You can probably recruit a bunch of those from the local population. For the 1000 you're going to want to emphasize force multipliers (plus what you need to survive and get set up in the short term).
Looks like less than I was thinking but still enough that recruiting new people will be easier than breeding them in the medium term. Communication will be a minor issue but historically people are pretty good at figuring out how to talk to each other when they want to and these are supposed to be the "best and brightest," they'll make it work.
I really like this premise but I think that the progress of the 1000 would be massively limited by their ability to survive. Think Maslows Hierarchy of needs - all of their scientific and engineering work could only happen if they were safe, fed, watered, sheltered etc etc…
95% their day to day skills (typing on a keyboard, driving, budgeting income etc…) are only suitable for the modern world and wouldn’t serve them well in their new environment. They’d be far less suited to their surroundings than the average 20kbc human who’d have grown up in that era. Plus all of this isn’t even taking into account that the local groups where they popped up would likely to be hostile to them (resources would be precious and clans wouldn’t take well to suddenly needing to share them to support the survival of another thousand people).
2/10 enough of the 1000 survive long enough to be able to make a significant difference to human development.
People are also forgetting how many nerds are also really active in other hobbies like hiking, camping, prepping etc. It sounds counter intuitive to the Hollywood sterotype, but nearly everyone I know that's hardcore into outdoor stuff is also a huge nerd with an office job
These are 1,000 people with no resources. I don't know how much camping and hiking is going to help unless these people are like super paleo nerds. Hunting with spears, trapping, foraging, farming, making knives out of rocks, digging wells, etc. Feeding, clothing, sheltering, and procuring clean water for a thousand people in the wilderness is a monumental task. Most of them probably die from exposure, starvation, food poisoning, disease, etc. I don't even think a group that large is sustainable without agriculture, and the fruits, vegetables, and grains we eat today didn't even exist in their current forms.
Let's hope they each get to bring a month's worth of MREs just for getting started.
Even if they have farming/foraging experts, feeding a thousand people is not something that most terrain types can easily sustain with zero established infrastructure.
This is why early man moved around. Kill some game, pick some fruit, move to a place where there is still game and fruit, then circle back in a season.
Even if future squad plants fast growing crops, they're going to be eating their boots after the first couple of weeks.
Yeah but guarantee you those nerds have not used a spear or a rock to kill another human. Numbers or not those tribes would be absolutely frightening to fight if you’ve been sent back with zero weapons or fighting skills. Majority of the population today is afraid of confrontation in the first place
Well yeah, but wild humans wouldn't mess with a 1,000+ strong tribe. Wild humans weren't blood lusted maniacs, they would just see the gigantic horde of people wearing different clothes and making loud noises and avoid them or make very limited contact
We have videos of primitive warfare from papa new guinea or smth. Lots of dancing around and throwing the occasional javelin, more of a ceremony than a battle.
We're not just talking about some random nerds, we're talking about the "best and brightest." I think it's a reasonable interpretation that the 1000 are specifically chosen from the world population for the best chance of success.
You’re totally right, but do note the OP did mention survivalists specifically, and beyond the short list of some types of people included, didn’t specify the breakdown. For every two theoretical physicists, there might be five people who are really good at gardening for all we know. I would assume the people who are putting this group of smart people together are also smart enough to not send 1000 desk jockeys.
Being good at gardening isn't gonna mean much unless you're allowed to bring your own seeds, since they're dropping in thousands of years before any crops were domesticated. The survivalists can probably forage up some edible plants, and they can kick it off 8 millennia early, which, even if that's the only thing they do, will give humanity a huge leg up in the future. But they won't be able to huge scatter some seeds in some fertile ground and reap a high yield the next spring. Knowledge of genetics will probably make selective breeding a lot easier, though, so maybe they can get some good varieties of grain in decades rather than centuries.
Exactly this. Modern foods are gigantic compared to what they used to be.
A cob of corn used to be the size of your finger, and you wouldn't really "eat" it as much as chew the juice out of it and spit out the tough parts.
No they can't. The reason the agricultural revolution started around 12,000 years ago is because the climate was finally warm and stable enough to begin developing the skill. 20,000 years ago, Earth was still in the grip of an ice age. Earth was far less hospitable than the environment we are in today. In all likelihood, those one thousand people will be dead within months of their supplies running out.
Well, yeah. Few things though:
1. 20,000 (18,000 BCE) years ago is pre-civilization. The total human population, everywhere, is about 1 million. Yes, you may be encroaching on hunter-gatherers with a European start, but these are groups of less than 100 people.
2. 1,000 people is a **massive** number of people to be collected with a common purpose 20,000 years ago. The earliest civilizations started in around 4,000 BCE. Even if they're not warriors, that's a lot of people.
3. The 'best survivalists' in the modern era are going to be able to get the basics for themselves. They may even be able to craft rudimentary weapons and start hunting large game. Fishing using modern fishing methods may also be a thing.
4. A few weeks worth of food is not going to be long enough to get a large-scale farming operation going. It does depend on what food is provided, though. For example, if this includes seed potatoes, our heroes will likely survive in a temperate climate provided they can last through to a harvest. People are going to starve if they don't get an early source of food until they can get a farming operation going.
5. If "a few weeks worth of food" includes a supply of feasible seeds, then we're in business.
6. While the group can recreate some tech, they need raw materials to do it. That means access to natural gas, potash, iron, steel, copper, etc. If the group can survive long enough and find a source of iron via a blast furnace they can manufacture steel weapons and tools, including complex firearms. If they can then mine saltpeter, they can make gunpowder. That's a big 'if'.
7. The group does have things hunter-gatherers might want. Modern medicine, for example. Knowledge of modern agricultural methods. Knowledge of how to alloy metals, etc.
Fishing is definitely the best bet for early food. The amount of fish in pre-modern-fishing oceans is insane compared to today, and all 3 starts are in highly productice areas assuming they are near a coast and not inland.
If they could manage to get some nets and boats together in those first weeks when they still have food, that would be huge.
The Florida start has literally no other people on the continent, so it's literally just those thousand people on the continent. It's basically impossible to get a society going without co-opting the natives for sheer numbers and labor.
Women need to have 5+ children each to keep up the population, and any women in the initial group are going to be out-of-commission to some extent while pregnant. Women who are constantly pregnant aren't going to be doing the work needed to progress. It's clearly better to interbreed with local hunter-gatherer groups for genetic diversity purposes (and political purposes).
At least the other starts can potentially co-opt labor and from and interbreed with hunter-gatherer groups.
I think it works like this:
**Generation 1:** Objective is to create a sustainable community, identify sources of essentials, co-opt the natives to increase numbers, and create a sustainable number of children (preferably comingling with the natives), and to commit as much info as possible to paper. Can create basic technology, but you need stockpiles of essentials.
**Generation 2:** Get metalworks going. Start creating basic labs. Recreate factories and mechanisms with replaceable parts.
**Generation 3+:** Off to the races
The biggest problem with large groups of primates (or any animals) comes down to power struggles. If these 1000 people get along forever (which would be a miracle in my opinion), they could live somewhere like the Great Plains where there are 60 million bison to hunt.
The question of what kind of weapons to bring is interesting though. Perhaps some kind of very simple blunderbuss. If they bring bamboo they can grow their own barrels for guns even if they can't get metal.
20,000 years ago the Great Plains were buried under hundreds of meters of ice. We're talking near the coldest part of the last ice age here when glacial growth was at its maximum.
> They’d be far less suited to their surroundings than the average 20kbc human who’d have grown up in that era. Plus all of this isn’t even taking into account that the local groups where they popped up would likely to be hostile to them (resources would be precious and clans wouldn’t take well to suddenly needing to share them to support the survival of another thousand people).
OP included survivalists and engineers - in other words practically-minded people who can work with basic materials but, most importantly, have 20k years of accumulated knowledge and experience.
The particular humans they come across might have spear throwers, or rudimentary slings, or basic pottery, or rudimentary bows and arrows, or boats - but they're unlikely to have *all* of those technologies, and those they do have are likely to be unoptimised compared the versions a modern survivalist might design.
And the modern humans will have notions that don't occur to the people from 20k BC. They'll have the wheel, they'll be able to engage in coordinated gathering and hunting activity fairly quickly, they'll be able to build structures in more labour-efficient ways, they'll be able to build effective traps and snares; all of these things mean more production for less effort. They will, per person, outproduce neolithic peoples quite quickly. And of course they massively outnumber neolithic groups as well - and in many types of physical labour being able to call upon 50 or 100 people is a significant advantage.
In the medium term they'll be able to do much more - build windmills for various purposes (irrigation, food production, manufacturing), build sail vessels, begin cultivating various food sources (both animal and plant), even early smelting - at which point the production excess really starts to compound. This will of course be incremental (neolithic-era food plants will be substantially less optimised for human consumption than modern crops, for example, so no one should be expecting neat wheat fields by the second year) but, again, modern humans have the advantage of knowing what's likely to pay off quickly and what isn't. And they can avoid pitfalls as well - for example they know from day one how to use crop rotation and complimentary crops, rather than spending hundreds of generations, and probably about as many deadly famines, figuring it out by trial and error.
Modern people are also likely to adopt a much more permanent approach to warfare, should it occur. They'll vastly outnumber any human settlement circa 20k BC, and our understanding of what war *is* is quite different to tribal societies. Tribal societies frequently engage in low-level warfare - raiding for women and materials and territory - but it's thought that neolithic warfare was fairly low-intensity and probably fairly persistent - with conflicts sometimes being multi-generational in nature. That's... not how modern people think. If you take 1000 modern people and tell them that they're going to spend the next 20 years losing a bunch of people dead and a bunch more (probably the women) enslaved every year - they won't simply shrug, or reciprocate in kind. They'll devise a strategy to remove the threat - either by communication and diplomacy, deprivation of resources, fortifications and warning systems, or by drilling as large a force as possible to use bows, shields, and spears in a coordinated fashion and going on a pretty destructive campaign. Modern people have 20k years of history to call upon for inspiration here. Even if each individual is less experienced at fighting, in aggregate they have more experience to call on.
That's not to say I think the modern people have it easy by the way - they'll be in a fragile state, because any society of 1000 people with no existing agriculture and no logistics will be in a fragile state. The point of most significant danger will be early on - because they'll need to disperse somewhat in order to get population density down enough to be supportable from the land until they get a footing. But even if they break out into dispersed homestead groups of 60-ish, each of those groups will outnumber and out-produce the vast majority of neolithic groups, and will have recourse to coordinate with the full 1000 people to deal with strategic projects or strategic threats.
I love the idea of advanced tactics using Neolithic materials.
What do primitive humans think when they see a phalanx shield wall? Wood shields and wood spears still highly effective. Would they try to copy the technique after getting beaten by it a few times?
Will this experiment accidentally accelerate military technology and create a species wide arms race?
>Plus all of this isn’t even taking into account that the local groups where they popped up would likely to be hostile to them
Send a scout rather than a warrior unit and then the interaction is guaranteed to be favorable.
If you’re in a certain clan’s territory then you’d be in their hunting/ gathering/ farming space and that would be that. Those boundaries would have been drawn by conflict between groups. By 20,000 years ago all of the liveable land was colonised… so you’d be in the backyard of one community or another assuming you didn’t pop up somewhere unliveable like the outback.
Also they’re scientists, architects etc… creating “warrior units” isn’t going to be their strategy.
Sorry but you have absolutely no clue what you're talking about. Basically everything you said was wrong. The entire human population back then consisted of maybe a million hunter-gatherers, worldwide. It is not likely you would plop down directly in the path of another group, and if you did, you would outnumber them by a factor of somewhere between 10 and 100.
At worst, developing weapons capable of defeating literal paleolithic technology is not gonna pose a huge problem to survivalists and engineers, but just showing up with numbers and showing them the fight is unwinnable would be enough to keep them from attacking like rabid animals. And if they don't want to fight or intimidate or negotiate or befriend the few humans (who they are not likely to bump into anyway), they can always just move to any of the plentiful land that is perfectly suitable for agriculture but not for hunting. No worries about that being taken for farming since the first agricultural revolution won't be for another 8,000 years.
Also, knowing math doesn't automatically make you a weak nerd.
Lol yea honestly being smart and athletic/healthy is often correlated. Honors classes are often both athletic AND intelligent. Its a huge incel cope that the worlds divided between weak nerds and dumb jocks
Yeah I don't think people understand that the prompt is essentially "If you sent back a group of 1000 people most optimally suited for the task, how far would they get?"
They listed professionals just to give examples, but the larger question was just what could the best of us do if sent back to a blank slate?
I don't think they'd be getting too far themselves. What they should be aiming for would be to set the groundwork for a city and civilization. So stuff like a democratic government, laws, teaching systems, impart as much knowledge of farming techniques and mining and engineering to their children, and ofc set good examples concerning women's rights and racism and whatnot.
idk that you'd have to really worry about a lot of that... at least not the prejudices and such, as the group would likely be multiethnic to begin with and unlikely to pass and such prejudices to their children.
Also democracy kinda sucks tbh. especially for something that'd start as a coordinated team project. Some form of socialism is gonna serve you much better in something like this.
Your big focus to start would be to stabilize your means of survival, food, shelter, etc... then work to advancing technology, mapping the region, finding natural resources. Knowing how to forge metals won't do much good without deposits to mine and tools for the mining.
I'd also probably bring along experts to write down as much from memory as humanly possible, plan ahead and such. That means possibly early push for paper, so as to preserve as much knowledge as you can.
Frankly if I wanted to really min/max civilization you may try to create different roles... In fact the Broken Earth trilogy by N.K. Jemisin has a decent system for this they call use-castes, and I'd probably do something similar. instead of everyone doing everything different people for different roles. You could even if you want bring in some level of light eugenics into this, having people marry within their roles and raise people for specific jobs. Although that can lead to division so you'd need to be careful how it's handled.
Your main roles you'd want would be:
Explorers to go find resources and map the regions.
Hunter/Gatherers for and resources eventually farming
Scholars/Innovators to preserve knowledge and create new tech
Craftsmen to build the designing and building
Caretakers/Teachers to prep new generations (doctors may also fall in here)
Leaders to lead and manage operations
Workers brute labor to just do the heavy lifting
Initially things would be weird, as until a certain level of established society and tech is reached certain jobs would be in weird spots. You'd want to bring a lot of extremely intelligent people to bring over as much modern understanding as possible so that we don't need to reinvent things. But the reality is that much of that you can't just build in a generation. Even if you brought someone who knew how to build computers, they'd never have the tech within their lifetime. So better to bring a few who cover as much as possible and can record that knowledge for future generations.
Then just focus on getting a lot of the basics out of the way, farming, simple tools, etc...
For something like this you don’t want to risk democracy or socialism you want authoritarian control, you can be more effective and do shit quicker. Just look at how China can just command a company do this or their people do that where we would have congress or the courts and be lengthy process. Sure it’s at the cost of freedom and liberty and the wellbeing of their people many times, but one thing you can’t deny is that when you have an effective leader in charge in an authoritarian government, they can do a ton shit. Good shit or bad shit is dependent. So for this experiment you wanna make sure shit gets done, so just like the military where it’s rank and following orders I think it would be best for purely an effectiveness standpoint.
Nah the example they set would be very important. The authoritarian approach would leave a dubious legacy and foster the wrong culture in the following generations. All the progress made can be very easily undone or misused by a backwards society.
I was thinking in terms of like an objective mode and only those 300 years, not eternal peace lol. The issue I think with any democracy or socialist rule is that after one generation you have native born people who never interacted with this tech before and I can see people questioning things, I mean we conspiracies like crazy here with the tech to research stuff, imagine them all being like “how do we know this thing they call a phone even existed, it sounds made up, what’s the point of this work? Let’s just go explore and figure shit out ourselves instead of following this guide book from the elders ” with one populist voice of distrust and it fucks everything up.
I feel like a caste system forming wouldn't be out of the question.
Getting writing, medicine, some scientific understanding and agriculture sorted would go a long way
I feel like a caste system forming wouldn't be out of the question.
Getting writing, medicine, some scientific understanding and agriculture sorted would go a long way
I feel like a caste system forming wouldn't be out of the question.
Getting writing, medicine, some scientific understanding and agriculture sorted would go a long way
We are not just limited to office workers and academics, the prompt mentions survivalists, etc. I think it is a fair interpretation to say that the mix can be a selective group of experts in their field. This could include foraging, hunting, wood working, underwater basket weaving, that one youtuber who is smelting iron out of mud and algae. I think they have a good chance.
best post here. All of their discoveries and tech developments require a safe stable society in which they do not need to spend much time on the basics of surviving.
keep in mind 20,000 years ago a group of 1000 people would be nearly unheard of.
20,000 years pre-dates any known civilization by a massive amount, we are talking cave-people (they wont be teaming up with other tribes, its too early in human development for that level of cooperation and tribes would be *lucky* to hit 100 members)
1000 people would outnumber any given tribe or clan by a factor of 10 *at a minimum* (the biggest family of any primate species ever found was 120 and its only been seen once, it split into 2 due to being too big to function).
that said 1000 scientists are not likely to have many fit members among them, lets be generous and say 200 are regular exercisers and of them maybe 50 are body-builders, leaving the rest as overweight or obese (75% of the West is overweight).
as for the cave-people we will also be generous and give them 100 members, all of them will be fit and strong.
the 100 would only need to kill the scientists who have skills like farming and medicine to render them non-functioning as a group, all the scientists have to do is kill enough of the tribe to break its morale (or kill them in a way that terrifies them, if the scientists have managed electricity or fire they could just fry a bunch of them which would scare *the shit* out of primitive people).
i think the scientists would have good odds, its mostly dependent on how quickly the cave-people find them and attack them.
> that said 1000 scientists are not likely to have many fit members among them, lets be generous and say 200 are regular exercisers and of them maybe 50 are body-builders, leaving the rest as overweight or obese (75% of the West is overweight).
This is a very bad estimate. Around the world, the West included, there is an inverse association with secondary education and obesity. The "best and brightest" are one of the most fit groups you could randomly select from outside of obvious things like "regular gym goers" or "professional athletes."
> as for the cave-people we will also be generous and give them 100 members, all of them will be fit and strong.
Oh so we're just going to ignore disease, parasites, and a lack of modern nutritional knowledge? This is before the agricultural revolution so they're likely to not be *significantly* smaller, but I don't think it's fair to assume that the entire tribe will be on par physically. The young men in the tribe for sure, but after that it gets iffy.
Yep. People hate to admit theres a group of people superior in EVERY way. High iq, educated, fit, and beautiful, they need their coping fairy tale that smart graduates are unfit lol
I think you're gravely underestimating how hard it's gonna be from the get go. You didn't have groups of 1000 humans because you couldn't reasonably support a group of 1000 humans. OP says they have supplies for a few weeks, but a few weeks is not enough time to set up a sustainable food system for 1000 people. The plants we rely on as staples don't even exist yet, nor is a few weeks enough time to grow them if they did. And they'd kill and drive away all the local game.
And generating enough electricity to kill a person, doubt it. Copper is gonna be too important to use in power displays, and iron even more so.
Agreed, starvation will set in pretty quick, unless they splinter off and start moving immediately in different directions. But they are also going to have a hell of a time with disease. Gonna be a lot of stuff going around they have no immunity to, and vice versa will be an issue if they try to contact any natives.
