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[Hiiri]

Ps. The council decides to increase productivity by whipping all inadequate workers (everyone), and showing any resistance to this law shall be considered unkind. Any such unkindness shall be punishable by exile or death.

[GrizzlyAdamz]

Laws vs ideals is kinda fuzzy when we can't write anything down. The couple of things I have written down are loosely interpreted and enforced, at least in our lifetime- the society is too small, so we can afford to operate on a case-by-case basis at first.
This all being for at first. Later on, we can try to lay a foundation, but again we can't really be too specific- we don't have the resources or the know-how, and the vast majority of what will happen will rest on descendents. So a law codex isn't feasible, whereas a set of small/short 'rules' might be survivable.

-Hmm, romans had wax writing tablets, interesting.

rewards the same for all amounts of work?

Well, there aren't many rewards to be had in the first place. Not beyond belonging in the society/human interaction.

those who get sick

Cared for of course; besides humanity, we don't have people to spare. If they're mental sick though...case-by-case.

is it enforced in any way?

That one just gets a stern talking-to. Perhaps shunning later, woo case-by-case freedom!

Ah, it's times like these where one would want fundamental human rights. Bring an encyclopedia, no need to start from total scratch. What is the justification for your council ruling? What should happen should simply one take power? 3 council members die? So on e.t.c.

We might be bringing the entire EB. Any suggestions?
Most likely it's based on possession of knowledge, so when we get more people/resources it'll be a type of constitutional (most likely semi-democratic) oligarchy. I'm playing with the idea of lots being drawn from a pool of educated people, and injecting democracy into it somewhere would also be good. Again, we can have the 5 plus the larger body (think town hall).
That stuff needs a constitution, so until that time we've an agreement to play nice. We can do the constitution, but ultimately what our descendants do is up to them.

-edit
Be (at least somewhat) constructive people! More to talk about that way.

[Loud Whispers]

-Hmm, romans had wax writing tablets, interesting.

-For teaching children how to write!

That'd be something you'd write down on paper. Or if you can't afford to write it down on paper, perhaps bring a hammer/chisel and carve your laws into rocks & pillars Ashoka style?

[GrizzlyAdamz]

No paper, no way to preserve paper. No way to make easy copies, (until we make a printing press/wood blocks, oh joy what fun that will be). The punched-leather braille would be easier to make than stone and last longer than paper. Wood blocks would likely be superior, but keeping a system of communicating with deaf/blind people that's only used to write down knowledge for the generations? That right there is cool. They'll think we were all blind in 1000 years, but that just makes it better. In the meantime that wax stuff will be invaluable for classes and could easily see use elsewhere.

-edit
btw check for edits in my previous post.

[10ebbor10]

You could use parchment rather than paper. Lasts longer.

[GrizzlyAdamz]

Lots of work & resources are needed for that as well.


-edit
How about goals? I figure I could cover those as well. Lets see,

-establish a viable population & sustainable lifestyle
-preserve & propogate knowledge
-establish [values]
-lay long-term foundation for government & culture which preserves [values]
-Achieve iron-age level of technology

[Frumple]

Paper making actually isn't that involved in regards to infrastructure, iirc. Mi madre made some by hand over the course of a couple days at a camp-thingy a long while back. Pretty rough stuff, but processed wood pulp is processed wood pulp. It's not a monolithic undertaking.

Ink might be more of an issue, but there's plenty of natural pigments from what I recall. Know-how and interest (reading and writing wasn't very wide spread, after all.) was more of an issue for early papermaking than resources and effort, as I recall. Doing it en masse is a bigger issue, but with such a small starting population that's a pretty far off problem.

You might consider looking into one of those DIY wiki things running around... there's been a couple linked on the forum a bit back, and basically exist to collect and organize means and methodology of going from the exact situation you're dealing with to industrial+ in the shortest period possible. I'd be printing and laminating one of those buggers to stick in the box.

[GrizzlyAdamz]

Fair enough- we could fabricate the screen out of wood if needed. (is that kosher?)

Have a link to anything in particular? Search wasn't particularly helpful, most things make the assumption we have modern tech/tools.

Anyone have an opinion on founding an oligarchy to start?

[Frumple]

This was one of the threads I was thinking about, though I think there were others. There's a few links in there. There's other stuff like that floating around the 'net and elsewhere, as well.

I'd probably imagine there'd be at least some modern tools in the box. Small crank generator and a netbook might take less room than paper et al, and if you can get some other means of data transference (paper, stone, whatever.) going in short order you could probably transfer a lot over to more lasting mediums before the electronics in it failed. Providing you did that, you might be able to fit in a nice little cache of jump start equipment.

Even if you did go with paper, something like the EB would probably be a bad idea -- there's a lot of stuff that wouldn't be very useful in it, and space is your primary resource. You'd ideally want texts based on the current state of various fields (chemistry, metallurgy, agriculture, etc., so forth, so on), with an emphasis on theoretical procedures on how the point was reached and how to go forward. And usability in a low tech environment, of course. Probably not written in english, to boot... some kind of cypher (shorthand, etc. Might be able to get really fancy with that and have texts that provide different information depending on which cypher you filter it through.) or a more concise language would be ideal (again, space!). Then maybe a bit extra in regards to ethics, etc. History would be kinda' useless, but fiction scenarios constructed both for readability and to highlight whatever values you end up going with would likely be ideal. You don't want to lose universal literacy, so making reading as interesting (and useful) as possible straight from the start is probably a good idea.

