How fast can a civilization evolve?

[popeye18]

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.

[tolbiny]

[ 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?

[tolbiny]

[ 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.

[Duke]

[ 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.

[tolbiny]

[ 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.

[tolbiny]

[ 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.

[popeye18]

[ 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.

[Duke]

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.

[popeye18]

[ 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?