How long should this take (tech re-discovery)


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Shadow Lodge

Say you have a large group of refugees from various cultures and tech bases. The highest tech bases was pre-gun powder renaissance.

Then you dumped them on liveable planet with nothing, how long would it take for them to reach pre-gun powder renaissance again?

If you dumped them on a planet that had a large civilization that, for whatever reason, died out 5000 yrs before.

Shadow Lodge

Anybody got any ideas?

Grand Lodge

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Pathfinder PF Special Edition, Starfinder Roleplaying Game Subscriber

Lets say the planet in question is our Earth and our civilization falls say in the next 100 years or so, and Humankind is extinct.

1. All of the electronic stuff is pretty much toast, circuitry long corroded by environment, leaking battery acid, etc. If you've seen the state of artifacts that old we dig up, there isn't going to be anything practically useful from what we left behind. Most of our cities will have left nothing behind save perhaps the occasional mound or depression to mark where they once stood.

2. Our civilisation has already extracted all of the oil and coal that was easily gotten out of the ground. i.e. there isn't a spot on the earth anymore where Future Jed Clampett can stick a pick in the ground and make a gusher. Everything we get out of the ground now, requires high tech that your prospective dumpees don't have available to them.

What's missing are all of the easy bootstraps that got us from oxbow level to industrial. So if your friends landed on our deserted Earth 5000 years in the future, they're pretty much screwed.

So much depends on WHY that civilization of yours kicked the bucket.


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Assuming you have people with all the know-how to make everything they had, to work every known material, then you could potentially have their tech level restored within a year, given time for people to create makeshift tools in order to harvest the materials to create more complex tools to construct the even more complex tools required to harvest and work better materials... and so on :)

There's a lot of factors involved, such as how many people you have in total - there's going to be a sweet spot between not enough people to spare the labor force needed and too many to feed from the local environment. How much of the required technical knowledge survived - if everyone knew how to use things but not how to actually make them, you're in trouble and are effectively regressed back to the stone age.

Things get exponentially more complicated once you enter the realms of power generation and miniaturization - which thankfully you're not here. If you had to invent the microchip from scratch, for example, I wouldn't be surprised for it to take an entire generation, at least, to bootstrap the required sciences.

Most of the time spent the first time around is the long waits for discovery and invention. All of that is done, so it's really just a matter of bootstrapping the process and doing it all in one go, assuming you have people in the new population that know how to do it.

Off the top of my head, I'd say you would need something like the following steps:

- Get farming. Get farming now. For gods sake start farming or everyone's going to die before we go much further. Trapping and foraging will have to suffice until the first crops are grown.
- Use makeshift tools (unworked stone and bone) to harvest lumber for basic construction.
- Basic carpentry is available around this point, we can probably make basic lathes and tools for spinning and weaving, even if they have to be made by carving wood with handheld pieces of flint. We can probably do very rough wooden gears and wheels. Arm people with basic spears for hunting (and defense if needed)
- As we've got cloth, we can also make paper. For pity's sake start writing everything down ASAP in case the only person that remembers how to do something dies on us.
- Continue with makeshift tools to harvest stone and ore. Assuming the same (or similar enough) ores are available, we can start mining.
- We can probably start making bows too.
- Try to find clay for pottery. Making the first kiln is going to be a pain but with enough effort you could probably carve one into a rockface. Obviously a lot easier once we have metal.
- This is a big pause because *finding* those ore deposits may take a while. It's heavily dependent on rarity of ore deposits, where on the planet they are, and how many people you have to poke around looking for them.
- From here you can construct the tools for basic metalworking and a decent level of carpentry.
- Next up you can use those to construct the tools for proper smelting and smithing. We can also make furniture, containers and decent boats. Hopefully there's some animals we can harness for power.
- If we have smelting, we can now make proper gears and clockwork mechanisms. Get that windmill or watermill ready for when the crops are grown, also a lumber mill. Basic printing press.
- Time to find sand and start making glass, too. Locate whoever used to do glassblowing and start making bottles and glasses!
- If needed, we can also make decent weapons and armor now. If nothing else, crossbows should make hunting easier.

(I'm sure someone who knows more about these things than I can point out if I forgot anything important or mixed anything up!)

So, all things considered, if luck is with you on everything I reckon you'd be at this point within a year, with the first year's crops now about to be harvested. Take to the fields with the scythes, and hitch the animals I hope we found up to the plough we just made, and get re-planting. Two years at the outside, if construction of mills, etc, takes longer due to lack of manpower. Much longer if everything conspires against you, such as being unable to find ore deposits or the only blacksmith dying before training a replacement.

(Huh. Just realized how similar that felt to playing Minecraft :D)

Shadow Lodge

I like minecraft, it can be fun doing the work ups from start.

Thanks for the info.

A little info for your benefit. The refugees are about 1.5-ish million in total. The come from a score of different prime material planes with tech levels ranging from stone age to pre-gun powder renaissance. Only apprentice level training survived the passage, this includes arcane and divine knowledge. There are two dozen different races. Several of the races broke away from the main refugee group leaving about 600-ish thousand of mixed humaniods.

Still working on some of whats going on.

Sorry if the original post seemed more sci-fi in content.

The prime material plane they now find themselves on once had a couple large civilizations scattered around the planet. The highest tech was a mish-mash early 18th century steampunk and magic, the lowest was late 13th century england (of course these are just equivalent tech to use as gages). The civilizations where wiped out a god plague. The originator of the plague was destroyed but it was to late most of the gods and all the mortal creature of intelligance greater the 4.

Shadow Lodge

Of course this is just an idea I'm working on.


Very cool. Thinking about it, but your actual question seems to have been mostly covered.


Allot of the process of invention is realizing it can be done - having people that know there is a way, and even if vaguely know what that way looks like, the process of getting there is greatly shortened. You aren't waiting around for someone to decide its possible.


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Jacob Saltband wrote:


A little info for your benefit. The refugees are about 1.5-ish million in total. The come from a score of different prime material planes with tech levels ranging from stone age to pre-gun powder renaissance. Only apprentice level training survived the passage, this includes arcane and divine knowledge. There are two dozen different races. Several of the races broke away from the main refugee group leaving about 600-ish thousand of mixed humaniods.

Ouch. That's a lot of people to manage.

They'll need to spread out to ensure they have enough resources, and that's going to result in a huge lack of communications and organization. Ideally you have a group that can operate out of a central hub, but that is going to put a lot of stress on a single system so you're likely looking at a number of individual towns each trying to do their own thing.

In the center of each you're going to want storage, processing, and some kind of government. Radiating out from that will be the resource gatherers (farms, mines, etc). Ideally people will be taking carts between towns to trade the things each has trouble obtaining, either because that town doesn't have that resource or doesn't have the specialist to make it.

This, of course, assumes everyone is willing to be co-operative. With those numbers there'll inevitably be large numbers that are content to simply raid the rest for whatever they need, so defense becomes an issue too.

Given those numbers, I hope they arrived spread out across a continent. Otherwise there will likely be large losses as they'll not have enough food in the starting area to last them long enough to move outwards to new areas. The people that start moving first will likely be better off, as those stuck in the center of the exodus and thinking they can stay put while everyone else finds a place to settle are going to find the area for miles around foraged and hunted to extinction point by everyone else as they moved away. Ideally, everyone starts moving outwards in different directions ASAP, hunting and gathering as they go.

So far I haven't touched on the remnants of the previous civilization. If people can salvage anything from those, it's going to help a bit, but after 5000 years I'm not sure whether much if anything will still be usable. I'm going to assume the best they manage is using the ruins of old roads as navigable routes to help hold their new civilization together as it spreads out (although again, 5000 years... you might not even realize there was once a road there as so much vegetation has overgrown them, died, and composted itself on top). There's a chance at least that any farms from back then have resulted in zones of wild crops being concentrated where those farms used to be.

Shadow Lodge

Thanks for all the input. I've still got a lot to work out.


Jacob Saltband wrote:
Thanks for all the input. I've still got a lot to work out.

Please let us know how it all works out, I'd be interested in seeing what you come up with! :)

Shadow Lodge

I'm not very good at putting my ideas into words but I'll give it a try once I've most of it worked out.

Grand Lodge

Pathfinder PF Special Edition, Starfinder Roleplaying Game Subscriber
Jacob Saltband wrote:

Say you have a large group of refugees from various cultures and tech bases. The highest tech bases was pre-gun powder renaissance.

Then you dumped them on liveable planet with nothing, how long would it take for them to reach pre-gun powder renaissance again?

If you dumped them on a planet that had a large civilization that, for whatever reason, died out 5000 yrs before.

Lets take some paralells for comparison. The present territory known as the Eastern United States was originally settled by three main groups, the Spanish in Florida, the English Jamestown settlers, and the Puritans who were originally aiming for the Jamestown colony but the captain they hired landed several hundred miles off course and refused to take them any further.

Average mortality for them was 50 percent dead in the first year,big factors being deprivation and climate shock, and these were people who had made at least some preparation in the form of supplies they brought with them.

Dumping that kind of population on an unsettled world all at once, without even that much preparation, expect the mortality rate to be 90 percent and upwards in the first year, with many of the others surviving only by cannibalising the dead.

Shadow Lodge

I'll change a few thing. The refguees will have some supplies and some magic. I expect at least 50% mortality. I'll work something out. This is of course only back ground for the homebrew world.


You might look into a book series called The Dragon Riders of Pern. It deals with people that settle a planet and then because of "Thread Fall" then get knocked back so far they have to re learn everything. It becomes all about survival. It's a cool bunch of books when you find out that they didn't come from that planet after all.


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Another point. You mentioned that they have at least apprentice level arcane skills. Even mere cantrips can be very valuable. The ability to easily lite fires, mend equipment, maintain sanitary conditions, create lights so work can continue past daylight hours, freeze food for storage & keep it from spoiling, ect. will allow a definite jump in survivability. It would be the difference between dumped in the wilds with nothing but your clothes, and being outfitted with a modern survival pack.


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Calex wrote:
Another point. You mentioned that they have at least apprentice level arcane skills. Even mere cantrips can be very valuable. The ability to easily lite fires, mend equipment, maintain sanitary conditions, create lights so work can continue past daylight hours, freeze food for storage & keep it from spoiling, ect. will allow a definite jump in survivability. It would be the difference between dumped in the wilds with nothing but your clothes, and being outfitted with a modern survival pack.

Yeah, once you have magic involved you're looking at "civilization in a can" :) Obviously it's a bit of a numbers game because you may not have enough casters to support everyone, but it's certainly a big headstart. I can see huge benefits from Mending, in particular.


The artifacts of the previous civilizations are still existing, mostly ruined foundations and shards of glassware and pottery. Sometimes they will find usable plates and lumps of rusty metals. Lucky ones might find golden coins and jewels. Even wooden items survive in some rare places, like hidden on clay or swamp in airless condition or at wery dry desert or dungeon.

Dark Archive

Note that "golden coins and jewels" will be basically worthless until you get a proper civilization going (unless of course they can be turned into tools or weapons somehow).


Calex wrote:
Another point. You mentioned that they have at least apprentice level arcane skills. Even mere cantrips can be very valuable. The ability to easily lite fires, mend equipment, maintain sanitary conditions, create lights so work can continue past daylight hours, freeze food for storage & keep it from spoiling, ect. will allow a definite jump in survivability. It would be the difference between dumped in the wilds with nothing but your clothes, and being outfitted with a modern survival pack.

Know direction.

Create water.

**detect poison**

The Exchange

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Specialization:
Mud bricks from clay and straw.
Construct kiln and furnace
Use clay to make object molds.
Separate iron from soils using magnets
Collect iron grains.
Burn wood buried in hole to make charcoal.
Mill charcoal into carbon.
Locate sulphur.
Mix iron, carbon, sulphur in ratios to determine best mix.
Fill brick furnace with lots of wood.
Place each mix in clay molds on brick shelf in oven.
Burn wood.
Determine which mixture yields best metal results.

So steel manufacturing in a month?

Shadow Lodge

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Here are the first couples lines of the entro.

"The mass of ragged and exhausted Refugees staggered down the passage between the dimensions , fleeing what most of them only knew as "The Enemy". The Refugees are comprised of over a dozen sapient creatures from more than a score of different Prime Material planes."

Shadow Lodge

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The first draft was off some what....this is still a work in progress.

"The mass of ragged and exhausted Refugees staggered down the passage between the dimensions , fleeing what most of them only knew as "The Enemy". The Refugees were comprised of over two dozen different species of sapient creatures from more than a score of different Prime Material planes. Some 300 or so spell casters lead the Refugees down the passage, while far to the rear an large army of martial and spell caster types fought a delaying action against "The Enemy".
The Refugees were starting to feel like they had been fleeing down the passage forever, when a hold was finally called. The passage between the dimensions was forty feet high and eighty feet across. The spell casters at the head of the Refugees conversed for several minutes before separating into three groups and moving back down the passage to divide the mass of creatures roughly into three groups. Once the Refugees were divided up, two-thirds of each spell casting group started the same ritual against the nearest passage wall. As the ritual progressed runes could be seen forming an arch twenty feet high and fifty feet wide. Ten minutes into the first ritual, the remaining spell casters started a second ritual."

Shadow Lodge

Like I said before....I'm not good at putting the ideas in my head into words.

Spoiler:

The mass of ragged and exhausted Refugees staggered down the passage between the dimensions , fleeing what most of them only knew as "The Enemy". The Refugees were comprised of over two dozen different species of sapient creatures from more than a score of different Prime Material planes. Some three hundred or so spell casters lead the Refugees down the passage, while far to the rear an large army of martial and spell caster types fought a delaying action against "The Enemy".
The Refugees were starting to feel like they had been fleeing down the passage forever, when a halt was finally called. The passage between the dimensions was forty feet high and eighty feet across. The spell casters at the head of the Refugees conversed for several minutes before separating into three groups and moving back down the passage to divide the mass of creatures roughly into three groups. Once the Refugees were divided up, two-thirds of each spell casting group started the same ritual against the passage wall nearest to their Refugee group. As the ritual progressed runes could be seen forming an arch twenty feet high and fifty feet wide. Ten minutes into the first ritual, the remaining spell casters in each group started a second ritual inside the first ritual.
Nearly two hours later the rituals were completed. Upon completion of the rituals three gateways opened to a Prime Material plane and bridges of solid golden light descended the three hundred feet to the ground. The spell casters were surprised that the three gates opened to vastly different location on the Prime Material plane instead of the few hundred feet apart they were in the passageway, but there was no time to try and figure out what went wrong, so they gave the signal to start the Refugees moving down the bridges.

Now I just have to start on the survival and building parts.


:)


Pathfinder Rulebook Subscriber

I'm working on a game concept, where a civilization was galactic spanning, then ran into an enemy that bombed them back into the stone age, and dumped the survivors on a world with nothing.

In the time line, it takes around 5-6k years to get back to having a space program in one of the nations, which then quickly escalates the technology advancement from there...


Jacob Saltband wrote:

Like I said before....I'm not good at putting the ideas in my head into words.

** spoiler omitted **

Now I just have to start on the survival and building parts.

Spoiler:
Inspired by some of Feist's backstory in Magician?

I'd say you're talking generations. You're going to lose damn near everything just trying to survive those first few years. Even most farmer/hunter/gatherer types aren't going to be able to adapt too quickly to a new world with no supplies, different creatures/plants to find, unknown climate/weather patterns, unknown pests. It's likely that's going to be the only priority for years. While the tools wear out and you hope the guys who know how to work metal live long enough to be able to take time from basic survival to find ores and bootstrap a whole mining/smelting/forging process.
Magic and any survivors from long-lived races will help. As will any Refugees from stone-age cultures, since they'll have the most useful skills to help make it through the first few years and start the bootstrap process.


I'd say one first priority would be to get anyone who knows anything to record that 'how to' somewhere.


RDM42 wrote:
I'd say one first priority would be to get anyone who knows anything to record that 'how to' somewhere.

First priority, until people start getting cold and hungry.

And then they start killing each other for food and shelter.


Pathfinder Rulebook Subscriber

That's how I kind of envisioned it. The only way they had to write anything down would be via painting on cave walls with dyes...
Eventually, due to the need to survive, they'd fall into factions, and either leave to find another place to call home or fight.

Shadow Lodge

thejeff wrote:
Jacob Saltband wrote:

Like I said before....I'm not good at putting the ideas in my head into words.

** spoiler omitted **

Now I just have to start on the survival and building parts.

** spoiler omitted **

Yes.

Shadow Lodge

I'm changing the parameters a little and giving the Refugees some supplies......food and a few tools.

Grand Lodge

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Pathfinder PF Special Edition, Starfinder Roleplaying Game Subscriber

You might want to read Darkover Landfall for some insight. It did not take long for the descendants of the Terran colonists to forget virtually everything about Earth, it was simply not relevant in the struggles first to survive, than over dominance of each other. And they were a lot more equipped than your ragged mob of misfits. Once the batteries wore out and the vehicles broke down, there was no support system for maintaining a high technology. The farsighted among them knew this would happen, and expedited the rediscovery of basic survival skills primitive style.

I also think you're worrying too much about details.

The only thing you have to decide is what the setting is going to be when the game starts. You can justify any path you want to arrive at that point from an undefined past. (when civilization falls, there really isn't going to be anyone that's putting a high priority on keeping a calendar after a generation or two.)

You can pretty much justify any "present" you want to. The big advantage about large time scales is that no one is alive to call you out on details. History can be as fragmented and as unreliable as needed. It would really be hard for it to be anything else.

Shadow Lodge

I understand what your says @LazarX. I suck at putting ideas into words so I'm putting it down simi-story like to help my thoughts. The rest of the stuff I'll be doing in chunks of 100yrs of time passing to ruffly 600yrs After Arrival. The first 200yrs the humans only have the longer lived races word for what happened.

Edit: in the end the game will be Pathfinder straight out of the books...for the most part.


I'm going to take a different approach. Without magic I would say recovery is impossible. The problem is that there will be no easily mined metals--the prior civilization already used them up.

Without metal or magic it's basically impossible to reach the metal that remains.

With adequate magic I would say the recovery occurs in a few generations.


Loren Pechtel wrote:
I'm going to take a different approach. Without magic I would say recovery is impossible. The problem is that there will be no easily mined metals--the prior civilization already used them up.

How do you "use up" metals?

I suspect that the graveyards full of rusty automobiles will make some of the highest quality iron ore anyone has ever seen.

Grand Lodge

Pathfinder PF Special Edition, Starfinder Roleplaying Game Subscriber
Orfamay Quest wrote:
Loren Pechtel wrote:
I'm going to take a different approach. Without magic I would say recovery is impossible. The problem is that there will be no easily mined metals--the prior civilization already used them up.

How do you "use up" metals?

I suspect that the graveyards full of rusty automobiles will make some of the highest quality iron ore anyone has ever seen.

Metals aren't the problem... it's the fact that all of the easily extracted oil and coal HAS been extracted, and getting anything else requires high tech.

If our industrial civilization fell on this planet, that would be the Catch-22 we'd be stuck in.


LazarX wrote:
Orfamay Quest wrote:
Loren Pechtel wrote:
I'm going to take a different approach. Without magic I would say recovery is impossible. The problem is that there will be no easily mined metals--the prior civilization already used them up.

How do you "use up" metals?

I suspect that the graveyards full of rusty automobiles will make some of the highest quality iron ore anyone has ever seen.

Metals aren't the problem... it's the fact that all of the easily extracted oil and coal HAS been extracted, and getting anything else requires high tech.

If our industrial civilization fell on this planet, that would be the Catch-22 we'd be stuck in.

Only if the new society decided to use oil and coal as a power source. With it not being readily available that seems unlikely. The real necessity is electricity and there are many ways to generate that on multiple scales without coal and oil.

Also, even if fossil fuel is required; there are still a bunch of natural gas deposits readily available (read: near the surface and sufficiently compressed for easy extraction) for a low-tech society that knew about them could take advantage of.

Grand Lodge

Pathfinder PF Special Edition, Starfinder Roleplaying Game Subscriber
BigDTBone wrote:
LazarX wrote:
Orfamay Quest wrote:
Loren Pechtel wrote:
I'm going to take a different approach. Without magic I would say recovery is impossible. The problem is that there will be no easily mined metals--the prior civilization already used them up.

How do you "use up" metals?

I suspect that the graveyards full of rusty automobiles will make some of the highest quality iron ore anyone has ever seen.

Metals aren't the problem... it's the fact that all of the easily extracted oil and coal HAS been extracted, and getting anything else requires high tech.

If our industrial civilization fell on this planet, that would be the Catch-22 we'd be stuck in.

Only if the new society decided to use oil and coal as a power source. With it not being readily available that seems unlikely. The real necessity is electricity and there are many ways to generate that on multiple scales without coal and oil.

Also, even if fossil fuel is required; there are still a bunch of natural gas deposits readily available (read: near the surface and sufficiently compressed for easy extraction) for a low-tech society that knew about them could take advantage of.

You really have problems generating electricity if you're starting from scratch. Solar panels aren't things you can cobble together from stone knives and bear skins. And given that natural gas comes from the same place we get oil from, I'm a bit doubtful of that easy availability.


BigDTBone wrote:


Also, even if fossil fuel is required; there are still a bunch of natural gas deposits readily available (read: near the surface and sufficiently compressed for easy extraction) for a low-tech society that knew about them could take advantage of.

Are there? Where? If that's the case, why are they so interested in fracking at the Marcellus Shale sites?


Coal power generation is steam technology. Steam is relatively easy to harness and create by burning timber. You won't get it nearly as hot at with coal and therefore the pressure you are able to put on a turbine will be less but power could be made. There are also direct drive methods to spin turbines; human, wind, and naturally flowing water.

Also, in a rebuilding situation all of these could be used to directly generate the mechanical power needed to complete tasks without having to store, transmit, and spend electrical power.

As for natural gas, it is found above oil deposits generally. And while it make take high-tech methods to extract shale oil, the gas in the same area can be released with relative ease. Again, if someone knew where to go looking.

The real question comes down to how much metal could be salvaged from our building infrastructure and vehicle fleets. Which would be heavily dependent on how much time passed and how exposed the iron/steel you need was.


Orfamay Quest wrote:
BigDTBone wrote:


Also, even if fossil fuel is required; there are still a bunch of natural gas deposits readily available (read: near the surface and sufficiently compressed for easy extraction) for a low-tech society that knew about them could take advantage of.
Are there? Where? If that's the case, why are they so interested in fracking at the Marcellus Shale sites?

Fracking allows access to deep/dirty oil deposits, it has the side benefit of releasing the natural gas in those areas.

As for where, my backyard. I live just west of DFW and we have natural gas deposits just over 100ft deep.

Grand Lodge

Pathfinder PF Special Edition, Starfinder Roleplaying Game Subscriber
BigDTBone wrote:

The real question comes down to how much metal could be salvaged from our building infrastructure and vehicle fleets. Which would be heavily dependent on how much time passed and how exposed the iron/steel you need was.

There was a program called "After Man", I think. it traced on what would happen in the centuries after if Man disappeared or died off suddenly. What would last and what would be lost early on.

Without maintennce for instance, the bulk of Manhattan Island for example, would fall in on itself within 5 years or so. While the Statue of Liberty would not survive more than a couple of centuries, her pedestal would be good until the next Ice Age ground everything away.


LazarX wrote:
BigDTBone wrote:

The real question comes down to how much metal could be salvaged from our building infrastructure and vehicle fleets. Which would be heavily dependent on how much time passed and how exposed the iron/steel you need was.

There was a program called "After Man", I think. it traced on what would happen in the centuries after if Man disappeared or died off suddenly. What would last and what would be lost early on.

Without maintennce for instance, the bulk of Manhattan Island for example, would fall in on itself within 5 years or so. While the Statue of Liberty would not survive more than a couple of centuries, her pedestal would be good until the next Ice Age ground everything away.

Yea, copper, iron, lead and nickel are definitely the most useful metals in rebuilding a high-tech civilization and after a few hundred years of unprotected weather oxidation would ruin most of what's loose in the world. Softer and less conductive metals like brass would be helpful for somethings but eventually a sizable stockpile or deposit of those metals would have to be found to further progress.


The mineralogy and metallurgy stuff here is really fascinating, it's not something I know anywhere near enough about myself.

I've always had this interest in anything connected to getting a medieval (or even older) society to modern tech in as few steps as possible (especially where time travel or otherwise bringing members of future society into older ones is involved - think A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court), so this is really cool stuff to read :)


Pre-gunpowder Renaissance?

Well, putting that aside,

(1d1000*x)+z years

where

x=circumstantial modifier related to the challenges or ease presented by their new home (e.g. amber waves of grain vs hardscrabble hills)

and

z=flat added number of years from ~100 to ~infinity, depending on the actions of the initial settlers, whether there is great cooperation or heavy infighting, how successful they are at a few key initial challenges relating to developing basic social and economic infrastructure fast enough to make use of some of the knowledge of the first settlers.


Coriat wrote:

Pre-gunpowder Renaissance?

Well, putting that aside,

(1d1000*x)+z years

where

x=circumstantial modifier related to the challenges or ease presented by their new home (e.g. amber waves of grain vs hardscrabble hills)

and

z=flat added number of years from ~100 to ~infinity, depending on the actions of the initial settlers, whether there is great cooperation or heavy infighting, how successful they are at a few key initial challenges relating to developing basic social and economic infrastructure fast enough to make use of some of the knowledge of the first settlers.

Z is lower if there is more infighting and less cooperation, right? At least if our current society is any indication...


Another idea that occurred to me would be if the earthly population dies off due to a catastrophic climate shift. Green house effect heating the planet up (depending on how much) would likely leave huge swaths of land in Antarctica quite temperate and that continent is largely untouched by human mining/drilling. If the replanted population were placed there they would be in an area of Stone Age tech but with access to similar resources of our own stone aged ancestors.


My guess would start somewhere in the neighborhood of the three or four hundred year margin, but there is a lot of room for that number to go up astronomically. A lot depends on whether or not you are averaging in some of the longer lived races (e.g. dwarves, elves), whether you are including savage races (orcs, goblins, ect), and what kind of threats exist in the world.

Starting with, as you describe it, nothing means they lack even basic tools required for fundamental elements of society. No knives, no shelter, no weapons, and no meaningful tools. Farming is out the window and will be for the foreseeable future - decades perhaps. In those decades you have to adopt what is effectively a hunter / gatherer nomadic lifestyle just to survive, and many people are not going to survive (especially the more experienced / educated demographics). Nothing means no books, so any knowledge they have to pass on has to live on in oral history, which can be very hit and miss. At best they are leaving behind concepts and ideas for what is possible that will endure and inspire, but there is a lot of ground that has to be covered before that can happen.

You transition from hunter / gatherer you need the tools for agriculture, which will take some time to acquire. You then need a stable enough food base for the first year to sustain the beginnings of agriculture without starving to death as herds move on and you exhaust the local forage. Then you need a community working together in sufficient concert to begin and sustain agriculture, which with stone age tools is incredibly hard work. So much so that most people will be far more comfortable living out their lives in the hunter / gatherer lifestyle. I don't think people appreciate just how much effort goes into a farming lifestyle without modern industry, and what percentage of the population is concerned with doing so even when you can make it work (and you can't everywhere with that tech base).

Your best bet is that a few thinkers in longer lived races (elves, dwarves) survive through the first few generations of incredibly privation and suffering with enough vision and drive to rebuild what they lost. Without them you are more or less out of luck, and are effectively starting out from the beginning with nothing but an sketchy oral history of what came before.

And even then you are hoping that more advanced regions aren't dragged down by nomadic hunter / gatherer bands without such advantages. You might as well be starting over from nothing in my opinion. The examples of Jamestown and Roanoke, where you had colonists starting out with supplies, relatively advanced technology, and a degree of support plus internal structures of power plus shared language, history, and culture and still see what is failure by any other name should paint how difficult it is at a fundamental level.

That's my thought though.

Edit I see that Thejeff and I thought along similar lines here. Matt, I think you are severely underestimating the difficulty in simply acquiring food, and the idea that you could immediately start farming strikes me as impossible. You lack seed, don't have tilled land, don't have domesticated animals to do so, don't have plows, don't even have basic farming tools like hoes or picks, ect.

The problem with starting at the bottom is that it takes an awful lot of energy just to survive until you get some advances online, and getting those advances online requires that you invest a lot of time. There is a catch-22. One could argue one reason we saw so many advances in such a short time was in many ways because humanity got better at extracting food by orders of magnitude and freed up tremendous resources for other purposes. Constant warfare also helped a bit in some fields.

Grand Lodge

Pathfinder PF Special Edition, Starfinder Roleplaying Game Subscriber
BigDTBone wrote:
Another idea that occurred to me would be if the earthly population dies off due to a catastrophic climate shift. Green house effect heating the planet up (depending on how much) would likely leave huge swaths of land in Antarctica quite temperate and that continent is largely untouched by human mining/drilling. If the replanted population were placed there they would be in an area of Stone Age tech but with access to similar resources of our own stone aged ancestors.

Antarctia, however isn't quite as blessed as North America, nor the Middle East. There's not a ton of resources there waiting for a warm spell. Otherwise the international treaty that put the continent off-limits to exploitation, would have been challenged by the world powers at be, including the U.S. which would have been more aggressive in carving out a slice for itself.

If Humanity were to die off, what would happen is that the Earth would reach a new geostasis as Mankind's additions to the CO2 level would stop and eventually it would be cycled out. A few centuries would pretty much erase all of Man's influence on the atmosphere.

Our plastic and chemical legacy on the other hand, not to mention our nuclear waste, would take far longer to cycle through.

Not that you would find usable plastic bottles in the 30th century, however it would break down to a fine material that would persist in the environment for a long time to come.

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