That said, my kids and I buried 50 copper coins in a forest in the sierras, perhaps a thousand years from now the aliens visiting our dead planet will find them. :-(
Not necessarily. A lot more silver has been mined since the Norman Conquest (for example in the New World, but also in the Old World) which increases its supply. The demand for and utility of silver in general has also changed since then.
Picking the 'BigMac index' might be fun, ie you try to price a Big Mac. (Since the Big Mac doesn't contain any tomatoes, you could probably have made a reasonable Big Mac clone in the Middle Ages.)
It gets ridiculous, if you go by the price of eg the amount of computation a human can do in a year. Or 'ice cubes in the height of summer'.
Edit: per an up level comment, 15 chickens or half a knife? Hmm, chickens are easy the knife isn't. (wide variability in knife pricing). Given that the 'collectible' value has increased beyond the monetary value.
Yes, but they were available in the Middle Ages.
> And there are tomatoes in the special sauce.
OK, I didn't know that. They didn't have tomatoes in the European Middle Ages before contact with the New World was established.
But you can probably come reasonably close enough to a Big Mac knockoff with stuff they had available in the Middle Ages.
"There's a page at Regia Anglorum that tries to give some examples. The "d" indicates a silver penny. It [a silver penny] might buy 15 chickens, but it also might only buy half a knife (because metal is rare in comparison to chickens and requires a bunch of skilled labor to work it.)"
aliens will likely find us the same way we find dinosaurs but probably no one will find us. 1000 years from now things will be very different but i suspect humans will still exist. imo we as a species have very little chance of living 1M years, tho.
Eg nowadays almost everyone has the 'modern overbite', ie the top front teeth extend in front of the bottom front teeth.
See eg https://nextnature.org/en/magazine/story/2013/did-forks-real...
The article explicitly blames forks, but people in Song China had a modern overbite long before Europeans invented forks. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overbite#Changing_human_dentit... and https://petermorwood.tumblr.com/post/181554755777/deadcatwit...
I do disagree with you though and think humans are like cockroaches now and there is a 0% chance of exterminating every last one of us and that’s a good thing. Nature had its chance at several bottlenecks in the past and failed.
>One of the greatest human bottlenecks occurred between 930,000 and 813,000 years ago, when the human population was reduced to about 1,280 breeding individuals for 117,000 years. This bottleneck may have brought human ancestors close to extinction.
honestly? get the population down. this means less consumption on an industrial scale and letting vital ecosystems recover. i can't imagine a good way of voluntarily cutting the pop by 50% and keeping it flat afterwards, but famine would do it.