How long would it take for a civilization to forget how it began?

Question

In my scenario, all of current humanity on Earth and space is teleported to a whole new planet in a different universe with new laws of physics that mostly govern a magic system based on energy manipulation and different biology. Humanity is transported without anything from Earth, just with their own minds and clothes, and from then onwards, there are continuous wars and famines, resource wars and even more wars for over 100 years as new countries form and fall and fight over territory.

How long would it take for humanity to devolve into medieval level society and technology if the printing press is never reinvented and books about the old world are constantly burnt and destroyed from constant wars and the only method of knowledge of the old world being passed down is orally from one generation to another?

Edit: Due to stuff like no shelter, hard to find food and poisonous water, and of course, magic monsters that show up at night and are stronger than full grown African elephants, 7.5 billion people will die, only 500 million will remain after the first year. These 500 million would either be smart enough to trick the monsters, be able to group together and be able to make a base quick enough or would have enough mana to fight the monsters.

Answer 1

How long would it take for a civilization to forget how it began?

• Definitely less than 5,000 years.

  We know for sure that 5,000 years is enough -- the mainline western civilization began some 5,000 years ago and we definitely do not know how it began.

• There are good examples that 400 years may be enough.

  Even a few hundred years may be enough. For example, the ancient Greeks in the 5th century BCE, when people like Herodotus or Xenophon or Thucydides were trying to inquire about history, had no idea how the Greek civilization began, and that beginning was not more than 400 years before their time.

P.S. About that devolution into medieval level society... Not going to happen. The western European medieval society, which is what is usually meant on this site when speaking of medieval anything without qualifications, was a unique and unrepeatable historical phenomenon, conditioned by a complex web of preconditions which is extremely unlikely to ever happen again elsewhere.

Answer 2

Myth or History?

And, coupled with that question, what level of precision do you desire? As soon as they happen, events will be formed into a narrative which is used by the current generation to affirm their cultural identity. There may be a few experts who study the details and question the simplistic narrative. They may or may not be able to teach other experts, but most people will swallow the narrative hook, line, and sinker.

• "Lincoln fought the civil war to free the slaves." Or was it about preserving the Union?
• "Columbus discovered America." Except for all those people who were already there ...
• "Barbarians overran the Roman Empire and caused the Dark Ages." So dark, actually, that they improved the plow and horse harness, invented the compass, and many more.

And the teachings of a certain Jewish preacher who was crucified by the Romans got preserved in remarkable detail, even if the historical detail got mangled by subsequent authors.

Now imagine a bunch of people who all tell their post-transportation children stories about the Old Earth they came from, where food was there for the taking in the supermarket (never mind the plastic cards that were involved), hot and cold running water came out of walls, and people could take holiday trips in airliners to beautiful beaches. Sounds like a paradise, no? But many of the people who tell this story are literate. If they redevelop paper and ink before they die, there will be detailed accounts. And those accounts will probably spell out things like germ theory, basic chemistry, or the speed of light which may or may not hold true in your magical world. If there are germs, and so on, and the lessons from Old Earth work, then your 'creation myth' gets much more believable. Which makes it more likely to be preserved and transmitted.

Answer 3

Basically, as soon as most of the people with lived experience of Earth's civilisation die. A few decades, perhaps. The main problem is that oral tradition is not very good for passing knowledge. It is good for passing instructions and stories, but these tend to be practical and knowledge of Earth's civilisation will not be of much use in a universe with different physics and biology.

And of course constant wars would create no shortage of things more important than a knowledge of faraway world to which you will never return.

But if it's any consolation, some things about Earth's civilisation may be remembered for millenia in the form of myths, similar to how the myth of the Flood can plausibly be a dim recollection of the sea level rise which followed the end of last ice age. But that wouldn't be anywhere near enough knowledge to rebuild civilisation to its present-day level; sorry.

Answer 4

It depends on definition of "forget". Likely, never.

