Print

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

[Graknorke]

This is something I think about quite a lot.
I think the question gets better if you don't know exactly when in history you'll be sent, so you can't even prepare. But I'm cool with sticking to pre-stone age.

If we assume that we actually meet a group who overcome their xenophobia and probably racism to let us actually teach them stuff, I reckon the average Bay Watcher could do pretty well. Demonstrating the applications of tool use and fire use are going to be the most immediate thing to get down, while developing language would be a longer term thing to be worked on. On its own cooking food and boiling water could massively help with life expectancy.
Next up you probably want to introduce the idea that seeds are good for something other than eating, since agriculture reduces the need to be constantly moving, and having a stable location makes technological progress much easier. And with farming of grasses or rice or whatever you're stuck with, you can make flour, and from there you could get bread (definitely), alcohol (after a while of trial-and-error), and then when you can get something with such a high density of sugars, that makes growing penicillium on a controlled scale something that can really be considered.

So some really conceptually simple things could lead to (relatively) massive QoL improvements. The metalworking stuff sounds nice too, but it's not the kind of thing I think of as being first priority. Also I imagine it's easier to justify your weird behaviour to a group of people who think you're a fucking nutter if it ends up being able to feed people far better and save people from what would previously have been a debilitating or fatal illness.

EDIT: Actually the farming bit isn't really necessary for the stuff in the second paragraph. You could do with wild plants. And it's not like your attempts at selective breeding are going to get very far within your lifetime anyway.

[mainiac]

I could teach them writing (basic charcoal on stone) and Malthusian economic theory applications to early agriculture populations. That might sound strange but the invention of agriculture while good for development greatly lowered the long term standard of living. Avoiding those mistakes would allow for human society to grow much more benevolently than any machine I could invent. Plus yknow a few lessons on hygene and farming.

[Radio Controlled]

Also note that you probably have no immume defenses system build up against local diseases, and you are not accustomed to the local food and bacteria in them. Baaaad case of the runs seems likely, at least in the beginning. Better make sure you don't dehydrate!

Perhaps a better question would be "if you were dropped into the jungle somewhere, would you survive?" And to be honest, while the average bay12er indeed has some unusual knowledge, I also suspect most of us in here aren't the epitome of physical fitness, nor trained survivalists. So you really better hope those local natives are friendly, cause if not, I suspect most of us would barely scrape by at best, or just outright die at worst.

[i2amroy]

Well yeah, a decade or so is a "in a perfect scenario" type of thing, and doesn't include many other factors. Realistically I would certainly expect to be able to hit a fairly stable agrarian society, complete with domesticated animals and a budding plant husbandry project, and with highly advanced ideas of science, medicine, sanitation, and a whole host of other modern ideas before I died. Such a society should also have large amounts of recorded knowledge, meaning that should they find an adequate source of metal they could then leap to a strange "bronze-industrial" (steampunk? ) age, with ideas and machines from the industrial era cast into bronze instead of steel.

Spoiler: big basic timeline/plan (click to show/hide)

For food purposes you'd ideally be near an ocean, as it provides the absolute best food source at that level of agricultural technology, as well as the salt source needed for preserving your food. Barring that your next best guess is to go hunter/gatherer until you find a cave that can provide you with either salt or nitrates through bats. At that point your best bet is probably to split the group. One half stays there to accomplish as much as they can on a handful of specialized tasks, while the other moves on to avoid overburdening the ecology at that location, as well as gathering as much food as they can from nearby locations, before bringing it back to the first group. The first group would be working on setting up a salt curing location for meat, transplanting as many berry bushes, young fruit trees, and other food-bearing wild varieties to near their location, and working on getting a basic ceramics work area up for storage vessels. They would also work on setting up a basic fenced area, since you don't actually need to domesticate an animal to farm it. If you can trap them into an area, then you just need to drive them from that area to your new adjacent one every once in a while as the grazing gets low, and picking them off becomes much easier. You would also work on raising captured animals, selecting directly for the how close you can get to them. It would be the start of a domestication process that we now know (thanks to the Russians), should finish in a handful of decades. For the time being it would still provide a reliable source of meat, though.

