How fast can a civilization evolve?

r3vbr · #1 07-07-2007, 01:43 AM

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)

Duke · #2 07-07-2007, 02:33 AM

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).

popeye18 · #3 07-07-2007, 03:11 AM

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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).

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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.

Bork · #4 07-07-2007, 03:19 AM

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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).

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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.

Duke · #5 07-07-2007, 04:38 AM

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.

Duke · #6 07-07-2007, 04:45 AM

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.

popeye18 · #7 07-07-2007, 05:15 AM

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

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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?

tolbiny · #8 07-07-2007, 04:01 PM

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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

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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.

Bork · #9 07-07-2007, 05:19 AM

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

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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.

tolbiny · #10 07-07-2007, 03:53 PM

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?