Let's see. 8 billion people teleported to a new planet. No technology, no agriculture, no tools. 80% would die in the first month from hunger and lack of shelter. By the end of the first year there would be a few millions survivors.

These people would be tough. "Fit" and lucky part of the humanity. Survivors. Lots of cannibals. They would be distributed all over the planet.

Fight over the territory - why? They would have an entire planet and there would be so few of them. There is no real reason for them to fight. Note - war always was expensive, it is only with industrialization humanity become able to support multi million armies. In the medieval period 10k was about what people could manage. Romans were better, but they were better at everything. Mostly in logistics though. They built a lot of roads in order to support the armies.

So, you have tough remnants of humanity distributed all over the new planet. They don't have much in the way of entertainment. They would tell stories. They would write stories. Hundreds of thousands of records, written for decades, all over the world. No printing press - even better, more unique records.

The oldest written document still surviving is ~5200 years old, and that was from a tiny civilization which just invented the idea of writing. Millions of people from all over the world distributed all over the new world - the records would be like cockroaches. Indestructible.

The technology itself would be lost - no technical artifacts, potentially not working technologies due to different physics, too many dead to restore and maintain technological level. But general approach to science would survive. Scientific method. Observation, explanation, testing. They would figure out the new physics, chemistry and magic pretty fast.

Answer 5

Framing Question: how important is it, really, for this society to have come from modern civilization?

The reason I ask this is because I find the entire premise of how your world got to where it was very hard to believe for a number of reasons:

• People don't just have wars. Famines cause plenty of conflict and chaos, but aside from general civil unrest of people fighting over food, it doesn't necessarily coalesce into an organized war of nations.
• I wouldn't assume that countries have any momentum going into a world without telecommunications, especially with the initial population bottleneck that is survival. This society is going to spring from tribes that formed from the survivors of all the initial fighting over food.
• People don't just burn books. There is always a political motivation behind destroying or obscuring knowledge. This just isn't going to happen at a widespread and coordinated scale. It's more likely that you lose technological knowledge to the starving anarchy and population bottleneck when humanity was first poofed into another world- but it's unlikely that you'll lose everything because there will be plenty of smart and knowledgeable people who had the wits to survive.
• Some survivor out there is going to know the principles of computation and be able to apply it to whatever magic exists in the world, so it won't be long before you have a working computer (albeit a very basic one). There are going to be enough people who remember computers to be willing to give the computer scientist the resources he/she needs in order to make a useful machine.
  • Logic gates and half-adders can be made using a wide variety of consistent, predictable systems from mechanical devices to water to dominoes to MineCraft Redstone. With enough logic gates and a pulse generator, you can do any computation imaginable.
• Apply this to basically every field of applied science/mathematics. There are lots of engineers who will survive and carry what they know about their technology to start over.
• The vast majority of people in modern society can read and write. People have lots of motivation to produce books and few have an ego big enough to want to stop it, let alone the charisma to get the power to do so at scale.

If you want a medieval magic society, just write that. This just feels like a very contrived way to create one because there won't even be echoes of modern technology in your world from the sound of it.

Answer 6

If I look at myself, I have heard stories of WWII through my grandfather and other relatives who fought it, and the earlier thing I was told was the appearance of the first airplane flying above their village about 100 years ago.

With no history books nor historians, what I could know from the past would be limited to that. Anything before that fades into stories and legends, mixed in the memories of those who heard them.

With constant wars having 3 generations coexisting would be even more challenging, resulting in an even more short direct memory.

I would say 3 generations is a good limit.

Answer 7

If as the OP said, the whole population of earth. ~8 billionish? were instantly transported to an alien world with zero tech to help survive. (this is a question within itself! and wouldn't mind seeing a question on it) how many would survive the first day (immediately dying from lack of shelter)? 3 Days from the lack of hydration. 20 days (weakend to the point of exhaustion from lack of food). Past a month no bets. Interpersonal and intergroup conflicts I can't even begin to assign an attrition rate. Disease from unknown viral infections, Not to mention how many would perish from god knows what in the first 15 minutes after the ... BAMPH!

