fast can a civilization evolve?
 

[ QUOTE ]
If they were trying to rebuild everything that we have in terms of technology, well, maybe 20 years? If they were trying to advance in one area, like computing/networking/whatever they might be able to go from nothing to now in 10 years (assuming that some chip designers make it into the top 10,000).


[/ QUOTE ]

Wouldn't there be LOTS of physical labor required at first? It might be problematic that these smart people are skewed to the weakling upperclass side of things. They would have to build machines and then factories while farming to sustain themselves.

It seems to me that it would take them a long time ( many generations) to get to the industrial age and then they would advance to current levels in a short period of time (1 generation). I would guess between 120-300 years.

Another thing I just thought of is that they may not be motivated to do the grunt work necessary to even head in the direction of building a computer. They may end up being happy living some kind of agricultural/hunter-gatherer life like native-americans were for a long time. They might as a group decide we are better off without nukes, satellites, cell-phones etc. (surely SOME will) I am going to revise my guess to no clue, but I think it could take a very long time, unless there is some artificial motivation for these super smart people to break their backs so their great grand-kids can look at porn on the internet.

Re: How fast can a civilization evolve?
 

These people are starting with a way to communicate. They also know the answers to every problem they'll face, and have a precise idea of where they want to go. With absolutely no foresight, we went from nothing to google in less than 100 years with computers. Knowing the results, and knowing much of how to get there, you're saying that that would take 1000?

There are people alive today that could recreate 1950s technology in under a year on their own. Not all of it, but one aspect of it as fully developed as it was then. Also, note that people won't have the internet, so they'll have a ton of free time to actually do things.

As for motivation, well, it's beside the point to think that they'll turn into Jeremiah Johnsons and live off the land. We're being asked how quickly they COULD do it. But at any rate, they need to get off the planet in at most about 5 billion years, and right now they don't know how long it will take to build real space ships.

Re: How fast can a civilization evolve?
 

Oh, and some are already overestimating the value of grunt work. Factories and massive amounts of manual labor were a solution to a problem of education. Not enough people actually understood what in the hell was going on, so they had to have simple tasks that a 9 year old chained to a machine could figure out.

Even if they DID follow the same route with factories, well, the smartest people in the world would figure quickly how to make their jobs much easier. Walk into a factory some time, and you'll be astounded at the jobs that people have, and how inefficient everything is. It's truly incredible that anything gets done at all. Yes, I did spend 2 summers as a youth working in a factory. If they could get their next 20 years of pay up front just by telling the owners how to make their own job unnecessary, we'd have a whole lot of millionaires sitting at home watching NASCAR.

Re: How fast can a civilization evolve?
 

[ QUOTE ]
They also know the answers to every problem they'll face

[/ QUOTE ]

They don't. Doctors use medical journals everyday. Engineers use math and physics books to find formulas.

Another thought...
How easy will it be to design a machine to make paper when you have no paper to design it on?

Re: How fast can a civilization evolve?
 

[ QUOTE ]
With absolutely no foresight, we went from nothing to google in less than 100 years with computers.

[/ QUOTE ]

You know there wasn't nothing 100 years ago. There was radar, internal combustion engines, mining operations, sewing machines, machine guns, motion pictures, dynamite, a piloted helicopter. Most importantly there was tons more than 10,000 people to do all the grunt work. Just because they are geniuses doesn't mean they can snap their fingers and have all the raw materials and tools to build a pc. They gotta pull that stuff out of the earth and process it. That takes a lot of work even with todays technology. I think the vast majority of of the time will be getting up to the level of 100 years ago, and they could probably compress the last 100 into 25.

Re: How fast can a civilization evolve?
 

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
They also know the answers to every problem they'll face

[/ QUOTE ]

They don't. Doctors use medical journals everyday. Engineers use math and physics books to find formulas.

Another thought...
How easy will it be to design a machine to make paper when you have no paper to design it on?

