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A stored food surplus built up by taxation can support other full-time specialists besides kings and bureaucrats. Of most direct relevance to wars of conquest, it can be used to feed professional soldiers. That was the decisive factor in the British Empire’s eventual defeat of New Zealand’s well-armed indigenous Maori population. While the Maori achieved some stunning temporary victories, they could not maintain an army constantly in the field and were in the end worn down by 18,000 full-time British troops. Stored food can also feed priests, who provide religious justification for wars of conquest; artisans such as metalworkers, who develop swords, guns, and other technologies; and scribes, who preserve far more information than can be remembered accurately.
Guns, Germs, and Steel
Jared Diamond
INTERROGATOR: Two protons? They only sent two protons? That’s almost nothing. YE: (laughs) You also said “almost.” That’s the limit of Trisolaran power. They can only accelerate something as small as a proton to near the speed of light. So over a distance of four light-years, they can only send two protons. INTERROGATOR: At the macroscopic level, two protons are nothing. Even a single cilium on a bacterium would include several billion protons. What’s the point? YE: They’re a lock. INTERROGATOR: A lock? What are they locking? YE: They are sealing off the progress of human science. Because of the existence of these two protons, humanity will not be able to make any important scientific developments during the four and a half centuries until the arrival of the Trisolaran Fleet. Evans once said that the day of arrival of the two protons was also the day that human science died. INTERROGATOR: That’s … too fantastic. How can that be? YE: I don’t know. I really don’t know. In the eyes of Trisolaran civilization, we’re probably not even primitive savages. We might be mere bugs.
The Three-Body Problem
Cixin Liu and Ken Liu
How exactly did Armand Peugeot, the man, create Peugeot, the company? In much the same way that priests and sorcerers have created gods and demons throughout history,
Sapiens
Yuval Noah Harari
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