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[wierd]

Helminthic therapy has been used successfully in humans.

https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Helminthic_therapy

Agreed, runaway helminth infection is VERY BAD JUJU. Thankfully, there are many well known purgatives that can be used to manage the condition, such as eating a small bit of tobacco leaf every once in a while.

[scrdest]

Helminthic therapy has been used successfully in humans.

https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Helminthic_therapy

Agreed, runaway helminth infection is VERY BAD JUJU. Thankfully, there are many well known purgatives that can be used to manage the condition, such as eating a small bit of tobacco leaf every once in a while.

Mostly was referring to the second link, but since both papers were talking animal models...

[TempAcc]

Personally, between infecting myself with suspicious intestinal parasites and eating hot peppers, I'd rather eat hot peppers :v

[Loud Whispers]

Combine the two ideas above and we'll get a kickass dieselpunk setting. Join the adventures of a bunch of random forumites as they struggle to reconstruct modernity from scratch while fighting off Tweaker Nazis.

Meth and mein kampf just equals the Aryan Brotherhood

I'm not sure if I'd like the idea of fighting them off on an alien planet

Or this planet for that matter

I fear OTHER PEOPLE in a technological collapse, because I would be too valuable to be allowed to go free. (EG, once known about, no group struggling for survival would PERMIT me to leave them.)

It reminds me of that one story where the most valuable thing in the group was an old gun, the second most valuable thing was the doctor, then the third was hunting dogs and the fourth was everyone else.

[Magistrum]

That means that for the first couple of weeks each survival person has to support 19 other people just to keep us all alive as those people learn to be self supporting. Even assuming we all worked together I'd say we would probably have something like a 20% die-off from starvation, plus whoever has a disease like asthma that requires technological support.

As far as I know you don't need the smallest of the survival knowledge to not starve. Like, we being around a thousand folks, can just move along and forage, no need to settle down and consume all the resources on one area, just move along and eat up a forest. Surviving is pretty chill.

I also think that we would probably have huge problems in setting our values to the group, like, hunting would probably be pretty risky, so we would be trying to determine who would be a smaller loss. Like, we must chose between me and wierd to go hunt, things would go like:
"Hey,wierd is better at hunting, and Magistrum is a high-master electronic, maybe we should try and keep him alive until we can find proper metal."
"But Wierd is a Glassmaker and has high survival skills, Magistrum's skills are basically useless near his at the moment."

And then we murder eachother. 

[i2amroy]

Yeah, but what skill levels you have doesn't matter if you aren't good enough to actually catch anything when you go hunting. We'd have to send out the survival knowledge people to hunt because they are the only ones who would actually be successful at it.

[Baffler]

Well I know we have at least a few hunters among us, hell, I'm one of them. I use a rifle, not a bow, but I still know how to butcher whatever small game (never tried anything bigger than a particularly fat rabbit) I might... peg with a rock? I know how to make a simple bow but I don't know how to get a string for it without investing a bunch of time in figuring out how weaving works, and I'd probably need a good deal of time to get to where I can reliably hit the broad side of a barn with the thing anyway.

But there are hundreds of bay12'ers to feed in that scenario. It would probably be a matter of sneaking up on small groups of deer with simple spears and surrounding them for us (a difficult and dangerous proposition, deer don't go down easily when shot, I wouldn't want to try cornering one and stabbing it to death) or digging then covering a bigass hole and hoping something heavy doesn't spot it before it falls in. Small game would be a bit easier to catch because things like snares will work there, but I only have an academic understanding of how trapping works and even if someone else knows how to set one up it'll still probably be at least a day and probably more before anything actually gets caught in one when we don't know where game tends to travel.

[Magistrum]

(a difficult and dangerous proposition, deer don't go down easily when shot, I wouldn't want to try cornering one and stabbing it to death)

That's why I made the conversation like that, "who should we send to get horrible maimed?".
But what about farming, is there any bay12'ers that have know how on raising crops? I only know how to raise our already breed crops, and it is no more than trowing the seeds on the ground. Maybe we would need to do *gasp* actual farming?
So, bay12, are any of you acquainted to farming? Have you lived in a rural area?