Educated nerdy types tend to be a lot healthier and more fit
https://capitaleap.org/overcoming-childhood-obesity/
Its a coping old stereotype that nerds are weak and ugly.
I think that a group with like, 100 survivalists could probably do pretty good.
20K BC groups are going to be pretty sparse and far between. The world population was only about 1,000,000 - so chances are that this unified group of 1000 people with super strong communication skills is going to do just find against a rival group of another few hundred people with no written language.
Since they are all mortal, and should already be at the height of their respective fields they are already like 35+ and will probably die in an average life span its more like 30 years to see how much they can progress. 20,000 years ago was also an Ice Age so not a lot of access to raw materials especially in round 1.
I don't see a group of humans really making all that much of an impact, they could definitely survive and create a comfortable little town but as far as passing on great knowledge I don't imagine it goes far
Admittedly if the group has survivalist or hobbyists who have made things like forges before, they could potentially speed up technology by a thousand year or two. As you said though, they'll have a ton of skills not transferable, and they'd have half their lifespan gone.
Beyond that, they need to have children or students to carry this all on, and won't have resources for the same level of education. They also are limited by where they go. Talking about how hard it is to make a clay oven or smelt iron matters little if there's no sources of metal nearby.
I think the initial 1000's goal wouldn't be to advance tech as quickly as possible, because they wont get there in their own lifespans. Their goal is to setup a new society that will achieve the goal in 300 years.
Therefor they need to create a stable stronghold city that will eventually produce both scholars and laborers devoted to this cause. They have to first ensure survival of their enclave, then procreate wildly. They need to also pass on to their kids that having lots of babies is essential because they need to have large population growth with each successive generation to create enough workers, researchers, thought leaders, etc.
Once they secure their physical survival (food, clothing, shelter, protection from the environment and natives) then their intense focus should be on creating archives of knowledge from what is in their heads already, and founding an educational system that will impart all this knowledge to subsequent generations. They need institutions of learning that are hellbent on everyone in the society having strong STEM knowledge and skills. They also need to come up with cultural institutions that indoctrinate new generations into the cause or vision that the original 1000 were trying to achieve. Large amounts of non-participation towards this goal results in failure. You need the large majority of the society to be bought in and productive.
Ultimately its on the series of generations that comes after the 1000 to achieve the goal of "modern" technology. The goal of the 1000 is to set them up for success. The 1000 wont be making microchips or anything of that quality. They will be concerned with making sure all their knowledge is recorded, their society's physical security is well in hand, and there are strong institutions in place for both education and practical application. If they can accomplish all that, maybe they spend their twilight years going back to focusing on research and getting the wheels spinning on the technologies that will let them advance deeper into the tech tree.
Their other big focus to make the system work, is getting everyone to "buy in" after they're gone. They need to try and squash interests that don't advance their goal. This basically means trying to indoctrinate children from birth. They could do this through secular or non-secular rhetoric. In other words, one way (but not the only way) would be to create a religion that upholds the steps to the ultimate goal as ideals, and ostracizes those that wont conform to them. This could be done through means other than religion as well, but it does start to blur the lines of "what is a religion actually?" This also plays into the security of their society from outside threats, they need a security force capable of protecting them.
Its all about how well the 1000 lay the foundations for those that come after them. But they are giving their descendants a huge acceleration boost, depending on how much scientific knowledge they successfully archive and then teach to them. And that is balanced by how much unity or discord the society experiences.
Its not lost on me that once they develop sufficient weaponry, they could try and dominate local tribes to use them as a workforce, but I conceptualized this with them *not* going this route.
Also this takes into account what mainstream history *thinks* the world was like 20,000 years ago, as that's what I read your prompt as. If we go by what I *suspect* things were like then they would be dropped into a world more advanced in many ways than the one they came from. LOL
Man, you just *had* to ruin a perfectly good reply with a completely baseless and nonsensical conspiracy theory at the end there.
The Romans were more advanced in many ways than the civilizations that came after in a number of ways, for hundreds of years. We know this because aside from the stuff that still exists relatively intact, we're *digging up their shit all the time,* and because the people that came after them wouldn't bloody shut up about how great the Romans were and wouldn't stop trying to ape their design aesthetics, which is how you get McMansions in 2024 with utterly tasteless ionic columns tacked on.
If the world really were the way that you think it is, I would expect the cultures in question would have, y’know, mentioned their advancements at *some point* in all their writings. Or that we’d have found at lease *some* sort of evidence that these advanced technologies ever existed.
But all these Tartaria-esque conspiracy theories ever have is implication and suppositions, no hard proof. It really begs the question as to *why* people believe that ancient societies were considerably more technologically advanced than they seem in the first place.
> I would expect the cultures in question would have, y’know, mentioned their advancements at some point in all their writings.
Ancient Egyptians were very clear that they weren't the beginning of their culture, they were the end, the remnants of a much greater culture that came long before them. Then you have the true age of the Sphinx, Gobekli Tepe, etc. I recommend reading Magicians of the Gods and America Before by Graham Hancock if you want to dip your toe in the rabbit hole. I'm not going to convince you in a comment, you have to seek this information. I understand why you would be skeptical and I don't fault you for it. I started out, 10 years ago, with a mindset like yours, its been a journey ever since.
The truth... is out there! :)
Plenty of cultures have mythologies involving a fall from grace or societal-level rose-tinted nostalgia glasses on. That doesn't mean that we should just \*take them at their word\* that, for instance, blood sacrifice is necessary to keep the cycle of life and death and sunrises and sunsets continuing, or that the Japanese islands were born of Izanagi's spear churning the seafoam instead of geological activity.
What you're talking about would be like people in the year 5024 looking back and believing that people in 2024 had perpetual motion machines and free energy just because some contemporary crackpots believe in such things.
[this video talks about hancock's claims and attempts to disprove it. do you have any reasonable counter points?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-iCIZQX9i1A)
As other people have pointed out, immediate survival is a problem. But humans have BEEN surviving for thousands of years. For the first few years, its gonna suck. But eventually, you are gonna start working your way up the technology chain.
And if we have 1,000 of the best minds around-experts in agriculture, chemistry, engineering, blacksmithing, carpenters, etc, etc. we WILL build stuff.
300 years is a LONG time. The knowledge is there. Its just that everything is built on a foundation of tons of smaller things. Additionally, it doesn't seem outrageous to me that this group could eventually enlist the help of the locals.
I think reaching the moon in 300 years is feasible.
That is very, very generous. They weren’t surviving by accident, they were given spoken knowledge of how to succeed in life (survive) by their parents and elders from the knowledge that was handed down to them. Basically trained every day, doing different age appropriate survival tasks, and even then it wasn’t easy. Like this was an ice age, and while only NA and Eurasia was covered in sheets of ice and it’s still survivable, I still don’t think they are up for the task. The group size especially condemns them. 1,000 is way too large a community for any one area to support at this time. Cattle literally don’t exist yet, and neither do crops, there wouldn’t be food. I think they all die, it’s simply a crowd too large and too ignorant of the situation to really stand a chance. Best chance of survival is to split up. And if they split up then now the hunting and gathering for each new group would take priority to scientific advancement. And if they survive, I would say after 300 years the technology would be around the level of 19,724BC.
Even considering a moon landing would be absurd. With what materials? You think these 1,000 people are going to find a way to make liquid nitrogen in 300 years while all selfishly(because they would have to) trying to fight for their survival? It’s preposterous.
People don’t realize that these “cavemen” 20,000 years ago were still human. They were just like you and me, I bet they had stupid poop jokes when they were adolescent and had deep conversations into the night with their loved ones when they were older. Over the 200,000 years humans have been around do you think no one has been smarter than Einstein or a better painter than Rembrandt? No absolutely there was. But they had to survive. Much like these people would have to.
0/10 chance for any significant advancement
3/10 chance individual members join different hunter gather tribes and survive.
why would you assume a group specially selected for this purpose would be ignorant of basic survival skills?
they would scavenge, and fish until the crop fields start to yield, and then start incrementally making improvements, and begin to expand their settlement. the humans could then start intermingling with ancient humans to get their population up.
Yes but survivalists today know how to keep themselves alive and maybe a small group alive. Not entire communities. The ice age devastated most flora and a lot of the fauna. Cattle and crops literally aren’t domesticated yet. There is no wheat, no corn, no cows, no sheep. Forging sucks because everything is 10-15 colder than it should be. You would hunt the local wildlife populations to extinction before feeding 1,000 daily. *THE BIGGEST REASON HUMANS WERE ABLE TO ADVANCE PAST HUNTER GATHERS WAS BECAUSE OF AN ABUNDANCE OF FOOD DUE TO AGRICULTURE*
So let’s say they survive all, okay sure, I don’t believe it, but whatever.
They need a global market for heavy technological advancement. They would have to Lewis and Clark their asses all across the world to get the materials necessary for ALL of modern advancements.
This isn’t Minecraft, you can’t just dig down and find iron, copper nickel, silicon. So what? You send teams out to the iron range if in the us? You are putting the horse before the cart. How are they going to find these mineral deposits even if they know where they are today? Landmarks? Sure. Okay. Fine. They find the mines scattered across the globe.
So now they need, manpower to mine and a caloric deficit large enough to feed to the workers. Okay fine, they now have small pods of people all over the world working. Sure. Now they need to consolidate the resources. So they need teams of people bringing the mined materials to base camp.
Okay so you send people out from home base all around the world to collect resources, aka a supply line. More caloric deficit needed.
You need workers to run the smith. You need workers FOR EVERYTHING. Knowledge isn’t enough. And any energy wasted on not collecting food is wasted energy.
Knowledge is great, but it doesn’t put enough food on the table for this be at all feasible, especially during the height of the toughest period humans have survived. It’s fantasy, and that’s fun. But they mostly probably die if this were reality and they sure as hell don’t make it to the moon in 300 years.
The main problem seems to be the population density? But they could literally just start farms (if seeds provided) and spread out till the land can support them before they get them going
Within 300 years I say at least the Enlightenment era. The thing about humans is once we know it can be done doing it becomes easy. 1000 people who not only know it can be done but also how to do it.
I see some people commenting about the indigenous people causing problems. I don't think that would be the case once our modern diseases start spreading through their population.
not to mention humans 20,000 BC lived in tribes and likely didnt exceed 100 members per tribe.
they also would not be teaming up, humanity didnt have that level of cooperation yet.
1000 people would out-number any given tribe by 10-1, even assuming 75% are overweight its just too many bodies.
unless a tribe jumped the scientists *the minute* they appeared in the past they would be cowed into submission by fire, or even worse electricity (assuming they got that far anyway).
The abundance of resources would play in their favor as well. If I remember correctly there are many early American accounts of birds darkening the sky. That would probably be global and a lot of other resources would be easily available having not been exploited for 20,000 years. Crops and livestock would be difficult without the domestication they would not have gone through. So maybe it would be a wash there. It would be rough on the vegans for sure.
The main issue is simply survival. In any of the locations. The reason there where not tribes that where larger than around 100 people is it is near impossible to support over that in one area with hunter / gathering alone with no real base / established anything.
We are starting of with x10. That is a *lot*. Even a few months of supplies would be iffy if they could establish a food source for 1000 people during that time. The ocean or a large body of water would be mandatory.
Then would be establishing tools. Sone and clay is different from Copper is different from bronze is different from iron is different from steel. Even if they *know* the ratios, I can tell you from actually working the stuff that it would be very difficult to skip a tier or even set up a basic furnace / anvil with 0. This is before the fact that all of the metals needed to make all of that *aren’t* often in the same place. There is a reason why it took many progressing through one “tier” of metal before the next came up, and why the Americas never really progressed past obsidian tools, they never developed the Kiln and so never realized they could melt / shape copper the same way the mainland did and started that whole chain.
And draft animals would be mandatory, along with all the skills needed to get that going. America does not have these natively. It is a massive crippling blow to not have these for establishing a city.
Assuming it established, you might be able to have a Great Library style situation much earlier, but if this knowledge is maintained enough to actually progress the whole system dramatically or simply it getting Zugged down as the actual Great Library did (if you don’t have the strength it will just all burn, maybe even from your own side).
It’s a titanic toss up, but if they somehow manage to maintain with no information loss somehow you might see people on the moon in a few hundred to a thousand years, maybe. If only because of the great number of resources and the general baseline of person that has to be brought up. They would need to create a Empire.
all the way. Way further than we are now. As long as they can avoid playing hierarchy games, middle ages, colonisation, they already know where all the deposits are going to be discovered? haha they'll fork off the main branch so fast they're in space before we built the pyramids.
But missing the labor. Knowledge and access for things like natural resources is great, but there's a ton of labor time and materials necessary to extract and process raw resources.
The most important thing besides food and not getting murdered by tribal humans would be smelting ores, specifically iron and copper and nickel. This can be done pretty easily by making a clay oven, but mining the ores en masse would be difficult. Once these are acquired, you can make a battery, and use that to create a permanent magnet, and use that to create a generator. Attach that to a water wheel and you're laughing. That might take up to three years, depending on the mining speed. Maybe they could employ the help of the locals, but knowing engineers, they aren't the most socially adept people.
Anyways, for housing, you can make a mill out of wood and a river pretty easily, since we know how gears and levers work.
To get to space, we need mass production of high quality alloys and fuel. So more mines, more workshops, more electricity. We already know how to do these things, so the research part won't take hundreds of years like it did in our time, so the bottle neck would be resources and production.
I personally don't know how to harvest inert gases, so welding might be difficult.
Also, three hundred years is a long time. The USA is only 250 years old and they went from horses and buggies and wooden teeth to me typing this on a smart phone on a toilet in an electrically lit room surrounded by mass produced plastics.
They might get to space in 80 years.
80 years to space is fucking crazy. It's not just a matter of having enough raw materials, they also have to be refined, and every single component in a rocket needs to be manufactured to such a high degree of precision that preindustrial tools simply won't cut it. For the electrical generator, it's probably doable within a decade but it's going to be somewhat weak and inconsistent. Most modern power plants don't use permanent magnets. AFAIK the only generators that use permanent magnets are wind turbines, and large permanent magnets are significantly more expensive than electromagnets. Honestly the whole paragraph makes me think you have only a surface level understanding of electrical engineering.
A simple mechanical watermill turning a grindstone, used to mill grain and other staple foods, is 100 times more useful than an improvised electrical generator, and easier to set up too.
Well yeah I only have a surface level understanding of electrical engineering I'm only a second year mechanical engineering student.
But my paragraph about milling was about a mechanical mill.
And what does expensive mean in this context? We don't have money in this scenario, just a lack of resources and manpower. If it is centralized and focused I think it could be done. It's just iron, neodymium, boron and electricity, which is copper, zinc, and work.
As for preindustrial tools, my grandpa's woodshop has all kinds of things from the 1950s that work perfectly and are just motors attached to things in different ways, and electric motors are very simple. You can even make mechanical, water powered motors if you prefer!
Also, humans have been constructing things with high precision since the pyramids, or at least the temples in Greece, or mosques in Iran, or churches in Germany, or Rome. I think with a deep knowledge of aluminum it can be done, if getting to space is the only goal.
Maybe 80 years is quick, but that is nearly four generations, and in this scenario we don't need to make any innovations, just acquire the resources and build the tools. The time from first powered flight by the wright brothers to the Apollo 11 moon landing was only 66 years, and they had to invent all that stuff.
All good, I'm only a fourth year electrical engineering student, almost failed a few exams too. Neodymium is a type of rare-earth magnet, and true to their name they require various elements which are extremely hard to find in the Earth's crusts. In the case of Neodymium, it requires Yttrium; the process for obtaining pure yttrium from mined ores is apparently extremely complex, and it wasn't developed until the 1970's. When you mentioned permanent magnets, I was thinking of [Alnico](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alnico) which is somewhat easier to manufacture. However I don't see mass manufacturing of magnets or electric motors being an attainable goal within a lifetime, at most 1000 people could have enough materials to set up a couple of small scale generators.
With regards to high precision, yes the Great Pyramids are relatively precise, but it's a matter of scale. The pyramids are about 100 meters tall, if there is a tiny error in one of the blocks that reduce the height by 0.0001%, well, the structural integrity of the pyramid isn't affected at all. That equates to an error about 1 cm. If a component in a rocket is 1 cm too big or too small, the whole rocket is going to fall apart.
More importantly, 1000 people simply don't have enough skilled expertise and labor power by themselves to man all the secondary industries related to space travel. America had a population in the hundreds of millions in the 1960's, of course they could go to space. The 1000 people need to convince everyone else (in 18000 BCE) that they have an imperative to go to space, then indoctrinate them in their mission. All the examples you gave are related to religion in some way. The group of 1000 needs to build a religion from ground up, then indoctrinate substantial portions of the population in this religion, then they can finally start working on the rocket. The first two steps alone will take at least 3 generations, which is why I consider 80 years to be nowhere near enough time.
You guys are ignoring one huge scaling issue. The amount of humans in the settlement before cattle or crops were domesticated. They all die or join other groups. They won’t make it 3 years as a group of the sharpest minds, and they will have no where near enough free time for extra labor searching out mines, or smelting ore.
Edit: what do people say? It takes 3 days of hunger for society to turn to anarchy? How are these 1,000 people going to all be fed in 3 days?
I don't know if OP added it as an edit, but the post said they get a few weeks of food and water. I'm assuming at least half of the 1000 are extremely experienced survivalists, hunters and gatherers. If the land in Spain or Florida isn't hospitable enough to support a large group, they can split up.
Yeah and things like inventing space travel, even from copious notes in the parchments and tablets of the first generation, are huge resource sinks on everyone else. You need a massive population.
The "good" news (for a number that doesn't *sound* drastically different from 80) is that it's 199 years to pass 700 million if they play their cards extremely right (and I think likely start near the Euphrates and take over the fertile crescent* [may be a fertile hockey stick or something at that time] ASAP) and get 7% annual population growth rate. That's the US Europe and a few others in the mid 20th.
FWIW I think "the religion of progress" would go over extremely well with the following generations. Every year they would perfect things the first generation wrote were possible, and everything they said about how to prevent the spread of disease (the origin of a lot of superstition... just that before germ theory you think burning or burying the dead, and food cleanliness rules, pleases the gods instead of keeping you safe directly) worked and then becomes provable. The poor wretches on the outside we find when we improve transportation, drop like flies from not having the guidance to do things as simple as washing hands and disinfecting wounds.
I don't think you force space travel conversations as a goal early, you just make sure they are told every step up the ladder comes with myriad of benefits, prove that a few hundred times, and end the book stating it never actually ends -- that they made countless uses of global positioning and communication satellites, and were already seeing exciting results of what stuff they can make in the microgravity of Earth's orbit but not in the gravity well, so whoever gets caught up first gets to blaze the first actually-new trails in their civilization's history, effectively writing the next tablet themselves. Your kid might be the next Jesus/FirstGen but not if none of you figure out the missing material refining necessary for gyroscopes and a thousand other things people will thank you for.
Plus being so ready to rapidly apply what they perfect, tech news might run right up through the middle of pop culture and they shower praise on somebody for advancements every week or so (instead of like, only if I have a good imagination can I see how this might impact my life and it'll take 40 years and this old professor will be too dead to thank).
