I've always been curious about how much we depend on existing infrastructure to perpetuate an industrial / post-industrial society. The idea isn't all that original either - think Robinson Crusoe, Swiss Family Robinson, and countless other fictional accounts. Perhaps it's something deep in our nomadic psyche that compels us to long for new lands. Perhaps it's just mere curiosity. Either way, it's the ultimate disaster recovery engineering challenge.. how could you rebuild everything we have now if it were all destroyed without, well, taking 100,000 years or however long it took our species to do it naturally?
If we were to strip away all our infrastructure and all we had were our brains and plenty of hands, could we rebuild it quick enough to prevent slipping back into the stone age? What sorts of limitations would you run into?
Let's say you and a small population were transported to an earth-like planet (for the sake of simplicity, let's try to eliminate as many weird variables as possible.. for all intensive purposes, let's just assume this other place is basically planet earth minus all human influence). What could you do with little more than the knowledge that you have? If it makes a difference, suppose you have a couple trinkets from earth. Maybe a laptop that has an archive of wikipedia and a handful of engineering / science textbooks?
Unless hunting & gathering seemed to be an easier solution for the medium term, my first goal would be 1. start farming, and 2. animal husbandry. Once food / shelter are figured out, I'd try and build some sort of bloomery, and attempt to smelt iron ore or whatever types of metallic ore I can find. (I suspect iron ore looks something like this so I'll know how to identify it in the wild.) Then I'd try to figure out a way to turn that smelted metal into wire. Then I'd try and find a magnetic rock (which for all I know would be as difficult as finding a gold nugget in the woods). Then I'd try to use my wire and magnetic rock to build an electric generator, and build a water wheel or something to power it. Not quite sure what i'd do from there, but hopefully from there I can at least figure out a way to charge the laptop without blowing it up.
Pretty sure I'm not capable of doing all that with what I know right now, but hopefully I'm not the smartest one in the colony.. and hopefully the area we're transported to is rich with natural resources! At any rate, if I could accomplish all that, I suspect that could at least get us to the 15th century or so. Maybe my next goal would be to try and build a transistor, although I suspect that would take considerable more infrastructure to create after looking at a picture of the first transistor built.
What could you build with nothing but natural resources and some helping hands that could launch a society into the industrial revolution? Would it even be possible without bringing a ton of stuff with us?