All this considered, with current world population, an even more technologically entrenched population from the future would only make it worse, a 20% survival rate IMHO is generous. Around ~1,600,000,000 That's about the same as earth around 1850ish and perhaps 14 pop/km^2.

Point being, losing 7.5 billion people in so many days is gonna leave a mark. Visceral survival instincts will kick in and no one will give a damn about anything other than their next meal and who is going to stab them in the back or who they can stab in the back to live another day. If anything meaningful at all is remembered past one generation (significantly shortened lifespan generation!), outside of an isolated extraordinary individual, it would be surprising.

Answer 8

This is a bit like asking “how long does it take to forget your own birth?”. Usually, by the time a city / nation / social pattern has developed to the point that we notice it, it’s already been around longer than anyone can remember. Places that were colonized recently may be an exception, but even in America, most people have no real idea how their town got started. They certainly don’t remember the connections to the old world their town’s founders left behind.

There’s a trope in SF of searching for the legendary lost planet of Earth as if this was a huge mystery, but why would anyone in the future care? It’s only interesting to the reader, because we live on Earth; but in these futures, we are long-dead boring primitives. It’s not like people today are roaming all over Africa hunting for the original human village (which could still be an actual inhabited place!).

We do retain some history, of course, but it’s highly selective, and we usually just hold onto stories that are still relevant somehow. E.g. we know quite a bit about the Roman Empire because a lot of European civilization is still based on it in various ways. But we know very, very little about what most Europeans’ actual ancestors were up to 2000 years ago.

Answer 9

It Depends

Even with lots of wars and famines going on, that doesn't mean that everyone is too preoccupied with them to bother to keep track of history.

So the printing press is never invented, but perhaps a pen and paper will be. (These items would prove very useful in time of both war and famine! Even war fought with "sticks and stones" as yours would apparently be)

So the question becomes dependent on how interested they are and how many people there are that are interested in maintaining the history, at which point, it kind of becomes your choice (as the writer).

So it could be anything from

everything gets written down by dedicated scribes and chroniclers, and future historians do their best to sort fact from fiction and propaganda. Even with books being burned by war it's not hard to see some accounts surviving.

... to ...

Nobody is really interested in it and so the knowledge just gets passed orally as you say, and after 3 generations it mutates á la "Chinese Whispers", and becomes legend or myth, and after several more generations might become lost altogether.

It's all dependant on how interested people are in a) maintaining history and b) researching it later.

Answer 10

It depends. Sometimes history can be forgotten in few generations, especially if the uncomfortable truths that should be forgotten are not important to people, but sometimes it can take a very long time.

Creation myths for example. There are dozens, and they have survived millennia, passed down from generation to another by telling and listening and retelling. Sometimes they have been part of cultural heritage of people whose culture was being eliminated, and the myths did not go away, they became contraband.

Christians are a very relevant example to Westerners, twofold: first they were oppressed in ancient Rome and Egypt and such, then Christians themselves tried to uproot every other culture, but many of the other cultures and Christians themselves retained their own understanding, some in less obvious ways, or even hiding it completely underground. After all, inquisition did not get rid of heretics even though it tried really hard.

Answer 11

A lot depends on how able they are to recover some basic technology. If they can get paper making and moveable type in a couple of decades (before too many people die) then they can record and distribute a lot of useful information about how to do useful things like iron smelting, mine drainage, low pressure steam engines etc, plus maybe some warnings about the existential threats of nuclear weapons and global warming. See The Day the Universe Changed episode 4 for some more background on this.

A big immediate challenge is going to be farming: they don't have any earth-type plants or livestock. Even if there are feral bovines and horses, that is a very long way from the domesticated variants we are familiar with. 5,000 years of selective breeding makes a huge difference.