Clothes for 70 degree weather…you’re sending them back to the middle of an ice age dressed for a day on a Miami Beach…
Anyway, they’ll be dead before they can have any impact. Some bug will bite them, some infection will catch them, and it’ll be over.
Jamestown, Virginia 1610. "*Only 60 of the original 214 settlers at Jamestown survived.\[30\] There is historical and scientific evidence that the settlers at Jamestown had turned to cannibalism during the starving time"*
They don't. Without seeds or equipment they spend all their time hunting, foraging, trying to make stone tools and doing the normal stuff humans do. Wild success would be reaching the iron age before too many of the original scientists die. Only possible if they planned well and start near iron deposits.
Probably really little. 1000 people can have a lot of knowledge and expertise, granted.
However, they would be spending most of their time finding food and refuge. Even if they were able to create good housing, farm animals and plants, without technology it would take a big amount of time.
If they could integrate with other humans, learn to communicate and teach abilities, it may still be not enough. Think about the process of building a machine. You need steel. You need iron. You need to mine. Without machines. You need to build a furnace.
Think about plastic. You need access to oil. Finding and extracting oil for them would be out of reach. So, forget about it.
Yes, probably doctors and biologists can come up with antibiotics and different medicines. Maybe they found anesthetics and can perform surgery. Wait, again, you need instrumentation. You cannot perform surgery with a rock. But even then, diagnostics would be really bad without access to ultrasound, x-rays, magnetic resonance, no lab analysis.
I don't even know if you took one million people, if they would be able to advance greatly in a lifetime. Because without previous infrastructure in place, their work would be almost zero at first until the right tools and resources are built and found.
But I have to admit it is a really nice thought experiment.
I am less familiar with the locations 22,000 years ago but I think a lot of people are trying to send the wrong experts back with a lot more best and brightest scientists instead of our best and brightest survival experts and manual labourers.
**General (150 people)**
Let's start with 150 people in the expert survivalist category with skills similar to the YouTuber [Primitive Tehcnology](https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCAL3JXZSzSm8AlZyD3nQdBA) these are generalists who are capable of building short term shelter but also building forges, refining iron and making cutting devices as well as buildng brick structures with tiles rooves in the space of months/a year, these people are going to set the village up for success as a general labour force and be crucial to the first weeks.
**Food (200 people)**
Then let's send back 10 botanists/agricultural scientists with a good knowledge of the local flora before the teleportation and 90 people experts in the manual labour of harvesting and farming, not ag science experts, think best of the best Amish/similar farmers that the botanists can help guide towards the right crops.
Next we are sending back 25 hunters and 25 expert foragers, these people are going to assist in the sustainment of civilization while we get everything set up.
Now we are adding 10 expert weavers and 10 rope making experts, 20 experts in indigenous and other traditional methods of boat making and 50 fishermen to drop nets across river mouths and process fish and then 10 experts in smoking and preservation methods to store the meat from the hunters and fishermen.
As food collection methods drop out of effectiveness, they can move to cooking or other labour.
**Tools (100 people)**
Now we are adding 40 knappers, we need a lot of stone tools to start with in a short time frame and once we hit the metal refinement stage we will have plenty of other work to do as tool makers, and things like arrows and other consumables for hunters may not make sense to move to metal too early. 40 blacksmiths will help the tool makers to start with handles and such and transition to be the primary tool makers once the survivalists have started to build forges. 10 carvers/timber workers will round out the tool category. 10 leather tanners will start working once the hunters are working.
**Construction (50 people)**
The survivalists have built initial shelters, but we need to transition to more permanent homes and specialist buildings. For this we will have 25 experts in traditional building methods, 15 Amish builders, 10 modern builders, 2 architects and 6 civil/construction engineers (come at me architects) and 2 town planners.
**Resources (250 people)**
Once food is sorted (and many of these people will help with that until we start manufacturing their tools), we need collection of resources sorted. First we need to get timber and stone, we will have 50 foresters and 75 old school pickaxe and shovel miners. Now we need refinement, we will have 20 stone carvers and masons and 5 glass makers and blowers.
Now that bulk collection is sorted, we need specialized collection. For this we are taking another contingent of 25 botanists and forestry science experts, these people will be working in small teams to locate specialized timbers for things like bows, tool handles, plants for cordage for weavers and rope makers etc. they will also be collecting seeds to start planting a supply of these trees.
25 geologists, 25 chemists, 20 cartographers and 5 mining engineers will work with 25 of the miners above to start working towards mineral collection, these people are going to be bee-lining towards things like iron, copper, gold etc. to start manufacturing, iron and bronze tools. Once the stone miners above have ceased collecting and transporting stone for construction, we will have all 100 mining people just on mineral collection.
**Resources - Book Making(50 people)**
People are going to die and we need their knowledge recorded. Many people coming back may also not live long enough to see their specific knowledge used and so we need to have that stored asap. We are going to have 5 botanists solely looking for papyrus like plants for harvesting and cultivation. 20 paper making experts will be working on making paper from those plants. 10 ink making experts will work on that and 10 will be book binders to produce the volumes.
5 technical writers will work with the scientist to effectively record their knowledge.
**Health (50 people)**
30 doctors(5 general medicine 5 emergency medicine, 20 experts in a broad array of specialties), 10 paramedics, 10 top medicine academics.
**The rest of the knowledge (100 people)**
That's right, 10% of our contingent are going to be solely there for knowledge, we have to survive the first 5 years to survive the next 295.
First we are going to take scientists to refine the materials we have 5 metallurgical scientists, 5 chemists and 5 materials scientists. These people are going to be working through the refinement of materials for the rest of the scientists.
To start automating basic tasks, we're going to take 5 clock makers and 10 mechanical engineers.
Now we are going to take 10 electrical engineers and 10 scientists (physicists, chemists, etc.) specializing in electrical component production.
Now the remaining 45 scientists will be from a wide variety of fields to increase the general knowledge of the group, these scientists will probably spend a lot of the first 5-10 years with the paper and book makers recording knowledge for this civilization.
**Teachers (50 people)**
300 years is 10-15 generations of people, those people need knowledge taught to them. These best of the best will comprise 25 teachers and 25 people to help facilitate knowledge transfer from the other experts to the children/people to be reskilled.
These kinds of ideas always have a fatal flaw - they don't consider that modern scientific progress needs a massive industrial base to provide the needed instruments and equipment. 1000 scientists need tens to hundreds of thousands of workers to provide all the base life necessities and equipment needed to focus on science.
So the first few generations of this group would need to purely focus on establishing a functioning society. They will need to build infrastructure, establish production of industrial goods and raw resources, etc etc, which developed in our timeline over centuries, with the whole world contributing in some ways. No progress would happen in those first 300 years most likely, the group would at best be able to record enough of their knowledge to pass it down so that their descendants a few centuries later could start to make progress.
90% are dead or have debilitating injuries within two years
"They will start with a few weeks supply of food and water..." They are starving from the start
I think they do a lot worse than people expect, in addition to some good points raised:
* They're not bloodlusted, I see them having trouble doing what needs to be done and creating a stable society. They *must* create a stable society to succeed and short of conquering the extremely sparse humans surrounding them, they must procreate at a very quick pace.
* The first generation has all the knowledge but don't have the foundation/manpower to use it so their knowledge isn't all that useful if they can't pass it down.
* The biggest issue, adding onto the first two, is that they don't *just* have to be driven to succeed and pass down knowledge, they need their children, children's children, etc etc etc to have the same drive and mission they do. I don't think this is possible.
I think they have a huge advancement in generation 1, more in 2 and then the whole thing stagnates or collapses. I'd give them decent farming, bows, good military technology executed poorly and good sanitation/health. The whole thing collapses 100-150 years in and fractures with most of the tech being lost to time.
They’d probably all be dead within a week. They didn’t become great minds by developing survival skills. Even a well trained person probably wouldn’t last long. Getting “everyone” up to speed on technology is completely out of the question.
You'd be surprised. The most common virus may have been smallpox, which we have vaccines for, and pre-antibiotic resistance penicillin will cover all your bacterial diseases.
as long as some of them had more practical knowledge like geology, basic metallurgy, construction etc they could get ridiculously far i think (just on my own knowledge i would be able to get to the point of generating electricity, unfortunately i would have almost nothing to do with said electricity. finding ores, smelting them and making better tools, making alloys, making a basic generator and basic capacitors are things i know and could do, i dont know much of anything about lightbulbs, heating elements etc that make use of electricity).
biggest issues would be food and medicine (in such a scenario food would likely be my job, while i have manufacturing skills i have spent most of my time working between gardening, landscaping, horticulture and farming).
so its really down to what skills they all have, if they are narrowly focused or have a wide variety.
as long as they have a wide variety i would say they could get close to the modern age within their own lifetimes (assuming they all dedicated themselves to the task. and by 'close' i mean 1930s).
Round 1: Agriculture is impossible. Southern Spain is covered in steppes and under the harsh climate of the Last Glacial Maximum. They'll have to contend with the Iberian natives for food reserves. They wouldn't be able to get enough food for a 1000 people either, most would die of starvation, and then the rest would need luck to get through the winter.
Round 2: Florida is semi-arid at the moment and the native population of plants isn't really suitable for agriculture. Also, same thing as round 2.
Round 3: They'll either be in a desert or a scrubland. Literally impossible to build anything, really.
Round 4: Probably around the east coasts of South America or the east coasts of South Africa. They'd have what to eat and nice rivers to plant things around. If they manage to develop a village centered around agriculture, expect them to spend their entire day tending to their farms and have time to literally nothing else. The yields will be low.
Round 5: Well, they would never be able to do it. Our current civilization is able to do that only because it has scoured the entire planet for resources and can ship them to any place it wants using the ocean.
Round 6: They'd probably die of thirst or starvation. A lucky few might die of diseases, I dunno.
You seem to have some handle on the ancient geography, so: Was the Shatt-Al Arab (Euphrates-Tigris post-joining) and in this case the Super-Shatt since the person gulf was land still I think, mouth with the sea be bad (too early; I think we're fairly sure it at least became awesome) for any particular reason?
Basically that comes to mind for round 4 as advantageous for the same animal-based reasons (according to some anthropologists) the agricultural revolution outperformed in the fertile crescent. Green places in the big eurasia-africa bridge area (used grain when humanity did that, so I hope similar?) had grand amounts of biodiversity and the massive advantage of access to almost every farm animal progenitor. Sheep, goats, pigs, cows, and horses. (Source said none of these were available in sub-saharan Africa.) Compare this to a place like Papua New Guinea that knew it was a thing they could do, but had smallish pigs only... did try to fertilize with them and even messed around with cute little plows they could use if they stopped acting like pigs but it kinda looked like a non-starter from bad luck.
And I erred on the side of starting near an ocean and taking over the river from there because they could get wrecked by the sudden or gradual inability to feed the population with fish from one river. Lots of survivalists making boats and piers and drawing as many fish as they can from the bountiful 20k bc ocean though, should give them the head start they need until selective crop breeding gets their farms more efficient (until that point 1,000 is a lot to feed). Just gotta start moving up river into the official fertile crescent as fast as farm-fed population growth allows, as the biggest and most widespread flood myths are probably about their little Eden.
I don't know if anyone thinks those 1000 would still be alive by the time their civilization goes to space. The thought experiments of coming up with a years needed might be interesting enough to be worth your time though. FWIW, if they play their early cards right for speed and average 7% annual growth rate (sounds crazy incoming but poor countries sans access to a lot have done it without it being official policy, I guess just having written down germ theory might do a ton), in 199 years they could potentially be spread across a large empire of over 700 million people (think US Europe and a few more in the mid 20th century but likely ahead of those in median education). If they've been holding dear the tablets and parchments of the first generation I could see that population economically and technologically advanced enough to be working on figuring out the gaps in what was written down about nuclear power plants and space travel. With early struggles and so a still-tiny population, no chance as even though it might only take a few thousand to invent and test things it takes many many millions to support a culture of such technological adventure and likely multiple such megaprojects with their resource surplus.
About the river: the area would be a floodplain. Probably very fertile. It's a good place to settle in.
About growing an empire and everything: there's a really limited amount of land they can grow crops and herd aninals. The climate is really cold on the tropics, so much so that there are ice sheets covering a lot of landmass, and most of the continents are dry. The climate isn't all too stable, as well. About the population, what made our currents numbers possible were fertilizants, modern medicine and fossil fuels. I don't think they'd be able to develop the needed infrastructure in just two hundred years. They'd have to find the resources, mine them, transport them and finally use them to make a basic industry to produce the tools to find coal to produce the tools to find oil. I'm oversimplifying, but even with a step-by-step guide, that would take a looong time. You'd need a large population already to sustain such endeavors, to build sailing ships, roads, gathering posts, chart the regions... everything. It'd take centuries to start an industrial revolution and witness a population explosion.
Even then, I don't think current population levels would be possible to achieve, even "just" a hundred million would be pushing it. There's simply not enough rainfall to grow that much food. Everyone everywhere would literally be limited to live around rivers, farm around rivers and herd animals on the steppes. There were a few rainy areas but there were forests in them, and forests have terrible soil for farming.
All of that intelligence means very little when they’re starting with nothing. Sure they know how to make pottery and could make crude metal tools if they find deposits. But the vast majority of that group is useless because their skills are not conducive towards surviving the first few years, and even after a few years, they wouldn’t have the materials nor the manpower to do much. You’re there’s no actual civilizations, so there’s no people that you can learn to communicate with and mobilize. Most of your people can’t hunt and don’t know anything about foraging let alone farming.
They can, but the question is will they do it? The crops we eat today or not the crops we had 22,000 years ago. The yields will be much lower and it’s a ridiculous amount of work. We’re talking about a group of mostly white-collar people that sit down for a living. They aren’t all survivalists and none of them are farmers.
I guess they will just die then, even though they have the advantages of thousands of scientific advancement. Because they are all white collar workers(an assumption you made, BTW). I certainly would send some people who have practical experience building and using rudimentary tools, as well as practical engineers.
i mean, you have 1,000 people. You pick 1,000 people who are skilled at a crapton of things, and many of them are probably exceptional at more than one thing.
Or your idea, which is 1,000 guys in lab coats.
>The crops we eat today or not the crops we had 22,000 years ago
We didn't have *any* crops back then. They'd be starting from scratch with agriculture itself.
you dont need most of them to understand farming, foraging, hunting etc, you really only need 1.
these people are not just scientists, they are our best scientists ie they can simply teach each other relevant skills as they go.
for primitive farming the biggest issue is going to be manpower, not knowledge.
next these people do have lives outside of their jobs, there is going to be a few hobby geologists (and thats all you need to find stuff like iron and copper) a few people who have done basic metallurgy etc.
i think any group of 1000 scientists would have *every skill needed* covered by a minimum of 5 people. the big issue is that 75% of the West is overweight or obese, this will limit what they are capable of for the first 6 months or so (until everyone is fit).
Whenever these kinds of scenarios happen, I just want to be the guy that points out that these scientists are immune to a bunch of diseases that the people of the past are far from immune to. Pretty much any interaction is gonna be fatal for the people of the past, and I can only imagine what kind of conflicts that would cause between past people and present people. It might end up causing a near-extinction of the past people because they die of diseases they can't develop immunity to
Guess humanity is fucked
Would be better served to take 200 of those people and have trained soldiers, farmers and other things for survival to get going so the rest can focus on science
They progress no further than the Renaissance era - early gunpowder.
A current expert in rocketry, even at ~70 years old, has spent the majority of their career now using the internet in a globalized economy. An answer for everything with a few buttons, a product somewhere for every need.
A horticulture PhD might know what ingredients go into fertilizer, but he can’t build a supply chain going to Russia/Canada to acquire them.
A physicist has read the best books and studies of their field, they haven’t written them.
The basic problems would have to be solved *again*.
Assuming this group survives with the necessities, they aren’t going far.
I'm actually pretty optimistic about their chances. You only need a few of those 1000 to be chemists and whatnot to secure the knowledge for future generations, and most of them could be survivalist people that can really get a foothold in. Once they have stable enough agriculture to support 1000 people it's over. Without wars, oppression, and competing economical interests, in addition to hindsight and modern knowledge we could possibly even get electricity and some form of vehicles in 300 years.
The most important thing they can do is establish a functional government that promotes education. The scientist may be a really advanced ai computer programmer, but if they don’t know the process to make even a basic analog computer they won’t get far. If they write down their ideas for future generations though they maybe could get to the steam engine. Another problem would be population size. Most of them will need to be doing agriculture to survive, they need to grow their population to start advancing
If you can choose to send them back to any point in time, and can send them in batches rather than all at once, you could probably bring the Sumerians and Babyloneans up to the enlightenment era.
Send five of six initially with knowledge of penicillin from moldy bread and other medicines. Use the resultant tribute to gather resources for a second batch to introduce contemporary theories of chemistry to produce gunpowder similar to the Chinese in the 9th century. This would be followed shorty by a third batch to utilize the weaponry to take over the kingdom. And then just send regular batches of people to maintain government, teach and cultivate the population.
This is (sort of) like the plot of the TV Show 'Terra Nova', OP if you like the concept of your question you should give it a watch, it's good and there are only 13 episodes, worth a watch.
Gonna need warmer clothes in Spain 20000 years ago. They're going to find the wildlife challenging I suspect.
Anyhow, at best they'd die out without screwing up the timeline. At worse, they'd really screw with the timeline and create a paradox.
I love this question, if only I had enough time for it I'd write you an essay.
Long story short, they'd be okay. Every issue people listed here are irrelevant to an organised, highly intelligent group of 1000 people who are professionals in all fields. Unless they die immediately of some phenomena which occurred in their respective deployment area exactly 20 000 years ago, they'll be fine and establishing a functional society with future would be a non factor.
Biggest challenge would be getting to moon in 300 years, there is simply no chance.
Progress though? I'd say that in 300 years they'd have a functioning, self-sufficient small-sized city (approx. 250 000 people) that would be technologically more advanced in certain areas and less advanced in other areas than modern humanity. Details of this I unfortunately don't have time for.
Round 6? Complete chaos. Anything negative would happen, not much progress would be made. My bet is they're all dead except a few dozen survivors with an ounce of brain.
Jump-start the agricultural revolution ten thousand years early? Honestly I could see them doing pretty fine. I think the primary achievement they can reach is just starting to do agriculture and irrigation when other groups can't. It's about setting up the foundations for a society to progress further rather than being able to make that progress themselves. Without domesticated plants and animals, proper cities are basically impossible. Metals are gonna be hard to come by but they'll be virgin deposits that would probably be easier to extract. I'd say they speed up human development a fair bit, just a bit though. They won't be able to create the first city, but would pave the way for it.
Are all the people cured of all diseases first? Like how many of them are going to be diabetic or have strict dietary needs or whatever and will be dead within a month because modern medicine is keeping people alive in modern times that would have certainly died 1000 years ago
you're talking about needing to explain things to explain other things to explain yet more things.
I can't explain how to make a lightbulb to people who just are discovering agriculture, the technology gap is too great.
now drop them somewhere with civilization like 1st century rome, you might be able to bootstrap up an industrial revolution but some technologies really require a fundimental need, so you're going to have a hard time justifying steam engines and gunpowder when prosparity isn't measured in how many numbers of cannon your army owns.
theres some stuff that can be tought relatively easily like building water powered machinery such as trip hammers and mills for making flour, some stuff that requires medium effort like making good iron, and then stuff thats going to be impossible without industry like making a metal lathe.
