Excerpt:
You have landed somewhere, you aren’t sure where. You see land around you. You need the things of daily life, like food, clothing, and shelter. The food you had on that steekin ark for the past year is now molded and rotten. The moisture exhaled by innumerable animals has caused the grain to grow white and fuzzy. Your clothes are wearing out and you need to replace the nice woven cotton and flax linens. So, you need to plant cotton and flax. You figure that it will take about 3 weeks hard work plowing a field to plant the cotton and then it will mature in about 3 months. That is a lot of work, given that you can’t eat cotton. You’re hungry, very hungry.
Quickly you decide that you need to plant food—wheat, barely, corn etc. So you need a plow. Let’s shoot for an iron plow because it is so much more efficient at turning the sod. So, how do I make iron? Well, the seven of us know that we need to get iron ore, and coal. We look around. What does iron ore look like? Which direction do I travel to get coal? And even if I know the answers to those two questions, with what do I haul the coal and iron ore back to this place with? Oh, yeah, I need to build a fire, a kiln to process the ore. How do I do that? Is a mud baked brick kiln enough to make the iron? We are all getting really hungry now. Even if I landed next to a pile of iron ore and coal, with a ready made kiln, will I get iron out if I put all that into the kiln and light the coal? No. There is one item missing which is requisite before you can make iron ore. I won’t tell you what it is, but if you don’t have it, you ain’t making iron.
Much more:
http://home.entouch.net/dmd/technologyflood.htm
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