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I had this idea, and it's just hypothetically, quite inhumane:
Why don't we place a few persons on an deserted island far from civilization. The islanders will consist of a few number of really small children and a few grown-ups divided between different villages.
The grown-ups will teach the children survival stuff and such things, and when the children are capable of surviving on their own the grown ups will leave the island and let the children take over.
Let us now move twenty years forward. What will life be like there? Will there be any survivors? Religions? Tribes?
What do you think would happen?

Sounds like Lord of the Flies

I'm up for this

Yeah, I got the idea when I was reading that book. But in this scenario the children won't even know about the outside world. They will think that the world consists of that island and a lot of water.

I'm 100 percent sure they will create religion and tribes. The Island must be big enough as Easter Island and has enough resources for a population of 100,000 to survive. The island must be planted with rice, corn, potatoes, wheat, coffe, cotton, tobacco, fruits and vegetables and also domestic animals like pigs, horse, cows, dogs, chickens, sheep, goats.  At least 200 participants 100 boys and 100 girls taught with basic survival to the island. 20 years is too short give them 100 years. You will be surprise how a modern man will become a primitive in a few years. I'm very curious what will they become in 100 years.

Try on my own son?! This thread is purely hypothetical.
And the point with the experiment would be that the inhabitants would not be taught how to live. They would not know of the outside world. That's why it has to be children.

Another experiment I want in my mind is too create a very powerful supercomputer that could simulate all atoms in planet earth and the solar system.

The simulation start at early part of planet earth when it has no life yet.
This experiment is like creating a virtual reality of our planet earth. It has an option to be fast forward the simulation or go back from any part of the simulation and change something on that simulated time.

I'm really curious life could be form from this simulated planet and it would become as advance as humankind.

There would be lots of benefits in this project like if life could start from nothing. What would like on other alien planets.  Intelligent life can be produced from this simulated planet numerous technologies can be harvest and other very important knowledge about life and civilizations.

that's brutal

who would accept to be a part of such an experiment?

That would be really interesting. I've had similar ideas myself.
None. That's why it's hypothetical.

They would not form religion yet; they might have supernatural beliefs, but they wouldn't have anything very organized that you could call a religion.  The majority of their time will be spent gathering resources; assuming they are not into agriculture yet, they will have spare time to develop better tools to help them gather, which will further increase their spare time.  They are unlikely to split up and battle each other as they will have nothing to really conquer, as food is abundant and wealth is largely nonexistent; it's not until food begins to run out--the breaking point between peace and chaos--that the stronger individuals will begin to dominate by demanding the lesser individuals follow them; this is a survival mechanism, wherein the stronger individual can use the energy of the lesser individuals to ensure his own survival, though he may insist it is for the survival of them all.  The tribes battle and take each other's food; the more powerful tribes, who are better at surviving this way, are the ones which will continue to procreate.  This continues until all the food is gone and everyone dies from cannibalism or starvation.

Now, at some point in time, or in a 2nd scenario considering they understand agriculture, this dark ending changes course and the majority of the tribe's time is spent ensuring their farms can continue to produce food.  They tend to war less as they have the basic necessities of life and have all their energy focused on sustenance; as agricultural methods improve, e.g. animal assistance, fertilization and farming tools, food quantities increase, the population grows, people can focus on doing things besides hunting or farming and have greater opportunities to, again, improve their living conditions.  Meanwhile, the stronger individuals, with the help of straggler tribe members--those who do not contribute a substantial amount--may insist that the work individuals are producing should be shared equally among the tribe members, of which failure to do so may result in ostracism or physical harm.  If successful, individuals tend to give in only a bare minimum of their effort, no savings can accrue to allow free time for innovation, and the tribe remains as a series of dirt huts for the next millennia; this is known as egalitarianism.  If unsuccessful, the stragglers may be supported by their individual families or pass away, while those who can save have better opportunities for improvement, and figure out more effective, efficient ways to get the most out of what they have to work with; better farming methods, more comfortable living conditions, sturdier houses, better waste disposal, time for art, music and developing language, formal and organized religion, on and on.

Two tribes who do not practice egalitarianism will realize the other has great new advancements in technology and different things to offer; they participate in trade and improve mutually.  They do this as they have a fundamental understanding of human rights, including civil and property, as they were able to understand why the egalitarian route was detrimental longterm for their survival.  Any tribe which does practice egalitarianism may attempt to conquer the tribes which do not, under the assumption that they, tribe A, deserves the fruits of the labor of non-egalitarian tribes B and C; tribe A does this because it is running seriously low on resources, after having consumed most of them and demoralized their working class, and if they don't conquer anyone, they will soon perish.  If unsuccessful, tribe A will disappear, and so have a huge life-or-death incentive to go to war.  If successful, tribe A's strongest will assume control over tribes B and C and, if he didn't already, will come up with a name for himself along the lines of "king" or "president".  Tribe a continues to eat the resources of tribes B and C until they, too, become close to death, and thus will attempt to conquer and assimilate the next tribe.  Meanwhile, individuals who do not agree with tribe A's egalitarian practices, continue to attempt to remove themselves from their society so they can continue working and saving so they can improve; tribe A's king insists that everyone must participate for their society to work, and threatens "traitors" with death if they do so.  There, the king, who does not have to work, comes up with a plot: if he codifies his desire into "law" and claims they are given to him by divine sovereignty, he can have something to point to when someone disagrees with him.  Further, the king insists he requires more equality than the others so he can perform his kingly duties; the amount he needs is at his discretion and failure to comply will result in punishment.

