Nothing else happens without it. Of course, nowadays with the meta this and that, the data about food is worth far more than the food itself. And what with the cyberarms race, with us building these giant Irish elk antlers contained on server farms at the expense of who knows what, I don't know.
So, regardless:
1) The triumph of the command economy, through panoptic consumerism, IOT, enforced electronic telepathy, and the mathematization and fidelity of all resource streams. (1 a) the end of arbitrage, or rather, the maximum light speed setting of which 2) The Big Squeeze (the push of ocean life towards the poles). 3) The triumph of the concept of liberty over freedom (the quaint ancient unwritten and/or medieval concepts of freedom) - or - this is your brain on approved topics 4) that's all I got.
]]>1) Sexy animal parasites in nature? Yeah, us. Some would argue we are predators, but I'd say that as a trivial category matter, like whether witches are Things that Float. So, predation as a subset of parasitism, as, say, a parasitic wasp ultimately kills its prey. We engage in so many parasitic behaviors, like slave taking and slave making, and in fact, I'd argue that the whole Hebbian Web of Life is made up almost exclusively of parasitic links and loops. And, yes, I consider some (not all) humans extremely sexy.
2) Which makes me wonder whether we've got sex all wrong. Rather than a defense against parasitism, maybe it is the most successful form?
3) I suppose it was inevitable God was brought up. (Me? Don't know, don't give a shit, but those stories are fun toys to play with). So, She is the ultimate hyperparasite, feeding upon the bloating corpses of universes, and infesting same with Her progeny (functionally fashioned somewhat in Her image), soon to return to eat same Progeny. So, fellow honeylambs, don't pray, or don't pray too loud, lest you attract the Wrong Attentions.
4) We've covered ingestion and metabolism, but what about excretion? Can you show me one form of life that doesn't shit in the kitchen? In fact, maybe that's not a universal constant, and the Fermi Paradox is explained by we are the Poop Planet, just this really gross and grotesque series of living turds feeding upon each other, when we aren't shining each other up.
]]>"My prediction is that we'll get to more sustainable populations running on 100% renewable energy by the end of the 21st Century."
Hope you're right, because the most likely alternative to your 2100 is another P-T extinction event, courtesy of Us Truly, which AFAIC neatly explains the Fermi Paradox.
]]>Dust. Dust is easy to make. As a griefer, I'd direct my vN probes to make a shitload of dust out of everything they could eat. I'd be looking for old to middling stars with a young dust disk around them. Or clouds of structured dust. That knowledge would bring my pants-shitting instincts to the fore.
]]>I'm sorry. I had it set on maximum filthy.
]]>Were I to write a book ala Guns Germs and Steel? I'd call it Germs, germs, germs, vermin, pests, and occasionally steel and guns.
Disease spread through the Norse vector was also unlikely due to their sparse numbers. Besides, the Vinland expeditions were never going to come to anything anyway because, well, they would invariably be slaughtered and/or driven into the sea by the 'skraelings' due to the Norse were hillbilly asshole neighbors.
One scenario that might work along your lines is what I call the Vivaldi Divergence.
The brothers Vandino and Ugolino Vivaldi, in 1291, set sail from Genoa to find a route to India, stumbled upon North America. The brothers and their Majorcan crew, raving from starvation and thirst, barely recognizable as human, nursed back to health by Waccamaw natives. And then, of course, the Great Dying starts, as the natives succumb to smallpox, measles, influenza, bubonic and pneumonic plagues. The native peoples are mowed down, as pestilence spreads across the continent, and then southwards through South America, until finally, in mere decades 30 million people are dead. The New World depopulated, the Inadvertent Spanish Holocaust occurring 200 years earlier than it did.
And in Europe, as in our own world, the Vivaldis vanished, forgotten, until Columbus arrives in 1491, to a renewed and resistant population of American Indians. (There is a chance that Columbus disappears, in which case, exploration into the Ocean Sea is postponed for decades). American Indians do not succumb to disease. The Spaniards, the Portuguese, the English and French are unable to gain a foothold in the New World. No Conquest. No colonies. No gold. No silver. More importantly, the Columbian biological exchange is slowed or delayed a century. Meaning, no potatoes. No guano. No Northern European population surge.
The US of A could easily have been stuck east of the Appalachians for quite some time had contingencies played out different. After all, the English colonization effort (without the drug trade - tobacco) was not exactly a spectacular success. At the time of Revolution, you could reach the western boundaries of the colonies after a three weeks trudge, and this after 150 years of colonizing. The attrition rate for English colonists was something like 9.6 for every 10. Virginia was worse than Ebola.
]]>It covers America west of the Mississippi from 1800 to around 1860. Two words. Fur trade. The book does not paint Anglos and their fire ant capitalism in any kind of good light. The 1850s are especially nasty.
Also, West of The Revolution, by Claudio Saunt.
I would comment, but it would all be just the blackest George-Carlin-flavored cynicism.
]]>http://www.powells.com/biblio/9780415312615
Section Four is where de Vany lays out the stable Paritean hypothesis (the fat-tail distribution people like Nicholas Nassim Taleb seems to favor over the Gaussian).
Or, if you prefer the Levy distribution (ring a bell? Levy flights, or levy walks, named by Mandelbrot because the distribution of large and small steps (risks) is a Levy distribution, were in the news last year. Something about predator search patterns).
De Vany: (snip)"The laws of the box office are those of a winner-takes-all contest. The laws are driven by a non-linear information dynamic that takes movies that are close to one another and propels them apart at exponential speed. Under the influence of these recursive and non-linear processes, movie revenues can “go anywhere”. They may even be chaotic. The extreme skew of the revenue distribution, the influence of extreme events, and the unstable and non-finite moments provide a rigorous basis for the "nobody knows" principle. I show that the stable Paretian model captures with high fidelity all the essential features of the statistics of the business." (unsnip)
If de Vany is correct, your patient vs. impatient trading equilibria model probably doesn't quite fit well.
]]>http://www.cracked.com/video_18685_5-gun-myths-you-probably-believe-thanks-to-movies.html
]]>In terms of 2012 box office receipts, 63% and falling:
http://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2013/apr/02/hollywood-hold-global-box-office
]]>