Absolute smallest viable size for a colony.

[Kaptin Keen]

I see you're thinking about the current heavily-engineered for docility animals we have now. You won't have those. What you will be trying to use is the local equivalent of a Cape Buffalo. Which means you will be learning an expensive lesson in the truism that few things on Earth can stand up to a pissed-off grass eater. How expensive? Depends on how fast your under-nourished colonists can run for their lives.

Likewise, 21st Century botany is irrelevant, because we're working with plants we've been altering for thousands of years. You will be starting from scratch and working entirely by trial-and-error, with your bare hands. No computers, no labs, no microscopes, no nothing.

Too be blunt, the scenario we've been handed is less colonization and more survival of a shipwreck. Which means everybody dying even after turning to cannibalism is a distinct possibility.

I ... just don't think you realise the level of brutality we're capable of.

Mind you, I don't actually know a lot about this, but it seems most animal will be far more cooperative even if you do something really simple such as blind them. They don't need to see to pull the plough. It may not work for wooly mammoth, or rhinos, or your cape buffalo. But I'm sure we'll find some animal that can be ... made to work.

But I agree: Everyone dying is a distinct possibility. In fact, if this wasn't a forum thread but a real suggestion, I'd say we'd be a foreign species on a planet where every single god damned pathogen, virus and disease was unknown to us, and we'd be absolutely certain to all die. We'd be utterly defenceless, and stand no chance in hell.

But this is just a fun discussion. A thought experiment. And my take is: Build the steam engine first.

[Rogar Demonblud]

Oh, if we're being realistic, we'll all die from the pathogens in our own bodies, since we're heavily dependent on modern medicine to survive as is.

Blinded animals are not docile. They are very prone to panic, especially in unfamiliar surroundings (like surrounded by a bunch of funny smelling animals they have no experience with). And even something as relatively small as a sheep or goat is lethal to a human when they attack. Lot of mass there, and they can accelerate, which again brings up the primacy of F=mv. Heck, even if they aren't going fast they can still crush your ribs or fracture your pelvis by shifting their weight if they're big enough (which happened on two different farms in the county during calving season this year). And again, no modern medicine in this scenario, so most things are likely to become a life-threatening injury.

Frankly, given the ground rules, your colonists will have the best chance at survival if you ignore first worlders and go collect a village in Africa. They're well-trained in getting much done with little resources, and are probably the best chance to get anything done without heavy computerized support. And that gets you survival, not anything much higher up the tech tree.

[Kaptin Keen]

Oh, if we're being realistic, we'll all die from the pathogens in our own bodies, since we're heavily dependent on modern medicine to survive as is.

Blinded animals are not docile. They are very prone to panic, especially in unfamiliar surroundings (like surrounded by a bunch of funny smelling animals they have no experience with). And even something as relatively small as a sheep or goat is lethal to a human when they attack. Lot of mass there, and they can accelerate, which again brings up the primacy of F=mv. Heck, even if they aren't going fast they can still crush your ribs or fracture your pelvis by shifting their weight if they're big enough (which happened on two different farms in the county during calving season this year). And again, no modern medicine in this scenario, so most things are likely to become a life-threatening injury.

Frankly, given the ground rules, your colonists will have the best chance at survival if you ignore first worlders and go collect a village in Africa. They're well-trained in getting much done with little resources, and are probably the best chance to get anything done without heavy computerized support. And that gets you survival, not anything much higher up the tech tree.

And yet humans kill billions of humans as a matter of routine, all the time, forever. While animals, basically, do not kill humans.

No, sorry. Like I said, I have pretty solid faith in us a a species. I don't like us, but I trust us to make things work. So long as we discount the things that would obviously kill us, such as small differences in atmospheric composition, or water contaminants, or disease, or poisons, or .... any of a thousand things far more basic than hunger, or lack of medicine, or lack of technology.

For what it's worth: If our goal was to manage to scrape by until some random disaster took us out wholesale, I agree with you: The most isolated tribal population on the planet propably has the best chance. But ... it's just not. A viable colony isn't 'not die until goblins find us and make us food'. A viable colony is 'thrive and tame this gods damned place'. For that, we need steam engines.

And a lot of other stuff. But steam engines first. Because they're the doorway to everything else. With knowledge, and a working steam engine, you're perhaps 50 years from air conditioning.

[Rogar Demonblud]

Not even close. You need to build an entire chemical industry from scratch before you have the refrigerants needed for an air conditioner. And before that, you need a petroleum industry to give you the volatiles you'll crack to make most modern chemicals.

And again, you're mistaking modern for what must be. You won't have guns, which is what enables our slaughter of the biota. Actually, given the starting conditions, what you'll have are sharpened sticks hardened in a fire, unless one of your colonists happens to be a bowyer and another a fletcher.

