Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Devling]

WE BELIEVE THAT EVER MAN IS CREATED PANCAKES

[GrizzlyAdamz]

They'll want  to know what a pancake is.

The problem with leaving it until later is, when is later? 100 years or 3 millenia? How many people will have to struggle & die for liberty if we don't try to instill this (concretely) now?

[i2amroy]

1)No, a SSD-reader is a very high tech thing. But it is durable enough to last you for 45-70 years, during which you can copy all of the blueprints for it and everything required to build one to a longer lasting medium. Assuming you streamline your culture towards creating one of them, the gap between when the first one finally fails and when the next one is successfully finished will probably only be 2-3 hundred years. Assuming you seal up your drives when the reader breaks they should be still good when you manufacture your first reader, and in a worst case scenario if you have one of your children focus their life on copying blueprints and information while the first reader still works you should still be able to obtain much more information from the reader and a single drive then you could store in dozens of textbooks. A quick calculation shows that (assuming 1 TB drives) you can get about a 35 to 1 ratio of drives to textbooks (using my smaller Electrical engineering textbook and the OCZ Octane as patterns), and the 1 TB drive can hold the equivalent of 10,000 textbooks worth of information, giving you a total information to space ratio of 35,000 to 1 with the drives. The idea is to trade about 50-60% of the lifetime of your textbooks (about 100 years) in exchange for the ability to store (35,000 x 'number of textbooks') times the amount of information.

2)In that case simply start with enough samples for all 3 (that would be around 6 vials, though you might want to go up to 9 to be extra safe) including the liquid nitrogen for the first week and inseminate over that period of time. You will still increase your genetic diversity quite a bit, and assuming you plant wheat ASAP they should all still be able to help quite a bit at harvest time (common spring wheat has an average growth time of 6 months). Since you only need to feed 5 people (8 counting the new children) getting through the first winter shouldn't be too difficult even with reduced labor at harvest time. After that you may want to stagger the pregnancies a little to ensure steadier manpower.

5)Take ingots, not ores. Ores require further processing that you won't have access to for a while, where ingots can be used immediately. Also rather then worrying about finding ore, why not just take a map with known ore locations?

6)Paint can be easily created from natural materials, how do you think it was done in the past? For example here is a simple 1 1/2 quart recipe for flour paint.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

1 cup flour
5 1/2 cups cold water
1 cup screened clay filler
1/2 cup additional powder filler, such as mica or sand

Gold on the other hand is heavy, unwieldy, fairly useless (many ancient cultures didn't value gold at all since it is useless for 99.9% of tasks). Within a few generations nobody will care if you make it out of gold since they won't value gold, where as if you make it out of a metal that can only be made with current technology then it becomes a one of a kind for hundreds of years, instantly raising it's value.

As for government it probably won't be worthwhile for you to plan one. Most likely you won't even break the 50 person mark with your "tribe" before your own death, so having a "government" is a little ridiculous. It will probably be at least 6-10 generations before you even have more then one village present, and probably at least a dozen more before you are spread out enough to be considered a tiny "country". As it is anything beyond your simple "village council" idea won't really be needed, though you would want to establish records of democracies that way when it came time for your 20-30th generation to finally set one up they would have a guideline. Of course if your teacher is expecting one then by all means go ahead and make one, but in the event of this actually occurring it would probably be a waste of time.

[Devling]

Why not make the safe out of steel or something? (Actual question)

[i2amroy]

Why not make the safe out of steel or something? (Actual question)

Steel rusts if unpainted/sealed for even a short amount of time. You would want a modern alloy designed for corrosion resistance, strength, and lightness IMO.

[Blargityblarg]

Titanium is probably a good choice, or stainless steel or aluminium.

[GrizzlyAdamz]

All of those suffer from corrosion.

1. I don't see the gap being that small- there are ridiculous jumps in tech between here and there, and by switching to that SSD we're depriving our descendants from ALL access to ANY information- this when we'd be lucky to have bronze smelting by the time we die and hand the mantle over to the 40-70 kids left over. Besides, wouldn't a reader require some kind of software as well?
As for copying it over- we simply wouldn't be able to store it all physically. If we did turn one of our kids into an arthritis-ridden slave, he probably wouldn't be able to copy over 50 textbooks, and that's not to mention the horrible medium he'd be transferring it to & all the problems it entails. I don't see removing the books as an option- perhaps throw in the SSD as well, but the books hafta stay.

2. But if we assume the worst case scenario: all three go into labor on the same day. All three look like breach births. We're fucked six ways from Sunday. If we can mitigate dangers like this, we should, and while it would be good to have at least one additional set of DNA, I'd doubt if any of our three women'd be brave or foolish enough to AI herself on day 1. Setting all three on a baby timer is just asking for trouble.

3. That map doesn't point out which hillock they're under- the samples are for us to ID them in the field. Turning some ores into metal can be extremely low-tech.

4. You think a golden safe housing our race's knowledge isn't going to be one of a kind? Despite it's drawbacks, it's impervious to corrosion, so no lack of care or exposure would hurt the safe itself, not in the slightest. That golden safe would last ages.