Government wise, it's kinda' hard to say. Most of the issues that sort of thing addresses isn't going to pop up until you've actually got a population large enough it becomes necessary. S'a long term, generations away (many generations if you're handwaving away the inbreeding thing, as it'll take a while to get a notable population going with a five person start, even assuming nothing buggers up along the way), issue. Dealing with that would be... tricky. My personal likely suggestion would just be to start and foster a heavy tradition of ethics, logic, and solid rhetoric, and see if the problem can't solve itself. A highly educated anarchy-type thing (there's a term for it that I'm forgetting, but whatever. Enlightened, maybe?) might be an interesting experiment.

Idle considerations: You might want to start out further south than Britian. A milder winter'd make it less likely you have trouble making it through that first few years. Critters aren't really gong to be an issue if you bring along a knife -- spend the first day carving out a few javelin throwers and fire hardening some sticks and you've basically ended any threat the animal world presents, to say nothing of the dozens of other tricks our species figured out when we bent the varying parts of the world over our collective knee. Real issues are disease (this might be a big one, dunno) and vermin of varying sorts, not larger critters.

[Devling]

Mostly PTW since I'm a bumbling buffoon who doesn't know nuffin bout nuffin, but the Prince might be good reading for this kinda thing.
Oligarchies and Princedoms aren't far apart.

[Descan]

Yah, I'd back pretty much everything the Frumpster said, including Sicily or Crete as possible islands instead of Britain, and that beyond netbook with terabyte+ hard-drive and power generator with a tonne of information, I'd also include some more advanced equipment that's hard to fabricate, mostly medical. Stethoscopes, for one. I'm sure you could think of others.

[Gervassen]

How long is a netbook going to last without breaking? Won't be ordering a new powersupply for a couple millennia.

[Frumple]

Decent one'll last a few years if it's built alright and well taken care of, easy. I've had laptops with shit maintenance and almost constant uptime last a half decade, with a couple of years working with non-functioning cooling (it still turns on, four or five years later since I've switched computers, actually, though it barely runs.) -- and remember, the point isn't necessarily for it to last forever, just for it last long enough to transfer <more information than you could store on paper> over to a hardier medium. Something actually built to be rugged and taken care of should last at least as long, possibly longer. Might just build it to directly link to the generator instead of via a cord intermediary or something, I'unno. Be an interesting engineering project.

I call it netbook, but honestly you'd be getting something custom built for reliability, portability, shelf life, and storage capacity. It'd basically be a hardened kindle with an expanded hard drive or something along those lines. E: And push comes to shove, they're almost certainly going to be more compact than a paper medium would have been. Bring a few of spares along, you'd still be looking at a net gain in space.

Not sure how long a crank generator would last, but from what I recall they lean toward fairly tough.

[GrizzlyAdamz]

I'm in disagreement about the netbook. The copying would require excessive amounts of man hours, especially when we're trying to eek out a living. In the meantime the clock's ticking on the electronic's life expectency. Not to mention the materials that would be required to make the copies, and the horrible info-compression ratio between whatever hand-copied leather-bound slip-shod parchment we can make and a near-solid 7-pt-font 1000 page textbook. Just copying one of those down would likely take a year, 6 months at LEAST.
-edit
Also, I disagree about history books. We don't bring it, it gets lost forever. That makes me sad on so many levels.

We considered those islands, along with others in the Mediterranean. They were 2nd runner up, but we figured the winters in south britain would be favorable compared to the year-long dryness and excessively hot summers in the med. Plus mount etna. Yes, THAT active volcano in sicily.
Other islands around the world had to worry about disease, unfriendly animal life, strange climate issues or natural disasters such as yearly hurricanes/typhoons & earthquakes/tsunamis.
Britain on the other hand has only lovely friendly indigenous animals like goats & horses, wooded hills & plenty of fresh water. The draw back? Cold winters, (easily handled with fires and warm furs), and the odd wild boar.
We'll be disembarking at the thaw and bringing whatever rations we can. Luckily, of our five people we have 3 medical personnel, an architect sailor dude and a lady that hunts, kills, prepares and eats her own venison on a regular basis.


Thanks for hunting down that link- found that kit thing online, but it still assumes we have access to modern tech & more space. Plus some knowhow.. I'll read the rest of the thread shortly.

[Frumple]

Re: The history books, in that scenario they're already lost. History's been reset, and all that rigmarole has turned into fiction (to an even greater degree than it already is ). If you're going to lose some of your precious space to fiction, you might as well tailor it to be something particularly useful, yeah? You could use historical exerts of varying sources, but within a generation or so there's going to be basically no one alive that remembers that stuff as anything but a story, and there'll be no way of confirming it since the archaeological record is being wiped clean. Sad is better than wasted space in the scenario you're providing, unfortunately

As for man hours regarding information transference, you're probably going to have a pretty notable amount of free time, especially since you're bringing modern know-how into a primitive situation (with a population that small you'll be able to chill with hunting/gathering for a bloody long time, and the latter doesn't really take much effort to build a surplus with if you know what you're looking for and where to find it.). The question is whether you can transfer more before the parts fail than you could bring along as paper (and with some spares, you might be looking at decades of use, I'd wager.). If yes, well, bob's yer uncle. It'd take more effort than your project probably deserves to actually find out which method wins out, though. Just go with whatever.