I could have this math completely wrong, but I think I was thorough enough with it:
With a single goat, if one consumed nothing but the goat and its products, as many as 14 people could be fed. Supplemented with other things, you could feed an entire village on 3 goats per day. You’d need to raise nearly 170 goats at a time to sustainably keep up a diet of exclusively meat, or about 120 when eating other things. Those 120 goats would need about 900 liters of water per day to not slowly die of dehydration.
When getting into the minutiae of how a village that doesn’t practice grain cultivation could support itself, you realize just how vital grains are for calorie consumption.
The sheer scale of how much food would need to be grown and transported to sustain a large population is often mind-boggling, and goes a long way to explain why some areas of Earth had colossal populations due to soil fertility and how much land could be exploited to grow food. The big reason why China, India, and southeast Asia had such historically large population densities was because the climate and soil could support mind-numbingly huge rice harvests, and rice could yield up to three harvests a year.
Another one that jumped out at me was the difference between modern and medieval or ancient farming methods.
Using medieval grain farming techniques and knowledge, you still needed around six acres of grain farmland to feed one person per year. With modern techniques, that can be brought down to one acre per person, but that's still a huge amount of space to support a population of any size.
I think one of my favorite examples of this comes from a far more recent time. So, in the fall of 1775, colonial officer Benedict Arnold lead an expedition along the Kennebec River in Maine with the eventual goal of reaching and taking Quebec. He had a small force, of just over 1,000 men; a pretty small force all things considered. His force ate about *three thousand pounds of food a day.* Think about that. This tiny crappy expedition marching through the middle of nowhere eats that much, every day. It's impossible to conceive of how much food a town of even middling size would eat.
And it gets even more nuts with cavalry. Horses eat an insane amount of fodder. A few hundred horses can eat more than thousands of human soldiers. Even at reast a horse consumes 15k calories per day, and when doing hard work it can consume 30k calories - 15 times what a human eats!
Cavalry were expensive to maintain just on fodder alone.
Yup. Most examples of groups that ate a primarily animal product diet weren't sustainable on a large scale. Usually very low population and nomadic in some way
It can be a bit hard for most of us to fathom the importance of consistent/always-available calories in the modern day!
>Gold and Silver is only valuable because we make them valuable. Another system may consider different things, like Cowrey Shells.
I would dispute the "only". Yes, *money* can be made out of plenty of other things beside gold and silver, including [shells](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell_money). But there are good reasons why several different cultures independently ended up using gold and silver to make coins, and also good reasons why both metals are useful in their own right. Gold is very chemically stable. Pure gold does not tarnish. It is the most malleable metal. Pure silver is also malleable and resistant to tarnishing and silver is the best thermal and electrical conductor. And while it is true that their value for jewellery and ornament arises only because humans make them valuable, by liking how they look, *liking pretty things* is actually a massive part of human motivation. Interestingly, the use of cowrie shells as money also arose from them first being used for body ornamentation.
Oh I fully hear you and understand. The point I made is that this revelation made me realise I could have a community that uses favours as currency.
Plus if we wanna talk strange currency there are the giant stone doughnuts on Java. Now that is some peak currency.
I've always assumed that the [Rai Stones](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rai_stones) were the inspiration for the unit of currency called the [*Ningi*](https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Ningi) in *The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy*:
>The Ningi is a galactic unit of currency, valued at one eighth of a Triganic Pu. A Ningi is a triangular rubber coin six thousand eight hundred miles along each side. Galactibanks refuse to deal in Ningis, declaring them "fiddling small change."
I gather that most historians now doubt that the word *salarium* actually did indicate that [Roman soldiers were paid in salt.](https://medium.com/@1kg/were-roman-soldiers-paid-in-salt-unveiling-the-mystery-74a1fbc31544) Pity, it was a cool idea.
Some of the main things that make good currency are rarity, difficulty to forge, durability, convenient, and some value outside of currency. Gold and silver satisfy these conditions as they're rare enough to not be everywhere but common enough to make currency out of, they're soft metals and so can be verified on the spot, they don't tarnish/rust very easily thus not devaluing much over time, and they can be used as jewelry (or in modern times, as conductors). Cash money didn't just take off on its own, it had to be backed by gold or silver in most societies for at least several decades. Cash is even more convenient than coins but has no value outside of currency; it really just requires trust to work.
