Humans were shaping their environments to produce food long before they plowed fields. Hunter-gatherers didn't just hunt and gather willy-nilly, picking up whatever they found, oblivious to how it got there.
Yeah, you have to consider that when you're living in nature you actually need to identify the plants that are edible so you can't actually just eat everything you find even if you could eat it in theory.
So if you wanted to gather plant food how do you make sure that the food you find is edible?
It's quite simple. If you know a plant is edible you take the seeds and you carry them with you and broadcast them all over the place.
The interesting part about this is that this is also a form of selective breeding, since you're choosing the edible plants over the inedible plants.
Note that you do not tend to the plants or do any form of agriculture, you're still foraging from random plants you encounter.
It blows my tiny wee Homo just-about-Sapiens mind that I have this brain which evolved to travel at walking pace for a few hours and think in terms of "you get loads of rabbits about an hour's walk from here behind those hills, and the really good berries are that way down towards the river".
And yet despite that it can quite happily plan out and navigate a route that is hundreds of miles long, at roughly 20 times the speed it was designed to travel at.
I'm sitting here writing a text message to someone 1800 miles away giving them directions to a shop in Vienna and I can visualise where they need to go for that to all work, with a brain that evolved to think about "not the next hill but the one after that" distance.
Probably not! I'd imagine that whoever did production design for the movie would have visited some of the labs of the time, or talked to people involved in AI – and the CM-1 / CM-2 were very much at the forefront of that type of computing back then.
But that's such a great find – I've seen T2 many times, but that visual of the black hypercube-looking design really is strikingly similar!
It's an almost 30 year old nearly 500 ton structure subjected to radiation, bombardment by starstuff and debris, the stresses of docking and undocking, of boosts, and of constant heating and cooling as it passes in and out of the sun. Getting a clear picture of the comings and going of gasses is probably not easy.
Also in 2021, Nauka (the cursed Russian module) arrived on the station, and accidentally fired thrusters while attached, fighting against the attitude control of the station, flipping it around 540 degrees and putting a lot of stress that the station wasn't designed for on all the structural parts.
It was surreal to follow when it was happening, NASA was seriously underplaying what was going on and it was up to amateurs with telescopes looking at the station to tell the world that the situation is still ongoing.
This is one of the three major mishaps related to Nauka.
