And did you tap latex trees for the rubber? Did you smelt ore for the metal? Did you buy the glass from a company that was used to can those vegetables or did you refine it yourself?
No. The seeds came from a catalog. The hatchet to chop the wood from a store.
Modern conveyance made it so you wouldn’t have to spend all day tending to survival. Yet the author seems to imply that life is harder now, than in the past.
I beg to differ.
An anthropologist should know about food scarcity. For thousands of years the family unit, tribe or village was under extreme competition from neighboring people and animals for resources.
There is a video from cameras on monkeys. They literally spend their whole day looking for food. Or in other words, every waking hour is spent in the pursuit of sustenance. Pre-tractor man was the same. Without modern capitalist agriculture you would be toiling on the farm tending to sheep, chickens, plowing fields, milking cows and all the myriad of tasks needed to fulfill the food groups you so nonchalantly stuff your face with. It be non-stop work for all the variety you currently take for granted.
The world, with low life-expectancies, was hazardous with no medicines, protections from the weather or modern law. Which i think brings a bit of stress when a festering carbuncle could mean your death. But thanks to innovation, it can now be easily cured by companies who seek monetary reward. I’ll take this normal over the other one.
Does the first colony on the moon lay claim to the whole moon, or only an area the colony can defend?
But then what is worth defending, value wise? Strategic location? Mineral or molecule? Low gravity research and development?
Prices will most likely be set by the classic calculus optimization problems. Therefore, it will be imperative to “not purchase” until value is commensurate to utility. Easier said than done of course.
Many many years ago, I had returned home from a friends. Think rural country road, cinder block garage a few yards off a dusty road that was separate from the house. A single industrial lamp fixture burning a 100 watt bulb swarmed by moths and insects. The night is heavy, hot and humid. Crickets and katydids turn nights silence away.
Like I’ve done many nights, before going inside I would walk to the other side of the road to take a leak in the bushes, and as I was finishing up… What the hell was that?!? Something was moving toward me.
Now I’ve been scared, gun pulled on me etc, but whatever I was seeing had me frozen, I literally couldn’t move, I was affixed as the little character bent down to climb through a hole in a rusty cattle fence overgrown with brush. A grey body, big eyes, hard to make out in the dull glow of the garage light and whatever faint moonlight existed, approached to within a few feet and stopped. All I could do was try and think of how much I love the Earth, the science of the universe and my reverence for nature and that of the natural world, and it stared, seeming to read my thoughts.
And like that it turned around and went back through the hole in the fence from whence it came, diminishing into the darkness of the night. Finally I was released and my muscles began to work. Half-way to the house, I began to wonder if that was real, like my memory of it was already fading quickly. I never said I saw an alien or anything like that, however I have told the story about the grey thing with little hands that had me paralyzed with fear.
Not so long ago I witnessed a raccoon walking and I sometimes wonder, was it a raccoon? Was it just the low light, brain filling in faint details of an out of world visitor??? I certainly would like to know.
I’ve read Wrangham, Haw, Girard, Fields and others, but for the sake of brevity I chose one of many facets.
The author states that modern life is stressful and not normal. Personally i rather walk into an air-conditioned market than worry if my arrow hits home after sweating in ambush all day just to eat.
I think it was more normal to work hard, experience competition, and feel stresses of survival for most of human kinds existence, and that only now in the last few hundred years have we had it truly easy, even with poor agricultural returns.