How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler

by Ryan North

Extremely Garbage Features of Farming: When wild food is abundant, farming is way more work than hunting and gathering. What farming offers, though, is the promise of a more reliable food source and, through domestication, more convenient food sources too. Farming also requires technologies for food storage, because its whole point is to produce more food than you can eat at once. This again is more work, but thanks to Section 10.2.4: Preserved Foods, you at least have the advantage of knowing exactly what to do. Farming creates the first income inequality, because not everyone can be farmers or share equally in the land required for it. Farmers have the most food and (initially) the most to trade, and everyone who doesn’t want to become a skeleton needs to continue eating food. You have just created rich and poor people, or at the very least the potential for them. Farming requires infrastructure (fences, etc.), which means you are no longer mobile. Your civilization has just become a giant and stationary target. While this text does not include explicit instructions for weaponry, we’re certain that, should the need arise, you can probably adapt several of the technologies included here to that purpose. Animals carry diseases and can transmit them to humans. Worse, some of our deadliest diseases don’t bother animals at all. Over 60 percent of all human diseases originate from close contact with animals, including such all-time champion diseases as anthrax, Ebola, plague, ...