[/ QUOTE ]

You obviously think that I'm overestimating the intelligence of the 10,000 smartest people in the world. I think you're underestimating it.

The paper thing would be solved in the first week, unless they just used chalkboards to fill the gap between nothing and some sort of electronic storage. Calcium and slate are fairly basic.

I think you're overestimating how far we've come. Like, yes, we have badass tires right now for cars. But is that necessary to get the internet? Nope. You can get basic crappy rubber from a tree and it will serve a lot of purposes. We can get the vast majority of what we have today at least drawn up by competent first-year college students. The 10,000 smartest people in the world should be more than that.

Reality is not like Civilization (the game). We don't really need to tool around with monotheism or whatever and keep the peon's morale up by building monuments. We're dealing with a bunch of damn brilliant people who are seeing how fast they can recreate the neat stuff that we have now, and using their spare time to mate with the one woman (ha ha) who is in the top 10,000 smartest people. If the 10,000 smartest people somehow broke off into factions and tried to kill each other, well, I assert that they weren't the 10,000 smartest.

To reproduce every single thing that we have, well, yeah that would take a while. Certainly not 1000 years, but we'd be at least as "advanced" as we are now. We wouldn't have 400 variations on the same themes, but we'd have one of the best of everything that they actually tried to figure out.

Like, most of our electricity gets generated by understanding electromagnetism and burning oil. That's pretty damn basic. As far as medicine, we're barely past the times where barbers bled people to "cure" various maladies. Looking at engineering, well, that's more in the domain of the smartest people to begin with. The smartest guys aren't the ones who can't derive things for themselves.

I might be thinking too highly of them, but thinking that lacking "basics" like paper would take any time at all to overcome is severely underestimating our best and brightest. I know I keep saying paper, but that's because it was brought up. I'd have used the same sort of argument against anything that I can think of that could be thrown out (wheels, electrical generators, and so on).

Re: How fast can a civilization evolve?
 

They would all die within 50 years, probably a lot sooner.

Re: How fast can a civilization evolve?
 

[ QUOTE ]
They would all die within 50 years, probably a lot sooner.

[/ QUOTE ]

I was just thinking about this. The chances of them all dieing off is proabably somewhat significant.

[ QUOTE ]
I might be thinking too highly of them, but thinking that lacking "basics" like paper would take any time at all to overcome is severely underestimating our best and brightest.

[/ QUOTE ]

I used the paper idea as a kind of metaphor. They are starting with completely raw materials in the ground. other examples... How long is it going to take them to have the machinery to dig for oil/natural gas when they have no fuels? How long is it going to take them to mine iron succesfully when they dont have steel?

Re: How fast can a civilization evolve?
 

[ QUOTE ]
You obviously think that I'm overestimating the intelligence of the 10,000 smartest people in the world. I think you're underestimating it.

[/ QUOTE ]

And by quite a lot. If we're using 'smart' as very intelligent and very knowledgeable then what they are capable of is amazing. Most people haven't had prolonged (any?) contact with anyone that would fit that 10,000 and perhaps are confusing them with the smartest million or so of which they may have met one briefly.

The amount of knowledge that some exhibit is astounding.

Here's an example of mere average+ intelligence/knowledge. My great grandfather was tested for mechanics by walking into a room with a tractor disassembled down to the smallest pin in a large messy pile in the middle of the room.
Would the a rocket scientist that is the smartest guy in a million have a problem building a water wheel and then they are off to heavy duty manufacturing.

from the OP-
[ QUOTE ]
(given that all the natural resources are abundant and readily availible and only work and knowlage are required)

[/ QUOTE ]

Popeye seems to be skipping that part. You don't need steel to mine for iron. You'd have plenty of fuel to drill for oil, wood burns and steam engines are a no-brainer to build. Splitting up into specialized teams would compound the speed of advancement.

