How long would it take to build today's technology?

[Endersmens]

Here is an experimental question. Be warned, it's not very specific, and it would be extremely hard to give a definite answer, but it's still a fun thought experiment.

So here is the question: With all of today's knowledge, how long would it take to go from nothing to having all the technology we have today?

Now, before you say instantly, think about this. While much of the time from the stone ages until now was spent in developing ideas and inventing, some of it was actually spent building. And, think about this. In order to make the computer you're likely reading this on, precision machines assemble precision parts together. In order to make those machines and parts, more precision machines are needed. To make those, precision hands are needed and premade materials. If we were to start over with nothing, this process would have to happen. The first tools would be used to make better tools, those tools to make even better ones, ect.

So, only taking into consideration build time, how long would it take to go from nothing to today's technology? Give your guess below! If I had to guess, purely on build time, I think we could go from nothing to today's technology in a matter of years, under a decade. Probably a bad guess, but who cares!

EDIT: To avoid confusion:

I guess I maybe should give more detail.

At the time of posting I was ignoring resource gathering, which takes out agriculture and mines and such. I literally only meant build time. Given the worlds population, in it's current state, given any and all materials, how long would it take to rebuild. Is that a little more clear? I.E. when you finish something you immediately use that to build the next thing. This is why I gave such a short time frame. No waiting for resources, no waiting for inventions. Just. Building.

Edited October 19, 2015 by Endersmens

[radonek]

This actually happened. Kinda. Tzarist russia before bolsheviks revolution was underdeveloped agricultural nation with almost nonexistent industry, all science and industry imported from west and ravaged with war to boot. Forty years later they beaten americans to space. Chairman tried same thing in fifties, only faster… and failed miserably. So my guess would be on the order of decades. I just have trouble imagining benevolent dictator performing this.

[RainDreamer]

From nothing? Well, I think maybe some decades to centuries. The first thing people will do, hopefully, is finding ways to record all knowledges right away, in some form that would last behind for a while with high fidelity, before the first generation who has all the current world knowledge and experiences die off and leaving a generation never seeing technology before behind. Then afterward, we will suffer some regression, as knowledge is lost little by little. Perhaps back to pre-industrial time. Then we might catch up once again. This is hopefully still the best case scenario where the rest of humanity still work together, instead of fighting over knowledge and lost technology to stand above others, which would regress us even further and slow progress significantly.

[Endersmens]

You guys are looking at it wrong. I said with all of today's knowledge, and only build time. Not taking into consideration thinking time or even resource gathering time, just build time. Basically how long would it take to build the present from nothing.

[Ralathon]

The growth of russia isn't a very good approximation due to its ability to import goods from outside. If Russia wanted to increase steel production they didn't have to build the foundries from dirt and rocks, they could just import them.

As for a time estimate, it depends entirely on the population you've got. If you dump 1 billion people on a virgin earth it will go much MUCH faster than when you send 10 guys.

[Endersmens]

The growth of russia isn't a very good approximation due to its ability to import goods from outside. If Russia wanted to increase steel production they didn't have to build the foundries from dirt and rocks, they could just import them.

As for a time estimate, it depends entirely on the population you've got. If you dump 1 billion people on a virgin earth it will go much MUCH faster than when you send 10 guys.

This would include all of today's population.

[Ralathon]

This would include all of today's population.

In that case it depends on the geographic distribution of those people. You need farmland to grow crops while your workforce rebuilds the world. You need mines to gather resources etc. But if we go with an optimistic scenario I reckon we could rebuild in 0.5 to 2 centuries. I'm basing this number mostly on the speed of the industrial revolution while taking into account all the needed knowledge is already present. As soon as you have a lathe you should be capable of building most modern machines.

If you're interested in this stuff, You could try the book "The Knowledge: How to rebuild our world from scratch". It explains a lot about how to rebuild modern machines from scrap.

[Endersmens]

I guess I maybe should give more detail.

