Gaaa! I can't find the reference to a short story I've read about an over-developed future where the entertainment of the time is "athlete performers wearing body/environment capture suits" who are trained for "any scenario" and then randomly dropped into alien primitive populations where they have to survive, live without detection, and their "reality show goal" is to become a leader or otherwise pivotal to that primitive race, all the while not being discovered by "the Federation" type of modern police because such intervention with a primitive race is highly illegal. The public watches it all in a "body sim" like VR player. Is this triggering anybody's memory? Can't believe I'm blanking on the author...

If it was one human, they'd die off before reaching any significant technological level. However someone who's been on a survival course should be able to survive for the length of their natural life (minus modern medicine), the first few days being the key.

Transporting a man and a woman doesn't help much either because there probably wouldn't be sufficient genetic variety to produce a viable species. I think I read you need thousands of humans to do that, and then there's enough spare capacity beyond mere survival to ensure that knowledge gets passed on.

There is a book about all this (a rather depressing book actually): https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/apr/03/knowledge-how-...

I'm not sure I would have the goal of the "modern world" in mind if transported to a pristine planet! Millions of people want the technology but not the stress and pollution of the rat race. A small remote coastal settlement in a temperate climate with some technology to make life easier (fishing nets, agricultural tools) sounds ok!

Of course the daily grind there is probably food production and medical issues.

My post was intended to be two questions:

1. What are the chances of any us surviving outside of human civilization if all technology was stripped from us, even if we had memorized all of humanity's combined knowledge?

2. How long would it take to replicate current technology from scratch, if all the research was already done for you, and you were basically immortal?

By "from scratch" I mean skipping the creating-the-universe part, just starting without any preexisting tools other than what you may find in nature.

I've given some thought to #2, from the perspective of a mildly-transhuman child left by herself in a jungle (it's a novel..), and came to the unfortunate conclusion that...

Maintenance is a killer. There comes a point, fairly early in technological development, where it's simply impossible for any single person to keep everything working and still have time to improve on the situation.

That's true for even the most benign of environments. Hana, unfortunately, was stuck in a rather damp jungle.

(And to preempt the possibly inevitable question, find it at https://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/threads/song-in-the-fo.... Read if you feel like; I like to think it's cute.)

Actually, Terry Pratchett's _The Long Mars_ discusses this, to an extent.

(In that setting, you can build a very simple machine --- powered by a potato, which actually makes sense in context --- which can take you to a parallel Earth. You can take what you can carry with you; but not iron, which stays behind. Turns out that setting up a society from scratch using only hand tools and brain power is kinda hard.)

Hmm. I've read the first book in the series (must get around to reading the rest), which is mainly exploration and doesn't focus too much on society-building, but as an engineer I'm not sure I buy that bootstrapping in a new Earth without bringing any iron/steel would be that difficult.

It would be an effort, but I think we could retool to bootstrap industry mainly using aluminium and copper alloys (engineering bronzes particularly are great materials). Some titanium and nickel alloys in the mix.

The first two are excellent. But then you can tell that Pratchett's influence has waned, and Baxter's bitterness and misanthropy is creeping in; in The Long Mars everyone's painfully disfunctional and whiny.

I'm still not sure I want to read the last two. I swore of solo Baxter books after getting burnt by Titan.

Sigh, that's another one on my reading list. I thought Baxter's Voyage was a wonderful novel - quite dry, but masterfully put-together, using NASA's true history to inform how an alternate history might have gone. Titan seems irresistible, but it sounds like it might be quite bitter.