5. Yar, kinda expected- at the very least, it's so that we can organize culture & knowledge preservation, things like that. Those records of democracies won't be very useful if no one knows they exist, or if our childrens have descended into barbarism.

[darkflagrance]

Do you need a balanced gender ratio of men to women? You could start with five women, artificially inseminate them (continuously), and start with five children rather than three.

[Blargityblarg]

All of those suffer from corrosion.

But not destructive corrosion; aluminium doesn't corrode past the surface, stainless steel will, but only after years in an absolutely terrible environment, Titanium works the same as aluminium: http://www.azom.com/article.aspx?ArticleID=1336

[i2amroy]

Do you need a balanced gender ratio of men to women? You could start with five women, artificially inseminate them (continuously), and start with five children rather than three.

I thought of that, but came to the conclusion that it would be unwise due to the fact that any sperm wouldn't keep for too long due to liquid nitrogen requirements and as such all would need to be AI'd within a week or two. At when all reached the later stages you would have nobody who could work very hard, and all would be on reduced work usage when you reached the hardest point of labor, the harvest. Also since you can only store one baby's worth of sperm consider this. With 5 women and 5 babies you have much less diversity due to the fact that with 3 women you can have two additional genetic children, one from each male. That gives you a 1:1 ratio of women to babies with the 5 women design, but a 3:1 ratio with the 3 women and 2 men design.

1)The biggest problem I see with technology isn't the creation of it, but rather the manpower required to develop the infrastructure. If you had enough people I have no doubts that a group could be dragged from the bronze age to at least the industrial in the space of a half century or so. You already have the technology, the problem is just having the people to run it. Therefore the faster you multiply the sooner you can reach the required levels.

2)A few things:
     A)Breech births are usually dealt with pre-labor if possible through ECV.
     B)In the event of a bad birth, C-section should be avoided unless it is absolutely necessary to save the mother. In almost all cases the mother will be worth more to the colony then a newborn baby, especially early on, and should be prioritized for saving. You will also be most likely unable to provide the cleanliness required for a successful C-section, and as such should avoid the risk of infection as well.
That said you may still want to consider AI'ing 2 of your 3 women at the beginning. Even if both go into labor simultaneously 3 people should be able to handle 2 (that's 1 for each and 1 to work as helper) and you would still have a great benefit.

3)Find a better map. I'm sure that somewhere out there there are maps stating exactly the location of deposits that have been mined, so you shouldn't need to ever guess. Combined with a simple picture showing you what to look for and you should be good.

4)The problem is when a house falls on it or something similar hits it. Gold is soft enough that it will deform under the stress, over time potentially damaging whatever is inside of it or opening it up to the elements. (What happens when the door is jammed shut or will no longer close due to deformation? Will you take a hammer to it to bend it back right?) There are plenty of alloys out there that will provide more benefits then gold will and won't have any of the drawbacks either. A solid gold safe has no advantages over a solid titanium one, and has some disadvantages that the titanium doesn't.

[darkflagrance]

One more thing is that if you use AI for the initial births, you might not only be able to get children of males you do not bring along, but AI tends to cause twin or triplet births, so you'd have a more dangerous pregnancy but increase population faster.

[DJ]

Why bother with bulky equipment for artificial insemination (I imagine the fridge would take a lot of room) when you can simply have the women pre-impregnated? It's not like the frozen sperm would hold for long anyway. Hell, you could stagger births more with pre-impregnation than artificial insemination after the embark.

[i2amroy]

Why bother with bulky equipment for artificial insemination (I imagine the fridge would take a lot of room) when you can simply have the women pre-impregnated? It's not like the frozen sperm would hold for long anyway. Hell, you could stagger births more with pre-impregnation than artificial insemination after the embark.

This right here would probably work best, IMO (Though I'm not sure if it would be allowed. ). You would still want them to be in the early stages though, say at the "just impregnated", 1 month, and 3 month points, that way you would still have enough labor early on in the beginning stages of setting up survival.

[GrizzlyAdamz]

1. No, it's I, another guy, and three ladies.
2. Looked at the site, seems to mostly deal with liquid mediums, (couldn't follow more closely than that). Here's what I know about this kind of corrosion resistance, particularly its big weakness. It would be constantly shedding it's film whenever we touched it, over time pitting would develop and this would be particularly prominent on the underside where there's a lack of O2 to replenish the film and there may be moderate reactions to traces of metal in the soil.
3. Yar, and since this is in such short supply, and will likely continue to be so for far longer than an SSD reader would last, it's likely any knowledge stored on it would just be straight-up lost.
4. Woohoo, INTERNAL cephalic version! funfun. 2/3 is going to be the rule, but we don't want to press the first year. Too many complications, too much risk. Losing a person is worse than not getting an extra baby.
5. It'll have internal steel reinforcement, safely contained within the impervious golden corrosion sheath! I still maintain gold is just too awesome to forgo.
6. Ha.