Anyway, as advancements occur, albeit very slowly, and populations grow, tribe A conquers more and more tribes until there are but a few very large tribes who practiced the same deeds as tribe A; we can now call these tribes, kingdom A, kingdom B, kingdom C etc.  The kingdoms fight over resources and power to get more resources until they become the size of nation-states (how big is this island anyway?), technology has finally advanced to the point that people can stop working at farms and do other things with their lives, political thinking leads to concepts like capitalism, socialism, anarchism, fascism, which are all just rebrandings of events which occurred long ago but nobody remembers as too many generations have passed and nobody has the time to stop and study anyway until just recently; the nation states get into an arms race to rid the world of one another once and for all but eventually get to the point where their weapons are so powerful that they can blow up the entire island if they weren't careful; nations A and B convince nation C that nuclear weapons are off-limits and nation C naively complies, and gets conquered by nation B once they get rid of them all; superpower A develops remote-controlled machines which can fly anywhere and bomb anything, superpower B starts swallowing up the neighboring smaller nations, superpower A installs its own presidents in countries which don't agree with it.  Eventually, everyone's a part of one of three tribes, it's illegal to think things you're not allowed to, you can be killed with a single order from the king, big brother is watching you, and 2 + 2 = 5.

So, either two things happen beyond that: the superpowers eat themselves alive and everyone dies from war, disease or famine, or the superpowers are discarded as a superstitious, illegitimate institution and people finally move out of the tribal island era and into an era of secular rationalism.  Beyond that is anyone's guess.

Wow!

Tribes or at least clans will be created for sure. But the formation of religion requires much more than 20 years. May be 200 years.

Many uncontact people still exist today why not observed them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Sentinel_Island

Tired of superpowers and nation states a small group of "libertarians" break away to a fresh, clean island and...


Then, once again:
Tired of superpowers and nation states a small group of "libertarians" break away to a fresh, clean island and...  :D

This is really interesting. So what you say is that western history will repeat itself on this island? The island in this experiment I think should be smaller btw.

That would be interesting as well, but those tribes already has some history.

Andamanese are living there for the last 50,000 years. So you can't compare between the two.

BTW... there used to be some two dozen Andamanese tribes. Now there are just 3. And the Sentinalese are the last remaining uncontacted tribe in the Andamans.

Someone apparently already did this with Minecraft, they stuck players on an island, made sure they couldn't leave and watched what happened.

http://kotaku.com/5936625/30-players-embrace-their-darker-instincts-in-a-grueling-two-month-minecraft-experiment/all

http://www.minecraftforum.net/topic/1212125-closed-map-experiment/

TLDR: They split into major factions to survive and ended up warring over scarce resources

So war is an inevitable part of being human, or we can be peaceful as long as "enough" resources are available?

Pretty much, if you think about it we're at the 'split into major factions' stage right now, with America invading smaller countries for resources and the same with Russia, so the only way we're going to get out of this situation is to go into space and find more resources so humanity can spread out again and settle down.

You want to settle in space?

Unfortunately our technology isn't that advanced to do so. May take many more decades for that to become possible. It may never happen in our lifetime.

We have to settle in space, it's not just me wanting to, our population is getting so big Earth just doesn't have the resources or space to support us, at least in space there's infinite vast amounts of area to build stuff in, here you practically have to be a millionaire in order to comfortably live in a major city.

As for not having the technology to do it, that's just because the funding for space exploration now is shit and there's no interest by governments to fund it because they're too busy shooting at each other.

It will be Going back to stone age. I think something like is being planned for mars

This is true. If all governments decided to put all their military budgets on space-exploration together we could be colonizing new worlds within our lifetime. Not only just a few people taking part in an experiment, but real colonization.

First of all we'll have to create an atmosphere we could live in? :P

Go back far enough and you find giant perfectly crafted stones cut and manipulated with technology in advance of our own current state of affairs.

I'd like to see modern engineers place the baalbek stone in the temple of jupiter. How do you get a block that big up a mountain?

Well... the population growth is declining in all regions of the world, with the exception of Africa and Muslim majority regions of Asia. Population has peaked in China, the most populous nation. So by 2050 or so, the world population will start to decline. The challenge is to preserve the earth until then. Looking at the current pollution levels, the world might become very much uninhabitable by then.  >:(

Just need enough plants and algae to produce oxygen.

That wouldn't be enough. First of all we'd need an atmosphere of some kind. One way would be guiding asteroids into Martian volcanos.

You think this random grownups would have any survival skills ?

The grown ups will teach the children survival stuff, so yes, the grown ups will.

Tribes B and C have better technology thanks to mutual trade. Tribe A attack is unsuccessful. Tribe A perishes and another tribes D,E,F,... will see advantages of voluntary cooperation and steer away from egalitarianism.
What happens then? They adopt Bitcoin eventually?

egalitarianism = socialism ?

They are not the same.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egalitarianism

But in the abovementioned case I (and perhaps OP?) meant economic egalitarianism of outcome. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equality_of_outcome)

I don't think that atmospheric Oxygen can be maintained in Mars, due to the low gravity. So we might need a continuous supply, to balance the gradual loss of Oxygen to the outer space.

If the asteroid is big enough it can add to the gravity but can make mars unlivable for a million years. Living on mars would be on enclosed domes or underground.

Elysium 8)

More bigger than Elysium. Actually a big mother ship that has many Elysium like cities inside.

It is possible, however, the low gravity and the lack of a magnetic shield would make the atmosphere disappear out to space much quicker than on the earth. However, it will still take a few million years for it to become to thin for humans to live there.

This is not a problem if we live underground.

What? Oxygen will not escape to outer-space if we live underground?

Lol, I think he meant that it won't escape from our underground buildings :D

why don't we all just chill and play Civilization V? :D

Bitcoin itself is a type of human civilization experiment.
We are little mice in a big crypto maze.  :D

Some people should really start to write blog. In middle of it i couldn't read any more ;)