The human race has accomplished amazing things over the centuries. We have built great civilizations. We have harnessed the power of water, electricity, nuclear energy. We have developed incredible technology: communication, computers, transportation, medicine, architecture, art, literature, theater…the list is endless. We have invented technology that allows us to survive in otherwise inhospitable environments. We have walked on other worlds.All these things, and so many more, were not the result of any one person. Not even the work of any one generation. Everything we have today is the result of the efforts of countless generations of our ancestors—centuries of generations of people discovering, inventing, developing, teaching—each building on the achievements of the previous generations.
Perhaps the most important achievement of all is the ability to record, store and share information. Cave paintings, clay tablets, papyrus, paper and ink, the printing press, digital storage devices—eons of developments have enabled us to get where we are today. And we are still advancing at an ever-increasing pace. None of this would be possible if we had not developed the means of recording, storing, recalling, and sharing information.
How many people alive today have the knowledge, skill, and expertise to build, from scratch, a jumbo jet, or a telephone, or even a mouse trap? If you assembled a team of the best automotive engineers available today, they could not build a car from scratch. Not even a primitive one. They would not have the combined knowledge among them to find iron ore, extract the iron, make steel, and form it into usable parts. They would not have the knowledge to find and develop any of the many materials and processes needed to accomplish this task in their lifetimes. The inventor of the first automobile could not have done it without all the discoveries and inventions that came before him. And he could not have done it without access to all that information that had been stored and made available to him.
Scientists say the early hominids first started using primitive stone tools about 2 million years ago. A million years later…a million years…they were still making primitive axes and knife-like cutting tools. They were living in small bands, existing by hunting and gathering. The only thing on their burgeoning minds was survival. That’s a long time without much progress. But they weren’t as smart as we are.
By 50,000 years ago, humans were well on their way to becoming the dominant species on earth. But they were still living in relatively small groups, still hunting and gathering. It was probably not until the rich resources of coastal areas were exploited, and food sources were more stable, that they really started to progress. About 40,000 years ago, they started making things, things not related to survival— art, music, leisure things…entertainment things. Once they had the time, free from worrying constantly about survival, and a stable food supply, rich in brain-building nutrients, they were able to think about other things. Abstract things. But still, there was nearly no progress in technology and civilization.
Jump ahead to about 8,000 years ago. The first traces of agriculture and domestication of animals are appearing. And in another 3,000 years, the first real civilization, Mesopotamia, appears. This is also about when written language first appears. That is not a coincidence.
Written language— the means of recording, storing, recalling, and sharing information. That allowed the cooperation and collaboration that paved the road to technology.
5,000 years later, we are even smarter, most of us—with bigger brains and better-developed processing power. What could we accomplish without access to any stored knowledge, other than what we have stored in our own brains?
This is the premise of Genesis II. Here is our experiment.
We are starting over. Everything that humans have created is gone. No buildings, no cars, no technology, no agriculture, no pollution, no government, no books. Most humans are gone, too, except for a small colony who will try to survive, and if it is to be, rebuild civilization. This will be our Genesis II
colony.How long will it take for this colony to repopulate, re-civilize, and rebuild their world to achieve anything close to what we have today? They seemingly have a huge advantage over their prehistoric counterparts. Each of them has a lot of useful information already stored in their brains. And their brains are much more advanced.
Our colony will start with a random group of people: 50 men and 50 women of varying ages, but none older than 50, nor younger than 10. That should give the oldest ones about 20 years to share their knowledge with the younger ones. And that should give the youngest ones a chance of survival without parents having to worry about caring for infants and toddlers…yet.
They have all the knowledge they possessed before all traces of civilization vanished. Just yesterday, they had cars, computers, cell phones, medicine, jobs, bills. Just yesterday they could buy food. They could read books, browse the internet, communicate with anyone on the planet in real time. They had time for recreation. They had access to everything the modern world had to offer.
Today they are starting over. They have nothing but the clothes on their backs, and their accumulated life’s knowledge.
How much of an advantage do they have? They will essentially be thrown back to a time where they will be living much as our ancestors did 150,000 years ago. Having somewhat larger brains and intellectual capacity than our 150,000-year-old ancestors is probably an advantage. But what will that advantage earn them? What advantage will they enjoy from the vast knowledge they each possess?
On day one, the first order of business is survival: food; water; shelter; protection from predators. This will be the only order of business for a long time, probably the lifetimes of all in the initial colony. They will immediately become hunters and gatherers. Just how useful is all their knowledge and brain power? They won’t be building ships to explore the world. They won’t be constructing pyramids, or organizing wagon trains for a trip out west. They simply need to survive.
Unfortunately, because we are all living in a world that was built by thousands of successive generations of our inventive ancestors, most of us have lost all basic survival skills.
For the best chance of survival, we will start our colony in a sub-tropical location on the coast, with abundant food, if they know what to look for, and fresh water.
We will give them a bit of a head start, and allow that everyone speaks the same language. That language will very quickly deteriorate. There is no need for most of the words and concepts that they had been accustomed to using every day, and those now-useless words will gradually be forgotten.
