Блог

Chinese Mountain Cat (Felis bieti), family Felidae, endemic to grasslands on the Tibetan Plateau of western China

Vulnerable.

The year is 1519, and you are Hernán Cortés. You and all of your compatriots are stuck in the most effective way to make someone a bad person: put them in a situation where they must become incredibly wealthy and powerful incredibly fast or else they will die horribly. Transatlantic voyages are absurdly expensive. Anyone in the ‘New World’ who isn’t rich enough to afford their own army is deeply in debt, with no collateral but their own sword-arm. It is an environment that does not reward half-measures. It does not even reward full measures. It only rewards putting a brick on the gas pedal and crossing your fingers - if you kill one person then you’re a murderer, but if you kill hundreds of thousands of people then you're a paragon of glory and the Spanish crown will make statues of you.

The year is still 1519 and you are Moctezuma II, Huēyi Tlahtoāni (great ruler) of the ‘Aztec Empire,’ also known as the Triple Alliance, or the Mexica. You know a thing or two about half-measures not being rewarded, because you are in a process of rapidly expanding and consolidating a nascent Mesoamerican empire. You are quite good at your job - even before you ascended to the throne, you cultivated a reputation as a skilled warrior, a dedicated student, and a devout worshiper. Your name means something like ‘lord who frowns in anger.’ It’s a fitting name, because the process of ‘imperial expansion and consolidation’ generally involves killing lots of people. To make matters worse, some weird hairy white guys showed up out of nowhere and they keep demanding an audience with you. You try every trick in the diplomatic handbook - deferment, threats, flattery, bribes - but everything you do just seems to make them more single-mindedly focused on your destruction. Later, after you are dead, they will claim that you thought they were gods.

The year is 1545, and this whole ‘colonialism’ thing is starting to peter out. Trans-Atlantic voyages are still ruinously expensive, and the pickings are getting slimmer every day - it’s not like you can go loot Tenochtitlan a second time. You’re starting to wonder if it’s time for everyone to pack up, go home, and forget about… holy shit is that a mountain of silver? Is that an honest-to-god mountain with more silver in it than every other existing silver mine on the face of the earth combined? Yes. Some call it Potosí. Many will call it “the mountain that eats men.” In a single moment, colonialism goes from a plundering campaign for recently-unemployed soldiers to a permanent institution. The alchemists back in Prague and Vienna never learned how to turn lead into gold, but the mercenaries and taskmasters in Potosí found a much simpler equation to turn blood into silver.

The year is 1571, and the economy of the Ming dynasty doesn’t feel so good. Their experiment with paper money was a failure, to put it gently. The experiment with paper money failed horribly. It turns out when you try to have paper currency but you don’t have sophisticated counterfeit protections and there’s also a booming cottage industry of people making paper in their cottages, well, you can guess how that ends. So you’re trying to shift to a silver economy. But then you run into an even bigger problem: you don’t have enough silver. So if you start demanding taxes in silver, the price of silver will skyrocket, which means taxes will skyrocket when the economy is already ailing from the whole ‘paper money’ thing. Some hapless scholar-official in Guangdong is nervously watching a peasant sharpen his pitchfork when he gets word from a messenger: some gweilo just showed up at the part with literal shipfuls of silver and they want to buy silk, tea, spices, and porcelain at outrageous markups.

Within living memory, the world was still ‘medieval’ in many ways - slow, parochial, zero-sum, carefully arbitrated by tradition and precedent. Legible. And now Spanish sailors take Bolivian silver on ships guarded by West African mercenaries and Japanese ronin, sailing to their colony in the Philippines to rub shoulders with Chinese officials, Indian sultans, and Malay merchants. All because some dipshit from Genoa got his math wrong and wouldn’t shut up about it.

Not sure if you’ve seen this one already, but it made me laugh so in the case that you have I’m passing it to you again

Grey Worm Caecilian (Ichthyophis griseivermis), family Ichhtyophiidae, Xuan Lien National Park, Thanh Hoa, Vietnam

Caecilians are amphibians, like frogs and salamanders.

They are not worms, nor are they snakes.

Where you'll see a rare bird.

The Cephalopods Are Coming

Fossil records reveal Earth’s mass extinctions are followed by a rise of ocean cephalopods. They’re rising again.

The quaint seaside village of Lyme Regis is precariously perched between rugged black cliffs in southwestern England. It sits astride one of the most famous fossil sites in the world. On an autumn day several years ago, I left behind the crowded streets of souvenir shops selling fossils and T-shirts. I walked along the cliffs and over the ribbed rocks underlying the beach, stepping across one of the most devastating mass extinctions of the geological record. The fossils beneath the village represent the end of the Triassic geological period. Around 200 million years ago, great gouts of deep Earth material welled out of volcanoes. As it flowed across land and sea bottom, it decanted enormous volumes of carbon dioxide. Mixed with the late Triassic atmosphere, it caused global temperatures to skyrocket. But it was not heat alone that stressed the world into one of the greatest mass extinctions in Earth history. The warming planet reduced the temperature differential between polar and equatorial regions. A consequence was a slowing of the important ocean currents called Thermohaline Circulation Currents. These are the drivers of oxygenating the oceans. When they slow and then halt, mass extinction follows. The living Triassic world, home to early dinosaurs, invertebrates, strange plants, and so much else, became a death world—on land, in the sea, in the skies...