establishment of a new resource base (which I found too stupid to take seriously even momentarily)
Let us contemplate the stupid, then, with the examples of domesticated corn and rice, which were extremely disruptive technologies. What they did was they gave you a tradeoff—you can grow a lot more calories, but you get worse nutrition. And as we know since we’re in the future, pretty much everyone chose the calories. But then you get a generation of vitamin deficiency and dying at 30 of rotten teeth until people figure out that you need to grow beans too, and you can sort of see how having a whole generation with more concentrated food sources, more kids, and earlier death would lead to radical change in the social structure. So new resources aren’t just “oops, I’m too rich now, time to collapse civilization,” they introduce new tradeoffs that can be disruptive enough to end civilization—IIRC there’s speculation that corn is one of the nails in the coffin of the Hopewell culture.
Let us contemplate the stupid, then, with the examples of domesticated corn and rice, which were extremely disruptive technologies. What they did was they gave you a tradeoff—you can grow a lot more calories, but you get worse nutrition. And as we know since we’re in the future, pretty much everyone chose the calories. But then you get a generation of vitamin deficiency and dying at 30 of rotten teeth until people figure out that you need to grow beans too, and you can sort of see how having a whole generation with more concentrated food sources, more kids, and earlier death would lead to radical change in the social structure. So new resources aren’t just “oops, I’m too rich now, time to collapse civilization,” they introduce new tradeoffs that can be disruptive enough to end civilization—IIRC there’s speculation that corn is one of the nails in the coffin of the Hopewell culture.