BTW, plonking 8 billion people on such a world is going to produce instant ecological collapse. In the short term everyone is going to be hunting food and chopping down wood for warmth and shelter, because otherwise they die. So next year there are zero prey animals and forests. You might want to rethink the numbers on this.

Answer 12

They will never forget.

The story of "we lived in x nice world and were magically transferred to this shitty world" is short enough and captivating enough that elders will be passing down to children for as long as people are alive.

Now, if you want lots of details to accompany those origin stories, those can linger for hundreds to thousands of years but don't expect them to be accurate and don't expect any good predictions, although others have made some good guesses.

Answer 13

First of all, even the survivors of a brutal winnowing will not be starting from scratch. Someone will remember how to knit. Someone will remember how to crochet. Many people will remember useful principles of genetics, even if magic modifies them for your new world. People will remember that machines used to do common tasks. Nobody will forget the wheel.

People will know that preserving knowledge is important; I just don't accept that "books about the old world are constantly burnt and destroyed from constant wars" will be universal. There will be protected enclaves where old knowledge is cherished and propagated. Even in areas of Earth with constant conflict, knowledge and religion are handed down. We have records of Pharaohs whose names were almost wiped out by their successful rivals.

I see a few issues that can be useful for your needs, though:

(1) Magic complicates everything -- people will distrust old science because some subset of it will just not work, or will not work reliably, in the new environment. You've said that the laws of physics are different, a lot of science will need to be rebooted, and if you can somehow break the scientific method then it will be much harder to redevelop science. (Note, though, that I'm not sure how far you can bend the laws of physics and have humans survive at all. We need molecules we can digest. We need our senses to work. We need consistent gravity within certain bounds. We need oxygen to breathe, or another molecule that dovetails with our physiology.)

(2) You're having trouble getting people here on Worldbuilding to buy into your premise, that 8 billion people were magically transported to this new world. Do you think the descendants of the survivors will believe it? I don't.

(3) You don't need to wipe out the origin myths -- it's probably enough to have enough competing origin myths that they are all discounted. (Be careful, though. People have been revisiting the Aboriginal Dreamtime stories since some of the fantastic mythological beasts described therein were found in fossil deposits...)

Answer 14

The answer is 20 years or 200 years, depending on what you mean by "remember" and "civilization".

About 20 years after the "stranding" in the new universe, majority of the people alive would be either ones born in the new universe, or ones who spent at least half of their lives there.

Sure, the Elders will likely remember the life before, and the incredible "science" they had, but this is not the same thing as remembering civilization, this is remembering a MYTH about their civilization. For the kids born in the new universe, or who were under 10 when they arrived, this is all old-people legends about impossible nonsense. Memory of civilization will die piecemeal as Elders either forget, or misremember things, or when they try to explain things to the youngsters in easier terms:

• "uh... a car was a magic cart that moved without horses"
• "we came from a... uh... kingdom known as America"
• "we had tiny bits of lightning enslaved withing copper wires"
• "we flew through the air on planes...ah...winged chariots!"

In theory, this is "remembering" but in practice, this is just mythology loosely based on the former civilization. Sure, old individuals would remember their origins, but the CULTURE no longer does. Another 20 years, the Elders all die and the secret of the origins die with them. All the youngsters would know is: "our people came from a paradise land of wonder and safety, but were cast out from there by angry gods." This is just standard mythology of just about every people in the history of mankind.

Oral tradition is exceptionally bad at preserving factual truth, it is designed to spread moral, cultural and emotional truths. The memory of civilization would not outlive the first generation, and would fall into vague myth in a century or two.

This does not even touch on an equally important factor: the people would likely intentionally suppress the truth, to make it easier to adjust to the New World. Your scenario would be extremely traumatic, and give the first generation tremendous PTSD. They would almost certainly try to intentionally forget, or at least taboo the subject, because talking about it can only lead to further emotional trauma.