My equivalent "Oh yeah that is how it works" moment came before Google existed. It was when I realised that there was a purpose behind [military drill](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foot_drill). The fiction I read as a kid tended to portray armies who moved on command as losing to individually skilful but loosely disciplined rebels. This was implied to happen because the drill had made the soldiers into mindless robots. Perhaps it did, particularly in the late 17th century - but when I came to read some actual history alongside my copious consumption of science fiction and fantasy, I observed that, irrespective of the merits of the two sides, the individualistic rebels usually lost and the side with the well-drilled army usually won.
Oh yeah this is something that popular media have really just not been talking about.
Military drill is not just about stuff like walking in parades or understanding the structure. It is about discipline and reactions.
You do as you are told when you are told on Reflex.
A prime example on this, if we are not looking at modern stuff, is the Roman Empire. They tended to field well disciplined and high quality forces compared to their enemies.
I was 14 years old when I learned what a tectonic plate was. My middle school didn't have science as its own class and there are gaps in my knowledge because of it. Took me even longer to learn that mountains either form when there's volcanic activity or when a tectonic plate gets on top of another.
I was forced to learn it as on my highschool profile the extended subjects are history, social studies and geography. I'm not sure if this is a thing outside of fromer eastern block
Anyway, would you like to know how lakes form?
It’s usually the opposite reaction of “drat! That’s how it works?” Happens mostly when I compare human and animal physiology. A few examples: the human tailbone is what allows us to support our own back when sitting. And the human foot/plantigrade gait is what allows us to be bipedal.
Something I learned back in astronomy is that the planets formed in our solar system in their order for very good reason. Closer to the forming star, temperatures were high, which meant the only materials that were solid were metals and rocks. This is why Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars are all rocky, terrestrial planets. Farther from the star, ices like methane and water are cold enough to condense into solids, which means that there’s more mass to make planets out of. This results in significantly larger planets with significantly stronger gravity. These planets have strong enough gravity to pull in light gasses like hydrogen (which there is a LOT of in a forming solar system). This exponentially continues until all the gasses are condensed into planets or the sun, and is why Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune are all gas giants.
I was trying to figure out the geography of my mechanical world when I found the concept of a "shellworld," which was an absolute lightbulb moment for me. It's a big, dumb object in the Ringworld vein with multiple concentric stacked inhabited spheres and a massive object at the core. No easy way to get sunlight into the lower levels, but you can't have everything.
I had a few moments where I figured a "placeholder explanation", then looked it up and I was right. Can't remember any specific examples right now, sadly. It was a while ago.
How much work horses needed. And the dirty business behind travel in medieval times. Slow, unsafe, and bad for the elderly.
Basically? The train was a game changer.
learned that it takes more energy to start something back up again than just to keep it running, like a glass bottle factory.
so, I figured that if my near lightspeed choo-choos need to stay at that speed in order to be efficient, I'll have time displacement bubbles at every station.
Gold and silver are only valuable because they're rare, which is as good a way of valuing things as any.
However. Diamonds are actually not very rare at all. They have uses in industry but as shiny rocks go they're not very special, even in terms of their appearance (there are more lustrous stones available). The only reason they are considered valuable is because De Beers company created artificial scarcity. I always feel the need to point this out, because franchises that treat diamonds as special, like Dungeons and Dragons, are buying into this highly unusual and modern-earth-specific form of price gouging.
Yes, colored stones like rubies are actually rarer than diamonds, they just don’t have a massive PR and marketing firm pumping them up. I learned that Russia has warehouses full of diamonds and could crash the market if they decided to have a clearance sale.
railguns vs coilguns . big one for scifi writing.
the square cube law for realistic sizes for astral vessels. i learnt about it and am still quietly ignoring it for rule of cool but i did scale everything down a decent bit
river formation and how it connects to deltas, and how civilizations lived near them
Learning that horses eat at least 3x what a human does, so the horse must do at least 3x the work to break even.
The early plowhorse harnesses were essentially cords wrapped around the animal's neck, choking it and severely limiting its work. Then someone came up with the idea of wooden harnesses, which transferred the load to the horse's shoulders, allowing the animals to earn their keep.
And all this I learned from _King David's Spaceship_, by Jerry Pournelle.