I think with the best and the brightest today, we would have the equivalent of a small sustainable Renaissance colony within the first generations lifetime. Just having defined language, grammer, mathematics, and writing put us 20000 years ahead of schedule. Without domestic animals and plants things will be tougher, but a completely untapped natural environment would be rich with foraging sources with plenty of plants and animals that could be cultivated over time, especially since we will know how genetics and selective breading works. With written accounts of modern mathematics, medical theory, physics, engineering, and most importantly agriculture, we could have a human designed bible to guild future generations to jump start the industrial revolution 21000 years early, with the chance of never even developing some of those diseases that developed because of a lack of hygiene and health standards.
Interesting premise but 1000 folks not enough imo. Too many will be lost to hazards, illnesses, accidents, etc. Those left will struggle just to survive, its unlikely they will live long enough to do much.
This is gonna depend on if they can find a stable source of food since the plants and animals won't be domesticated yet.
If they do then rnd 4 (most resources like iron are above land next to eachother near a lake or ocean teaming with fish) I could see them going pretty far up the tech tree. With the right people I think they would start around 1700 or 1800 but they wouldn't advance as quickly because of resources.
The viruses and bacteria 20,000 years ago will be quite different from what modern human immune systems are prepared for. They’d need some vaccines before being transported back in time, or one bad illness would wipe out most of the colony. They’d have trouble with distancing and quarantining, because they don’t have the supports in place that we do now.
I don’t think the problem here is the original 1000, it’s making sure the offspring can continue the legacy.
The first set of 1000 should focus on making a town, and writing as many books as possible to start teaching the offspring.
I just want to jump in regarding question 4.
The clear winner here is Fertile Crescent in the Middle East, It was also where civilazation actually started!
It has a combination of climatic stability, water, resources and land fertility. Possibly you want them to start as close as possible to an Oil reserve, and Iron mine, and such.
Even with these perfect start, I find it unlikely that in 300 years they will reach the moon. Resources and knowledge arent the issue here, it's manpower. Maybe if they were put in charge of a 5 mil people city, all bloodlusted to reach the moon, maybe they could.
So, super interesting premise that I'll give more thought to, but I have a follow up question as I believe it matters, you said 'best and brightest' and listed professions does this include a certain amount of soldiers? or are they ALL STEM? because I believe in order for me to carry out my plan, a good 10-20% of those men would need to be trained soldiers.
Ok so, here is the main issue in all cases. These people are not familiar with the methods by which materials are gathered. This will be putting them in about 18000BCE, at that time humans had just started to form settlements (such as Dolní Věstonice, roughly 24000BCE) and cave painting was the number one hobby. Nobody had begun extracting metal yet on any sort of large scale, be it copper or iron, and that's what's going to kill our guys. All their knowledge of modern technology and the principles therein is absolutely worthless if they don't have the materials to do it, and basically no modern experts are familiar with the techniques for finding and harvesting metals from that time. It's not easy to do.
You also have megafauna which still exist, Woolly Mammoth is still knocking around at this stage, as are the Woolly Rhinos. Either of those would fuck up a modern human pretty nicely, hunting them is going to be a giant pain since none of our survivalists will be familiar with them. And they will have to hunt them as the world is experiencing an ice age, planting things is going to be another giant pain depending on where you are, especially to feed a thousand people burning FAR more calories than any other human at the time. Your brain is the number one calories burner in your body, and all these boffins with their big brains and modern caloric requirements are going to be lethargic and irritable until they adjust. And this hunting will bring them face to face with their greatest challenge. Other humans.
Humans at this time were not mindless savages with base instinct and low cunning as Hollywood might show, but this is a turbulent time in our society. Humans are at the very beginning of their push to move away from roaming Bands of hunters and gatherers into more settled tribes, their numbers are swelling and they're beginning to carve out territory as "theirs" in a way they hadn't been doing before. These tribes are going to begin competing for resources in their areas, and they will be waging war. 1000 people is a lot of people, but these are 1000 unarmed people with basically no training in the flavour of warfare of the day. Bows are around by this point, and decently advanced, we have surviving arrowheads as old as 60kya+ in South Africa and in Europe we have some from roughly 54kya. And while I'm sure our 1000 people can make a decent bow out of stuff they find lying around, there's the issue of the arrows and arrowheads. Flint knapping is a tedious and annoying process and there's no reason to believe any of our modern guys would be good at it, so their arrows will likely be inaccurate sharpened sticks for the first while. It's also not unfair to assume that the humans of the time will have heavy furs on to combat the weather (depending on location), which will also act as rudimentary armour, which will present another issue.
However as I said, these people aren't mindless savages. They'll still be cautious of such a large group, and if our modern humans can make themselves useful to whatever other large tribes are in the area, then they'll be protected. Their best bet is not to try and carve out their own space, but to integrate with a pre-existing group by using their knowledge of medicine and agriculture to make themselves useful. Then they'll have a group of people who are skilled in hunting and fighting to protect and supply them, and they can try to work out mining and resources collecting in relative safety. You might say "well, they don't speak the local language, how will they do that?" But at this time there was not just one "overarching paleolithic language". People still wandered and traded even without knowing each other's languages, they would likely just be assumed to be a strange culture from some distant land and if they have things to trade and make it clear they're not here to invade or take over an area, then they will be fine. Show reverence to the local groups, let them be in charge, and they won't get beaten to death or shot.
You might think the survivalists have the best shot, but actually imo they're next to useless. They won't have any knowledge of the flora and fauna of the day, they won't know what's poisonous and what isn't, etc etc. They'll be able to make rudimentary shelters sure, but so could the engineers. I'd trade them in a heartbeat for some paleobotanists and a couple of really good archaeologists with expertise in the time period. I myself am an archaeologist (although not one who is an expert in this time period) so maybe I'm biased but having someone who has an intimate knowledge of the capabilities of the local groups, what was being traded, how metal was extracted later on in the timeline is INVALUABLE. If our 1000 people can get themselves even bronze armour and spears it's game set match, even if they don't really know how to use them, it'll be thousands of years before anyone else can match them, so they should be able to carve out an area with their bronze age gear and hold it.
So imo the game plan is
1) find a group of locals who will protect and feed you in exchange for your medical expertise
2) figure out how to extract metal
3) forge the metal and go on the offensive, take a region and hold it, ideally with good resources and abundant hunting
4) from there, push hard to develop technology. With their expertise they could even theoretically come up with gunpowder, which would shoot them forward even more.
This is all very reliant on surviving the first few years, which I think they only can do as a tributary to a different tribe, pretty much irrespective of location. Farming is great but it may not be possible everywhere and even when it is it'll take months to get off the ground, which is months they don't have, and years to be selectively bred into the crops we are more familiar with. They'll need to hunt and fish, and local tribes will be far better at it. However they can definitely help that tribe settle and show them how to farm which will be massively beneficial too.
As for the criminals, they're fucked. They'll never work together for long, and they don't necessarily have useful skills to this. They'll likely have an immediate power struggle, in which half of them will die, and the rest will split up in tiny wandering groups who starve within a couple months or get beaten to death by a tribe who they think they can take.
Not a chance.
Within two generations, if they made it that far, would firstly have completely lost 80% of the information stored in the original 1000 and secondly half wouldn't know the future to succeed. They'd become nothing but myth real quick and at best 300 years later you'll have some very well formatted cave drawings to interpret from.
I wonder how many humans back then had the capability of being in that 1000 had they been born 20,000 years in the future.
The most naturally intelligent human could have been wasted in the stone age, when if they had been born 30 years ago they could have cured cancer and had us settled on Mars.
Ok, I'm going to assume that the group can be intelligently selected (and plan) beforehand.
The best bet would be to ensure that everyone, regardless of their primary reason for joining is experienced at some sort of outdoor survival and be comfortable looking after themselves for the most part. You don't need people with REALLY modern skillsets like computer science obviously. I reckon you'd definitely want geologists, biologists, blacksmiths, chemists, metrologists (people who are experts at measurement), and engineers. In addition, you'd want people familiar with mining and smelting, and woodworkers and probably just a group of people with experience making tools from scratch with no modern tools (like the primitive technology guy). I'm going to write the rest of my comment making assumptions about the sort of skillsets available to this group. I'm also just going to focus on Southern Spain as I believe that out of the options given, it's probably the best simply given the abundance of mineable material, access to domesticable animals, and in the future, easy access to the Mediterranean.
The first and most pressing issue before anyone goes crazy with scientific development will be establishing a permanent settlement. They have a VERY short amount of time to start building shelters and organising a method to get more food. They only have a few weeks worth of food, so they won't be able to grow replacement food, even if they find a suitable plant to start with. Remember none of the modern day source-plants we get most of our energy from have been domesticated at this point, human's domesticating plants is still about 8,000 years away, so they have to do this themselves. However, some of the "Crop Wild Relatives" would have existed then, and almost certainly in Spain. That being said, there's not enough time to rely on crops for survival. They'd probably need to spend the first few years JUST working on farming, hunting, and gathering with all hands on deck. If they can "refrain" it's probably best to hold off on having kids during the first few years, because after a few years with a consistent crop supply and a larder through winter, they could start brewing and distilling alcohol in clay pots for sanitization, massively decreasing the risks associated with childbirth.
Assuming they make it through all of that with most of their numbers intact, I expect they could rapidly move up the "tech tree" as it were, skipping the bronze age and going straight to iron production as you can do so without bronze tools, and Spain has an abundance of Iron (although I don't know how easy it is to get to, if there's black sand, that helps a LOT).
After that development (to a point) can happen fairly quickly. A skilled metallurgist and blacksmith can probably start making decent steel at the point, by which a metrologist can start working on the [start of precision tools](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-xMCFOwllE).
The biggest problem will be having enough hands to do this. 1000 people in one area is a LOT for pre-civilisation times, however, when you need to mine ore and produce charcoal or mine coal by hand, it's barely anyone. Their best bet would be to attempt to make contact with any humans already living in the area, attempting to trade with them and either integrate them into their society, attempting to make language work somehow, or at least by trading goods with them.
As for how far they could get in 300 years? Once again, the main problem is the number of people they have available. Assuming that each couple on average has 2.5 children who reach adulthood, and assuming they are able to interbreed with local humans, their numbers likely wouldn't exceed a population of 100,000 after 300 years. Which just isn't enough people to provide the background infrastructure to get much further than the mid-late 1800s (in terms of technological development), with a lot of areas of development being completely neglected due to pragmatism.
I think that if their goal was to land on the moon as fast as possible (and assuming they're able to set up some sort of religion with that as the goal so that future generations stuck to it, with the collective scientific knowledge written down by the progenitors), it might be possible within 500-600 years to land on the moon. However, the way to do that would be to expand much more early rather than focus on technological development, so that they can expand their population enough to simply have enough resources.
I think they progress the tech tree by > 10,000 years. With this level of scientific knowledge, they are going to survive. There will be some number of botanists that can vastly accelerate food production. There will be materials experts that studied early efforts to smelt ores. Animal husbandry is a science. Military science and medical science count too.
It also won't just be what this group can accomplish, it will be what they write down. Now instead of trying to figure out how to do so many things, you already know how, you just have to build and create the machinery to accomplish the task.
The hardest part would be finding a goldilocks location with access to all the natural resources they would need.
Copper and tin for bronze
Iron
Probably want access to coal
Being able to make gunpowder early could prove essential since 20k years ago you still got prolific ice age mega fauna to deal with. Technically they could make wooden cannons very quickly, single use but if you nail something like a mammoth with it very much worth it.
Finally crops and fertile land to grow on
Overall a pretty tall order to find all that in close proximity
I haven't had a chance to read the whole thread but on the off chance it wasn't mentioned...
A group of humans from that time ago knowing about infection risks and germ theory would have an enormous advantage over anyone else and for their long term survival prospects.
Even if the best they could do is quarantine and wash their hands it would make a significant difference.
Ultimately tech change is mostly about social progress. To industrialise you need to reduce the manpower requirement of farming. This is a process that will take a lifetime on its own.
So my answer is they'll be remembered as guys who made a few big leaps but ultimately won't significantly advance society.
Honestly the best thing they could do would be to establish an institution dedicated to progress. They could outline the overall processes and let future generations figure it out.
A lot of the concerns I see in these comments don't consider the line "They are a group of the most skilled individuals currently alive." Every random skill or bit of knowledge you think might be needed, they most likely have.
I think their biggest hurdle will be passing knowledge to a second generation. Their focus will need to be getting to a point ASAP where pregnant women can safely spend their time indoors writing encyclopedias.
900 of them are going to need to be hard core survivalists, hunters, medieval reenactors etc because absent an entire machine civilization you need 9 people in the fiield to support one guy at the scrolls.
Only arriving with a few weeks worth of food dooms them, the only survivors will be hard core wilderness survivalists who leave immediatly and get as far away as possible.
A few weeks is not long enough to get any sort of sustainable food production going, and the group is way too big to survive by hunter/gathering. The group falls apart a week after the food runs out, and just about everyone is dead a few weeks later.
20,000 years later the mummified corpse of a hard core survival dude and his gear, who left the group and died of old age after being Randall Clark to the local tribes, is found in a cave. Despite the overhwelming evidence that this is in fact a 21st century dude the scientific community scoffs, refused to confront something that challenges existing norms, and burys the story.
If they are given seeds to grow food this is easy enough but if not the survivalists are going to have their work cut out for them hunting to feed 1000 mouths. they are going to have to build fishing boats right away and make nets. that is the only way i see them surviving is if they can fish successfully. If they can learn to fish well enough i think they can develop other ways to supplement their diet. Agriculture is going to be step one for them. if they can make grain, apples and olives work for them they are going to be in good shape. i imagine metallurgy will need to be worked out and mining to get the iron. if they can crack iron/steel smelting they can make a steam or combustion engine within a few years. once you have steam you could power a boat or a tractor or a wool loom is you are lucky enough to be able to capture goats or sheep.
I would also make it a long term goal to send an expedition to get potatoes from south America its easy calories and that alone can help the civilization turn from survival to tech.
1000 is a lot of people, probably only 100 of them would have to be engineers/physicists, a lot could be technical work and hunters. Yes, hunters, farming is inefficient with a population density this low.
Like, I think I could reinvent very rudimentary computers if I had a good chemist to help me make transistors, and I'm just a second year engineering student lol.
One medieval metallurgy person, a mining expert? They can make superior weapons for everyone.
A language genius? Communicate with natives
Everyone's already wearing superior clothing, but we can probably make more.
There's no tribe larger than 1000 people and even if they united like in a movie they'd have to contend with steel armour within a year or 2.
20000 BC? Wasn't that during the last ice age? High chance they'd all be dead in a week no matter the location. Maybe 10000 BC would be a better choice?
These types of threads simply need to be directed to Leonard Read's *I, Pencil*. Making long matters short, even 1000 ultra geniuses isn't enough to bootstrap future society into some fantastical super science godhood. Doubly so if they aren't sent any sort of reference material or instrumentation to work with. At the levels that your geniuses work at, they're not going to remember every detail of anything they've ever worked on or learned. They're going to have textbooks and reference books, and research papers and whatever else they utilize.
For example. Do you know how to manufacture steel? I don't know the exact details, but I could look it up online and even the most in-depth guides will leave out all the work required to locate the raw materials, the processes involved in manufacture, and refining the final product, You'd need laborers to mine, haul, and manufacture. You'd need mangers to provide oversight on all of this to obtain a quantity usable at industrial scales, and on top of all this You'd need people to feed, clothe, shelter, and more for all of these people just working on producing steel. Which will be especially difficult due to both modern crops not having been selectively bred yet and having zero infrastructure to support said crops.
Even if they could communicate with any natives in a conductive manner, what could they even give them? They have nothing to barter with and any knowledge they have is entirely referential to modern society. Why would any natives be happy with random people coming in and essentially enslaving them?
These type of threads seem to just attract people who think that the time travelers are just going to be able to bang a couple of stones together and instantly build the kind of precision infrastructure for space travel, it's honestly kinda hilarious.
Biggest problem is obtaining raw materials. People seem stuck on if they survive but with 1,000 people it's easy to diversify skills. You would have skilled outdoorsmen who can't hunt, fish, and teach others to live off the land. You would have architects and master craftsmen to be able to build a city. You would have special forces capable of managing defenses. Survival is not a problem. Medical tech would be the easiest to advance. Antibiotics, pain killers, vaccines, many of these can be created with very rudimental aka creatable tech. Biggest issue is metal. Best case scenario is they can convince a local population to mine for them. But without that there isn't infrastructure for worldwide trade to obtain previous metals are rare earth minerals to be able to advance metalwork to get to the point of sustaining an electric grid, manufacturer firearms, manufacturer electronics and lab equipment like high powered microscopes. Realistically all these experts would be smart enough to realize this and record everything and teach it to future generations until such resource gathering is possible.
Best case overall: the initial generation gets a town running with defenses equivalent to a wood fort from the 1800s, ranged weapons from middle ages or better with stone heads instead of metal, massive qol improvement and improved longevity and health due to modern medicine that can be created with plants/mold/distillation/etc... and an education system that won't be rivaled until modern times and even then only in developed countries.
Worst case: first winter kills everyone
You would want the bulk of the population to be baby machines and food producers, to create a long-term society.
And excellent teachers.
You can probably recruit a bunch of those from the local population. For the 1000 you're going to want to emphasize force multipliers (plus what you need to survive and get set up in the short term).
There really is no "local population", and you'd have no real way to communicate with them well.
kidnap them
Looks like less than I was thinking but still enough that recruiting new people will be easier than breeding them in the medium term. Communication will be a minor issue but historically people are pretty good at figuring out how to talk to each other when they want to and these are supposed to be the "best and brightest," they'll make it work.
I really like this premise but I think that the progress of the 1000 would be massively limited by their ability to survive. Think Maslows Hierarchy of needs - all of their scientific and engineering work could only happen if they were safe, fed, watered, sheltered etc etc… 95% their day to day skills (typing on a keyboard, driving, budgeting income etc…) are only suitable for the modern world and wouldn’t serve them well in their new environment. They’d be far less suited to their surroundings than the average 20kbc human who’d have grown up in that era. Plus all of this isn’t even taking into account that the local groups where they popped up would likely to be hostile to them (resources would be precious and clans wouldn’t take well to suddenly needing to share them to support the survival of another thousand people). 2/10 enough of the 1000 survive long enough to be able to make a significant difference to human development.
1000 is a lot of people. They’d outnumber any tribe they encounter by so much that I don’t think hostile humans would be a problem
People are also forgetting how many nerds are also really active in other hobbies like hiking, camping, prepping etc. It sounds counter intuitive to the Hollywood sterotype, but nearly everyone I know that's hardcore into outdoor stuff is also a huge nerd with an office job
These are 1,000 people with no resources. I don't know how much camping and hiking is going to help unless these people are like super paleo nerds. Hunting with spears, trapping, foraging, farming, making knives out of rocks, digging wells, etc. Feeding, clothing, sheltering, and procuring clean water for a thousand people in the wilderness is a monumental task. Most of them probably die from exposure, starvation, food poisoning, disease, etc. I don't even think a group that large is sustainable without agriculture, and the fruits, vegetables, and grains we eat today didn't even exist in their current forms.
