[ExI] Easter Island again

[Keith Henson]

On Thu, Mar 26, 2009 at 11:25 PM, Damien Broderick <thespike at satx.rr.com> wrote:
> At 08:57 PM 3/25/2009 -0700, Keith wrote:
>
>> What I was looking for is technical suggestions about how people with
>> human labor, knowledge, six square miles of rocks and a little
>> charcoal could implement a modern technological society on Easter
>> Island.  This is in the context of mining the moon.
>
> Hang on, cobber. That might have been what you were looking for, but what
> you *said* you were looking for was this:
>
>> If you can propose a technical
>> path to get the historical Easter Islanders out of their mess, I would
>> be most interested.
>
> Hence the points raised about the mess of the historical Easter Islanders
> arguably being due to runaway rat populations, introduced diseases and
> armed invaders. None of these feature in exploiting the moon, luckily,
> except possibly for mutated diseases--and not even those if it's done by
> telefactor.

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

There is general agreement that the population crashed *before*
contact with Europeans, probably due to overpopulation and
environmental destruction.  That's the mess I was talking about.  And
"technical path" means making stuff like boats and windmills out of
rocks and seawater.

If someone came ashore with the original people who colonized the
island with complete knowledge of modern technology, could they build
a modern technological society from this knowledge and local
resources?  I consider this similar in difficulty to attempting to
build up industry on the moon.

Keith