I could have this math completely wrong, but I think I was thorough enough with it: With a single goat, if one consumed nothing but the goat and its products, as many as 14 people could be fed. Supplemented with other things, you could feed an entire village on 3 goats per day. You’d need to raise nearly 170 goats at a time to sustainably keep up a diet of exclusively meat, or about 120 when eating other things. Those 120 goats would need about 900 liters of water per day to not slowly die of dehydration. When getting into the minutiae of how a village that doesn’t practice grain cultivation could support itself, you realize just how vital grains are for calorie consumption.
The sheer scale of how much food would need to be grown and transported to sustain a large population is often mind-boggling, and goes a long way to explain why some areas of Earth had colossal populations due to soil fertility and how much land could be exploited to grow food. The big reason why China, India, and southeast Asia had such historically large population densities was because the climate and soil could support mind-numbingly huge rice harvests, and rice could yield up to three harvests a year. Another one that jumped out at me was the difference between modern and medieval or ancient farming methods. Using medieval grain farming techniques and knowledge, you still needed around six acres of grain farmland to feed one person per year. With modern techniques, that can be brought down to one acre per person, but that's still a huge amount of space to support a population of any size.
I think one of my favorite examples of this comes from a far more recent time. So, in the fall of 1775, colonial officer Benedict Arnold lead an expedition along the Kennebec River in Maine with the eventual goal of reaching and taking Quebec. He had a small force, of just over 1,000 men; a pretty small force all things considered. His force ate about *three thousand pounds of food a day.* Think about that. This tiny crappy expedition marching through the middle of nowhere eats that much, every day. It's impossible to conceive of how much food a town of even middling size would eat.
And it gets even more nuts with cavalry. Horses eat an insane amount of fodder. A few hundred horses can eat more than thousands of human soldiers. Even at reast a horse consumes 15k calories per day, and when doing hard work it can consume 30k calories - 15 times what a human eats! Cavalry were expensive to maintain just on fodder alone.
Yup. Most examples of groups that ate a primarily animal product diet weren't sustainable on a large scale. Usually very low population and nomadic in some way It can be a bit hard for most of us to fathom the importance of consistent/always-available calories in the modern day!
>Gold and Silver is only valuable because we make them valuable. Another system may consider different things, like Cowrey Shells. I would dispute the "only". Yes, *money* can be made out of plenty of other things beside gold and silver, including [shells](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell_money). But there are good reasons why several different cultures independently ended up using gold and silver to make coins, and also good reasons why both metals are useful in their own right. Gold is very chemically stable. Pure gold does not tarnish. It is the most malleable metal. Pure silver is also malleable and resistant to tarnishing and silver is the best thermal and electrical conductor. And while it is true that their value for jewellery and ornament arises only because humans make them valuable, by liking how they look, *liking pretty things* is actually a massive part of human motivation. Interestingly, the use of cowrie shells as money also arose from them first being used for body ornamentation.
Side note, highly conductive metals are naturally anti-microbial. So silver, gold, copper, etc. are basically self-sterilizing materials.
Oh I fully hear you and understand. The point I made is that this revelation made me realise I could have a community that uses favours as currency. Plus if we wanna talk strange currency there are the giant stone doughnuts on Java. Now that is some peak currency.
I've always assumed that the [Rai Stones](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rai_stones) were the inspiration for the unit of currency called the [*Ningi*](https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Ningi) in *The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy*: >The Ningi is a galactic unit of currency, valued at one eighth of a Triganic Pu. A Ningi is a triangular rubber coin six thousand eight hundred miles along each side. Galactibanks refuse to deal in Ningis, declaring them "fiddling small change." I gather that most historians now doubt that the word *salarium* actually did indicate that [Roman soldiers were paid in salt.](https://medium.com/@1kg/were-roman-soldiers-paid-in-salt-unveiling-the-mystery-74a1fbc31544) Pity, it was a cool idea.
Some of the main things that make good currency are rarity, difficulty to forge, durability, convenient, and some value outside of currency. Gold and silver satisfy these conditions as they're rare enough to not be everywhere but common enough to make currency out of, they're soft metals and so can be verified on the spot, they don't tarnish/rust very easily thus not devaluing much over time, and they can be used as jewelry (or in modern times, as conductors). Cash money didn't just take off on its own, it had to be backed by gold or silver in most societies for at least several decades. Cash is even more convenient than coins but has no value outside of currency; it really just requires trust to work.