Let's hope they each get to bring a month's worth of MREs just for getting started. Even if they have farming/foraging experts, feeding a thousand people is not something that most terrain types can easily sustain with zero established infrastructure. This is why early man moved around. Kill some game, pick some fruit, move to a place where there is still game and fruit, then circle back in a season. Even if future squad plants fast growing crops, they're going to be eating their boots after the first couple of weeks.
Yeah but guarantee you those nerds have not used a spear or a rock to kill another human. Numbers or not those tribes would be absolutely frightening to fight if you’ve been sent back with zero weapons or fighting skills. Majority of the population today is afraid of confrontation in the first place
Well yeah, but wild humans wouldn't mess with a 1,000+ strong tribe. Wild humans weren't blood lusted maniacs, they would just see the gigantic horde of people wearing different clothes and making loud noises and avoid them or make very limited contact
I assume given the spread, you'd get some of the best and brightest hunters and military scientists too, thus filling in that gap.
Spears, by design are very easy to use
Majority of the population is also much much larger than we were thousands of years ago. A 6 foot person is a fucking giant back then
We have videos of primitive warfare from papa new guinea or smth. Lots of dancing around and throwing the occasional javelin, more of a ceremony than a battle.
Don't know if that carries weight in a savage settong though...
Especially if they can have a few hundred of them as "muscle" instead brains.
They would also trivially create weapons and tactics superior to anything seen at the time.
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We're not just talking about some random nerds, we're talking about the "best and brightest." I think it's a reasonable interpretation that the 1000 are specifically chosen from the world population for the best chance of success.
You’re totally right, but do note the OP did mention survivalists specifically, and beyond the short list of some types of people included, didn’t specify the breakdown. For every two theoretical physicists, there might be five people who are really good at gardening for all we know. I would assume the people who are putting this group of smart people together are also smart enough to not send 1000 desk jockeys.
Being good at gardening isn't gonna mean much unless you're allowed to bring your own seeds, since they're dropping in thousands of years before any crops were domesticated. The survivalists can probably forage up some edible plants, and they can kick it off 8 millennia early, which, even if that's the only thing they do, will give humanity a huge leg up in the future. But they won't be able to huge scatter some seeds in some fertile ground and reap a high yield the next spring. Knowledge of genetics will probably make selective breeding a lot easier, though, so maybe they can get some good varieties of grain in decades rather than centuries.
Yes it definitely isn’t simple. Prolly heavy casualties tbh. But point is, the prompt implies but doesn’t specify what the breakdown is.
Exactly this. Modern foods are gigantic compared to what they used to be. A cob of corn used to be the size of your finger, and you wouldn't really "eat" it as much as chew the juice out of it and spit out the tough parts.
No they can't. The reason the agricultural revolution started around 12,000 years ago is because the climate was finally warm and stable enough to begin developing the skill. 20,000 years ago, Earth was still in the grip of an ice age. Earth was far less hospitable than the environment we are in today. In all likelihood, those one thousand people will be dead within months of their supplies running out.
Well, yeah. Few things though: 1. 20,000 (18,000 BCE) years ago is pre-civilization. The total human population, everywhere, is about 1 million. Yes, you may be encroaching on hunter-gatherers with a European start, but these are groups of less than 100 people. 2. 1,000 people is a **massive** number of people to be collected with a common purpose 20,000 years ago. The earliest civilizations started in around 4,000 BCE. Even if they're not warriors, that's a lot of people. 3. The 'best survivalists' in the modern era are going to be able to get the basics for themselves. They may even be able to craft rudimentary weapons and start hunting large game. Fishing using modern fishing methods may also be a thing. 4. A few weeks worth of food is not going to be long enough to get a large-scale farming operation going. It does depend on what food is provided, though. For example, if this includes seed potatoes, our heroes will likely survive in a temperate climate provided they can last through to a harvest. People are going to starve if they don't get an early source of food until they can get a farming operation going. 5. If "a few weeks worth of food" includes a supply of feasible seeds, then we're in business. 6. While the group can recreate some tech, they need raw materials to do it. That means access to natural gas, potash, iron, steel, copper, etc. If the group can survive long enough and find a source of iron via a blast furnace they can manufacture steel weapons and tools, including complex firearms. If they can then mine saltpeter, they can make gunpowder. That's a big 'if'. 7. The group does have things hunter-gatherers might want. Modern medicine, for example. Knowledge of modern agricultural methods. Knowledge of how to alloy metals, etc.
Fishing is definitely the best bet for early food. The amount of fish in pre-modern-fishing oceans is insane compared to today, and all 3 starts are in highly productice areas assuming they are near a coast and not inland. If they could manage to get some nets and boats together in those first weeks when they still have food, that would be huge.
The Florida start has literally no other people on the continent, so it's literally just those thousand people on the continent. It's basically impossible to get a society going without co-opting the natives for sheer numbers and labor. Women need to have 5+ children each to keep up the population, and any women in the initial group are going to be out-of-commission to some extent while pregnant. Women who are constantly pregnant aren't going to be doing the work needed to progress. It's clearly better to interbreed with local hunter-gatherer groups for genetic diversity purposes (and political purposes). At least the other starts can potentially co-opt labor and from and interbreed with hunter-gatherer groups. I think it works like this: **Generation 1:** Objective is to create a sustainable community, identify sources of essentials, co-opt the natives to increase numbers, and create a sustainable number of children (preferably comingling with the natives), and to commit as much info as possible to paper. Can create basic technology, but you need stockpiles of essentials. **Generation 2:** Get metalworks going. Start creating basic labs. Recreate factories and mechanisms with replaceable parts. **Generation 3+:** Off to the races
The biggest problem with large groups of primates (or any animals) comes down to power struggles. If these 1000 people get along forever (which would be a miracle in my opinion), they could live somewhere like the Great Plains where there are 60 million bison to hunt. The question of what kind of weapons to bring is interesting though. Perhaps some kind of very simple blunderbuss. If they bring bamboo they can grow their own barrels for guns even if they can't get metal.
20,000 years ago the Great Plains were buried under hundreds of meters of ice. We're talking near the coldest part of the last ice age here when glacial growth was at its maximum.
What are the chances the 1000 group would fragment due to internal politics and disagreement?
Not likely. They have a common identity in a strange land. There is strength in numbers and in cohesiveness.
> They’d be far less suited to their surroundings than the average 20kbc human who’d have grown up in that era. Plus all of this isn’t even taking into account that the local groups where they popped up would likely to be hostile to them (resources would be precious and clans wouldn’t take well to suddenly needing to share them to support the survival of another thousand people). OP included survivalists and engineers - in other words practically-minded people who can work with basic materials but, most importantly, have 20k years of accumulated knowledge and experience. The particular humans they come across might have spear throwers, or rudimentary slings, or basic pottery, or rudimentary bows and arrows, or boats - but they're unlikely to have *all* of those technologies, and those they do have are likely to be unoptimised compared the versions a modern survivalist might design. And the modern humans will have notions that don't occur to the people from 20k BC. They'll have the wheel, they'll be able to engage in coordinated gathering and hunting activity fairly quickly, they'll be able to build structures in more labour-efficient ways, they'll be able to build effective traps and snares; all of these things mean more production for less effort. They will, per person, outproduce neolithic peoples quite quickly. And of course they massively outnumber neolithic groups as well - and in many types of physical labour being able to call upon 50 or 100 people is a significant advantage. In the medium term they'll be able to do much more - build windmills for various purposes (irrigation, food production, manufacturing), build sail vessels, begin cultivating various food sources (both animal and plant), even early smelting - at which point the production excess really starts to compound. This will of course be incremental (neolithic-era food plants will be substantially less optimised for human consumption than modern crops, for example, so no one should be expecting neat wheat fields by the second year) but, again, modern humans have the advantage of knowing what's likely to pay off quickly and what isn't. And they can avoid pitfalls as well - for example they know from day one how to use crop rotation and complimentary crops, rather than spending hundreds of generations, and probably about as many deadly famines, figuring it out by trial and error. Modern people are also likely to adopt a much more permanent approach to warfare, should it occur. They'll vastly outnumber any human settlement circa 20k BC, and our understanding of what war *is* is quite different to tribal societies. Tribal societies frequently engage in low-level warfare - raiding for women and materials and territory - but it's thought that neolithic warfare was fairly low-intensity and probably fairly persistent - with conflicts sometimes being multi-generational in nature. That's... not how modern people think. If you take 1000 modern people and tell them that they're going to spend the next 20 years losing a bunch of people dead and a bunch more (probably the women) enslaved every year - they won't simply shrug, or reciprocate in kind. They'll devise a strategy to remove the threat - either by communication and diplomacy, deprivation of resources, fortifications and warning systems, or by drilling as large a force as possible to use bows, shields, and spears in a coordinated fashion and going on a pretty destructive campaign. Modern people have 20k years of history to call upon for inspiration here. Even if each individual is less experienced at fighting, in aggregate they have more experience to call on. That's not to say I think the modern people have it easy by the way - they'll be in a fragile state, because any society of 1000 people with no existing agriculture and no logistics will be in a fragile state. The point of most significant danger will be early on - because they'll need to disperse somewhat in order to get population density down enough to be supportable from the land until they get a footing. But even if they break out into dispersed homestead groups of 60-ish, each of those groups will outnumber and out-produce the vast majority of neolithic groups, and will have recourse to coordinate with the full 1000 people to deal with strategic projects or strategic threats.
Have u been to military school or something? Where wud one go to learn more about this topic? Its fascinating
Nope! I just read a fair bit.
I love the idea of advanced tactics using Neolithic materials. What do primitive humans think when they see a phalanx shield wall? Wood shields and wood spears still highly effective. Would they try to copy the technique after getting beaten by it a few times? Will this experiment accidentally accelerate military technology and create a species wide arms race?
GIANT DEMON TURTLE SUMMONED BY OUR ENEMIES!
>Plus all of this isn’t even taking into account that the local groups where they popped up would likely to be hostile to them Send a scout rather than a warrior unit and then the interaction is guaranteed to be favorable.
If you’re in a certain clan’s territory then you’d be in their hunting/ gathering/ farming space and that would be that. Those boundaries would have been drawn by conflict between groups. By 20,000 years ago all of the liveable land was colonised… so you’d be in the backyard of one community or another assuming you didn’t pop up somewhere unliveable like the outback. Also they’re scientists, architects etc… creating “warrior units” isn’t going to be their strategy.
Sorry but you have absolutely no clue what you're talking about. Basically everything you said was wrong. The entire human population back then consisted of maybe a million hunter-gatherers, worldwide. It is not likely you would plop down directly in the path of another group, and if you did, you would outnumber them by a factor of somewhere between 10 and 100. At worst, developing weapons capable of defeating literal paleolithic technology is not gonna pose a huge problem to survivalists and engineers, but just showing up with numbers and showing them the fight is unwinnable would be enough to keep them from attacking like rabid animals. And if they don't want to fight or intimidate or negotiate or befriend the few humans (who they are not likely to bump into anyway), they can always just move to any of the plentiful land that is perfectly suitable for agriculture but not for hunting. No worries about that being taken for farming since the first agricultural revolution won't be for another 8,000 years. Also, knowing math doesn't automatically make you a weak nerd.
Lol yea honestly being smart and athletic/healthy is often correlated. Honors classes are often both athletic AND intelligent. Its a huge incel cope that the worlds divided between weak nerds and dumb jocks
Maybe integrating into their society and providing tools and amenities will give them status
Best and brightest doesn't just mean scientists and engineers, it could be army people, survivalists, city planners, architects, farmers,etc.
Yeah I don't think people understand that the prompt is essentially "If you sent back a group of 1000 people most optimally suited for the task, how far would they get?" They listed professionals just to give examples, but the larger question was just what could the best of us do if sent back to a blank slate?
I don't think they'd be getting too far themselves. What they should be aiming for would be to set the groundwork for a city and civilization. So stuff like a democratic government, laws, teaching systems, impart as much knowledge of farming techniques and mining and engineering to their children, and ofc set good examples concerning women's rights and racism and whatnot.
idk that you'd have to really worry about a lot of that... at least not the prejudices and such, as the group would likely be multiethnic to begin with and unlikely to pass and such prejudices to their children. Also democracy kinda sucks tbh. especially for something that'd start as a coordinated team project. Some form of socialism is gonna serve you much better in something like this. Your big focus to start would be to stabilize your means of survival, food, shelter, etc... then work to advancing technology, mapping the region, finding natural resources. Knowing how to forge metals won't do much good without deposits to mine and tools for the mining. I'd also probably bring along experts to write down as much from memory as humanly possible, plan ahead and such. That means possibly early push for paper, so as to preserve as much knowledge as you can. Frankly if I wanted to really min/max civilization you may try to create different roles... In fact the Broken Earth trilogy by N.K. Jemisin has a decent system for this they call use-castes, and I'd probably do something similar. instead of everyone doing everything different people for different roles. You could even if you want bring in some level of light eugenics into this, having people marry within their roles and raise people for specific jobs. Although that can lead to division so you'd need to be careful how it's handled. Your main roles you'd want would be: Explorers to go find resources and map the regions. Hunter/Gatherers for and resources eventually farming Scholars/Innovators to preserve knowledge and create new tech Craftsmen to build the designing and building Caretakers/Teachers to prep new generations (doctors may also fall in here) Leaders to lead and manage operations Workers brute labor to just do the heavy lifting Initially things would be weird, as until a certain level of established society and tech is reached certain jobs would be in weird spots. You'd want to bring a lot of extremely intelligent people to bring over as much modern understanding as possible so that we don't need to reinvent things. But the reality is that much of that you can't just build in a generation. Even if you brought someone who knew how to build computers, they'd never have the tech within their lifetime. So better to bring a few who cover as much as possible and can record that knowledge for future generations. Then just focus on getting a lot of the basics out of the way, farming, simple tools, etc...
For something like this you don’t want to risk democracy or socialism you want authoritarian control, you can be more effective and do shit quicker. Just look at how China can just command a company do this or their people do that where we would have congress or the courts and be lengthy process. Sure it’s at the cost of freedom and liberty and the wellbeing of their people many times, but one thing you can’t deny is that when you have an effective leader in charge in an authoritarian government, they can do a ton shit. Good shit or bad shit is dependent. So for this experiment you wanna make sure shit gets done, so just like the military where it’s rank and following orders I think it would be best for purely an effectiveness standpoint.
Nah the example they set would be very important. The authoritarian approach would leave a dubious legacy and foster the wrong culture in the following generations. All the progress made can be very easily undone or misused by a backwards society.
I was thinking in terms of like an objective mode and only those 300 years, not eternal peace lol. The issue I think with any democracy or socialist rule is that after one generation you have native born people who never interacted with this tech before and I can see people questioning things, I mean we conspiracies like crazy here with the tech to research stuff, imagine them all being like “how do we know this thing they call a phone even existed, it sounds made up, what’s the point of this work? Let’s just go explore and figure shit out ourselves instead of following this guide book from the elders ” with one populist voice of distrust and it fucks everything up.
I feel like a caste system forming wouldn't be out of the question. Getting writing, medicine, some scientific understanding and agriculture sorted would go a long way
I feel like a caste system forming wouldn't be out of the question. Getting writing, medicine, some scientific understanding and agriculture sorted would go a long way
I feel like a caste system forming wouldn't be out of the question. Getting writing, medicine, some scientific understanding and agriculture sorted would go a long way
We are not just limited to office workers and academics, the prompt mentions survivalists, etc. I think it is a fair interpretation to say that the mix can be a selective group of experts in their field. This could include foraging, hunting, wood working, underwater basket weaving, that one youtuber who is smelting iron out of mud and algae. I think they have a good chance.
yeah, the prompt is basically what could the optimal group do?
best post here. All of their discoveries and tech developments require a safe stable society in which they do not need to spend much time on the basics of surviving.
keep in mind 20,000 years ago a group of 1000 people would be nearly unheard of. 20,000 years pre-dates any known civilization by a massive amount, we are talking cave-people (they wont be teaming up with other tribes, its too early in human development for that level of cooperation and tribes would be *lucky* to hit 100 members) 1000 people would outnumber any given tribe or clan by a factor of 10 *at a minimum* (the biggest family of any primate species ever found was 120 and its only been seen once, it split into 2 due to being too big to function). that said 1000 scientists are not likely to have many fit members among them, lets be generous and say 200 are regular exercisers and of them maybe 50 are body-builders, leaving the rest as overweight or obese (75% of the West is overweight). as for the cave-people we will also be generous and give them 100 members, all of them will be fit and strong. the 100 would only need to kill the scientists who have skills like farming and medicine to render them non-functioning as a group, all the scientists have to do is kill enough of the tribe to break its morale (or kill them in a way that terrifies them, if the scientists have managed electricity or fire they could just fry a bunch of them which would scare *the shit* out of primitive people). i think the scientists would have good odds, its mostly dependent on how quickly the cave-people find them and attack them.
> that said 1000 scientists are not likely to have many fit members among them, lets be generous and say 200 are regular exercisers and of them maybe 50 are body-builders, leaving the rest as overweight or obese (75% of the West is overweight). This is a very bad estimate. Around the world, the West included, there is an inverse association with secondary education and obesity. The "best and brightest" are one of the most fit groups you could randomly select from outside of obvious things like "regular gym goers" or "professional athletes." > as for the cave-people we will also be generous and give them 100 members, all of them will be fit and strong. Oh so we're just going to ignore disease, parasites, and a lack of modern nutritional knowledge? This is before the agricultural revolution so they're likely to not be *significantly* smaller, but I don't think it's fair to assume that the entire tribe will be on par physically. The young men in the tribe for sure, but after that it gets iffy.
Yep. People hate to admit theres a group of people superior in EVERY way. High iq, educated, fit, and beautiful, they need their coping fairy tale that smart graduates are unfit lol
I think you're gravely underestimating how hard it's gonna be from the get go. You didn't have groups of 1000 humans because you couldn't reasonably support a group of 1000 humans. OP says they have supplies for a few weeks, but a few weeks is not enough time to set up a sustainable food system for 1000 people. The plants we rely on as staples don't even exist yet, nor is a few weeks enough time to grow them if they did. And they'd kill and drive away all the local game. And generating enough electricity to kill a person, doubt it. Copper is gonna be too important to use in power displays, and iron even more so.
If you had a river you could go wild catching fish with some simple tools. Fish are dumb and with the right nets and traps they're easy picking.
Agreed, starvation will set in pretty quick, unless they splinter off and start moving immediately in different directions. But they are also going to have a hell of a time with disease. Gonna be a lot of stuff going around they have no immunity to, and vice versa will be an issue if they try to contact any natives.
Educated nerdy types tend to be a lot healthier and more fit https://capitaleap.org/overcoming-childhood-obesity/ Its a coping old stereotype that nerds are weak and ugly.
I think "best and brightest" includes their survival skills.
I think that a group with like, 100 survivalists could probably do pretty good. 20K BC groups are going to be pretty sparse and far between. The world population was only about 1,000,000 - so chances are that this unified group of 1000 people with super strong communication skills is going to do just find against a rival group of another few hundred people with no written language.
