How to Take Over the World: Practical Schemes and Scientific Solutions for the Aspiring Supervillain - Hardcover

North, Ryan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 059319201X ISBN 13: 9780593192016

Verlag: Riverhead Books, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

NAMED A BEST NONFICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR BY ESQUIRE

“Comic book fans will fall hard for this delightfully daffy guidebook. . . . Exuberant, optimistic, and just plain fun, How to Take Over the World will both surprise and delight.” —Esquire

A book this informative should be a crime!

Taking over the world is a lot of work. Any supervillain is bound to have questions: What’s the perfect location for a floating secret base? What zany heist will fund my wildly ambitious plans? How do I control the weather, destroy the internet, and never, ever die?

Bestselling author and award-winning comics writer Ryan North has the answers. In this introduction to the science of comic-book supervillainy, he details a number of outlandish villainous schemes that harness the potential of today’s most advanced technologies. Picking up where How to Invent Everything left off, his explanations are as fun and elucidating as they are completely absurd.

You don’t have to be a criminal mastermind to share a supervillain’s interest in cutting-edge science and technology. This book doesn’t just reveal how to take over the world—it also shows how you could save it. This sly guide to some of the greatest threats facing humanity accessibly explores emerging techniques to extend human life spans, combat cyberterrorism, communicate across millennia, and finally make Jurassic Park a reality.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ryan North is a New York Times–bestselling author whose books include How to Invent Everything, Romeo and/or Juliet, and To Be or Not To Be. He's the creator of Dinosaur Comics and the Eisner Award–winning writer of Adventure Time, Jughead, and The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl for Marvel Comics, and he has a master's in computational linguistics from the University of Toronto. Ryan lives in Toronto with his wife, Jenn, and their dog, Noam Chompsky.

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1. Every Supervillain Needs a Secret Base

 

Three may keep a Secret, if two of them are dead.

-Benjamin Franklin (1735)

 

Every villain needs a place to live, work, and scheme. While civilians may content themselves with a "home," an "office," or a "home office," you're going to live the supervillain dream by plotting in style and comfort from your own palatial secret base.

 

There are some restrictions to keep in mind when scoping out locations for a secret base. The "secret" part of "secret base" means it should be hidden, or at the very least inaccessible: you don't want meddling do-gooders easily stumbling across it. "Base" means it should be sustainable and self-sufficient, able to support you (and ideally a staff of henchpeople) for months if not years at a time. Remember, if you can't bunker down in it for the long term, then you don't have a base: you have a vacation home.

 

And one simply does not take over the world from a secret vacation home.

 

Background

First, let us dissuade you from what you're already thinking, which is this:

 

Obviously the best place for me to build a secret supervillain base is inside a volcano, this is easy, I don't even know why I bought this book since I know all this stuff already.

-You (currently)

 

Building in an active volcano is a bad idea: it can explode with little to no warning, cooking you alive as the air fills with toxic gases and rocks rain from above onto a floor that is literally lava. Even a dormant volcano means you're living inside a very visible, non-secret hole/tourist attraction.

 

Your main concern here is self-sufficiency: if your base is to support you and your henchpeople without having to rely on the outside world, it will need to be a certain minimum size. The precise nature of that minimum size depends on how you answer the question of "wait, how much space do we really need to keep a human being alive indefinitely?"

 

Various authorities have attempted to answer this question throughout history. In the 700s CE in England, land was measured in hides, which reflected the amount of land thought necessary to support a family. Hides ranged in size from around 240,000 to 728,000 square meters (m), depending on the productivity of the land, but around the Norman conquest in 1066 CE, they became standardized at around 485,000m: slightly less than half a square kilometer. Whether families at the time included just immediate family members or also extended family is now unclear, but if you assume a small family of just four people, that works out to 121,250m of arable land per person.