Come winter you should have both groups rejoin at the stationary location and pray you can make it through, since that would be the toughest point to breach. The cave should provide a fairly nice shelter, albeit a slightly chilly one, but it would probably be warmer than outside in the middle of the winter. During the winter you should then focus on disseminating as much information as you can to protect yourself from accidents happening. Instead of storytelling around the fire there would be lecturing going on. At this point a large part of your food would probably be meat related, though if you had managed to save up a bit of fruit and other plant foods and were careful about doling it out you could probably make it through the winter without any serious issues.

At spring and for the next few years you would seek to continue the pattern, looking to achieve stabilization as quickly as possible. You'd also want to get ink and paper or vellum up and running as soon as you could without endangering anything else, since that allows you to start writing down all of this knowledge to protect yourself from accidents. Honestly farms are unlikely to be the way you want to go, since the domestication of draft animals and the lack of plant husbandry performed would severely hurt any attempt. Instead your best bet is probably going to be to focus on meat production (boars will eat just about anything, as will goats, and fish can be fished for most of the year), supplemented by transplanted orchards, berry fields, and other returning food crops to remove the need to replant each year while still providing enough of a varied diet.

At this point you're basically just going to be continuing your efforts into the food industry, while working on perfecting various water-powered things like mills, working on your woodworking, ceramics, cooking, and paper industries while getting as much of your knowledge written down as possible before you die of something or other, and that's about it. At this point how much farther you can go literally comes down tot eh luck of the draw with metal deposits; if you were lucky enough to find some basic metal you could then get to work on a basic blacksmithing operation, which would allow for drastic increases in tool quality and a huge decrease in the amount of time certain tasks take. You could then also work on getting a glassblowing industry up, while drastically cutting time required for woodworking now that you can set up a lumber mill and cut down trees much easier. Get even luckier and have a wide variety of minerals and you could take the level all of the way up to basic steel forging.

End result is a civilization filled with ideas of science, woodworking, stoneworking, government, and medicine from today that would still be elsewise stone age for all intents and purposes until they could discover a source of metal. Given the fact that infant mortality would be much lower due to basic health tenants, you would probably see a population explosion allowing for the push out of new settlements. Should any of them discover a source of metal, then you would see another huge technological leap, as they jump quickly up to almost the pre-industrial era due to finally having a metal that they can work with.

Perhaps a better question would be "if you were dropped into the jungle somewhere, would you survive?"

I'm pretty sure the original question's point was more about technological/societal advances rather than just basic survival skills, which is why I've been handwaving a bunch of things like language barriers, people believe what you are saying instead of thinking you are a madman, and your personal disease resistance (and theirs to whatever future diseases you bring back with you). Because honestly without the handwaves the answer for pretty much anyone, even modern-day wilderness survival masters, will be "get sick, be shunned by the natives due to starting horrible plagues with anyone you meet, and die a horrible death alone".

A related point though, which is that if you were actually dropped on earth (as opposed to some other pseudo-similar random planet) you wouldn't necessarily need to find metal or oil. You could already know exactly where the metal deposits were located and would just need to get there.

[mainiac]

So start a population explosion and political life without sustainable living standardz. Congrats you have made humanity even more warlike then original timeline

[i2amroy]

So start a population explosion and political life without sustainable living standardz. Congrats you have made humanity even more warlike then original timeline

Nah, because if everyone is believing everything you say you could impress into them the idea that more diversity is a good thing, leading to greater acceptance of differences (there have been at least a few cultures in actual history already that viewed "mixed blood" as being a good thing). Also the fact that you just shortcut religion before it ever got started means that you just cut out a huge amount of war and strife right there on account of "those people being different" without it ever needing to be dealt with later.

As for sustainability, a lot of it just depends on how fast you can get working plant farms up. In the beginning you will probably be forced to keep splitting out into new settlements to prevent destruction of the area you are on, but honestly you'd probably want to do that anyways since having a bunch of smaller, intertrading settlements spread over a larger geographic area will be much more resistant to being wiped out and destroyed as a whole than a single large one would (don't put all your eggs in one basket and all that jazz). As your plant husbandry worked at getting better plants set up you could then work on shifting from a mainly meat-based diet to a more plant-based one, which would allow for bigger settlements to survive in an area without destroying it. Additionally the ideas of sanitation and basic plumbing, along with the knowledge of the fact that you are going to cause a population explosion means you could set out your sanitation with the ideas of easy expansion to accommodate for more people in mind, meaning that you could hold your living standard despite the population growth.

[mainiac]

There is this little problem called exponential growth.  You ethics don't solve that.  In fact your solution just makes the scale of the eventual conflict worse.