Again, we need a massive, very specific list of what technology we're bringing along on this trip, because this is not a colonization as we understand it. This is a shipwreck, where you are tossed on shore with the clothes on your back and maybe some tools salvaged from the wreck. Or maybe the better comparison is being marooned, which is really just killing someone without technically having their blood on your hands.

[Rockphed]

I was going to suggest having half the mechanical engineers be civil engineers instead, but you have the 4 foremen/carpenters.

You might want to have some midwives, though there is significant overlap with nurses. I'm not sure what infant and child mortality would look like in a world with germ theory but no drugs (not even opium or aspirin), but it will probably be significantly higher than the (almost) 0 our society enjoys.

[Rogar Demonblud]

If you're going to be around water, you'll need somebody who knows how to build boats. And someone with small boat skills to use them.

An astronomer is probably a necessity, to help you start calculating and maintaining a calendar. Equinoxes and solstices are most important, but you'll need the rest eventually.

Likewise, a meteorologist. Planting's no use if you don't know when the rain's going to come. Ditto first frost, onset of winter, major storms, etc.

You'll need to expand the medical suite to include a pharmacologist, a trauma surgeon, likely a dedicated obstetrician with 160 women of breeding age and maybe a pediatrician as well. Consider replacing the chaplain with at least a pair of psychologists; these people will be under considerable pressure and in essentially a locked room, neither of which are good for prolonged mental health. And you'll need somebody with a secondary specialty as a mortician eventually.

And as an aside, you probably want to make sure at least some of these people have some entertainment skills.

[Rogar Demonblud]

It isn't about 'the arts'. It's about having something to do when there's no work. Music theory has little to do with actually playing music, and historians generally make lousy tale tellers (there's a reason for the stereotype of history just being the recital of endless lists of names and dates).

And morticians are about more than embalming. They also are trained in many of the health aspects of a dead body, including putrefaction rates, how far from the residential area you'd need to bury them, how deep (which varies with the water table, which is why New Orleans has above ground mausoleums instead), etc. Actually, making sure someone in the medical team has forensics training is probably a good idea, as they can help narrow down what thing in the environment is toxic enough to kill people.

Pharmacology is very different from identifying plants (botany) or making chemicals (chemistry). Pharmacology deals not only with how to make chemicals into drugs and medicines but also figuring out things like dosage, LD50, interactions, etc

[Aeson]

Likewise, a meteorologist. Planting's no use if you don't know when the rain's going to come. Ditto first frost, onset of winter, major storms, etc.

Without advanced technology - radar, aircraft, satellites, and computers on which to run simulation models, preferably, or distant weather reporting stations at a minimum - a meteorologist isn't going to be much better at predicting these things than a nonspecialist familiar with rules-of-thumb and regionally-applicable proverbs would be, especially in the absence of a historical weather record for the area. Also, I would point out that even with all of these things and a long record of local weather conditions we're still only capable of accurately predicting the weather maybe a week into the future in most cases.

It certainly wouldn't hurt to have some meteorologists on hand to record and analyze weather data and maybe begin constructing a climate model, but if they don't have the tools that modern meteorologists use to make their predictions then you could very well be just as well off relying on experienced backpackers or campers or other people who have spent significant amounts of time outdoors as on trained meteorologists for your weather predictions. It doesn't take an expert to notice that temperatures have been falling for more than a week straight, that certain types of clouds often precede specific types of weather, or that a red sky at dusk/dawn can be a decent predictor of weather for the next day or so depending on which direction weather systems normally move in the area.

[Rogar Demonblud]

The Royal Society started making accurate mid to long range weather forecasts in the late 17th Century. Again, modern technology is not a requirement. Actually, all we get with modern technology is a few more places past the decimal point and a heck of a lot more automation to make up for the human attention span.

[Aeson]

The Royal Society started making accurate mid to long range weather forecasts in the late 17th Century. Again, modern technology is not a requirement. Actually, all we get with modern technology is a few more places past the decimal point and a heck of a lot more automation to make up for the human attention span.

The way that low-tech long-range forecasts work is by comparing present and "recent" conditions to historical conditions and guessing based on what matches up best. Unless historical weather data for the local region is something that your colonists have been provided with for this alien planet that they've been dropped on, they're not going to be able to make accurate long-range forecasts until several decades after they arrive.

[Manga Shoggoth]

I wonder how hard it would be to build a barometer and thermometer from scratch. If you have those and some basic training in using them that might be as good as you'll get until you have radar and a world-wide communications network.

If you can get hold of a reasonably dense fluid (Mercury is the one of choice) and have glass-blowing good enough to make and bend tubes then a basic barometer is fairly easy. Likewise, mercury (high temperaturtes) or alcohol (low temperatures) in a tube with a thinn(er) bulb at one end gives you a thermometer.