At the time of posting I was ignoring resource gathering, which takes out agriculture and mines and such. I literally only meant build time. Given the worlds population, in it's current state, given any and all materials, how long would it take to rebuild. Is that a little more clear? I.E. when you finish something you immediately use that to build the next thing. This is why I gave such a short time frame. No waiting for resources, no waiting for inventions. Just. Building.

Also, that book is a bit creepy in the fact that It's literally exactly what I was thinking (well besides the resource thing)

[Nuke]

sort of similar to a hypothetical problem ive always wondered about. in my scenario we are discovered by hostile aliens. they invade earth and start exterminating humans. unable to stop them, some humans steal a time machine and use it to send all our knowledge and technology back in time, giving it to ancient egypt or rome or whatever. idea is you ratchet up the tech level so that when the aliens arrive you can deal with them (assume accidental discovery, they were flying through on a 5000 year survey of their part of the galaxy and just found us on accident).

if you want to pass the scientific method, and you give them a stack of the most important science papers in the last thousand years, the scientific method would end up requiring that they would have to re-verify all that knowledge before they could make progress on their own. and the technology, give the roman legions ak-47s, aircraft and nukes and see how long it takes them to take over/destroy the world. having the tech and not learning the discipline that comes with each technological advancement could be very destructive. to set limits on war and industry such that they dont put the world on an even more destructive path than we have. i always think that the aliens would show up to a dead planet and start terraforming.

on top of that if you try to give them knowledge they might burn you for heresy. you would probibly have to show up with an army that can deal with any threat and forcibly teach them. even then there is the zulu scenario, where a primitive army with numbers can take out a smaller army with better tech (and why we didnt use that on the aliens is beyond me).

there is also the obvious problem of infrastructure. just because you know how to make steel for example, doesn't mean you can use the most advanced process right away. you will probibly have to bring out iron age technology to help the egyptians bootstrap industry. its not just building factories you have to build everything that makes a factory, and everything to make the supplies the factory requires. you cant just shovel rocks in one door and computers out another. you dont just depend on the previous generation's knowledge but also what they built.

[Luckless]

Really depends on a lot of factors. I've personally built precision cutting tools from raw materials in 'primitive' settings in a matter of days. If you could focus production and development along carefully controlled lines, then it really wouldn't take long if you had enough manpower on hand to cover the first few hurdles of industrial capacity. With a well controlled feedback loop: Building small tools to use to build larger tools, and establishing the core industrial resource production, then in theory it could be as low as a decade, if not less if you were able to somehow manage communication and planning.

[Streetwind]

Maybe six to eight years or so, if you dedicated unlimited resources and manpower to the task.

The problem with some technologies is that they have absurd ramping times. You could probably get 90% of the way there in a year or so, but fabricating modern silicon circuits can take years on its own. Not for an individual chip to be produced at a time in a running factory, of course - but, to go from inserting raw materials into a completely offline factory to receiving the first working product from that factory.

Now take into account that today's technology can only be produced computer-aided, and you have to go through several computer chip generations, each of which can take months to years to yield usable hardware. And that's only the tiniest subset of human technology examined.

(This post has been brought to you by pure speculation and guesstimation by myself.)

[Endersmens]

Maybe six to eight years or so, if you dedicated unlimited resources and manpower to the task.

The problem with some technologies is that they have absurd ramping times. You could probably get 90% of the way there in a year or so, but fabricating modern silicon circuits can take years on its own. Not for an individual chip to be produced at a time in a running factory, of course - but, to go from inserting raw materials into a completely offline factory to receiving the first working product from that factory.

Now take into account that today's technology can only be produced computer-aided, and you have to go through several computer chip generations, each of which can take months to years to yield usable hardware. And that's only the tiniest subset of human technology examined.

(This post has been brought to you by pure speculation and guesstimation by myself.)

It seems legit, I was thinking a decade or under. Computers will take the most time though.