[i2amroy]

I think you're misunderstanding; my goal is to cause exponential growth. At this point we are literally the only human civilization on the entire planet, we have plenty of space to spare, and the more we spread the more resources and manpower we have access too, as well as the less likelyhood of being completely wiped out by a plague or other horrible disaster. In this case exponential growth is a good thing, because we could spread for generations and generations without ever running out of space or resources to use, and the more people we have out there working on things the faster they are going to get done. And sure, eventually we'll get fractures and strife, but I think a society that has had the ideas of "acceptance" and "mixing with those who are different is a good thing" driven into them from the beginning is going to be a lot less likely to burst into war than our current "us or them", xenophobic-esque one is.

[Radio Controlled]

How large is your starting pool? Cause if you have no locals to intermingle with, inbreeding ho! Unless there's enough of you at the start to avoid that, in which case, starvation ho! 

((Note, estimates vary on the number of peeps needed to have a stable genetic pool, but I've heard numbers from around 70-100 to much more, depending on a lot of variables (eg environmental pressure.))

[i2amroy]

The idea that different is good/attractive was simultaneously intended to promote interbreeding and mingling with any other local groups we might find. But honestly without access to additional locals to bulk out the genetic numbers there isn't really anything you can do about interbreeding other than passing the knowledge of tracking genealogies and purposely working to avoid it as much as absolutely possible, so a small amount of it happening might just be a risk you have to take until you can find more locals.

[Loud Whispers]

I honestly kinda think you're underestimating the amount of time and effort it would take.

So, let's indeed drop you in there with manpower. How are you gonna feed all these people? Hunter-gathering for such a large group? There goes a lot of manpower. Wanna farm? You have no tools yet, no crops that took ages of selection in terms of size and such. You'll have to domesticate the animals anew. Sure, modern knowledge will speed things up. But even with modern knowledge, you won't be turning that tree with the hard chewy things into delicious large fruits anytime soon.

In 1936 the Lykov family fled to Siberia, one of the most inhospitable places on Earth. In 1961 a particularly harsh frost killed off all of their crop, leading to a terrible famine where the mother starved to death just to ensure her children were fed enough to survive. They had but a single grain of rye left, and from this single grain they rebuilt their entire crop.

Now, most people cannot do what a bunch of slavs with a purpose did; but survival necessitates it so, so you give it your all. Pitfall traps, endurance hunting and fishing would go hand in hand with farming. No matter where you go, as long as you're not in some barren desert or frozen wasteland there is some sort of tuber or legume that you can farm. With modern knowledge on how to enrich soil, which crops and weeds enrich soil and what boosts crop yields, only the most insular of persons would fail at farming, and in time would go from being poor at farming to great at it.
Also... People did not create delicious juicy fruits out of horrid inedible chewy things. They chose delicious juicy fruits and bred them to be bigger, juicier and more delicious fruits. If we are also handicapped by being placed on an utterly alien world where even the biology of everything is different... That is an additional constraint that I do not recall being in the OP.

Starting from scratch, without starting technology, a whole lot of your effort goes to basic survival. No use planting crops, if they take a few weeks to grow, you gotta eat for those weeks. So, if you start with a lot of people, a lot will probably starve, and if you wanna prevent that, you won't be advancing in tech a lot until you have a lot of infrastructure set up. And untill you have a few farms that can feed a lot more people than they need to be worked, a lot of manpower is lost.

Why on earth would you not plant crops just because they take seasons to grow? That's the point of crops! You get the food in the harvest!

Of course, it wouldn't take as long as it took originally for humanity, but it certainly will take more than a few years. And everytime something goes wrong? A single harvest goes wrong along the way? Dang, now the one guy who new the most about medicine starved, since you can't ship in some food from somewhere the harvest didn't fail. There goes all his knowledge and skills.

as long as everyone wrote everything down eventually expertise would continue to be built upon until we got back to working order - it's easier to relearn than discover.

It is also notable just how many ways mankind learned how to write, from writing on leaves, to papyrus, to painting to carving. And even failures - short of a cataclysmic failure, or a deliberate sabotage, would not be able to wipe out a resourceful community not solely reliant on any one thing. Disease, freshwater drought, a gorillion locusts, sudden wolf attack - there's not much you can do after the fact unless you've already advanced to the point where these things are not an issue. One can safely rule out these problems that would very likely result in everyone dying, otherwise we'd be kicking ourselves down for not being able to deal with the eruption of Pompeii II: The sequel, with stone age tools.


