If all man-made things were wiped out, how long would it take to re-create modern civilization?

What about the woman-made things?

See hear now wrote:

Farmers

Engineers

Construction workers

Mechanics

Factories

Repeat.

Otherwise, no food, no heat, no electricity, no fuel, no vehicles, no roads, short life span, no nothin'.

There is no such thing as farming without tools. What will you farm with? Have you ever tried to till raw, virgin land? Of course you haven't, because there is very little land left which is untouched by man. You can't farm with sticks and rocks, that's not how it works. You need a bronze age first. Also, farm what? You going to stroll down to the home depot for some seed packets?

And even if you could farm with sticks and rocks, what will you eat while you're waiting around for your crops to mature? And then, where will you store them so they don't just rot straight away? Farming, especially without the help of tools and implements and machines, is a hard, labour intensive activity. What source of calories is fuelling this endeavour?

Mankind would be erased totally in this scenario. No survivors. Not even primitive tribes would be left because already there are no primitive tribes left on the earth which have not been significantly touched by the advances of the modern age. Even bone-through-the-nose indians in deepest jungle are carrying their water around in plastic tubs now.

I think first of all we would all need to move closer to the equator as soon as possible where we can stay warmer. We would have to light fires straight away and go fishing for fire grilled salmon or something. It wouldn't be too bad if you follow Bear Grylls and can apply his survival techniques. I would start chopping down trees and building log cabins. You would be uncomfortable for a while but once people start reinventing other things it won't be too bad. We wouldn't have to worry about social media taking over people's lives. People would interact better and learn faster without bad distractions that have been invented.

Well, I grew up on a farm in the Midwest in the 50's and 60's with a lot less capital and mechanization than we have now. We raised most of the food that was on our table. Yes, I have farmed virgin prairie.

In my previous post, I assumed that without man-made items, most people would die, and the survivors would have reverted to hunter-gatherer methods of procuring food. I believe that is considered "pre-civilization" survival. I'm guessing there would be pockets of survivors here and there, near the more easily obtained natural food sources like seafood, for example.

However, whether man would survive wasn't the question, was it? The assumption was that there would be some level of survival, and the question was "how long would it take to re-create modern civilization?"

I didn't attempt to answer the time question, it's a tough question. But given that my grandfather was farming prosperously with horses, no electricity, and no hybrid seed less than 100 years ago, I think we could re-create most of modern civilization in 200-300 years, depending on how many people survived with the appropriate knowledge and skill. I'm assuming the desire and intention are there to do it quickly.

I think progress would be initially very slow, but given that we have solved many, many problems to do with survival over the last few hundred years, the pace of progress towards re-creating civilization would pick up speed greatly after 50-100 years of rebuilding agriculture, mining and then manufacturing and transportation.

I felt that the previous posters had ignored the actual sequence of knowledge and activities it would require to even begin to rebuild.

To begin to re-create modern civilization, as the OP inquired, you would need at least the skills and knowledge of the professions I listed. They would create the tools necessary to begin the rebuilding of a civilization, then use the tools to do the building. At first from wood and stone, then from metals. That's how we got here, I think.

Having the memory and the knowledge of what is needed and what is possible, those professions, if they could be supported by a group of hunter-gatherers, could begin to rebuild.

You speak of farming as though it would be impossible for a group to survive by other means while their crops were growing; and yet here we are, having developed agriculture not all that long ago. Storage of the food is really not that complicated, you need potters, then eventually a source of wood and construction workers.

People successfully carried water before we had plastic.

This needs to be made into a TV series. It would be so unique. Some episodes could simply be a single day. Others could be a montage of decades. Entire seasons could be a certain decade. The timeline would be very unique. Of course there would be a constant change in actors, this would be a unique show I would watch!

Some sort of counter at the start of each show similar to 24's clock, but it would be in years since the reset.

"Year: 3,202"

See hear now wrote:

Well, I grew up on a farm in the Midwest in the 50's and 60's with a lot less capital and mechanization than we have now. We raised most of the food that was on our table. Yes, I have farmed virgin prairie.

While I appreciate the thought you're putting into this, I think you're failing to recognise the scope of the reset in the original scenario. It's "all man made objects" vanish instantly and the earth, the actual land, is re-set to 20,000 years previous. Your grandfather may have farmed with horse and plough, but he didn't have to find, mine, and smelt the iron ore his plough was made of, and the harness by which his team was hitched to it. He didn't have to weave his own cloth.