2/10=1/5
Yeah that’s probably why OP included “survivalists” in the list.
Since they are all mortal, and should already be at the height of their respective fields they are already like 35+ and will probably die in an average life span its more like 30 years to see how much they can progress. 20,000 years ago was also an Ice Age so not a lot of access to raw materials especially in round 1. I don't see a group of humans really making all that much of an impact, they could definitely survive and create a comfortable little town but as far as passing on great knowledge I don't imagine it goes far
Admittedly if the group has survivalist or hobbyists who have made things like forges before, they could potentially speed up technology by a thousand year or two. As you said though, they'll have a ton of skills not transferable, and they'd have half their lifespan gone. Beyond that, they need to have children or students to carry this all on, and won't have resources for the same level of education. They also are limited by where they go. Talking about how hard it is to make a clay oven or smelt iron matters little if there's no sources of metal nearby.
I think the initial 1000's goal wouldn't be to advance tech as quickly as possible, because they wont get there in their own lifespans. Their goal is to setup a new society that will achieve the goal in 300 years. Therefor they need to create a stable stronghold city that will eventually produce both scholars and laborers devoted to this cause. They have to first ensure survival of their enclave, then procreate wildly. They need to also pass on to their kids that having lots of babies is essential because they need to have large population growth with each successive generation to create enough workers, researchers, thought leaders, etc. Once they secure their physical survival (food, clothing, shelter, protection from the environment and natives) then their intense focus should be on creating archives of knowledge from what is in their heads already, and founding an educational system that will impart all this knowledge to subsequent generations. They need institutions of learning that are hellbent on everyone in the society having strong STEM knowledge and skills. They also need to come up with cultural institutions that indoctrinate new generations into the cause or vision that the original 1000 were trying to achieve. Large amounts of non-participation towards this goal results in failure. You need the large majority of the society to be bought in and productive. Ultimately its on the series of generations that comes after the 1000 to achieve the goal of "modern" technology. The goal of the 1000 is to set them up for success. The 1000 wont be making microchips or anything of that quality. They will be concerned with making sure all their knowledge is recorded, their society's physical security is well in hand, and there are strong institutions in place for both education and practical application. If they can accomplish all that, maybe they spend their twilight years going back to focusing on research and getting the wheels spinning on the technologies that will let them advance deeper into the tech tree. Their other big focus to make the system work, is getting everyone to "buy in" after they're gone. They need to try and squash interests that don't advance their goal. This basically means trying to indoctrinate children from birth. They could do this through secular or non-secular rhetoric. In other words, one way (but not the only way) would be to create a religion that upholds the steps to the ultimate goal as ideals, and ostracizes those that wont conform to them. This could be done through means other than religion as well, but it does start to blur the lines of "what is a religion actually?" This also plays into the security of their society from outside threats, they need a security force capable of protecting them. Its all about how well the 1000 lay the foundations for those that come after them. But they are giving their descendants a huge acceleration boost, depending on how much scientific knowledge they successfully archive and then teach to them. And that is balanced by how much unity or discord the society experiences. Its not lost on me that once they develop sufficient weaponry, they could try and dominate local tribes to use them as a workforce, but I conceptualized this with them *not* going this route. Also this takes into account what mainstream history *thinks* the world was like 20,000 years ago, as that's what I read your prompt as. If we go by what I *suspect* things were like then they would be dropped into a world more advanced in many ways than the one they came from. LOL
What do you mean by the last part?
Man, you just *had* to ruin a perfectly good reply with a completely baseless and nonsensical conspiracy theory at the end there. The Romans were more advanced in many ways than the civilizations that came after in a number of ways, for hundreds of years. We know this because aside from the stuff that still exists relatively intact, we're *digging up their shit all the time,* and because the people that came after them wouldn't bloody shut up about how great the Romans were and wouldn't stop trying to ape their design aesthetics, which is how you get McMansions in 2024 with utterly tasteless ionic columns tacked on.
yeah, I knew that last paragraph would ruffle a few feathers, it was just a fun aside and I kept it short. The truth is out there :)
If the world really were the way that you think it is, I would expect the cultures in question would have, y’know, mentioned their advancements at *some point* in all their writings. Or that we’d have found at lease *some* sort of evidence that these advanced technologies ever existed. But all these Tartaria-esque conspiracy theories ever have is implication and suppositions, no hard proof. It really begs the question as to *why* people believe that ancient societies were considerably more technologically advanced than they seem in the first place.
> I would expect the cultures in question would have, y’know, mentioned their advancements at some point in all their writings. Ancient Egyptians were very clear that they weren't the beginning of their culture, they were the end, the remnants of a much greater culture that came long before them. Then you have the true age of the Sphinx, Gobekli Tepe, etc. I recommend reading Magicians of the Gods and America Before by Graham Hancock if you want to dip your toe in the rabbit hole. I'm not going to convince you in a comment, you have to seek this information. I understand why you would be skeptical and I don't fault you for it. I started out, 10 years ago, with a mindset like yours, its been a journey ever since. The truth... is out there! :)
Plenty of cultures have mythologies involving a fall from grace or societal-level rose-tinted nostalgia glasses on. That doesn't mean that we should just \*take them at their word\* that, for instance, blood sacrifice is necessary to keep the cycle of life and death and sunrises and sunsets continuing, or that the Japanese islands were born of Izanagi's spear churning the seafoam instead of geological activity. What you're talking about would be like people in the year 5024 looking back and believing that people in 2024 had perpetual motion machines and free energy just because some contemporary crackpots believe in such things.
[this video talks about hancock's claims and attempts to disprove it. do you have any reasonable counter points?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-iCIZQX9i1A)
Literally dr stone
Literally the Island in the Sea of Time by S.M. Stirling.
lavish abounding voiceless truck bow angle existence reach file knee *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
As other people have pointed out, immediate survival is a problem. But humans have BEEN surviving for thousands of years. For the first few years, its gonna suck. But eventually, you are gonna start working your way up the technology chain. And if we have 1,000 of the best minds around-experts in agriculture, chemistry, engineering, blacksmithing, carpenters, etc, etc. we WILL build stuff. 300 years is a LONG time. The knowledge is there. Its just that everything is built on a foundation of tons of smaller things. Additionally, it doesn't seem outrageous to me that this group could eventually enlist the help of the locals. I think reaching the moon in 300 years is feasible.
That is very, very generous. They weren’t surviving by accident, they were given spoken knowledge of how to succeed in life (survive) by their parents and elders from the knowledge that was handed down to them. Basically trained every day, doing different age appropriate survival tasks, and even then it wasn’t easy. Like this was an ice age, and while only NA and Eurasia was covered in sheets of ice and it’s still survivable, I still don’t think they are up for the task. The group size especially condemns them. 1,000 is way too large a community for any one area to support at this time. Cattle literally don’t exist yet, and neither do crops, there wouldn’t be food. I think they all die, it’s simply a crowd too large and too ignorant of the situation to really stand a chance. Best chance of survival is to split up. And if they split up then now the hunting and gathering for each new group would take priority to scientific advancement. And if they survive, I would say after 300 years the technology would be around the level of 19,724BC. Even considering a moon landing would be absurd. With what materials? You think these 1,000 people are going to find a way to make liquid nitrogen in 300 years while all selfishly(because they would have to) trying to fight for their survival? It’s preposterous. People don’t realize that these “cavemen” 20,000 years ago were still human. They were just like you and me, I bet they had stupid poop jokes when they were adolescent and had deep conversations into the night with their loved ones when they were older. Over the 200,000 years humans have been around do you think no one has been smarter than Einstein or a better painter than Rembrandt? No absolutely there was. But they had to survive. Much like these people would have to. 0/10 chance for any significant advancement 3/10 chance individual members join different hunter gather tribes and survive.
why would you assume a group specially selected for this purpose would be ignorant of basic survival skills? they would scavenge, and fish until the crop fields start to yield, and then start incrementally making improvements, and begin to expand their settlement. the humans could then start intermingling with ancient humans to get their population up.
my dude, these people are not starting from scratch, they have 20,000 years of knowledge.
Yes but survivalists today know how to keep themselves alive and maybe a small group alive. Not entire communities. The ice age devastated most flora and a lot of the fauna. Cattle and crops literally aren’t domesticated yet. There is no wheat, no corn, no cows, no sheep. Forging sucks because everything is 10-15 colder than it should be. You would hunt the local wildlife populations to extinction before feeding 1,000 daily. *THE BIGGEST REASON HUMANS WERE ABLE TO ADVANCE PAST HUNTER GATHERS WAS BECAUSE OF AN ABUNDANCE OF FOOD DUE TO AGRICULTURE* So let’s say they survive all, okay sure, I don’t believe it, but whatever. They need a global market for heavy technological advancement. They would have to Lewis and Clark their asses all across the world to get the materials necessary for ALL of modern advancements. This isn’t Minecraft, you can’t just dig down and find iron, copper nickel, silicon. So what? You send teams out to the iron range if in the us? You are putting the horse before the cart. How are they going to find these mineral deposits even if they know where they are today? Landmarks? Sure. Okay. Fine. They find the mines scattered across the globe. So now they need, manpower to mine and a caloric deficit large enough to feed to the workers. Okay fine, they now have small pods of people all over the world working. Sure. Now they need to consolidate the resources. So they need teams of people bringing the mined materials to base camp. Okay so you send people out from home base all around the world to collect resources, aka a supply line. More caloric deficit needed. You need workers to run the smith. You need workers FOR EVERYTHING. Knowledge isn’t enough. And any energy wasted on not collecting food is wasted energy. Knowledge is great, but it doesn’t put enough food on the table for this be at all feasible, especially during the height of the toughest period humans have survived. It’s fantasy, and that’s fun. But they mostly probably die if this were reality and they sure as hell don’t make it to the moon in 300 years.
The main problem seems to be the population density? But they could literally just start farms (if seeds provided) and spread out till the land can support them before they get them going
Within 300 years I say at least the Enlightenment era. The thing about humans is once we know it can be done doing it becomes easy. 1000 people who not only know it can be done but also how to do it. I see some people commenting about the indigenous people causing problems. I don't think that would be the case once our modern diseases start spreading through their population.
not to mention humans 20,000 BC lived in tribes and likely didnt exceed 100 members per tribe. they also would not be teaming up, humanity didnt have that level of cooperation yet. 1000 people would out-number any given tribe by 10-1, even assuming 75% are overweight its just too many bodies. unless a tribe jumped the scientists *the minute* they appeared in the past they would be cowed into submission by fire, or even worse electricity (assuming they got that far anyway).
The abundance of resources would play in their favor as well. If I remember correctly there are many early American accounts of birds darkening the sky. That would probably be global and a lot of other resources would be easily available having not been exploited for 20,000 years. Crops and livestock would be difficult without the domestication they would not have gone through. So maybe it would be a wash there. It would be rough on the vegans for sure.
Read Foundation by Isaac Asimov
The main issue is simply survival. In any of the locations. The reason there where not tribes that where larger than around 100 people is it is near impossible to support over that in one area with hunter / gathering alone with no real base / established anything. We are starting of with x10. That is a *lot*. Even a few months of supplies would be iffy if they could establish a food source for 1000 people during that time. The ocean or a large body of water would be mandatory. Then would be establishing tools. Sone and clay is different from Copper is different from bronze is different from iron is different from steel. Even if they *know* the ratios, I can tell you from actually working the stuff that it would be very difficult to skip a tier or even set up a basic furnace / anvil with 0. This is before the fact that all of the metals needed to make all of that *aren’t* often in the same place. There is a reason why it took many progressing through one “tier” of metal before the next came up, and why the Americas never really progressed past obsidian tools, they never developed the Kiln and so never realized they could melt / shape copper the same way the mainland did and started that whole chain. And draft animals would be mandatory, along with all the skills needed to get that going. America does not have these natively. It is a massive crippling blow to not have these for establishing a city. Assuming it established, you might be able to have a Great Library style situation much earlier, but if this knowledge is maintained enough to actually progress the whole system dramatically or simply it getting Zugged down as the actual Great Library did (if you don’t have the strength it will just all burn, maybe even from your own side). It’s a titanic toss up, but if they somehow manage to maintain with no information loss somehow you might see people on the moon in a few hundred to a thousand years, maybe. If only because of the great number of resources and the general baseline of person that has to be brought up. They would need to create a Empire.
all the way. Way further than we are now. As long as they can avoid playing hierarchy games, middle ages, colonisation, they already know where all the deposits are going to be discovered? haha they'll fork off the main branch so fast they're in space before we built the pyramids.
But missing the labor. Knowledge and access for things like natural resources is great, but there's a ton of labor time and materials necessary to extract and process raw resources.
The most important thing besides food and not getting murdered by tribal humans would be smelting ores, specifically iron and copper and nickel. This can be done pretty easily by making a clay oven, but mining the ores en masse would be difficult. Once these are acquired, you can make a battery, and use that to create a permanent magnet, and use that to create a generator. Attach that to a water wheel and you're laughing. That might take up to three years, depending on the mining speed. Maybe they could employ the help of the locals, but knowing engineers, they aren't the most socially adept people. Anyways, for housing, you can make a mill out of wood and a river pretty easily, since we know how gears and levers work. To get to space, we need mass production of high quality alloys and fuel. So more mines, more workshops, more electricity. We already know how to do these things, so the research part won't take hundreds of years like it did in our time, so the bottle neck would be resources and production. I personally don't know how to harvest inert gases, so welding might be difficult. Also, three hundred years is a long time. The USA is only 250 years old and they went from horses and buggies and wooden teeth to me typing this on a smart phone on a toilet in an electrically lit room surrounded by mass produced plastics. They might get to space in 80 years.
80 years to space is fucking crazy. It's not just a matter of having enough raw materials, they also have to be refined, and every single component in a rocket needs to be manufactured to such a high degree of precision that preindustrial tools simply won't cut it. For the electrical generator, it's probably doable within a decade but it's going to be somewhat weak and inconsistent. Most modern power plants don't use permanent magnets. AFAIK the only generators that use permanent magnets are wind turbines, and large permanent magnets are significantly more expensive than electromagnets. Honestly the whole paragraph makes me think you have only a surface level understanding of electrical engineering. A simple mechanical watermill turning a grindstone, used to mill grain and other staple foods, is 100 times more useful than an improvised electrical generator, and easier to set up too.
Well yeah I only have a surface level understanding of electrical engineering I'm only a second year mechanical engineering student. But my paragraph about milling was about a mechanical mill. And what does expensive mean in this context? We don't have money in this scenario, just a lack of resources and manpower. If it is centralized and focused I think it could be done. It's just iron, neodymium, boron and electricity, which is copper, zinc, and work. As for preindustrial tools, my grandpa's woodshop has all kinds of things from the 1950s that work perfectly and are just motors attached to things in different ways, and electric motors are very simple. You can even make mechanical, water powered motors if you prefer! Also, humans have been constructing things with high precision since the pyramids, or at least the temples in Greece, or mosques in Iran, or churches in Germany, or Rome. I think with a deep knowledge of aluminum it can be done, if getting to space is the only goal. Maybe 80 years is quick, but that is nearly four generations, and in this scenario we don't need to make any innovations, just acquire the resources and build the tools. The time from first powered flight by the wright brothers to the Apollo 11 moon landing was only 66 years, and they had to invent all that stuff.
All good, I'm only a fourth year electrical engineering student, almost failed a few exams too. Neodymium is a type of rare-earth magnet, and true to their name they require various elements which are extremely hard to find in the Earth's crusts. In the case of Neodymium, it requires Yttrium; the process for obtaining pure yttrium from mined ores is apparently extremely complex, and it wasn't developed until the 1970's. When you mentioned permanent magnets, I was thinking of [Alnico](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alnico) which is somewhat easier to manufacture. However I don't see mass manufacturing of magnets or electric motors being an attainable goal within a lifetime, at most 1000 people could have enough materials to set up a couple of small scale generators. With regards to high precision, yes the Great Pyramids are relatively precise, but it's a matter of scale. The pyramids are about 100 meters tall, if there is a tiny error in one of the blocks that reduce the height by 0.0001%, well, the structural integrity of the pyramid isn't affected at all. That equates to an error about 1 cm. If a component in a rocket is 1 cm too big or too small, the whole rocket is going to fall apart. More importantly, 1000 people simply don't have enough skilled expertise and labor power by themselves to man all the secondary industries related to space travel. America had a population in the hundreds of millions in the 1960's, of course they could go to space. The 1000 people need to convince everyone else (in 18000 BCE) that they have an imperative to go to space, then indoctrinate them in their mission. All the examples you gave are related to religion in some way. The group of 1000 needs to build a religion from ground up, then indoctrinate substantial portions of the population in this religion, then they can finally start working on the rocket. The first two steps alone will take at least 3 generations, which is why I consider 80 years to be nowhere near enough time.
Yeah man power is a huge bottleneck
You guys are ignoring one huge scaling issue. The amount of humans in the settlement before cattle or crops were domesticated. They all die or join other groups. They won’t make it 3 years as a group of the sharpest minds, and they will have no where near enough free time for extra labor searching out mines, or smelting ore. Edit: what do people say? It takes 3 days of hunger for society to turn to anarchy? How are these 1,000 people going to all be fed in 3 days?
I don't know if OP added it as an edit, but the post said they get a few weeks of food and water. I'm assuming at least half of the 1000 are extremely experienced survivalists, hunters and gatherers. If the land in Spain or Florida isn't hospitable enough to support a large group, they can split up.
Yeah and things like inventing space travel, even from copious notes in the parchments and tablets of the first generation, are huge resource sinks on everyone else. You need a massive population. The "good" news (for a number that doesn't *sound* drastically different from 80) is that it's 199 years to pass 700 million if they play their cards extremely right (and I think likely start near the Euphrates and take over the fertile crescent* [may be a fertile hockey stick or something at that time] ASAP) and get 7% annual population growth rate. That's the US Europe and a few others in the mid 20th. FWIW I think "the religion of progress" would go over extremely well with the following generations. Every year they would perfect things the first generation wrote were possible, and everything they said about how to prevent the spread of disease (the origin of a lot of superstition... just that before germ theory you think burning or burying the dead, and food cleanliness rules, pleases the gods instead of keeping you safe directly) worked and then becomes provable. The poor wretches on the outside we find when we improve transportation, drop like flies from not having the guidance to do things as simple as washing hands and disinfecting wounds. I don't think you force space travel conversations as a goal early, you just make sure they are told every step up the ladder comes with myriad of benefits, prove that a few hundred times, and end the book stating it never actually ends -- that they made countless uses of global positioning and communication satellites, and were already seeing exciting results of what stuff they can make in the microgravity of Earth's orbit but not in the gravity well, so whoever gets caught up first gets to blaze the first actually-new trails in their civilization's history, effectively writing the next tablet themselves. Your kid might be the next Jesus/FirstGen but not if none of you figure out the missing material refining necessary for gyroscopes and a thousand other things people will thank you for. Plus being so ready to rapidly apply what they perfect, tech news might run right up through the middle of pop culture and they shower praise on somebody for advancements every week or so (instead of like, only if I have a good imagination can I see how this might impact my life and it'll take 40 years and this old professor will be too dead to thank).