 

Factoring in the modern farming technologies developed over the past millennium, a more recent 1999 calculation determined that a diversified and sustainable European (meat-eating) diet demanded 5,000m of farmland per person, further calculating that if you assumed a largely vegetarian diet; no soil degradation, erosion, or food waste; ample irrigation; and godlike farmers who both planted and tended to their crops perfectly, you could probably get that number down to just 700m a person. Lower numbers are better here: they help keep your base reasonably sized and have the side effect of making it easier for the rest of the world not to starve to death. That's a good thing, given that the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization's measurements of global arable land per person have been trending downward for decades: in 1970, it was 3,200m per person; in 2000, it was 2,300m per person; and in 2050, the global arable land is projected to be down to just 1,500m per person.

 

But even these calculations are still just estimates and educated guesses: they're not facts. Supervillains ponder and plan and scheme, yes, but they also reach a point where they take bold and decisive action. The supervillain's technique to scientifically discover how much space humans actually need to survive is straightforward:

 

1. Find some humans.

 

2. Put them in an enclosed area of a certain size, then seal them in so that neither they nor anything else can get in or out.

 

3.  Sit back, relax, and then check in every once in a while to see if your humans died or not.

 

And even though we're only one chapter in, this book has already saved you lots of money, because I can tell you that this experiment has already been performed before! It was run in 1991 on eight human volunteers during the two-year experiment that was the inaugural run of Biosphere 2, and it cost $250 million USD, equivalent to almost $500 million today. Money in your pocket, friend.

 

Whatever Happened to Biosphere 1?

There were some earlier proof-of-concept prototypes to Biosphere 2, including a sealed test module filled with plants (some to eat, some to produce oxygen), which saw stays by humans that ranged from an initial 72-hour visit to a 21-day experiment in closed-loop, bioregenerative, self-sustaining isolation. However, none of these prototypes were called "Biosphere 1." That's because members of the project considered Biosphere 2 to be a sequel to the natural environment they'd come from, which makes Earth the true Biosphere 1. Therefore, the answer to "whatever happened to Biosphere 1?" is "a heck of a lot actually, gosh, where do I even start?"

 

Biosphere 2 is a 12,700m complex of concrete, steel, and glass built in Arizona whose expenses were privately funded by billionaire Ed Bass. On September 26, four men and four women entered the complex through an airlock, intending to remain for two full years-during which they would depend entirely on the environment inside to keep them alive. In theory, the only thing to enter the Biosphere in that time would be electricity, and the only thing to exit it would be information. The sealed campus was divided into different biomes: a tropical rainforest (modeled on Venezuelan tepuis: tall, flat, and isolated mountaintop ecosystems), a savannah (modeled on South American grasslands), a desert (modeled on coastal fog deserts, with parched ground but moist air), a marsh (inspired by the Florida Everglades), and an "ocean" (salt water, Bahaman sand, and tropical coral reef). Beneath the Biosphere was a basement filled with support machinery, which was also accessible to the "biospherians" inside, since they would be the ones responsible for its maintenance and repair.

 

Each biome contained its own indigenous plant and animal species: the plants were responsible for producing the oxygen the humans would breathe, while the animals were chosen both for biodiversity and for food. A breeding pair of Ossabaw Island hogs was included due to their ability to "turn almost anything that remotely resembled food into meat and fat," with chickens and goats making the cut for similar reasons: they were sources of meat, eggs, and milk that could eat things that humans won't. Since everything was self-contained, the biosphere had its own water and carbon cycle. The biospherians would, in effect, be drinking the same water over and over again. It was to be the first time in history that humans would be separated for so long from the natural biosphere of their planet.

 

The experiment was not without its challenges, including:

 

The site drew unexpected attention, with tourists gathering and tapping on the enclosures' glass when they wanted a photo of the biospherians. Few places inside the Biosphere actually provided privacy to its inhabitants.

 

Some members brought insufficient supplies of clothing from outside, eventually resulting in vital items like boots being barely held together with...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Riverhead Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2022
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 059319201X
• ISBN 13: 9780593192016
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 416
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland