re: We’re no smarter than people centuries ago. Watch a castle built using 13th century tech

quote:

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Woodworkers and masons today may use tools powered by different means and have far more speed and power behind them, but if you look, they are still using the same basic tools and techniques as craftsmen 1000 years ago.

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I think that’s mostly true but I also think there are likely a fair number of techniques that are obsolete (or at least really niche) today due to modern tools and materials. There are certainly construction methods used today that would be impossible without modern tools/materials as well.

I think the proposed scenario was basically taking the same project but allowing them to use whatever tools/materials they wanted as long as they started with medieval tools. What I’m really imagining is a step further - what if you took a representative sample of modern people, sufficiently large to cover a wide range of skills/backgrounds, and dropped them on an “Earth” with no developed infrastructure, technology, etc.? The caveat is that they have access to the internet (somehow - don’t ask me how that work ).

So basically they have to rebuild civilization from the ground up with all of our current human knowledge available, but no tools or infrastructure.

I think some of the things you would find include:

1. There are craftsmen with the skill to build things without modern tools, but not nearly as many of them (proportionally) as there would have been in the Middle Ages.

2. A huge portion of the population would effectively be resigned to manual labor, at least for the first generation, because they have no skills that directly translate to that environment.

3. It would take many generations to reach anything resembling modern first-world civilization. This is because even with the benefit of today’s knowledge base, you would still need to match the sheer economic output. This means you need bodies, so part of it depends on the size of your starting population. But you also need infrastructure, which takes a long time to build up. You need mines before you can build steel mills. You need steel mills before you can build chemical plants. You need chemical plants before you can build tons of other stuff. And your per capita economic output (productivity) is extremely low to start, increasing as you get each piece of the supply chain in place.

I don’t know, I got off on a tangent I guess. I just think it’s an interesting concept. I also didn’t realize this was a 6 month old thread but c’est la vie.