2-3 generations would span 100 years so they wouldn't have bred down to dumb yet, but hopefully they wouldn't recreate a modern USA, the OP said 'smartest', there are no GW's on this island or any member of the senate or congress.

luckyme

Re: How fast can a civilization evolve?
 

"or any member of the senate or congress"

except Ron Paul./

Re: How fast can a civilization evolve?
 

What do you think the average age of the smartest people in the world is? I might be underestimating their intelligence, but i believe you guys might be underestimating the physical hardhips these people will experience. How long is it going to take to have stable food and water supplies? How long will it take them to produce fertile farming fields and good techniques?

Re: How fast can a civilization evolve?
 

[ QUOTE ]
"or any member of the senate or congress"

except Ron Paul./

[/ QUOTE ]

Ron Paul is one of the top 300 smartest people in the USA? thanks, that explains a lot. I'd have thought one of the top million smartest in the USA would be stretching it.

luckyme

Re: How fast can a civilization evolve?
 

Would the 10k smarties do better than 10k average folks? Sure, but just because you are smart doesn't mean you can go from pointy sticks and rocks to steam engines overnight. Also, how are they going to share this knowledge with the next generation? A big chunk of being smart is knowing where to find information, when there is no reference materials this becomes more difficult.

Re: How fast can a civilization evolve?
 

From the OP
[ QUOTE ]
(given that all the natural resources are abundant and readily availible and only work and knowlage are required)

[/ QUOTE ]

If they are stranded on Greenland it'll definitely take longer than if they are on the equivalent of a better endowed Hawaii.

[ QUOTE ]
What do you think the average age of the smartest people in the world is?

[/ QUOTE ]

Same as the rest of the people .. 30ish.

[ QUOTE ]
How long is it going to take to have stable food and water supplies?

[/ QUOTE ]

On a large, well-endowed island with fish-laden waters and forests with streams/rivers animals? Knowing about preservation techniques, nutritional needs, and cultivation skills? think how easy salting fish is, or making pemmican or, or drying or canning ( which doesn't take cans). ( water and fish etc ARE natural resources).
I suspect you're picturing the Sudan or worse.

A water wheel is a huge leg-up working back from what we know now and some metals are easy to produce. Well engineered stone tools can do great things hooked to a source of power.
A book about what dumb homesteaders managed in a few years in much worse settings than this and without the hindsight is a good summer read.

[ QUOTE ]


[/ QUOTE ]

Re: How fast can a civilization evolve?
 

[ QUOTE ]
How fast can a civilization evolve?


[/ QUOTE ]

A far more interesting question is: given a civilization, how fast can it devolve or desend into choas and nothingness?

Not fast enough is my answer.

Le Misanthrope

Re: How fast can a civilization evolve?
 

[ QUOTE ]
Would the 10k smarties do better than 10k average folks? Sure, but just because you are smart doesn't mean you can go from pointy sticks and rocks to steam engines overnight. Also, how are they going to share this knowledge with the next generation? A big chunk of being smart is knowing where to find information, when there is no reference materials this becomes more difficult.

[/ QUOTE ]

I think this would be a good gameshow. Not that junkyard wars [censored], but a full year or something to see how far "smart" people can get given very similar constraints. We'll see things that we never dreamed of, and also not see some things that we figured were important. I don't see the steam engine as being necessary at all as a stage of development. It didn't even last very long.

I figure they could come up with good ways to store and transmit information in the first 5 years.

Re: How fast can a civilization evolve?
 

I'm assuming starting conditions of basically no tools since none where stipulated. I don't see this turning into a society of Professors from Gilligan's Island very quickly. Sure knowing how to make the tools is a great place to start, but it's still going to take time to create the equivalent of a front loader or other big tools that make things easy now. Most of the time is going to be spent gathering food or looking for plants to cultivate for food, or maybe looking for animals to domesticate to help with the work. Human power is pretty limited.

Re: How fast can a civilization evolve?
 

How long before they have antibiotics? Theres gonna be alot of minor injuries(to us) that could easily become deadly. Especially in the earlier days.

