If I were stuck on a tropical island by myself...

[mcsven]

To answer the question directly: you'd need a magnet and a piece of wire. And it's a general physics question - of the kind that is covered at a very basic level. No specialist engineering knowledge required.

 

[Basic]

I'd like to extend the question a bit:
How long would it take to recreate the technology we have now from scratch, if the only thing you can bring from our current life is the knowledge in a bunch of peoples heads?

Let's say you hand pick 100 persons, and put them on an island without any tools. (If they want a knife they'll have to make one from a rock.) There's enough resourses on the island. But if they want iron, they'll have to find the ore by themself. They work well together, there's no intrigues, no polar bears, no strange black smoke, and no others. There's a reasonable amount of food as long as they know how to hunt/collect it, and no huge dangers.

They're all determined to rebuild as much of technology as they can. How long will it take before they make their first GPU.

 

[trinibwoy]

How many women are in this 100?

 

[Basic]

That's all up to the "god" who picks out the people.

I guess the only working options would be 0 or 50 (or 100).

If it should work with no women, they'd have to finish in one generation, and that might not be possible. Even if it won't take a generation, it would still take quite a long while. To make people survive and get along, you'd need a complete society. So a 50-50 mix would probably be best. Even though I pressed on the technology side, I ment that you'd need to build the rest of the social structure too. But it's a society with highly skilled and motivated people working together towards the same goal. Internal conflicts don't exist for some reason.

I'm more interested in the idea of rebuilding/reimplementing current knowledge from memories, than social experiments. So that's why I say that people just get along.

 

[Skrying]

It'd happen very quickly then. With a gathering of knowledge and no issues beyond resources. I'd say 50 years and you'd have it.

 

[epicstruggle]

It'd happen very quickly then. With a gathering of knowledge and no issues beyond resources. I'd say 50 years and you'd have it.

I would imagine more like 200 or so years. Given that even a knife isnt provided, they would have to move through all the "ages" and the information needed for some of the leaps might not be as intuitive as we might imagine.

epic

 

[_xxx_]

They would kill each other before ever getting that far IMO.

 

[WhiningKhan]

Some of you might like to read Riverworld books by Philip Jose Farmer.

Read the first one in late 80s I guess, couldn't find the sequels and have forgotten it since. IIRC the first book ended in an annoying cliffhanger - I guess I'll have to look up the sequels now that you reminded me of it.