Now let's imagine cash money backed by favours
My equivalent "Oh yeah that is how it works" moment came before Google existed. It was when I realised that there was a purpose behind [military drill](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foot_drill). The fiction I read as a kid tended to portray armies who moved on command as losing to individually skilful but loosely disciplined rebels. This was implied to happen because the drill had made the soldiers into mindless robots. Perhaps it did, particularly in the late 17th century - but when I came to read some actual history alongside my copious consumption of science fiction and fantasy, I observed that, irrespective of the merits of the two sides, the individualistic rebels usually lost and the side with the well-drilled army usually won.
Oh yeah this is something that popular media have really just not been talking about. Military drill is not just about stuff like walking in parades or understanding the structure. It is about discipline and reactions. You do as you are told when you are told on Reflex. A prime example on this, if we are not looking at modern stuff, is the Roman Empire. They tended to field well disciplined and high quality forces compared to their enemies.
I was 14 years old when I learned what a tectonic plate was. My middle school didn't have science as its own class and there are gaps in my knowledge because of it. Took me even longer to learn that mountains either form when there's volcanic activity or when a tectonic plate gets on top of another.
I was forced to learn it as on my highschool profile the extended subjects are history, social studies and geography. I'm not sure if this is a thing outside of fromer eastern block Anyway, would you like to know how lakes form?
Sure
Shit, I didn't actually listen in class. When I get home I'll find my notes, decipher what the fuck I wrote and translate it to english
It’s usually the opposite reaction of “drat! That’s how it works?” Happens mostly when I compare human and animal physiology. A few examples: the human tailbone is what allows us to support our own back when sitting. And the human foot/plantigrade gait is what allows us to be bipedal.
Something I learned back in astronomy is that the planets formed in our solar system in their order for very good reason. Closer to the forming star, temperatures were high, which meant the only materials that were solid were metals and rocks. This is why Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars are all rocky, terrestrial planets. Farther from the star, ices like methane and water are cold enough to condense into solids, which means that there’s more mass to make planets out of. This results in significantly larger planets with significantly stronger gravity. These planets have strong enough gravity to pull in light gasses like hydrogen (which there is a LOT of in a forming solar system). This exponentially continues until all the gasses are condensed into planets or the sun, and is why Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune are all gas giants.
I was trying to figure out the geography of my mechanical world when I found the concept of a "shellworld," which was an absolute lightbulb moment for me. It's a big, dumb object in the Ringworld vein with multiple concentric stacked inhabited spheres and a massive object at the core. No easy way to get sunlight into the lower levels, but you can't have everything.
I had a few moments where I figured a "placeholder explanation", then looked it up and I was right. Can't remember any specific examples right now, sadly. It was a while ago.
How much work horses needed. And the dirty business behind travel in medieval times. Slow, unsafe, and bad for the elderly. Basically? The train was a game changer.
learned that it takes more energy to start something back up again than just to keep it running, like a glass bottle factory. so, I figured that if my near lightspeed choo-choos need to stay at that speed in order to be efficient, I'll have time displacement bubbles at every station.
Gold and silver are only valuable because they're rare, which is as good a way of valuing things as any. However. Diamonds are actually not very rare at all. They have uses in industry but as shiny rocks go they're not very special, even in terms of their appearance (there are more lustrous stones available). The only reason they are considered valuable is because De Beers company created artificial scarcity. I always feel the need to point this out, because franchises that treat diamonds as special, like Dungeons and Dragons, are buying into this highly unusual and modern-earth-specific form of price gouging.
Yes, colored stones like rubies are actually rarer than diamonds, they just don’t have a massive PR and marketing firm pumping them up. I learned that Russia has warehouses full of diamonds and could crash the market if they decided to have a clearance sale.
I’m not sure. A lot of the stuff I know is actually from YouTube or just knowing it
railguns vs coilguns . big one for scifi writing. the square cube law for realistic sizes for astral vessels. i learnt about it and am still quietly ignoring it for rule of cool but i did scale everything down a decent bit river formation and how it connects to deltas, and how civilizations lived near them
Learning that horses eat at least 3x what a human does, so the horse must do at least 3x the work to break even. The early plowhorse harnesses were essentially cords wrapped around the animal's neck, choking it and severely limiting its work. Then someone came up with the idea of wooden harnesses, which transferred the load to the horse's shoulders, allowing the animals to earn their keep. And all this I learned from _King David's Spaceship_, by Jerry Pournelle.