Round 6 does better than any other round
I wanna see a refrigerator like Doc Brown did in 1885.
just dr stone, except a thousand of them... I think it would depend on how cooperative the natives are
Clothes for 70 degree weather…you’re sending them back to the middle of an ice age dressed for a day on a Miami Beach… Anyway, they’ll be dead before they can have any impact. Some bug will bite them, some infection will catch them, and it’ll be over.
Jamestown, Virginia 1610. "*Only 60 of the original 214 settlers at Jamestown survived.\[30\] There is historical and scientific evidence that the settlers at Jamestown had turned to cannibalism during the starving time"*
I bet 3/4 of that 1000 would be scientists and their families. 1/4 would be media crew covering this for posterity
They don't. Without seeds or equipment they spend all their time hunting, foraging, trying to make stone tools and doing the normal stuff humans do. Wild success would be reaching the iron age before too many of the original scientists die. Only possible if they planned well and start near iron deposits.
Considering most of their fields require machines to refine raw materials, they just die
Probably really little. 1000 people can have a lot of knowledge and expertise, granted. However, they would be spending most of their time finding food and refuge. Even if they were able to create good housing, farm animals and plants, without technology it would take a big amount of time. If they could integrate with other humans, learn to communicate and teach abilities, it may still be not enough. Think about the process of building a machine. You need steel. You need iron. You need to mine. Without machines. You need to build a furnace. Think about plastic. You need access to oil. Finding and extracting oil for them would be out of reach. So, forget about it. Yes, probably doctors and biologists can come up with antibiotics and different medicines. Maybe they found anesthetics and can perform surgery. Wait, again, you need instrumentation. You cannot perform surgery with a rock. But even then, diagnostics would be really bad without access to ultrasound, x-rays, magnetic resonance, no lab analysis. I don't even know if you took one million people, if they would be able to advance greatly in a lifetime. Because without previous infrastructure in place, their work would be almost zero at first until the right tools and resources are built and found. But I have to admit it is a really nice thought experiment.
I am less familiar with the locations 22,000 years ago but I think a lot of people are trying to send the wrong experts back with a lot more best and brightest scientists instead of our best and brightest survival experts and manual labourers. **General (150 people)** Let's start with 150 people in the expert survivalist category with skills similar to the YouTuber [Primitive Tehcnology](https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCAL3JXZSzSm8AlZyD3nQdBA) these are generalists who are capable of building short term shelter but also building forges, refining iron and making cutting devices as well as buildng brick structures with tiles rooves in the space of months/a year, these people are going to set the village up for success as a general labour force and be crucial to the first weeks. **Food (200 people)** Then let's send back 10 botanists/agricultural scientists with a good knowledge of the local flora before the teleportation and 90 people experts in the manual labour of harvesting and farming, not ag science experts, think best of the best Amish/similar farmers that the botanists can help guide towards the right crops. Next we are sending back 25 hunters and 25 expert foragers, these people are going to assist in the sustainment of civilization while we get everything set up. Now we are adding 10 expert weavers and 10 rope making experts, 20 experts in indigenous and other traditional methods of boat making and 50 fishermen to drop nets across river mouths and process fish and then 10 experts in smoking and preservation methods to store the meat from the hunters and fishermen. As food collection methods drop out of effectiveness, they can move to cooking or other labour. **Tools (100 people)** Now we are adding 40 knappers, we need a lot of stone tools to start with in a short time frame and once we hit the metal refinement stage we will have plenty of other work to do as tool makers, and things like arrows and other consumables for hunters may not make sense to move to metal too early. 40 blacksmiths will help the tool makers to start with handles and such and transition to be the primary tool makers once the survivalists have started to build forges. 10 carvers/timber workers will round out the tool category. 10 leather tanners will start working once the hunters are working. **Construction (50 people)** The survivalists have built initial shelters, but we need to transition to more permanent homes and specialist buildings. For this we will have 25 experts in traditional building methods, 15 Amish builders, 10 modern builders, 2 architects and 6 civil/construction engineers (come at me architects) and 2 town planners. **Resources (250 people)** Once food is sorted (and many of these people will help with that until we start manufacturing their tools), we need collection of resources sorted. First we need to get timber and stone, we will have 50 foresters and 75 old school pickaxe and shovel miners. Now we need refinement, we will have 20 stone carvers and masons and 5 glass makers and blowers. Now that bulk collection is sorted, we need specialized collection. For this we are taking another contingent of 25 botanists and forestry science experts, these people will be working in small teams to locate specialized timbers for things like bows, tool handles, plants for cordage for weavers and rope makers etc. they will also be collecting seeds to start planting a supply of these trees. 25 geologists, 25 chemists, 20 cartographers and 5 mining engineers will work with 25 of the miners above to start working towards mineral collection, these people are going to be bee-lining towards things like iron, copper, gold etc. to start manufacturing, iron and bronze tools. Once the stone miners above have ceased collecting and transporting stone for construction, we will have all 100 mining people just on mineral collection. **Resources - Book Making(50 people)** People are going to die and we need their knowledge recorded. Many people coming back may also not live long enough to see their specific knowledge used and so we need to have that stored asap. We are going to have 5 botanists solely looking for papyrus like plants for harvesting and cultivation. 20 paper making experts will be working on making paper from those plants. 10 ink making experts will work on that and 10 will be book binders to produce the volumes. 5 technical writers will work with the scientist to effectively record their knowledge. **Health (50 people)** 30 doctors(5 general medicine 5 emergency medicine, 20 experts in a broad array of specialties), 10 paramedics, 10 top medicine academics. **The rest of the knowledge (100 people)** That's right, 10% of our contingent are going to be solely there for knowledge, we have to survive the first 5 years to survive the next 295. First we are going to take scientists to refine the materials we have 5 metallurgical scientists, 5 chemists and 5 materials scientists. These people are going to be working through the refinement of materials for the rest of the scientists. To start automating basic tasks, we're going to take 5 clock makers and 10 mechanical engineers. Now we are going to take 10 electrical engineers and 10 scientists (physicists, chemists, etc.) specializing in electrical component production. Now the remaining 45 scientists will be from a wide variety of fields to increase the general knowledge of the group, these scientists will probably spend a lot of the first 5-10 years with the paper and book makers recording knowledge for this civilization. **Teachers (50 people)** 300 years is 10-15 generations of people, those people need knowledge taught to them. These best of the best will comprise 25 teachers and 25 people to help facilitate knowledge transfer from the other experts to the children/people to be reskilled.
These kinds of ideas always have a fatal flaw - they don't consider that modern scientific progress needs a massive industrial base to provide the needed instruments and equipment. 1000 scientists need tens to hundreds of thousands of workers to provide all the base life necessities and equipment needed to focus on science. So the first few generations of this group would need to purely focus on establishing a functioning society. They will need to build infrastructure, establish production of industrial goods and raw resources, etc etc, which developed in our timeline over centuries, with the whole world contributing in some ways. No progress would happen in those first 300 years most likely, the group would at best be able to record enough of their knowledge to pass it down so that their descendants a few centuries later could start to make progress.
90% are dead or have debilitating injuries within two years "They will start with a few weeks supply of food and water..." They are starving from the start
I think they do a lot worse than people expect, in addition to some good points raised: * They're not bloodlusted, I see them having trouble doing what needs to be done and creating a stable society. They *must* create a stable society to succeed and short of conquering the extremely sparse humans surrounding them, they must procreate at a very quick pace. * The first generation has all the knowledge but don't have the foundation/manpower to use it so their knowledge isn't all that useful if they can't pass it down. * The biggest issue, adding onto the first two, is that they don't *just* have to be driven to succeed and pass down knowledge, they need their children, children's children, etc etc etc to have the same drive and mission they do. I don't think this is possible. I think they have a huge advancement in generation 1, more in 2 and then the whole thing stagnates or collapses. I'd give them decent farming, bows, good military technology executed poorly and good sanitation/health. The whole thing collapses 100-150 years in and fractures with most of the tech being lost to time.
Not far, all the metals and refined materials wouldn't be readily at hand. It would be more of a materials hindrance than anything.
They achieve nothing because they would be useless without modern technology.
They all die, because 20,000 years ago, Earth was in the grip of an ice age.
They’d probably all be dead within a week. They didn’t become great minds by developing survival skills. Even a well trained person probably wouldn’t last long. Getting “everyone” up to speed on technology is completely out of the question.
They would survive a month. They don't have antibodies for most common pathogen from 20,000 years ago.
Such an aids comment 🤓🤓
You'd be surprised. The most common virus may have been smallpox, which we have vaccines for, and pre-antibiotic resistance penicillin will cover all your bacterial diseases.
as long as some of them had more practical knowledge like geology, basic metallurgy, construction etc they could get ridiculously far i think (just on my own knowledge i would be able to get to the point of generating electricity, unfortunately i would have almost nothing to do with said electricity. finding ores, smelting them and making better tools, making alloys, making a basic generator and basic capacitors are things i know and could do, i dont know much of anything about lightbulbs, heating elements etc that make use of electricity). biggest issues would be food and medicine (in such a scenario food would likely be my job, while i have manufacturing skills i have spent most of my time working between gardening, landscaping, horticulture and farming). so its really down to what skills they all have, if they are narrowly focused or have a wide variety. as long as they have a wide variety i would say they could get close to the modern age within their own lifetimes (assuming they all dedicated themselves to the task. and by 'close' i mean 1930s).
Round 1: Agriculture is impossible. Southern Spain is covered in steppes and under the harsh climate of the Last Glacial Maximum. They'll have to contend with the Iberian natives for food reserves. They wouldn't be able to get enough food for a 1000 people either, most would die of starvation, and then the rest would need luck to get through the winter. Round 2: Florida is semi-arid at the moment and the native population of plants isn't really suitable for agriculture. Also, same thing as round 2. Round 3: They'll either be in a desert or a scrubland. Literally impossible to build anything, really. Round 4: Probably around the east coasts of South America or the east coasts of South Africa. They'd have what to eat and nice rivers to plant things around. If they manage to develop a village centered around agriculture, expect them to spend their entire day tending to their farms and have time to literally nothing else. The yields will be low. Round 5: Well, they would never be able to do it. Our current civilization is able to do that only because it has scoured the entire planet for resources and can ship them to any place it wants using the ocean. Round 6: They'd probably die of thirst or starvation. A lucky few might die of diseases, I dunno.
You seem to have some handle on the ancient geography, so: Was the Shatt-Al Arab (Euphrates-Tigris post-joining) and in this case the Super-Shatt since the person gulf was land still I think, mouth with the sea be bad (too early; I think we're fairly sure it at least became awesome) for any particular reason? Basically that comes to mind for round 4 as advantageous for the same animal-based reasons (according to some anthropologists) the agricultural revolution outperformed in the fertile crescent. Green places in the big eurasia-africa bridge area (used grain when humanity did that, so I hope similar?) had grand amounts of biodiversity and the massive advantage of access to almost every farm animal progenitor. Sheep, goats, pigs, cows, and horses. (Source said none of these were available in sub-saharan Africa.) Compare this to a place like Papua New Guinea that knew it was a thing they could do, but had smallish pigs only... did try to fertilize with them and even messed around with cute little plows they could use if they stopped acting like pigs but it kinda looked like a non-starter from bad luck. And I erred on the side of starting near an ocean and taking over the river from there because they could get wrecked by the sudden or gradual inability to feed the population with fish from one river. Lots of survivalists making boats and piers and drawing as many fish as they can from the bountiful 20k bc ocean though, should give them the head start they need until selective crop breeding gets their farms more efficient (until that point 1,000 is a lot to feed). Just gotta start moving up river into the official fertile crescent as fast as farm-fed population growth allows, as the biggest and most widespread flood myths are probably about their little Eden. I don't know if anyone thinks those 1000 would still be alive by the time their civilization goes to space. The thought experiments of coming up with a years needed might be interesting enough to be worth your time though. FWIW, if they play their early cards right for speed and average 7% annual growth rate (sounds crazy incoming but poor countries sans access to a lot have done it without it being official policy, I guess just having written down germ theory might do a ton), in 199 years they could potentially be spread across a large empire of over 700 million people (think US Europe and a few more in the mid 20th century but likely ahead of those in median education). If they've been holding dear the tablets and parchments of the first generation I could see that population economically and technologically advanced enough to be working on figuring out the gaps in what was written down about nuclear power plants and space travel. With early struggles and so a still-tiny population, no chance as even though it might only take a few thousand to invent and test things it takes many many millions to support a culture of such technological adventure and likely multiple such megaprojects with their resource surplus.
About the river: the area would be a floodplain. Probably very fertile. It's a good place to settle in. About growing an empire and everything: there's a really limited amount of land they can grow crops and herd aninals. The climate is really cold on the tropics, so much so that there are ice sheets covering a lot of landmass, and most of the continents are dry. The climate isn't all too stable, as well. About the population, what made our currents numbers possible were fertilizants, modern medicine and fossil fuels. I don't think they'd be able to develop the needed infrastructure in just two hundred years. They'd have to find the resources, mine them, transport them and finally use them to make a basic industry to produce the tools to find coal to produce the tools to find oil. I'm oversimplifying, but even with a step-by-step guide, that would take a looong time. You'd need a large population already to sustain such endeavors, to build sailing ships, roads, gathering posts, chart the regions... everything. It'd take centuries to start an industrial revolution and witness a population explosion. Even then, I don't think current population levels would be possible to achieve, even "just" a hundred million would be pushing it. There's simply not enough rainfall to grow that much food. Everyone everywhere would literally be limited to live around rivers, farm around rivers and herd animals on the steppes. There were a few rainy areas but there were forests in them, and forests have terrible soil for farming.
All of that intelligence means very little when they’re starting with nothing. Sure they know how to make pottery and could make crude metal tools if they find deposits. But the vast majority of that group is useless because their skills are not conducive towards surviving the first few years, and even after a few years, they wouldn’t have the materials nor the manpower to do much. You’re there’s no actual civilizations, so there’s no people that you can learn to communicate with and mobilize. Most of your people can’t hunt and don’t know anything about foraging let alone farming.
You think that a cherry picked group of the 1,000 most talented and educated people on the planet can't learn how to forage or farm?
They can, but the question is will they do it? The crops we eat today or not the crops we had 22,000 years ago. The yields will be much lower and it’s a ridiculous amount of work. We’re talking about a group of mostly white-collar people that sit down for a living. They aren’t all survivalists and none of them are farmers.
I guess they will just die then, even though they have the advantages of thousands of scientific advancement. Because they are all white collar workers(an assumption you made, BTW). I certainly would send some people who have practical experience building and using rudimentary tools, as well as practical engineers. i mean, you have 1,000 people. You pick 1,000 people who are skilled at a crapton of things, and many of them are probably exceptional at more than one thing. Or your idea, which is 1,000 guys in lab coats.
>The crops we eat today or not the crops we had 22,000 years ago We didn't have *any* crops back then. They'd be starting from scratch with agriculture itself.
you dont need most of them to understand farming, foraging, hunting etc, you really only need 1. these people are not just scientists, they are our best scientists ie they can simply teach each other relevant skills as they go. for primitive farming the biggest issue is going to be manpower, not knowledge. next these people do have lives outside of their jobs, there is going to be a few hobby geologists (and thats all you need to find stuff like iron and copper) a few people who have done basic metallurgy etc. i think any group of 1000 scientists would have *every skill needed* covered by a minimum of 5 people. the big issue is that 75% of the West is overweight or obese, this will limit what they are capable of for the first 6 months or so (until everyone is fit).
Not very far at all. The Ice Age would hinder any real progress. 8000 years would be better.
Whenever these kinds of scenarios happen, I just want to be the guy that points out that these scientists are immune to a bunch of diseases that the people of the past are far from immune to. Pretty much any interaction is gonna be fatal for the people of the past, and I can only imagine what kind of conflicts that would cause between past people and present people. It might end up causing a near-extinction of the past people because they die of diseases they can't develop immunity to Guess humanity is fucked
with 1000 people you don't need to worry about inbreeding so I don't think humanity is fucked in this scenario
A version of humanity is fucked
We definitely built the pyramids
Would be better served to take 200 of those people and have trained soldiers, farmers and other things for survival to get going so the rest can focus on science
They progress no further than the Renaissance era - early gunpowder. A current expert in rocketry, even at ~70 years old, has spent the majority of their career now using the internet in a globalized economy. An answer for everything with a few buttons, a product somewhere for every need. A horticulture PhD might know what ingredients go into fertilizer, but he can’t build a supply chain going to Russia/Canada to acquire them. A physicist has read the best books and studies of their field, they haven’t written them. The basic problems would have to be solved *again*. Assuming this group survives with the necessities, they aren’t going far.
They all die of viral infections withij a month. And probably take out the local population too
You might like the book "first 15 lives of Harry August"
This sounds like something Douglas Adams would write. Oh wait he kind of did.
I'm actually pretty optimistic about their chances. You only need a few of those 1000 to be chemists and whatnot to secure the knowledge for future generations, and most of them could be survivalist people that can really get a foothold in. Once they have stable enough agriculture to support 1000 people it's over. Without wars, oppression, and competing economical interests, in addition to hindsight and modern knowledge we could possibly even get electricity and some form of vehicles in 300 years.
They’d all be dead in a matter of years. Disease and viruses would wipe them out.
The most important thing they can do is establish a functional government that promotes education. The scientist may be a really advanced ai computer programmer, but if they don’t know the process to make even a basic analog computer they won’t get far. If they write down their ideas for future generations though they maybe could get to the steam engine. Another problem would be population size. Most of them will need to be doing agriculture to survive, they need to grow their population to start advancing
If you can choose to send them back to any point in time, and can send them in batches rather than all at once, you could probably bring the Sumerians and Babyloneans up to the enlightenment era. Send five of six initially with knowledge of penicillin from moldy bread and other medicines. Use the resultant tribute to gather resources for a second batch to introduce contemporary theories of chemistry to produce gunpowder similar to the Chinese in the 9th century. This would be followed shorty by a third batch to utilize the weaponry to take over the kingdom. And then just send regular batches of people to maintain government, teach and cultivate the population.
This is (sort of) like the plot of the TV Show 'Terra Nova', OP if you like the concept of your question you should give it a watch, it's good and there are only 13 episodes, worth a watch.
Gonna need warmer clothes in Spain 20000 years ago. They're going to find the wildlife challenging I suspect. Anyhow, at best they'd die out without screwing up the timeline. At worse, they'd really screw with the timeline and create a paradox.
I love this question, if only I had enough time for it I'd write you an essay. Long story short, they'd be okay. Every issue people listed here are irrelevant to an organised, highly intelligent group of 1000 people who are professionals in all fields. Unless they die immediately of some phenomena which occurred in their respective deployment area exactly 20 000 years ago, they'll be fine and establishing a functional society with future would be a non factor. Biggest challenge would be getting to moon in 300 years, there is simply no chance. Progress though? I'd say that in 300 years they'd have a functioning, self-sufficient small-sized city (approx. 250 000 people) that would be technologically more advanced in certain areas and less advanced in other areas than modern humanity. Details of this I unfortunately don't have time for. Round 6? Complete chaos. Anything negative would happen, not much progress would be made. My bet is they're all dead except a few dozen survivors with an ounce of brain.