[Findthepin1]

13.82 billion years. Based on empirical evidence.

[sgt_flyer]

well, to help 'restart from zero' we would also need to refill all the surface deposits of minerals first - because starting from zero, you won't be able to dig deep enough to get the metals needed for most of the tools you need.

Then, you need to redevellop a logistic system if you want to create most alloys (even steel) - because unless you are lucky, you'll have a hard time ferrying the various resources needed to sustain industrialisation.

Once you start to automate some things (using pure mechanical energy to automate various stuff was used way before electricity became avaible - and they transmitted this power through belt drives or flatrod systems) you'll be able to grow the needed infrastructure faster and faster to get back to our current technological level (of course, your logistics will need to grow as well to sustain your increased resource needs - and as you'll have less people avaible for making the food needed by all your workers, you'll need to dedicate some of your industry production to make agricultural machinery)

Once you get these basics in work order, you can start to reach for miniaturisation

Edited October 19, 2015 by sgt_flyer

[Endersmens]

I guess I maybe should give more detail.

At the time of posting I was ignoring resource gathering, which takes out agriculture and mines and such. I literally only meant build time. Given the worlds population, in it's current state, given any and all materials, how long would it take to rebuild. Is that a little more clear? I.E. when you finish something you immediately use that to build the next thing. This is why I gave such a short time frame. No waiting for resources, no waiting for inventions. Just. Building.

Also, that book is a bit creepy in the fact that It's literally exactly what I was thinking (well besides the resource thing)

well, to help 'restart from zero' we would also need to refill all the surface deposits of minerals first - because starting from zero, you won't be able to dig deep enough to get the metals needed for most of the tools you need.

Then, you need to redevellop a logistic system if you want to create most alloys (even steel) - because unless you are lucky, you'll have a hard time ferrying the various resources needed to sustain industrialisation.

Once you start to automate some things (using pure mechanical energy to automate various stuff was used way before electricity became avaible - and they transmitted this power through belt drives or flatrod systems) you'll be able to grow the needed infrastructure faster and faster to get back to our current technological level (of course, your logistics will need to grow as well to sustain your increased resource needs - and as you'll have less people avaible for making the food needed by all your workers, you'll need to dedicate some of your industry production to make agricultural machinery)

Once you get these basics in work order, you can start to reach for miniaturisation

See the above quote. I will add it to the OP to avoid confusion.

[michaelhester07]

Resource gathering and refinement are huge parts of the build process. In the spirit of what you're asking for.

Say we have 7 billion people all sitting on top of huge deposits of iron, steel, plastic, copper, gold, silicon, and food. We want them to build a modern society. Do they have tools? We'll assume no. Do they have energy? Wood? coal? oil? Nuclear? Sugar? We'll assume an infinite supply of energy, but limited by what they've currently built. We're basically Age of Empires 2 set to deathmatch settings.

First we need to make a simple hammer. We have sticks, rope, and ingots of steel. Tie them together. we have a hammer. Hammers let us build shovels which will be used to move the iron and steel around.

Next we need simple carts to move the material. Sticks form the shell, iron and steel form the wheels.

Able to move material we next need to...

Know what. I don't really know the steps to go from immense piles of simple resources to what we have in modern technology. There are so many levels of refinement that came together to make the computer I'm now typing this out on. To recount all the steps to go from piles of resources to computers would take more space than this forum has. For how long it would take assuming we have a society with such "wealth" I would imagine around 50 years. This assumes you get all 7 billion working toward building the computer. That is just one part of today's tech. We have cars, central heat/air conditioning, rockets, cities with infrastructure, roads, houses. All of that went through several layers of refinement and spawned technology to further that refinement.

I don't think any modern event of such happening (like that town earlier in this thread) could accurately describe this as today's developing world can simply buy the refinement and skip ahead in the process. Agriculture town can buy computers and cars and central air. They don't have to develop it.