Calibrating them could be difficult, but you would be able to make relative measures.

[tyckspoon]

Well sure but all you need for that is a guy with a flute and some drums (and ideally something mildly alcoholic to drink, but we'll get there).

Fermentation happens by accident easily enough - if the destination world has sugars and yeasts or something analogous enough (or if the start supplies included some yeast cultures, perhaps; they're useful for a number of things and would take up next to no space) then mildly alcoholic drinks are probably one of the *first* things that will happen. Possibly even as a way to turn an otherwise non-edible fruit into a usable food.

All our medical staff will have training in things like dosage and interactions. I don't know enough chemistry to know how much infrastructure it takes to extract/synthesize useful drugs from the environment. If there is a lot to be gained in that direction it would probably also be worth bringing some glassblowers, now that I think of it.

For trying to isolate and/or synthesize a specific compound or active ingredient.. quite a lot. A lab with properly controlled conditions to exclude contaminants, the ability to apply precise amounts of heat, something to separate out different parts of a plant (gas capture column, centrifuges, etc), a variety of reagents to try to react with things to see if you can get the bits you don't want to combine into a form that can be easily removed (plus the prerequisite infrastructure to have the ability to make or refine the reagents to the required degree of purity so you can reliably replicate the process).. the specialist glassware is potentially the least troublesome part, and by itself is not going to get you where you want with this. You'll probably be limited to 'The flowers of this plant do something useful, but not the stem or leaves' for a while, and your pharmacists will be engaged in preparing those active parts into powders/pills/tinctures/whatever until sufficient tools can be recreated to try to identify the actual specific active ingredients.

Dosing control will probably have to be handled by gathering a large supply of whatever items and making up large batches of the medicine in order to try to average out differing potencies and concentrations of the active drug components - otherwise it will be quite difficult to reliably say that, for example, 5g of ground willow-bark will yield roughly a 100mg dose of Tylenol.

[The Random NPC]

And yet humans kill billions of humans as a matter of routine, all the time, forever. While animals, basically, do not kill humans.

One of the major reasons that animals don't kill humans is that we murdered to death all of the ones that did. The rest we bred to basically be as nonthreatening as possible (unless we wanted it to be threatening). In this hypothetical, none of the animals have the million-year long lesson that taught them not to mess with humans.

[Rockphed]

One of the major reasons that animals don't kill humans is that we murdered to death all of the ones that did. The rest we bred to basically be as nonthreatening as possible (unless we wanted it to be threatening). In this hypothetical, none of the animals have the million-year long lesson that taught them not to mess with humans.

I am fairly certain that humans have only been doing the murdering for the last half million, and we still lose to things like bears, big cats, crocodiles, and hippos. That said, keeping from dying to large predators is an important part of survival. Add capsaicin to the list of things to find and domesticate ASAP (though I can't remember if bear-spray even works on Polar Bears, or if it just makes them grumpy and more likely to eat you on general principle).

[Rogar Demonblud]

I wonder how hard it would be to build a barometer and thermometer from scratch. If you have those and some basic training in using them that might be as good as you'll get until you have radar and a world-wide communications network.

You'll need an anemometer and probably a hygrometer as well. Actually, if you want, it's kind of fun to use a few basic tools and teach yourself the general workings of meteorology. Although one of the things you'll learn fairly quickly is that what you get from direct observation and the look-up tables in a reference book is about as good a forecast as you get with the computer models they use on the news.

[Kaptin Keen]

One of the major reasons that animals don't kill humans is that we murdered to death all of the ones that did.

By unfortunate accident, you mean?

Or because we extincted them? It's the latter, right? So it doesn't really work as a counterargument. Although I realise that a global population of man eating Raptors could possible better afford the losses than our tiny colony.

I still have solid faith in our murderous disposition. Any place that isn't LV426, my money is on the humans.

[Ragoscy]

I've found this topic interesting and I want to point out one thing.

I see that people are worried about infections and germs, but what you don't realize is all of our pathogens evolved right along with us. If our colonists are sent to this new world completely free of pathogens then, they might be lucky enough to not have anything that would infect them. It is very possible that they would have quite a long respite of no infections at all.

The down side of this is that any infections they get would almost certainly be new and unknown, and the treatments just as uncertain. So I think they would not have to worry about disease for a while, maybe even a long while, but when they do start getting sick they won't know what is actually making them ill or even how to treat it.

[Rockphed]

I've found this topic interesting and I want to point out one thing.

I see that people are worried about infections and germs, but what you don't realize is all of our pathogens evolved right along with us. If our colonists are sent to this new world completely free of pathogens then, they might be lucky enough to not have anything that would infect them. It is very possible that they would have quite a long respite of no infections at all.