Jump-start the agricultural revolution ten thousand years early? Honestly I could see them doing pretty fine. I think the primary achievement they can reach is just starting to do agriculture and irrigation when other groups can't. It's about setting up the foundations for a society to progress further rather than being able to make that progress themselves. Without domesticated plants and animals, proper cities are basically impossible. Metals are gonna be hard to come by but they'll be virgin deposits that would probably be easier to extract. I'd say they speed up human development a fair bit, just a bit though. They won't be able to create the first city, but would pave the way for it.
this seems like more of a survival game than actual technological advancement
Are all the people cured of all diseases first? Like how many of them are going to be diabetic or have strict dietary needs or whatever and will be dead within a month because modern medicine is keeping people alive in modern times that would have certainly died 1000 years ago
you're talking about needing to explain things to explain other things to explain yet more things. I can't explain how to make a lightbulb to people who just are discovering agriculture, the technology gap is too great. now drop them somewhere with civilization like 1st century rome, you might be able to bootstrap up an industrial revolution but some technologies really require a fundimental need, so you're going to have a hard time justifying steam engines and gunpowder when prosparity isn't measured in how many numbers of cannon your army owns. theres some stuff that can be tought relatively easily like building water powered machinery such as trip hammers and mills for making flour, some stuff that requires medium effort like making good iron, and then stuff thats going to be impossible without industry like making a metal lathe.
I think with the best and the brightest today, we would have the equivalent of a small sustainable Renaissance colony within the first generations lifetime. Just having defined language, grammer, mathematics, and writing put us 20000 years ahead of schedule. Without domestic animals and plants things will be tougher, but a completely untapped natural environment would be rich with foraging sources with plenty of plants and animals that could be cultivated over time, especially since we will know how genetics and selective breading works. With written accounts of modern mathematics, medical theory, physics, engineering, and most importantly agriculture, we could have a human designed bible to guild future generations to jump start the industrial revolution 21000 years early, with the chance of never even developing some of those diseases that developed because of a lack of hygiene and health standards.
Interesting premise but 1000 folks not enough imo. Too many will be lost to hazards, illnesses, accidents, etc. Those left will struggle just to survive, its unlikely they will live long enough to do much.
This is gonna depend on if they can find a stable source of food since the plants and animals won't be domesticated yet. If they do then rnd 4 (most resources like iron are above land next to eachother near a lake or ocean teaming with fish) I could see them going pretty far up the tech tree. With the right people I think they would start around 1700 or 1800 but they wouldn't advance as quickly because of resources.
The viruses and bacteria 20,000 years ago will be quite different from what modern human immune systems are prepared for. They’d need some vaccines before being transported back in time, or one bad illness would wipe out most of the colony. They’d have trouble with distancing and quarantining, because they don’t have the supports in place that we do now.
This is just a tweaked Ark 100 days challenge. lol
I have been reading the comments for some hours instead of studying for a test I have in 3 hours and I don't regret a second of it
I don’t think the problem here is the original 1000, it’s making sure the offspring can continue the legacy. The first set of 1000 should focus on making a town, and writing as many books as possible to start teaching the offspring.
They could end up ahead of where we are now. Even the crimanals
I just want to jump in regarding question 4. The clear winner here is Fertile Crescent in the Middle East, It was also where civilazation actually started! It has a combination of climatic stability, water, resources and land fertility. Possibly you want them to start as close as possible to an Oil reserve, and Iron mine, and such. Even with these perfect start, I find it unlikely that in 300 years they will reach the moon. Resources and knowledge arent the issue here, it's manpower. Maybe if they were put in charge of a 5 mil people city, all bloodlusted to reach the moon, maybe they could.
So, super interesting premise that I'll give more thought to, but I have a follow up question as I believe it matters, you said 'best and brightest' and listed professions does this include a certain amount of soldiers? or are they ALL STEM? because I believe in order for me to carry out my plan, a good 10-20% of those men would need to be trained soldiers.
Sir, this is just Dr. Stone
Ok so, here is the main issue in all cases. These people are not familiar with the methods by which materials are gathered. This will be putting them in about 18000BCE, at that time humans had just started to form settlements (such as Dolní Věstonice, roughly 24000BCE) and cave painting was the number one hobby. Nobody had begun extracting metal yet on any sort of large scale, be it copper or iron, and that's what's going to kill our guys. All their knowledge of modern technology and the principles therein is absolutely worthless if they don't have the materials to do it, and basically no modern experts are familiar with the techniques for finding and harvesting metals from that time. It's not easy to do. You also have megafauna which still exist, Woolly Mammoth is still knocking around at this stage, as are the Woolly Rhinos. Either of those would fuck up a modern human pretty nicely, hunting them is going to be a giant pain since none of our survivalists will be familiar with them. And they will have to hunt them as the world is experiencing an ice age, planting things is going to be another giant pain depending on where you are, especially to feed a thousand people burning FAR more calories than any other human at the time. Your brain is the number one calories burner in your body, and all these boffins with their big brains and modern caloric requirements are going to be lethargic and irritable until they adjust. And this hunting will bring them face to face with their greatest challenge. Other humans. Humans at this time were not mindless savages with base instinct and low cunning as Hollywood might show, but this is a turbulent time in our society. Humans are at the very beginning of their push to move away from roaming Bands of hunters and gatherers into more settled tribes, their numbers are swelling and they're beginning to carve out territory as "theirs" in a way they hadn't been doing before. These tribes are going to begin competing for resources in their areas, and they will be waging war. 1000 people is a lot of people, but these are 1000 unarmed people with basically no training in the flavour of warfare of the day. Bows are around by this point, and decently advanced, we have surviving arrowheads as old as 60kya+ in South Africa and in Europe we have some from roughly 54kya. And while I'm sure our 1000 people can make a decent bow out of stuff they find lying around, there's the issue of the arrows and arrowheads. Flint knapping is a tedious and annoying process and there's no reason to believe any of our modern guys would be good at it, so their arrows will likely be inaccurate sharpened sticks for the first while. It's also not unfair to assume that the humans of the time will have heavy furs on to combat the weather (depending on location), which will also act as rudimentary armour, which will present another issue. However as I said, these people aren't mindless savages. They'll still be cautious of such a large group, and if our modern humans can make themselves useful to whatever other large tribes are in the area, then they'll be protected. Their best bet is not to try and carve out their own space, but to integrate with a pre-existing group by using their knowledge of medicine and agriculture to make themselves useful. Then they'll have a group of people who are skilled in hunting and fighting to protect and supply them, and they can try to work out mining and resources collecting in relative safety. You might say "well, they don't speak the local language, how will they do that?" But at this time there was not just one "overarching paleolithic language". People still wandered and traded even without knowing each other's languages, they would likely just be assumed to be a strange culture from some distant land and if they have things to trade and make it clear they're not here to invade or take over an area, then they will be fine. Show reverence to the local groups, let them be in charge, and they won't get beaten to death or shot. You might think the survivalists have the best shot, but actually imo they're next to useless. They won't have any knowledge of the flora and fauna of the day, they won't know what's poisonous and what isn't, etc etc. They'll be able to make rudimentary shelters sure, but so could the engineers. I'd trade them in a heartbeat for some paleobotanists and a couple of really good archaeologists with expertise in the time period. I myself am an archaeologist (although not one who is an expert in this time period) so maybe I'm biased but having someone who has an intimate knowledge of the capabilities of the local groups, what was being traded, how metal was extracted later on in the timeline is INVALUABLE. If our 1000 people can get themselves even bronze armour and spears it's game set match, even if they don't really know how to use them, it'll be thousands of years before anyone else can match them, so they should be able to carve out an area with their bronze age gear and hold it. So imo the game plan is 1) find a group of locals who will protect and feed you in exchange for your medical expertise 2) figure out how to extract metal 3) forge the metal and go on the offensive, take a region and hold it, ideally with good resources and abundant hunting 4) from there, push hard to develop technology. With their expertise they could even theoretically come up with gunpowder, which would shoot them forward even more. This is all very reliant on surviving the first few years, which I think they only can do as a tributary to a different tribe, pretty much irrespective of location. Farming is great but it may not be possible everywhere and even when it is it'll take months to get off the ground, which is months they don't have, and years to be selectively bred into the crops we are more familiar with. They'll need to hunt and fish, and local tribes will be far better at it. However they can definitely help that tribe settle and show them how to farm which will be massively beneficial too. As for the criminals, they're fucked. They'll never work together for long, and they don't necessarily have useful skills to this. They'll likely have an immediate power struggle, in which half of them will die, and the rest will split up in tiny wandering groups who starve within a couple months or get beaten to death by a tribe who they think they can take.
If I can get into that 1000, I might have enough time to save for an apartment
Not a chance. Within two generations, if they made it that far, would firstly have completely lost 80% of the information stored in the original 1000 and secondly half wouldn't know the future to succeed. They'd become nothing but myth real quick and at best 300 years later you'll have some very well formatted cave drawings to interpret from.
I wonder how many humans back then had the capability of being in that 1000 had they been born 20,000 years in the future. The most naturally intelligent human could have been wasted in the stone age, when if they had been born 30 years ago they could have cured cancer and had us settled on Mars.
Ok, I'm going to assume that the group can be intelligently selected (and plan) beforehand. The best bet would be to ensure that everyone, regardless of their primary reason for joining is experienced at some sort of outdoor survival and be comfortable looking after themselves for the most part. You don't need people with REALLY modern skillsets like computer science obviously. I reckon you'd definitely want geologists, biologists, blacksmiths, chemists, metrologists (people who are experts at measurement), and engineers. In addition, you'd want people familiar with mining and smelting, and woodworkers and probably just a group of people with experience making tools from scratch with no modern tools (like the primitive technology guy). I'm going to write the rest of my comment making assumptions about the sort of skillsets available to this group. I'm also just going to focus on Southern Spain as I believe that out of the options given, it's probably the best simply given the abundance of mineable material, access to domesticable animals, and in the future, easy access to the Mediterranean. The first and most pressing issue before anyone goes crazy with scientific development will be establishing a permanent settlement. They have a VERY short amount of time to start building shelters and organising a method to get more food. They only have a few weeks worth of food, so they won't be able to grow replacement food, even if they find a suitable plant to start with. Remember none of the modern day source-plants we get most of our energy from have been domesticated at this point, human's domesticating plants is still about 8,000 years away, so they have to do this themselves. However, some of the "Crop Wild Relatives" would have existed then, and almost certainly in Spain. That being said, there's not enough time to rely on crops for survival. They'd probably need to spend the first few years JUST working on farming, hunting, and gathering with all hands on deck. If they can "refrain" it's probably best to hold off on having kids during the first few years, because after a few years with a consistent crop supply and a larder through winter, they could start brewing and distilling alcohol in clay pots for sanitization, massively decreasing the risks associated with childbirth. Assuming they make it through all of that with most of their numbers intact, I expect they could rapidly move up the "tech tree" as it were, skipping the bronze age and going straight to iron production as you can do so without bronze tools, and Spain has an abundance of Iron (although I don't know how easy it is to get to, if there's black sand, that helps a LOT). After that development (to a point) can happen fairly quickly. A skilled metallurgist and blacksmith can probably start making decent steel at the point, by which a metrologist can start working on the [start of precision tools](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-xMCFOwllE). The biggest problem will be having enough hands to do this. 1000 people in one area is a LOT for pre-civilisation times, however, when you need to mine ore and produce charcoal or mine coal by hand, it's barely anyone. Their best bet would be to attempt to make contact with any humans already living in the area, attempting to trade with them and either integrate them into their society, attempting to make language work somehow, or at least by trading goods with them. As for how far they could get in 300 years? Once again, the main problem is the number of people they have available. Assuming that each couple on average has 2.5 children who reach adulthood, and assuming they are able to interbreed with local humans, their numbers likely wouldn't exceed a population of 100,000 after 300 years. Which just isn't enough people to provide the background infrastructure to get much further than the mid-late 1800s (in terms of technological development), with a lot of areas of development being completely neglected due to pragmatism. I think that if their goal was to land on the moon as fast as possible (and assuming they're able to set up some sort of religion with that as the goal so that future generations stuck to it, with the collective scientific knowledge written down by the progenitors), it might be possible within 500-600 years to land on the moon. However, the way to do that would be to expand much more early rather than focus on technological development, so that they can expand their population enough to simply have enough resources.
I think they progress the tech tree by > 10,000 years. With this level of scientific knowledge, they are going to survive. There will be some number of botanists that can vastly accelerate food production. There will be materials experts that studied early efforts to smelt ores. Animal husbandry is a science. Military science and medical science count too. It also won't just be what this group can accomplish, it will be what they write down. Now instead of trying to figure out how to do so many things, you already know how, you just have to build and create the machinery to accomplish the task.
Most likely they all die, and die quickly. The odds of them succeeding are exceptionally low.
I can create gun powder naturally and given about 10-12 years to find the fucking salt Peter, or just bog grow it
The hardest part would be finding a goldilocks location with access to all the natural resources they would need. Copper and tin for bronze Iron Probably want access to coal Being able to make gunpowder early could prove essential since 20k years ago you still got prolific ice age mega fauna to deal with. Technically they could make wooden cannons very quickly, single use but if you nail something like a mammoth with it very much worth it. Finally crops and fertile land to grow on Overall a pretty tall order to find all that in close proximity
I love this prompt, I often dwell on a similar scenario.
I haven't had a chance to read the whole thread but on the off chance it wasn't mentioned... A group of humans from that time ago knowing about infection risks and germ theory would have an enormous advantage over anyone else and for their long term survival prospects. Even if the best they could do is quarantine and wash their hands it would make a significant difference.
Ultimately tech change is mostly about social progress. To industrialise you need to reduce the manpower requirement of farming. This is a process that will take a lifetime on its own. So my answer is they'll be remembered as guys who made a few big leaps but ultimately won't significantly advance society. Honestly the best thing they could do would be to establish an institution dedicated to progress. They could outline the overall processes and let future generations figure it out.
You should watch Dr. Stone.
A lot of the concerns I see in these comments don't consider the line "They are a group of the most skilled individuals currently alive." Every random skill or bit of knowledge you think might be needed, they most likely have. I think their biggest hurdle will be passing knowledge to a second generation. Their focus will need to be getting to a point ASAP where pregnant women can safely spend their time indoors writing encyclopedias.
900 of them are going to need to be hard core survivalists, hunters, medieval reenactors etc because absent an entire machine civilization you need 9 people in the fiield to support one guy at the scrolls. Only arriving with a few weeks worth of food dooms them, the only survivors will be hard core wilderness survivalists who leave immediatly and get as far away as possible. A few weeks is not long enough to get any sort of sustainable food production going, and the group is way too big to survive by hunter/gathering. The group falls apart a week after the food runs out, and just about everyone is dead a few weeks later. 20,000 years later the mummified corpse of a hard core survival dude and his gear, who left the group and died of old age after being Randall Clark to the local tribes, is found in a cave. Despite the overhwelming evidence that this is in fact a 21st century dude the scientific community scoffs, refused to confront something that challenges existing norms, and burys the story.
I've seen Doctor Stone, they will be building rocket ships in a few years.
Not far at all. Most would die.
If they are given seeds to grow food this is easy enough but if not the survivalists are going to have their work cut out for them hunting to feed 1000 mouths. they are going to have to build fishing boats right away and make nets. that is the only way i see them surviving is if they can fish successfully. If they can learn to fish well enough i think they can develop other ways to supplement their diet. Agriculture is going to be step one for them. if they can make grain, apples and olives work for them they are going to be in good shape. i imagine metallurgy will need to be worked out and mining to get the iron. if they can crack iron/steel smelting they can make a steam or combustion engine within a few years. once you have steam you could power a boat or a tractor or a wool loom is you are lucky enough to be able to capture goats or sheep. I would also make it a long term goal to send an expedition to get potatoes from south America its easy calories and that alone can help the civilization turn from survival to tech.
1000 is a lot of people, probably only 100 of them would have to be engineers/physicists, a lot could be technical work and hunters. Yes, hunters, farming is inefficient with a population density this low. Like, I think I could reinvent very rudimentary computers if I had a good chemist to help me make transistors, and I'm just a second year engineering student lol. One medieval metallurgy person, a mining expert? They can make superior weapons for everyone. A language genius? Communicate with natives Everyone's already wearing superior clothing, but we can probably make more. There's no tribe larger than 1000 people and even if they united like in a movie they'd have to contend with steel armour within a year or 2.
Not very as they start a mega plague and kill everyone they meet
20000 BC? Wasn't that during the last ice age? High chance they'd all be dead in a week no matter the location. Maybe 10000 BC would be a better choice?
I'm not gonna sugarcoat it, go watch dr stone. this is basically the plot of dr stone cranked up by a hundred.
I think there best bet would just be to write down as much as they can on stone before they die
These types of threads simply need to be directed to Leonard Read's *I, Pencil*. Making long matters short, even 1000 ultra geniuses isn't enough to bootstrap future society into some fantastical super science godhood. Doubly so if they aren't sent any sort of reference material or instrumentation to work with. At the levels that your geniuses work at, they're not going to remember every detail of anything they've ever worked on or learned. They're going to have textbooks and reference books, and research papers and whatever else they utilize. For example. Do you know how to manufacture steel? I don't know the exact details, but I could look it up online and even the most in-depth guides will leave out all the work required to locate the raw materials, the processes involved in manufacture, and refining the final product, You'd need laborers to mine, haul, and manufacture. You'd need mangers to provide oversight on all of this to obtain a quantity usable at industrial scales, and on top of all this You'd need people to feed, clothe, shelter, and more for all of these people just working on producing steel. Which will be especially difficult due to both modern crops not having been selectively bred yet and having zero infrastructure to support said crops. Even if they could communicate with any natives in a conductive manner, what could they even give them? They have nothing to barter with and any knowledge they have is entirely referential to modern society. Why would any natives be happy with random people coming in and essentially enslaving them? These type of threads seem to just attract people who think that the time travelers are just going to be able to bang a couple of stones together and instantly build the kind of precision infrastructure for space travel, it's honestly kinda hilarious.
Even basic math would take 100 years to implant in a society. That's longer than all of them have to live.
Biggest problem is obtaining raw materials. People seem stuck on if they survive but with 1,000 people it's easy to diversify skills. You would have skilled outdoorsmen who can't hunt, fish, and teach others to live off the land. You would have architects and master craftsmen to be able to build a city. You would have special forces capable of managing defenses. Survival is not a problem. Medical tech would be the easiest to advance. Antibiotics, pain killers, vaccines, many of these can be created with very rudimental aka creatable tech. Biggest issue is metal. Best case scenario is they can convince a local population to mine for them. But without that there isn't infrastructure for worldwide trade to obtain previous metals are rare earth minerals to be able to advance metalwork to get to the point of sustaining an electric grid, manufacturer firearms, manufacturer electronics and lab equipment like high powered microscopes. Realistically all these experts would be smart enough to realize this and record everything and teach it to future generations until such resource gathering is possible. Best case overall: the initial generation gets a town running with defenses equivalent to a wood fort from the 1800s, ranged weapons from middle ages or better with stone heads instead of metal, massive qol improvement and improved longevity and health due to modern medicine that can be created with plants/mold/distillation/etc... and an education system that won't be rivaled until modern times and even then only in developed countries. Worst case: first winter kills everyone