BCS wrote:
Hello Georg,
[...]
I'll grant it's a hard job, but look at WW-II, throw in some large ugly
unifying force and Stuff Gets Done!
Well, for example, when the Allied ganged up against Hitler, there were
more than a hundred million people /focused/ on one single thing: to get
him out before he gets us. /Nothing/ else had priority. Even housewives
did the best they could to help, including nursing each others kids so
the others could go to work making bombs.
So, _one_hundred_million_ really determined people, a few years, and
they made some simple airplanes and war boats, some explosives, and
guns. (OK, I'm putting this down a little... They also trained some guys
to walk across France with assault rifles. :-) )
But the whole point is, they were a lot more than a couple of thousand,
they had the infrastructure all in place, a ready society, and a common
enemy! And it *still* took a couple of years to get up to D-day.
Heck, look at 1900-2009. I'd say
that most of the tech that existed in 1900 could be built from the
ground up in under 50 years if the people didn't needed to do any R&D
and are motivated enough.
Reread my post. It's easier for the whole world than for a couple of
thousand guys. There's simply too much to do. And, like Andrei said, too
much expertise needed [for the nontrivial things] to have time to learn
it all by that number of guys.
As for some hard numbers, I recall a NOVA show
where a construction planner was asked to set up a time line for the
pyramids using period tech. The time line was under 3 years (2.5 IIRC).
Say 2000 men and 3 years. But stacking stones is a bit easier than doing
rocket science, right? Building rockets is not just stacking iron, most
of it is the rocket science, and that takes reading, thinking, and
asking each other. A lot.
And even if they had full blueprints, there's an awful lot of parts to
make, and a crapload of fuel to make. And the fuel factory, with or
without blueprints.
Just to get a measure, write on a piece of paper how many hours you
would need to write a Monopoly (the board game) server that servers
10000 players, on a PC. One honest and careful estimate, according to
your own programming skills. Then, do that many hours of work on it, and
see how many percent of the work you got done in that time. (If that's
too big a project, then do a TicTacToe server.)
I don't want the answer. It's for yourself.