This is a fun question but to truly answer it in the spirit that the OP wants would take a lot of typing.

[wumpus]

Quite possibly infinity.

You might have "all of today's knowledge" today, you won't have it all tomorrow. You can't even write it all down (on what? Can you, personally, make paper? How about with only what you can find while camping?). Every time somebody dies, that much tech is lost (nobody is learning even the old tech). Toss the green revolution. Toss fertilizers. Toss tractors. Toss the trucks needed to move the food to the people. Expect 90% of the population to die in the first season, followed by another 90% of that within the next few years. Don't expect the remaining 1% to be doing anything but staying alive and heroically trying to re-create an 18th century technology base.

So now you have a population that can likely whip up any mid-20th century design they need, say a kalashnikov or a 50s chevy with hand tools (only slightly exaggerating). The real kicker is going to be the resources. Back in 1900 when oil was discovered in Pennsylvania, it took little more than drilling a water well to get oil. Since then, oil that can be recovered for less than $50/barrel has already be drilled and mostly pumped dry (survivors in oil country will have it a little easier, for awhile). Iron ore won't be an issue: simply "mine" a landfill and harvest the metals for recycling/reforging, but there is no way to "recycle" oil. Unless this happens after a worldwide solar PV grid is made (and one largely locally based, not requiring too complex an infrastructure to run), there won't be a second industrial revolution.'

I'm still willing to believe that a population that can survive a collapse could get back to 20th century tech (presumably with power it would take longer to get back to present due to the lower population (and thus fewer engineers), but it would pretty much follow the curve). The effects of the collapse of the state likely have to be seen to be believed: consider the fall of Rome or the havok wrought by small pox on the american indians (oddly enough, much "higher" civilizations in North America had already collapsed on their own, but what was lost was shocking). If we don't get back to the 20th century in a generation (due to fighting/lack of property laws/whatever between those with food/fuel/metals).

There's also the issue that whoever hoarded meth precursors will likely be king.

[radonek]

Not only computers. Any complicated factory process will need to settle down, tweak construction quirks, train workforce… Unless whole thing is performed by infallible robots from perfect plan, every factory/rafinery/chemical processing facility etc. can take years to begin function properly. There are also technological steps to be made - you cant build, say, steel mill, from scratch. You will have to spend lots of time with precusor technologies building tools for the next step. Computer chips? Easy (in relative sense, of course). If you have required knowledge, its just some very coplicated machines and processes. Now, building a powerplant - thats not just setting up some machines. Thats lot of work. You know, carrying heavy stuff to places. So, I'd still say decades, and most of that time would be spent building industrial backbone.

[magnemoe]

It seems legit, I was thinking a decade or under. Computers will take the most time though.

It will get harder as closer you get to 2015. Getting up to early industrial revolution is simple as in mostly blacksmithing and if you are good you could create an simple steam engine, note that you need master blacksmiths to get to this level.

Now you need to make machines to take you to the next level so you can build the next set, you also need much more specialization. Still getting to 1900 level technology is pretty easy, getting closer to 1950 and you need organizations the size of decent countries to build everything as its so many specialized parts.

yes you save a lot knowing that many things are just needed as bridges, you are unlikely to spend time developing large scale vacuum tube technology as you will have transistors soon however people have to live in the meantime too.

Now things start to get real hard as you say advanced integrated circuits are hard, modern cars are hard, even 30 year old cars before they was stuffed full with electronic are hard, the engines require lots of specialized metalwork and very high precision.

Many things are also very hard to do in small scale as they require huge facility to make anyway.

[PB666]

This actually happened. Kinda. Tzarist russia before bolsheviks revolution was underdeveloped agricultural nation with almost nonexistent industry, all science and industry imported from west and ravaged with war to boot. Forty years later they beaten americans to space. Chairman tried same thing in fifties, only faster… and failed miserably. So my guess would be on the order of decades. I just have trouble imagining benevolent dictator performing this.