I think you skip over vast, vast difficulties which approach impossibilities when you boil it down to simplicities like "the professions I listed... They would create the tools necessary to the rebuilding..." The tools and knowledge you are talking about were developed over centuries of slow thinking and figuring things out, and in the meantime those civilisations already had the basic needs of survival met. You simply could not go from THIS (internet, medicine, jet and space travel, home depot, and a population of organisms ENTIRELY dependent on complex technology for their most BASIC survival) to the stone age in the blink of an eye and expect the human organism ever to rebuild a society from that. It would be like driving into a stone wall at the speed of sound. No survivors.

So we're back to arrowheads and stone tools? Ok. What percentage of the living will even be in an area of the earth where the type of stone (flint, obsidian, etc) necessary for tools can be found? Not all stone can hold an edge or be used for tools. That's to say nothing of the knowhow to make them. And nobody is going to have much time to dedicate to learning new skills when every waking moment must be put to finding food enough to survive the day, and defending yourself against other things that want to eat you or take what little you have.

Someone above also mentioned depression, which is valid. Your "the carpenters would build the tools necessary..." theory presupposes that everyone immediately bands together and all chips in like a military drill team to get the job of survival done. How cooperative do you really think humans are right now? I walk around in this world every day and see sullen, suspicious, isolated people as the norm. You think people suddenly are going to all band together for a communal effort when they find themselves in the blink of an eye naked in the wilderness? Sorry, it's going to be law of the jungle to the 10th power. No cooperation, no communalism. When that little bit of sparrow's meat you just caught means the difference between my surviving the cold night instead of you, I'm putting every ounce of effort into bashing your brains out with a rock to get that sparrow.

See hear now wrote:

Well, I grew up on a farm in the Midwest in the 50's and 60's with a lot less capital and mechanization than we have now. We raised most of the food that was on our table. Yes, I have farmed virgin prairie.

If we consider domesticated plants and animals to be "man-made things" then you're not going to be able to farm productively. Wild progenitors of corn, wheat, etc were not very productive. How would you even get water? You'd have to live near a stream or large lake and hope that the millions of people upstream of you aren't using it as a toilet. Or you'd have to collect rainwater -- somehow -- and hope people don't try to steal it.

I think social cohesion will be the most difficult problem. You're going to have a lot of people swarming your farm and not a lot of ways to defend it. I'd move to Japan and hope they let me in.

My first thought was how many people would die in the first 12 hours. I suppose it would depend on the season . Most people wouldn't make it through the first night in the middle of winter as far south as Dallas.My bet is that cold or heat would kill off half of humanity in the first day - especially if you combine those elements with the need to go find food. Imagine all of obese america wondering around in the summer heat trying to find food or water - Dead.

My second thought was that during the first 3 days cannibalism will be the most ready available food source (and bones for tools) - after that the humans would start to spoil but crude tools will be abundant...

Humans are one of the few animals that have a problem with cannibalism (mostly due to various religious or spiritual doctrine)

Third thought. Religion was paramount to building trust and a societal frame work -i.e. I trust you not to kill me in my sleep because you believe in the same ghost I do.

Would we see current religion perpetuated - or would they be replaced? Or would the need for religion be replaced by the "knowledge of before the reset"?

If there was no gravity and nails on the ceiling....

Who thinks of this stuff?

Theres a theory that this already happened man. The people with the knowledge for all things we have would die in a generation. Their children might not process everything taught. In 4 generations all information of the past would be so screwed up wed be back into the stone age mentally. Wed have to discover oil etc. Wed be even further back to be honest. Thousands of years

12HRS wrote:

Third thought. Religion was paramount to building trust and a societal frame work -i.e. I trust you not to kill me in my sleep because you believe in the same ghost I do.

Would we see current religion perpetuated - or would they be replaced? Or would the need for religion be replaced by the "knowledge of before the reset"?

I too have wondered what would become of religion in the wake of something like this. Interesting thought. The immediate survivors would retain whatever allegiances or understanding of religious faith they'd lived with their entire 21st century lives. And would frankly have much more pressing matters to worry about / would be daily, by the minute, confronted with the total indifference of god and nature.

I wonder how many generations it would take before the survivors (if any) were back in a place where they were worshipping sun gods and inventing other primitive explanations for what natural phenomena are now explained by various sciences.

Joe Idaho wrote:

Er dude, the world is only 6,000 years old.

By the way, the people who search for large prime numbers sound like gimps.

^Great comment

Like others have said, the majority of people are dead within weeks. I'm sure mathematicians would try to preserve as much knowledge as possible. The main problem would be creating a stable enough society that could actually progress towards computing primes. At first glance the 250 year estimate seems fairly reasonable.