Re: How fast can a civilization evolve?
 

[ QUOTE ]

There are people alive today that could recreate 1950s technology in under a year on their own. Not all of it, but one aspect of it as fully developed as it was then. Also, note that people won't have the internet, so they'll have a ton of free time to actually do things.


[/ QUOTE ]

They gotta eat Duke. Its going to take decades to clear enough farm land and build storage facilities to allow for things that absolutely have to come before the internet. Things like plumbing and electricity- massive infrastructures that require enormous amounts of time and labor to build. If I was building a new civilization I wouldn't pick a single computer programmer, it would be made up of farmers who still practice sustainable forms, a few blacksmiths and a few engineers who would do nothing but write down [censored] they know for future generations.


[ QUOTE ]

There are people alive today that could recreate 1950s technology in under a year on their own. Not all of it, but one aspect of it as fully developed as it was then.

[/ QUOTE ]

Really, how many also know how to mine the copper you are going to need? Or the power plants you need for refining, what clothes are they going to be wearing 2 years into this project when their old ones have wasted away?

Re: How fast can a civilization evolve?
 

[ QUOTE ]

Oh, and some are already overestimating the value of grunt work. Factories and massive amounts of manual labor were a solution to a problem of education

[/ QUOTE ]

Factories require massive amounts of people to mine and refine steel, build bricks, lay foundations, ect ect. You can't do these things until you have enough food being produced and stored to feed all the people who aren't producing food/shelter/clothing while building the factory. People were farming the Nile delta for thousands of years before they were able to fund projects like the pyramids.

Re: How fast can a civilization evolve?
 

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]

There are people alive today that could recreate 1950s technology in under a year on their own. Not all of it, but one aspect of it as fully developed as it was then. Also, note that people won't have the internet, so they'll have a ton of free time to actually do things.


[/ QUOTE ]

They gotta eat Duke. Its going to take decades to clear enough farm land and build storage facilities to allow for things that absolutely have to come before the internet. Things like plumbing and electricity- massive infrastructures that require enormous amounts of time and labor to build. If I was building a new civilization I wouldn't pick a single computer programmer, it would be made up of farmers who still practice sustainable forms, a few blacksmiths and a few engineers who would do nothing but write down [censored] they know for future generations.


[ QUOTE ]

There are people alive today that could recreate 1950s technology in under a year on their own. Not all of it, but one aspect of it as fully developed as it was then.

[/ QUOTE ]

Really, how many also know how to mine the copper you are going to need? Or the power plants you need for refining, what clothes are they going to be wearing 2 years into this project when their old ones have wasted away?

[/ QUOTE ]

When you assert that the 10,000 smartest people in the world won't be able to figure out how to generate power, mine copper, or whatever, I can't really take it as a serious objection.

Just because skilled but uneducated people DO that sort of thing right now, does not mean that those are prerequisites.

Re: How fast can a civilization evolve?
 

[ QUOTE ]
Knowing about preservation techniques, nutritional needs, and cultivation skills? think how easy salting fish is, or making pemmican or, or drying or canning

[/ QUOTE ]

For every fish you salt you have to catch at least three. One to salt, one to eat the day you are fishing, and one to eat the day you are mining the salt and salting the fish. Hunter gatherer tribes number in the tens usually with maximums in the 100-300 range. Nature does not provide enough for large groups of sedentary people.

Re: How fast can a civilization evolve?
 

[ QUOTE ]

When you assert that the 10,000 smartest people in the world won't be able to figure out how to generate power, mine copper, or whatever, I can't really take it as a serious objection.


[/ QUOTE ]

What exactly are these guys eating while they are sitting around figuring this stuff out? It takes ass loads of time to build up stores of food, your ignorance of agricultural history is broadly on display here.

Re: How fast can a civilization evolve?
 

[ QUOTE ]
When you assert that the 10,000 smartest people in the world won't be able to figure out how to generate power, mine copper, or whatever, I can't really take it as a serious objection.


[/ QUOTE ]

Think of the conditions these people will be in. How much do these people know about starting a fire from scratch? How equipped will they be at hunting? How are they going to transport and purify water right away? Theres a good possibility many would die in the first few weeks.

I would agree that 10,000 of the worlds most brilliant minds could reacreate all these things, but not naked and starving in the woods watching their commrades die. There are alot of basics that would have to be taken care of before they even began to contemplate how to do these things.

Re: How fast can a civilization evolve?
 

OK.

Can we agree that a safe upper bound is 5000 years? That's close to the earliest written language, and people back then knew jack [censored] about air conditioning. They could barely write, and were so befuddled with the universe that they spent as much time inventing gods and hoping real hard for rain as they did actually doing the things that they'd need to do.

What I'm saying is that we can accelerate the advancement from 3000 BC to 0 into a time frame of like 5-10 years. Any more and we didn't really find the 10,000 smartest people. The population should be close to doubling in that time if we picked enough women. So we'd have a much smaller population, but we'd have things like a wheel, fire, basic hydroelectric power, the ability to make things cold, and so on almost immediately.

So, no we won't have pyramids, but we'll have what they had as far as sustenance, shelter, and so on.

Now, we know about gravity. We know about wind resistance. We know how to make things blow up. We know about evolution so we can start early with selectively breeding better livestock, fish, and so on. We know about bacteria, so we know to use that fire to cook our food. We know about medicine, so our witchdoctors should be a hell of a lot more effective. These are things that we get for free, just starting out.

If you double the rate of progress from 0-now, and also remove the dark ages (If the 10,000 smartest people split up into religious factions and start trying to kill each other then that speaks less of humanity than I'd like to believe), we're looking at 500 years.

I'm saying that it's well more than double, as we won't waste time on all of the same paths. We'll spend a lot less time tooling with astrology, for instance. We may very well completely skip the steam engine phase.

This is how I'm breaking it down, so please share with me what is intrinsically wrong with that viewpoint. I'll retract (for now) my 10, or 20, or whatever I originally said, so we can have some sort of a constructive discussion. I'll bring that back in a bit after we're at least on the same page as to how I'm looking at it.

To tolbiny: you're confusing what I'm saying with a lack of historical knowledge. I'm just saying that not only are there steps that will be completely skipped, but that there is a good reason for them to be skipped. Also, they won't take as long because we already know the answers to virtually all of the questions that would be necessary to recreate today. The first time through they didn't even know what to ask.

To popeye: Once again, they're smarter than you think. If someone were incapable of figuring out how to make fire, then they're not in the 10,000 smartest people.

Re: How fast can a civilization evolve?
 

[ QUOTE ]
To popeye: Once again, they're smarter than you think. If someone were incapable of figuring out how to make fire, then they're not in the 10,000 smartest people.

[/ QUOTE ]

I think your right. I believe i may be underestimating their intelligence. The biologists among them would probably be able to come up with very good farming techniques rather quickly even if no one has any farming background. Same with breeding animals as you said. Engineers are going to know where and how to build housing.



[ QUOTE ]
What I'm saying is that we can accelerate the advancement from 3000 BC to 0 into a time frame of like 5-10 years. Any more and we didn't really find the 10,000 smartest people. The population should be close to doubling in that time if we picked enough women.


[/ QUOTE ]

I highly disagree here. I can see many people dieing early on. 10,000 is alot of mouths to feed. As well, procreating before a highly stable source of meat and fruit/vegetables was established would be a very bad idea. Hopefully their young are able to reach a decent age before the many elders are rendered useless for physical labor.

I think an interesting question is how the first days would go. 10,000 of the smartest people equals ALOT of ego. Do they all band together in one single group? This seems as if it would cause some problems. Can one man standing on a rock be heard by 10,000 people on a beach? If he could be heard, how many are going to listen?