There will probably be natural leaders among the group. Power struggles will occur right away. They may divide into smaller groups. But for the sake of our experiment, let’s say they all get along and cooperate for a while. The need to communicate and cooperate becomes very important for the survival of this small group.
The events of day one are the events of every day for hundreds of years. 24 hours a day, every day, will be spent on survival. Day after day, for weeks, months, years. Survival is a daily struggle. There is simply no time for anything else. On day one, they are desperately looking for food. On day 365, they are desperately looking for food.
Our initial colony should have quickly developed primitive structures for shelter. Have they figured out how to start a fire? They need a permanent source of water. Primitive stone and wood tools will likely be developed quickly. Use of metal is probably many centuries in the future. There will inevitably be breeding. Will babies survive? There will be no doctors, unless one of our random pioneers is a doctor. A real doctor, not something totally worthless like a neurosurgeon.
How long will it be before they have developed any form of agriculture? Certainly the first group would have had to figure out which plants could be safely eaten. Most of the crops we enjoy today have been developed over thousands of years of genetic engineering, and the primitive ancestors of those plants would not be recognized by our Genesis II pioneers. They can forget about their imagined gluten intolerance, there may never be wheat again anyway. No corn either; corn as we know it simply does not exist. Would they have tried to domesticate any wild animals for food? Are they chasing wild pigs and beating them to death with sticks?
But here is the big question for the Genesis II group: How are the people going to transfer all their knowledge of what had been a great civilization to their progeny? There are no books. There is no paper, no pens. There is no way, without inventing it again, to record, store, and pass on any knowledge to the next generation. How much of it is even important? When you talk about jets, computers, telephones, it is all abstract to someone who only knows dirt and trees and cold, scary nights. If any knowledge survives beyond the second generation, it will be in the form of vague legends, with no relevance to the current world.
So even if you have been told what had been, and could be again, no one has all the information to be able to get there again. And there is no way to record and store what information you do possess.
Is any of that information useful anyway? How useful is the knowledge of a gas BBQ grill? Metals would need to be discovered. You don’t just find deposits of aluminum foil, steel rods and sheet metal. It usually exists in some form of ore, inextricably mixed with other minerals. But who even knows what to look for? What is propane? It’s like air, but it burns? Where do I find that? Can I see it when I find it? Do I need my own container? You can’t depend on Wikipedia for help.
By the third generation, most of the charter members of the Genesis II colony have died, and the people are living as our million-year-old ancestors had. Primitive tools and food sources. Primitive shelters. The only advantage they have is a more advanced brain. The stories their ancestors have passed down are abstract legends. There is no knowledge of a million years of discoveries, inventions and development. They have no clue that just 50 years ago, one had only to turn a small handle for fresh, running water. The concept of driving to McDonalds for a full meal is alien.
The third generation doesn’t know that they might be progressing to more technology or a more advanced world. They are starting over. But they don’t know that. They are simply surviving.
With no vaccinations, they will have to blame autism on something else. There will be no alien abductions, Bigfoot, Loch Ness Monster. There will be very real predators trying to eat them. There will be no fad diets. They will eat tree bark to survive.
Whatever progress has been made by the third generation will be the state of the art for the next thousand years or more. Advances are few and far between. They accumulate slowly, but they are still only minor advances, punctuated by long periods with no real progress. It is only as time wears on that inventions lead to innovations that lead to technology. Then progress accelerates. Our current technological revolution has only occurred in the last two hundred of the previous million years. What allowed it to accelerate?
Those first Genesis II pioneers, with all their knowledge, have provided no more benefit to the start of civilization than a group of Neanderthals. All their combined knowledge may have helped that first colony survive and thrive, but by the third generation their combined knowledge is reduced to a small handful of legends about abstract ideas. Even those will disappear by the next generation. They still haven’t developed paper and pen, so it is all word of mouth. With no way to relate them to the real world of simple survival, those abstract ideas are useless— abandoned, then forgotten.
It could take 50,000 years for our Genesis II pioneers to gain the same success that took 50,000 years the first time around. The only thing that will speed it up is if the first members of that first colony use every bit of time and resources available, beyond what is necessary for basic survival, to develop the pen and paper, and begin to record everything they know and learn. Everyone in that first Genesis II colony needs to be aware of how important it is to develop those tools that are not important for basic survival, but are essential for progress.
There is one final thing that needs to be considered. The vast majority of people who have ever lived have had little or no involvement in the discoveries, inventions and developments that have advanced civilization. Perhaps not even one in ten thousand has contributed in any meaningful way. Those thousands of inventors, innovators and visionaries had to come from a pool of many millions of people. We all benefit, but most of us do not contribute useful ideas or concepts. Because of that, the more people there are—the bigger the population— the better the chance that someone will be born who will invent something useful and help drive progress. So, no matter what, the population needs to grow to a certain size before innovation can really become a force.
A hundred millennia of progress is an awesome thing, but no one has the knowledge or experience to do it again without knowledge of, and access to, everything that has gone before. How smart are we? Not much smarter than our ancestors from 50,000 years ago. We just have more to build on. We are truly living on the shoulders of our ancestors, but it was the pen and paper that made it possible.
Scott Wright © 2016