That's still not nothing..

There are several technological cycles required to get to steel production.

Food cycles, domestication cycles, natural product extraction cycles

just to get electrical smelting operations, 10 to 20 years.

Once there its a matter of ramping up coal fired power plants.

So we are talking minimally 60 years.

And btw, all the schematics for building things, all now stored on computers. They are lost, anything that does not have a paper copy would be lost. And to copy paper, you have to build paper making and printing technologies. So the ability to distribute information basically collapses to hand transported and people hovering over diagrams in library transcribing (pencil technology, iron gaul ink technology) until you have a modem and an 8088 or Z80 processor. By the time we got to the point we could actually build an 8088, all the people who would have been familiar with its manufacturing would be long dead, so you hope that you made paper and writing quickly as to understand what they did to make those chips.

[Endersmens]

That's still not nothing..

There are several technological cycles required to get to steel production.

Food cycles, domestication cycles, natural product extraction cycles

just to get electrical smelting operations, 10 to 20 years.

Once there its a matter of ramping up coal fired power plants.

So we are talking minimally 60 years.

And btw, all the schematics for building things, all now stored on computers. They are lost, anything that does not have a paper copy would be lost. And to copy paper, you have to build paper making and printing technologies. So the ability to distribute information basically collapses to hand transported and people hovering over diagrams in library transcribing (pencil technology, iron gaul ink technology) until you have a modem and an 8088 or Z80 processor. By the time we got to the point we could actually build an 8088, all the people who would have been familiar with its manufacturing would be long dead, so you hope that you made paper and writing quickly as to understand what they did to make those chips.

Once again, you're taking it too far. None of this is feasible in the way I described. All knowledge is known in some way. It doesn't matter if it has to be stored somewhere, it's still known somehow.

[YNM]

Even if it were to be something along Asimov's Nightfall after the nightfall and everyone in the bunker goes out to spread the knowledge, it'd still take some good decad es to reach mechanical-electrical generation. It's not like you can smelt copper, even more so for copper wire, with your hand. Nor that you can make an handmade IC... But after mechanical - electrical machines are done and massive production is on, it doesn't takes a year for your smartphone to be re-released.

[PB666]

Once again, you're taking it too far. None of this is feasible in the way I described. All knowledge is known in some way. It doesn't matter if it has to be stored somewhere, it's still known somehow.

Until the last person with direct first hand knowlrdge dies, subsequently until you have a wriiten language it gets mythified every 20 years, until the 8080 is forgotten and peaolpe only remember the magical touch screen of the Ipad. So that will do you when you want to build a simple network to send information in rs232 at 200 baud.

[magnemoe]

Until the last person with direct first hand knowlrdge dies, subsequently until you have a wriiten language it gets mythified every 20 years, until the 8080 is forgotten and peaolpe only remember the magical touch screen of the Ipad. So that will do you when you want to build a simple network to send information in rs232 at 200 baud.

We have detail knowledge in how old steam engines worked and how they was constructed. same with 200 baud modems.

That is less known is the tricks in building them and operating them.

[PB666]

We have detail knowledge in how old steam engines worked and how they was constructed. same with 200 baud modems.

That is less known is the tricks in building them and operating them.

Steam engines have to many mechanic parts that have sharp tolerances. Entry level electric power can be driven by water turbine, all thats required is a shaft and a plaform and a dynamo. Once you get an electric smelter then you can build the pressure hull for a steam engine. You have to be abke to heat iron/steel reliably hot enoughbso that it can be poured and rolled. If course the first parts you want to make are the steel working tools. This is all going to be done in initially wooden factories so we can expect quite a few to burn down.

Unless of course you find aluminum salts and bake lime from stone to make cement, which can be used to make foundaries of concrete beam, which of course needs reinforced iron rebar.

Its not simply regurgitating textbook knowledge, its a process that will take blood and sweat and a few lives while you worknthrough th low tech hazards phase.