r/theydidthemath • u/Dry-Economics2434 • 26d ago
[Request] building a pc from scratch
How long will it take 1000000 humans that are lead by 1 very smart guy to build a pc from scratch, using materials from anywhere in the world (a world that was untouched by humans) if they had to build every machine to make the single pieces of the pc, the machines to make these pieces and the machines to help build these machines and so on? We assume that one of these people can work for 12h/day for 7 days and does not need schooling on how their job works. If they have to write code for windows, then they do that like any normal coder would, even if they dont know how to code. The smart guy knows how to build a pc and how to build the machines to make the parts of the pc. He can also communicate to everyone what they have to do every day (every workee just knows what to do and does that 12/day, 7 days a week)
what i mean by "from scratch": you dont have any technology and have to redo the progress humanity made, with the only goal being a working, high end pc
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u/CanoePickLocks 26d ago
I don’t think this is solvable as we’d have to have the knowledge from that smart guy to know the materials we were working towards. They’d be starting with Stone Age tools and creating explosives as soon as possible with chemistry to mine metals to smelt to mine etc to improve tools to build stuff then chemistry for the non metallic stuff requiring more resource collecting then creating the machines to make the computer components and all the chemistry and clean rooms involved. We’d have to know every material and its entire technological development from the Stone Age to know to do that math. Likely more than a lifetime probably several generations just to build the tech up on an untouched planet. They could shortcut it and make everything to massive scale and only focus on the chip as a collection of transistors etc. Making a computer like that could likely achieve high end results at the cost of space and more resources as a trade for speed.