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Lalartu comments on The Octopus, the Dolphin and Us: a Great Filter tale - Less Wrong
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You greatly underestimate population size nesessary for civilization.
10 people, of course, can't rebuild the whole civilization, but 10 top scientists and engineers with relevant expertise, given access to the natural resources, can make iron, steel, copper, tooling, build an electric generator, and so on [assuming they don't get eaten by wildlife early on]. Of course, when they die out, it's gone with them - the heavily inbred future generations aren't going to be able to continue that, and probably won't even survive.
No they cant. For example to make copper you need copper mine workers, smeltery workers, woodcutters, charcoal burners, wagon drivers to transport wood, ore and coal, carpenters to make wagons, builders to build mine and smeltery and farmers to feed them. That is impossible for population less then few thousands at least. Industry nesessary to make a generator requires population in millions.
To make copper, you need copper ore and charcoal and a fire and bellows out of animal hide. Those things weren't produced in a modern industrial manner until something known as "industrial revolution". You had a little town, it had a blacksmith, and the blacksmith could smelt his own iron (and copper, if he has the ore, as copper smelting is pretty easy). You'd be surprised how much technology existed entirely locally within a small village.
Actually, to make copper tools all you need is copper nuggets (which aren't all that rare) and a couple of rocks.
Humans made tools out of meteorite iron before they developed metallurgy.
Heh, yeah. But when you don't have transportation and it's just 10 people it may be difficult to find such things without a metal detector... I was just recalling one time I made a little bit of copper from low grade malachite, using a torch. It is really easily reduced from the ore. More easily than iron.