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[Devling]

Do you have anyone who knows stuff about fishing? Or building? Carpentry and such?
Because that stuff is rather important.

[Frumple]

Presumably everyone's going to have the basics of stuff like that down, dev. A degree of specialization might be useful, but the baseline capability's going to include general survivalist stuff and basic "civilized" skills. Carpentry's not really all that complicated if you're not making it complicated. Same for construction in general, fishing, hunting, etc. These are things a single person can be fairly capable with without much trouble, and fundamental basics like that is something all of the people involved should have.

Before they go, ideally, but if not cross-training afterwards is going to be a high priority.

[ed boy]

I would add to the list of things a mathematics textbook, along with a few physics/engineering ones, and agricultural books, maybe with some geology, biology and chemistry thrown in. Go for the ones that present matter really densely.

If you want more inspiration, look here. This was a family in russia that cut themselves off from society for over 40 years. The things that they valued to most was tools, and you would likely want to bring an awful lot (as well as backups). Pretty much anyting electrical would not be suitable.

Also, keep in mind that we're pushing the reset button on society, and with an incredibly small population. That means that a lot of things which one would be used to from living in western society and the things that one would want to implement are simply not feasable. Marriage/family conventions, Universal education, and child labour rules would likely have to be abandoned. Given how small the population is, a formal set of laws would just not be worth it, but looking at the OP, that's something which may not be worth it at all.

If you're interestead in the long-term prospects of this society, then you basically need to spend the majority of your resources in the box trying to jump-start agriculture. The first few generations need to focus on sustainably increasing population as fast as possible - you've mentioned that your starting population is about 100, and you need that to be increased to five thousand at least before you get any significant cultural development.

Of course, going from 100 to 5000 is a fifty-fold increase, and this will take many of hundreds of years, especially to do so sustainably. That means that by the time your society is going to need any significant administrative system, the original population will be long dead, and there is a very high chance that however it is set up administratively at first, it will not resemble that at all. If you do want to have a cultural influence in the distant future, then best way to achieve it would probably be by setting up a religion. You don't need to prioritize methods of making physical records - any history you have can be preserved via oral tradition. Preserving the textbooks that you have, though, is exceedingly important. The agriculture ones alone would allow you to skip thousands and thousands of years of human development.

EDIT: Basically, apart from the box, you will be pretty much the same as a small tribe fifty thousand years ago. If we use past human development as a guide, you basically want to reach the neolithic revolution as fast as possible - if you don't, then within a few hundred years the last remnants of any advantage you have will be erased. You therefore want to being in that box everything you need to speedrun human history - the agricultural stuff will let you jump to the neolithic revolution, and the physics and maths textbooks will let you try and speed through the twelve thousand years since. Don't spend too long trying to implement culture or administration for the first few generations, because it will likely go to shit before your society actually does anything.

[Remuthra]

Mathematics textbooks don't teach you mathematics, you should bring a textbook on math history instead.

[Devling]

I think the only way this question can be anything but "What do we need to survive and then have babies", is if you assume all five of you are immortal.

[ed boy]

Mathematics textbooks don't teach you mathematics, you should bring a textbook on math history instead.

Good mathematics textbooks do.

ANnd you have to keep in mind that we want to skip as much of human history as possible. Why would we want them to use an old, okay method when they could use a modern, more efficient method? It's no use telling people that for thousands of years people thought that pi was 22/7 when we could give them ten significant figures in the same space.

[Descan]

Medicine and medical equipment! One of the main reasons we've gotten so far in the last few hundred years is medical advances. At the very LEAST medical books...

[Scelly9]

Survival books. Not many of them, but a couple. Enough to make sure they won't die out because of a poison root or someone breaking an arm.

[penguinofhonor]

Government will initially consist of an 'elder council' of the original 5 members. These are replaced by the council itself via a 3/4 vote as they die or abdicate. We make the plans and decisions for the growing society, with 3/5 vote required for establishing a general plan and 4/5 for a concrete decision. Our council will function as both the criminal & civil courts, will be responsible for all legislative functions and must also be the chief executive. IF in the future it is required, the military should be a separate and subservient organisation that sits on meetings and may advise us.

I've chosen this because hey, we're going to be a bit smarter than our progeny, and not only is this the simplest working form of government, (given our resources (LACK OF PAPER I'm looking at you)), but hopefully good will come of our maintaining a hold over this gov. Really, with what we're starting from, my opinion is our future is based on what our progeny do, not us. Thus the focus should be on educating them and trying to lay a foundation for them to improve on.

Looks to me like you're laying down the foundations for a revolution. What makes you inherently smarter than anyone that's going to come after you? What if they come up with their own ideas and the "council of elders" disagrees? Things could get violent.

