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[wierd]

we are spoiled by modern availability, but there were spices used in the dark ages that have mostly fallen out of favor now.

Things like red cedar berries, lavender sprigs, lemon balm, etc.

Those are now basically just ornamental trees, flowers in a flower bed, or garden variety weeds these days.

Personally, I would gather the following items here in north america:

Red cedar berries
Pine pollen anthers
lavender, if available
black walnuts
currants
elder berries
yellow wood sorrel (nice and sour, but high in oxalic acid. use sparingly)
eastern red sumac berries in late dry summer (the clusters exude citric acid as a white crust. This is very useful nutrionally as well as for spice use.)
salt
hot peppers, if available.
wild grape leaves (nice astringent taste)
etc.

Things like cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, etc... are all tropical. they wont grow here. abandon all hope of apple or pumpkin pie. 

a faux lemon merange pie could be fasioned from lemon balm and sumac berry extractives though. Sugar from repeat crystallization of honey, or from reduced apple juice. (note, the pie filling would not be yellow.)

[Loud Whispers]

If I was stuck with local spices I'd only have mint, nettle, chestnut, pepper, cinnamon, garlic and onions. The range would probably include salt and chives, rosemary, and... Well lots of other spices if I included the whole nation, but it's still a big limit compared to modern availability of everything.

But point taken, it wouldn't be that bad, very few places on Earth have very few spices.

...Our early cheeses would be horrifying!

[BoredVirulence]

Garlic and onions. Thats all you need. And pepper.

I think as a group we'd fare pretty well. I imagine our issue would be population growth. I'm not saying there are no women, and I haven't seen any statistics on it, but I can't imagine its a lot. I'm assuming we might have 30% if we're lucky. I'm certain we would have at least 2 generations where some men would lack partners.

Which reminds me, can we bring spouses? Mine is training for physical therapy, and while early on she has some knowledge on anatomy and treating injury without medicine *Gasp*

I have some basic survival skills, all theoretical. Forging would work fine though for food, for a time. My skills would probably best go towards irrigation and waste management, and some basic metallurgy. I can, in theory, make glazed clay pots, and could produce some metals with the proper ores. If Wierd can follow up on his basic transistors, I could build some simple circuits and we might be able to get some electronic machinery, late game. Then again, if we can get proper waste management, irrigation, agriculture, basic mechanic's and architecture, I see no reason why we couldn't have roman standard's of living in a decade or so. Modern technology would probably be out of our reach, maybe some basic electronics towards the end of our lifetimes. Either-way, I think we could go from foraging / hunting and gathering to late 1800's in a lifetime. Our real problem would be finding rare resources to drive our electronic goals.


As an individual, I could manage a decent standard of living. I wouldn't ever try and teach my skills to others though. One of the most valuable things is learning and discovering the technology, not just getting there. You can't hand a primitive society science and tools and expect them to become Greece or Rome.

[Loud Whispers]

I would be willing to swap garlic with lemon, but agreed onions are absolutely mandatory.

[Graknorke]

Hey come on, garlic has to come above lemon. Garlic contains all kinds of good shit to be eating.

[TempAcc]

Garlic and onions can also be pickled with relative ease to create a food source thats not only delicious but lasts a long time. Garlic is special because its a great source of allicin, which is amazingly useful. Onions are also a great source of vitamin C.

[BoredVirulence]

I do like lemon, but I still vote garlic. It also grows in more places, so thank god for that. Hopefully we can just have both. And some for of pepper. Peppercorn and bell peppers will do fine.

Also, as far as needing salt. We can smoke our meat. We can use liquid smoke to smoke our meat. I have this knowledge! I'm suddenly more useful! Proud to be an American (Yes, we revolutionized BBQ with liquid smoke)...

[Loud Whispers]

While we go about the wonders of garlic and onion (I am convinced that garlic is mandatory, if only to kill vampires in this new world), we have forgotten one vital thing.

We forgot to bring bees.

[TempAcc]

If there's anything Unreal World taught be, is that preserving meat with salt is expensive >:v, we're better off just smoking everything.

I'm rather skilled at making sun cured meat, though, if that counts for anything. All you need is some nice, not too thick cuts of beef with spices, a box like structure covered by a fine net to keep bugs away, and strong sunlight. The result is positively delishus.

[BoredVirulence]

We need to decide though, is this a whole new world with flora and fauna ecosystems compatible with us? Or is this an earth where the continents got messed up, and humans died out before they did any inventing more than the spear?

If its essentially a reconsituted earth, one where earthly knowledge of how to do stuff specifically is useful but we may lose geo-spatial-specific bonuses, then we have our bees, we just have to learn to live with whatever variety is nearby.

If its a new world, then... Well, we'll just have to hop our collective knowledge can solve the lack of bees. The ecosystem doesn't need them, but any honey / wax specific craft (and Wax is useful) will require work arounds. Then again, we have other things to worry about, such as where to get the yeast for the booze? What if there are no microbes that can be manipulated to produce alcohol?...

Lets pick earth?

[BoredVirulence]

If there's anything Unreal World taught be, is that preserving meat with salt is expensive >:v, we're better off just smoking everything.

I'm rather skilled at making sun cured meat, though, if that counts for anything. All you need is some nice, not too thick cuts of beef with spices, a box like structure covered by a fine net to keep bugs away, and strong sunlight. The result is positively delishus.

Liquid smoke isn't just easy to make (its similar to distilling liquor or spirits from alcohol vapor, except instead of alcohol vapor, its smoke), it was originally produced for meat preservation. Now its used for flavor because of refrigerators. Also, smoked sun dried meat sounds delicious. Unfortunately usually drying requires the use of less fatty meat, or at least that's my understanding. But I guess we can still smoke it.

[mainiac]

I'm still not seeing exactly why this is a problem. Care to elaborate on what exactly you are seeing is wrong with exponential growth as we attempt to solidify ourselves?

Pre-industrial productivity growth is measured in low single digit numbers per century.  Even if you are frontloading them with a bunch of centuries worth of knowledge at once pretty soon their society is going to be virtually stagnant from an technological economic standpoint.

It wont be stagnant however because it is rapidly growing.  But pretty soon the best resources are being cultivated.  Then you push into more marginal areas and the standard of living for the new people drop.  Pre-industrial humans are at the mercy of their environment like any other animal.  Sure they farm the land instead of just hunting and gathering but pretty soon you run out of good farmland.  Pretty soon people are competing for the best land...

And that right there is where the bad stuff enters in because competition for land is responsible for about 99% of the dickish things in human history.  Sexism, genocide, slavery, class oppression, they all came from those competitive pressures.  And what you've done is turned those pressures up to 11.  Before it was the two or three viable adult offspring from each woman of the last generation competing for resources.  Now it's gonna be five or six viable offspring living to adult hood.

They will expand as best they can but pretty soon they will just turn their efforts to competing with each other.  The pressures they are under would be much more intense then anything humans faced.  And while humanity tended to gradually expand to each new limit you are freeing these guys to breed freely for generations then suddenly they are going to hit a wall all at once.  The results would be horrific.

A happy society is one that avoids the negative social pressures of population until it can invent industry and start growing the economy faster then it can grow the population.  You have created the exact opposite, no economic growth but breakneck population explosion.

[Magistrum]

Liquid smoke isn't just easy to make (its similar to distilling liquor or spirits from alcohol vapor, except instead of alcohol vapor, its smoke), it was originally produced for meat preservation. Now its used for flavor because of refrigerators. Also, smoked sun dried meat sounds delicious. Unfortunately usually drying requires the use of less fatty meat, or at least that's my understanding. But I guess we can still smoke it.

Here in my state we are regarded as more tough and rural people, so our culture is also like that. I have been taught how to make "charque" (google  says it's "Ch'arki" in english, I'm not buying it.), but that stills needs salt. The thing is, you can store charque for two months, and even more depending  on the quality, without a single difference of eating it on the spot, and then up to half year before the meat spoils, but then it already lost most of it's proteins and whatever makes it a better choice than vegetables.

If its essentially a reconsituted earth, one where earthly knowledge of how to do stuff specifically is useful but we may lose geo-spatial-specific bonuses, then we have our bees, we just have to learn to live with whatever variety is nearby.

Yes, my challenge just re-rolls the dices on the earth's natural resources and continent locations.

What you said.

That's a good point you have there, and I was going to bring it up to see what the guys would say, but you spoiled it.
Yeah, we are making a population that will explode catastrophically, but not all systems have economical growth, neither get problems by growing too fast. There's no society as of now, and bay12 will then chose it's own system for settling stuff. I think most people would agree to go communism for government style and democracy(no representatives) for voting system, just so we can share all our knowledge to the max at the start. We would probably have to work hard to decide what is the culture we will give to our children. They know nothing, and there's no stranger. We are all humans, so we decide what's morally good or wrong. We could, for example, impede racism. Since there are no other cultures, there wouldn't be cultural shock huge enough to recreate it for a good time. If we never expose our children to social shunning, there won't be marginal groups for another century or so, until they manage to create one on their own(they will, most likely).
Also, we will be most likely composed primarily of men, so we could have several small groups scout hills and the like, without lacking manpower to defend ourselves from the wild. Having a bad starting position wouldn't be a problem either, we could just move all together in a huge group, eating what we find along the way, hunter-gather style.

I'm only a novice cartographer and don't know much about geology, only have a good eye, sense of direction and scale.

So, this is my next question: Do bay12 have cartographers or people with such skill?

[i2amroy]

-snip-

To address your points:
1) This would only be a "pre-industrial society" until we found the proper metals. We're handing them the vast majority of post-industrial ideas along with the technology. There's no reason why their productivity growth can't match post-industrial levels. Heck, we could even go Ghandi-esque and impress that the ideas of self-supporting for each village as much as possible are good ones.

2) We are literally the only human civilization on the planet. We've got plenty of room, even at exponential growth rates. Example:
Let's assume that we get dropped in a random point in North America. We build a village then, and we claim 20 square miles of land. Every generation, each village doubles in population, so they build another village for their descendants. Now we know a lot of land isn't very usable, so we're going to assume that 2/3rds of it is useless (in actuality we use a fair bit more than 1/3rd). At that current rate, it would take 17 generations before they ran out of usable space in North America. And that's assuming that they don't develop the idea of not having tons of children that shows up in almost every civilized country. We could give every group of 100 people their own little village on good ground, for over 350 years, and still not run out of space (on 1 continent!).

3) And as for things like sexism, genocide, slavery, and class oppression, yeah, you might suffer from that a bit. But honestly I think a culture that has spent it's entire history being told that "we" is humanity, not "we" is the Easterners, or the Southerners, or whatever, and that has been raised on the idea that everyone is equal is gonna have a much better shot at it than us. And if we push early that a ritual of adulthood is to move to a place as far away from your home as possible, and then intermingle and become part of the people there (not conquer, join!), then we get the further bonds of everyone being related to everyone. How can you oppress the Easterners when your Grandfather was one? Why would you call for the genocide of the coastal people's when that's where you were born? Heck, with a multi-tiered democratic system, you might even be able to hold the world together as a single democratic empire without any serious fractures, though such a system would probably end up looking a lot like our current nations do, just with a more even split and with an overriding humanistic body that actually had the power to accomplish things (as opposed to our current unbalanced and powerless systems). If handled right a combination of seriousness, direct democracy, and representative democracy (because honestly direct democracy starts to fall apart with huge enough numbers, but if you keep enough touches then representative can still work in a way) can be quite a powerful tool at keeping people together despite their differences.

[mainiac]

1) Doubling every generation is too low.  Remove the population pressures and human populations grow much faster then that.
2) Even doubling every generation, after 20 generations you are fucked.  Starting with just 1000 humans after 400 years you have hit a billion people.  Preindustrial societies could only feed that, barely, after centuries and centuries of labor by hundreds of millions of people developing marginal land into something worthwhile.  More realistically you hit the wall locally after hitting 10 million or so when the immediate area is massively overpopulated for it's low lever of land development and plagues and wars upset society.

Remember, these people dont have 20 centuries to develop high calorie potato and rice strains.  They're trying to feed a metropolis on millet.