[freeformschooler]

(a difficult and dangerous proposition, deer don't go down easily when shot, I wouldn't want to try cornering one and stabbing it to death)

That's why I made the conversation like that, "who should we send to get horrible maimed?".
But what about farming, is there any bay12'ers that have know how on raising crops? I only know how to raise our already breed crops, and it is no more than trowing the seeds on the ground. Maybe we would need to do *gasp* actual farming?
So, bay12, are any of you acquainted to farming? Have you lived in a rural area?

Yep. It's tough work and requires more know-how than you'd think, especially because managing a farm is much more than just growing crops. We've figured out some nifty tricks over the years that would give us an edge over cavemen playing with seeds if reduced to a primitive situations. For example: Willow twigs can make rooting hormone for propagating bush foods, and rotational coppicing means infinite fuel if you do it right. There's probably some old knowledge about farming the hard way (no machine power) that's been lost over the years and we'd have to relearn.

[wierd]

Mostly just good old composting, crop rotation and proper fallowing technique, how to plow with a horse, etc.

My mom would be a godsend in those matters. Woman can grow anything.

[Magistrum]

Mostly just good old composting, crop rotation and proper fallowing technique, how to plow with a horse, etc.

My mom would be a godsend in those matters. Woman can grow anything.

I think you can see her again now that you are an adult, it should have been hard to run from her...

That's very good, how do you think we could set a farm? How much time would it take for us to collect enough seeds/saplings for planting crops for a whole thousand of mouths? And then how much time for it to mature?

[freeformschooler]

Mostly just good old composting, crop rotation and proper fallowing technique, how to plow with a horse, etc.

My mom would be a godsend in those matters. Woman can grow anything.

I think you can see her again now that you are an adult, it should have been hard to run from her...

That's very good, how do you think we could set a farm? How much time would it take for us to collect enough seeds/saplings for planting crops for a whole thousand of mouths? And then how much time for it to mature?

It's good to keep in mind that agriculture was not the end all be all of food for most of its history. What was planted was still supplemented by hunting and probably foraging. For an interesting modern story, see merrderber's AMA on plebbit about growing up very primitively. Men and boys hunt boar while women manage the crops. So probably you wouldn't be farming to feed 1000 mouths right away, and hunting would provide a buffer against starvation while you got the farm up and running. Many foraged weeds can also be eaten.

If we're talking about the traditional seasonal staples (potatoes, grains, cabbages and such), I don't know how long it'd take to find them in the wild, but as long as you're smart you can get your first food around the end of the growing season, and those same crops provide their own seeds - a bolting cabbage can produce many seeds, young potatoes are plucked and stored for the next crop. As long as you had the initial resources, held a food buffer, and knew what you were doing, it wouldn't take very long to start a farm. I think the biggest challenge would not be planting and growing crops but rather making the metal tools and taming the animals required to tend a good sized farm. Remember that all our best draft animals today have been bred for many generations, and we have mines and factories to produce mattocks.

This all assumes you live in an area with good rainfall. Irrigating could mean a farm takes much longer to start.

[Loud Whispers]

The greatest lost would be all the excellent spices needed for juicy cuisine ;-;

[TempAcc]

Well, lots of spices aren't terribly hard to grow. The problem comes when you're trying to make stuff like indian spices and more elaborate stuff that you cant just pluck off a plant and let it dry for a while. There's a reason spices were luxury goods for a long time.

I think once the very basics were put into place, like shelter and food/water, the next most important thing would be a waste disposal system. If there's anything antiquity/medieval age has taught us is that if you want serious populations and settlements to be a thing, then you need to get rid of waste in some way, and hopefuly not in the ol english way of just dumping it onto the streets :v

[Loud Whispers]

The old English way

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Weren't that bad :<

Also the variety of spices would be severely hamstringed by those only available locally, up until this world had the equivalent of the Portuguese happen. Also, if we weren't by the seaside in hot weather, we'd pretty much have to rely on salt mines. And mining is pretty shitty no matter which way you look at it, unless you're a Dorfy fecker