It would be amusing however, to see a community to form around this restructuring of civilization. For if history has taught us anything, it is that first you have the civilization of builders and farmers, who are then taken over by warrior nomads. The warrior nomads conquer more builders and farmers and eventually settle down, becoming builders and farmers themselves, until more warrior nomads arrive and expand the Empire of builders and farmers further ad infinitum, with technology advancing all the way. Providing no Genghis Khan of the motorcycle nomads sacks Bagdhad12, an optimist would place the time taken to recover to an industrial world at anywhere between 100-300 years, maybe much less.

[Radio Controlled]

Note that I was responding to the plan of roy to drop in with a bunch of people, not the OP scenario. How many people were in that scenario you just described?

Also, have you ever eaten wild apples? That shit isn't very good yo, to someone accustomed to our modern version, but it does provide some nutrition, so in a survival situation, that's something. But not nearly as sustaining as the bred version. Either way, I used that as an example, to show your initial farming won't be supporting the large amount of people the modern version would.

Getting food in the harvest won't save you if you die by that time, was the point. Or, if enough of your people die that a large part of their knowledge and skills are lost.

And writing everything down, from scratch? Never mind that practical skills aren't that easy to hand down in writing, you will be much too focussed on basic survival for a long while before you can afford luxuries like making paper and ink and writing a lot of shit down. Have you ever seen a decent physics textbook? How long would 1 person take to write all that down on shitty paper with shitty ink?

I think the biggest chance you'd have was if you were dropped into a civilisation that was already more established, but still relatively 'primitive' (say, ancient Mesopotamia) and see how far you get. If you don't have to busy yourself with reenacting Best of Bear Grylls, then you could see how fast modern knowhow could advance a civilisation, which was probably more the idea here.

[Bohandas]

I think the biggest chance you'd have was if you were dropped into a civilisation that was already more established, but still relatively 'primitive' (say, ancient Mesopotamia) and see how far you get. If you don't have to busy yourself with reenacting Best of Bear Grylls, then you could see how fast modern knowhow could advance a civilisation, which was probably more the idea here.

So like a more extreme version of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court or Evil Dead 3: Army of Darkness

[Loud Whispers]

Note that I was responding to the plan of roy to drop in with a bunch of people, not the OP scenario. How many people were in that scenario you just described?

Also, have you ever eaten wild apples? That shit isn't very good yo, to someone accustomed to our modern version, but it does provide some nutrition, so in a survival situation, that's something. But not nearly as sustaining as the bred version. Either way, I used that as an example, to show your initial farming won't be supporting the large amount of people the modern version would.

Ya, and wild jackfruit, rambutan, sugar cane, apples, plums, bananas, lychees; only ones I found to be resolutely horrendous were durian and they taste horrendous in their farmed varieties too.

Getting food in the harvest won't save you if you die by that time, was the point. Or, if enough of your people die that a large part of their knowledge and skills are lost.
And writing everything down, from scratch? Never mind that practical skills aren't that easy to hand down in writing, you will be much too focussed on basic survival for a long while before you can afford luxuries like making paper and ink and writing a lot of shit down. Have you ever seen a decent physics textbook? How long would 1 person take to write all that down on shitty paper with shitty ink?

M9 physics would not be the first thing written down, all you'd need at first are basic scientific principles on evidence, simple laws like what elements are, what gravity is, how energy is stored, what the fuck magnets are, acceleration and what not. We aren't talking practical skills, those build up in practice. We're talking knowledge. And knowledge builds upon knowledge. Write it down and you avoid your knowledge being lost in the event of an elder dying.

I think the biggest chance you'd have was if you were dropped into a civilisation that was already more established, but still relatively 'primitive' (say, ancient Mesopotamia) and see how far you get. If you don't have to busy yourself with reenacting Best of Bear Grylls, then you could see how fast modern knowhow could advance a civilisation, which was probably more the idea here.

Ehhhh.... Not as fun.

[Magistrum]

I propose a different challenge.

We, Bay12Forums, all go to sleep, and wake on the dirt, in other planet (due to cheating by already knowing where natural resources are). Bay12 must survive. All our collected knowledge must be put to work together, and we must create a society, advancing the most possible in the technology tree.

Not as individuals, but together, how far can we go?