The down side of this is that any infections they get would almost certainly be new and unknown, and the treatments just as uncertain. So I think they would not have to worry about disease for a while, maybe even a long while, but when they do start getting sick they won't know what is actually making them ill or even how to treat it.

We wouldn't have to worry about the viruses. We would, however, have to worry about bacteria, fungi, parasites (though some of them are species specific), and so forth.

[Eldan]

Switzerland still has traditional "Weather Tasters", men who without any instruments can make at least reasonable weather predictions a few days ahead. Apparently, the older and more experienced ones test reasonably well in scientific experiments. Certainly good enough for an agricultural society, where these came from.

So, probably a skill set that some of our farmers or hunter gatherers could have without needing dedicated meteorologists.

[Rockphed]

By unfortunate accident, you mean?

Or because we extincted them? It's the latter, right? So it doesn't really work as a counterargument. Although I realise that a global population of man eating Raptors could possible better afford the losses than our tiny colony.

I still have solid faith in our murderous disposition. Any place that isn't LV426, my money is on the humans.

Even more fun is that we mostly extincted the large predators with nothing more advanced than stone tools. Large predators means our colony will have to enact a variety of safety measures, but I doubt they will be in serious danger from predators.

[Rogar Demonblud]

I've found this topic interesting and I want to point out one thing.

I see that people are worried about infections and germs, but what you don't realize is all of our pathogens evolved right along with us. If our colonists are sent to this new world completely free of pathogens then, they might be lucky enough to not have anything that would infect them. It is very possible that they would have quite a long respite of no infections at all.

The down side of this is that any infections they get would almost certainly be new and unknown, and the treatments just as uncertain. So I think they would not have to worry about disease for a while, maybe even a long while, but when they do start getting sick they won't know what is actually making them ill or even how to treat it.

If we're sent without pathogens, then we've lost about half our immune system and a third of our digestion. We are very dependent on our little friends.

[Kaptin Keen]

We wouldn't have to worry about the viruses. We would, however, have to worry about bacteria, fungi, parasites (though some of them are species specific), and so forth.

I'm not so sure about the viruses. Sure, it would be silly to assume the species of another world just happen to have DNA equivalent to our own. On the other hand, it's equally silly to assume they don't.

And personally, I lean towards the first kind of silly. I think life, universally, is self-ordering. I think if we find an earthlike world, it will have earthlike life. Including near-identical DNA. But that's easy to say, since we may never know the truth of it. Unless we conveniently find life somewhere in our own solar system, that is.

[Rogar Demonblud]

We've found prokaryotes on Mars, Titan and in Venus' atmosphere (talk about extremophiles). All of them would be able to do unpleasant things to us, due to chemistry being chemistry.

[Rockphed]

Wait when did this happen and why wasn't it huge news?

I, likewise, am skeptical that we have actually found life anywhere else in the solar system, for pretty much the same reason. I know that we have seen chemicals that are more easily explained by life than by non-living processes in a couple spots (I want to say Enseladus), and there is the whole "Mars is making methane somehow" thing, but I don't remember seeing anything about actually finding the living organism responsible.

[Rogar Demonblud]

And I thought I was bad about keeping up with what the probes were finding.

On mobile, so my ability to link is nil, but for Mars we've found pieces in meteorites and it looks like the seasonal geysers also support some form of life. On Titan, what was found was frozen archaeobacteria, but we obviously can't bring it back to study. And I really don't know what's up with Venus, except we found it. Contamination is a possibility, I guess.

[Eldan]

Yeah, I'm calling bull on that? I read a lot of space news. And I'm a research biologist. There's no way I would have missed that. Source?

[Kaptin Keen]

Rogar does seem well informed - but it feels a little off that even moderately alert readers of science news would have ... just missed the headlines.

I remember reading we found life on Mars ... in a piece of rock, on Earth (as in, the rock was from Mars, and contained traces of bacteria). Then that was thoroughly refuted by other scientists.

[Eldan]

Oh, yeah! I remember that one. They were Earth bacteria that just happened to be on a meteorite from Mars.

[Rogar Demonblud]

I can't remember off the top of my head if it's four or five meteorites, but they've all shown marks of life.

The stuff from Titan is more interesting, to me at least. Titan is a much better candidate for colonization than Mars.

[Kaptin Keen]

Oh, yeah! I remember that one. They were Earth bacteria that just happened to be on a meteorite from Mars.

Precisely so. And there was another one which had markings that might have been the remains of exo-bacteria - but might just as well have been the stone working from the heat of entering the atmosphere.

There's a level of Occam's razor, right? Is it more likely this bit of rock travelled eons of time and god only knows how much distance around the solar system, to land on Earth, bearing with it proof of life elsewhere - or .. maybe it's something else?!