[GrizzlyAdamz]

On history books: My excuse is we're going to be having issues communicating with our kids, just with the references. There's such a vast pool of knowledge and experience that they won't have access to unless we bring it, the generation gap would be the greatest this world has ever seen. By god we need a history book!

-Ed
Yep, we're grabbing all those- in particular, a book of flora & fauna should be especially useful. Looks like an interesting link- what we're ding is bringing the metal heads of the tools, multiples. Not so much little stuff- mostly axes, picks, shovels, hammers, a couple knives etc.

Marriage/family are getting an overhaul, but we're going to try to keep our place as educated as possible.Yep, won't be much of a government, yep, mostly going to be concerned about the future, especially since I have a benchmark to hit for content.

Just neolithic? I was hoping to hit that in the first year. What I really wanted to aim for was iron within my lifetime. But with such a small population, that might not be exactly feasible.

Actually we're only starting with five (5) people. Possibly more if we can preserve sperm long-term in a compact, self-sufficient manner.

We're more interested in educating the childrens, so the idea of using a durable medium to pass on what knowledge we can is more appealing than making a religion. :/

Yep, figure we'll have to ingrain the books we have as semi-holy, and make the box an outdoor safe.

Welp, it most likely will go to shit, yes, but we've gotta try to prevent that- kind of the goal.



-Desc
Perhaps medical tools, but anything that isn't made of metal isn't going to last very long. Yes, we're bringing biology/anatomy textbooks.


-penguin
Mostly the fact that we went through the modern US educational system- we won't be able to maintain that bar for our kids. I made a change to that later, I'll update the OP- as our kids grow up and we get more people, we'll be hosting semi-formal meets with (many) more people, and eventually they'll provide most of the discourse and the council will just be the final say. Hmm, kritocracy?

-dev
Yar, the architect guy's got a good handle on carpentry & the like. In addition, we'll be bringing a construction (stone/wood) manual, and I know a smidgeon about a lot of things. Fishing's most likely in ms. hunter's camp, but yay for books.

btw I'm procrastinating about reading the village diy thread, fyi frumps.

[ed boy]

Yep, we're grabbing all those- in particular, a book of flora & fauna should be especially useful. Looks like an interesting link- what we're ding is bringing the metal heads of the tools, multiples. Not so much little stuff- mostly axes, picks, shovels, hammers, a couple knives etc.

You'll have to bring lots, and even then you can't rely on metal tools forever. In the case of the russian family I linked to, they brought two kettles, that only lasted about fourty years.

Just neolithic? I was hoping to hit that in the first year. What I really wanted to aim for was iron within my lifetime. But with such a small population, that might not be exactly feasible.

The jump from neolithic to using iron was large. It took about 7000 years after the neolithic revolution before iron was first used. It would be a lot more reasonable to go for copper, which require simple furnaces and tools to work with, though the process would be an extremely large investment with just the five of you.

We're more interested in educating the childrens, so the idea of using a durable medium to pass on what knowledge we can is more appealing than making a religion. :/

You wouldn't want to rely on personally creating a physical medium, nor bringing one with you. As long as you decide from the start what you want to be preserved, and can teach that to the children from the start (and be consistent with each other), then that will suffice for a long time. Creating a physical medium would be nice, but it would have to be recreated eventually, so you can't rely on one definitive source.
[/quote]

[Blargityblarg]

If you're going for early metalworking, I'd suggest reconsidering your island; one of your major stepping stones is bronze, the materials for which are very rarely found together. Britain is IIRC rich in tin and iron, not so much copper - Crete (Again, IIRC) had both tin and copper in relative abundance. Cyprus also is heavy on the copper (copper = cuprum = Cyprus, they named it after the place) and the climate might not be such an issue as you think; after all, early human civilisation thrived in warmer climates than Britain; Egypt, Mesopotamia, Rome...

[Devling]

You should also rush the pyramids.

[DJ]

As far as the writing medium, I'd go with cave walls. Cave paintings have endured for tens of thousands of years, so it'd be a very durable method for writing down stuff. Still, transcribing all the needed books by hand would take far too much time. I'd go with some kind of a USB card puncher for getting it out of the computer, and build a mechanical computer for reading them. I reckon you could build a pulleys and levers computer without any metal, using just wood, glue and string.

[Descan]

I'm assuming you're bringing seeds and such with you, right?

What about animals? Like, baby calf, pig, chicken, dog? All girls, with a sperm-bank for them as well? Whatever would fit, at least. Probably can't bring the cow (probably a good idea in the long-run, anyway. Environmentally speaking.), but the chicken and dog at least.