It’s too damned hot. Should’ve worn a t-shirt. Oh well, let’s get to work.
There’s a lot of early flowering plants here, and we have absolutely no idea about the potential pharmaceutical benefits. Get the pollen, get the nectar – hell, get the smaller ones entirely intact and we can talk limited-scale experimental farming back home. Very limited. Don’t want the prices to drop. Shit, look at the water run off those ferns – we’ve got ferns for days, cycads for weeks, conifers for decades. The flowers yeah yeah yeah they’re photogenic but we can’t forget this stuff. Even if any or all of this is no good for medicine we can make them prestige ornaments, especially if they’re fragile enough. Maybe they’ll need specific soil nutrients, maybe they’ll die without good clean air.
Smell that air. That’s good, fresh air -no pollution, no smokestacks, no exhaust. We can bottle that, sell it as a cure-all. Prehistoric Pure? PureHistoric? We can let marketing figure out the brand name later. What do you mean, ‘historically high levels of volcanism?’ We can put that in the fine print c’mon what did I just say, leave that shit to marketing. We’re here for the big picture.
Like that skyline – yeah, that’s a big picture. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. You read those articles about how the sky used to be a different colour? We can sell prints of this shit. ‘The sky you used to have.’ Nice, real nice. Hey maybe we can get special editions using pigment from real Mesozoic organisms, get some premium product out there. Sunsets are different colours too nowadays, right? Chemical composition of the atmoblah blah, we can do a sunrise and sunset run too. That’s money. Pocket money, but it builds the brand.
Listen to the sounds – hear that? Those are animals nobody’s ever heard before, making noises in ways we’ve never been able to know. That’s entire fields of ASMR audio never before imagined, let alone explored. Fuck making a niche, we can make a whole genre. And sound effects – decades, for DECADES we can kill off the very notion of paying someone to make a fake monster noise or an imaginary bird call. Almost everything on this planet doesn’t just have a value attached to it, it produces value simply by moving around and being listenable. Now THAT’S a freebie.
There’s another smell in the air. That’s salt. We’re near the sea, aren’t we? You know what sucks? Fishing. Fishing sucks. There’s no more goddamned fish and we can’t fish any more of them or we run out entirely. I bet we can get some good work in here with that. Bring in some trawlers – hell, build a port – and the expense’ll pay for itself so fast we’ll have people bankrupting themselves to get in line for a construction bid. And that’s to say nothing of the prestige meats. People pay good money for tuna steak, what do you think they’ll fork over for a filet of mosasaur? Everyone loves sea serpents!
And of course, we can’t forget the landbound economy. Look at that triceratops family there – we’re talking animals the size of HOW many cows? All over the place? And the environment already suits them pretty well? Fuck, it’s a planet that’s an open-range farm. All we need to do is find out which ones taste better and try to encourage them along. And you know what, if the most readily-available stuff tastes like shit we can always turn it into hot dogs – sufficient sodium solves all flavours. ‘Dino dogs,’ c’mon, look, we don’t even NEED marketing for some of this stuff.
Beyond the meat, there’s the hide. Let’s bring back hats. Remember beaver fur hats? Remember how that single item of clothing coming from one specific animal drove a corporation to exploit half of north American for massive profits for two hundred years? Imagine that but every animal in our eyesight and beyond is a beaver-in-waiting. Fuck hats, we can make anything from these motherfuckers and we can and we will and there’ll be an entire new GENRE of substances you make leather out of. ‘Cow’ will be for very old and very poor people.
Can’t forget the soil, of course (all those farms that have tired earth and need to chug fertilizer by the bucketful to grow one more field of corn). And the rock (quarries sitting right at the surface, unharvested). And the stuff underneath (do I need to spell it out?). All we have to do is find out where the deposits we already HAVE grabbed are and we can take open season on the rest. Oil. Coal. Ore. Anything that’s eroded away or subducted into the mantle or buried under a craton or just plain GONE by the present? In this here and now, that’s free real estate. Nobody has more money than fossil fuel companies, nobody. And we’re holding the keys to making their wildest dreams come true.
Speaking of free real estate, since we’re going to be spending some time here setting up operations, we’re also going to be setting up some housing. And once we’ve done that for the workers, why not also do it for the people with actual money? Find a nice little isolated lagoon on an island in Europe or along the coast of the American interior seaway and put up some fences and maybe a SAM battery and hey, the world’s most prestigious mansion – and one generously outside of most legal jurisdictions. Can you even BEGIN to imagine how many billionaires would happily feed people to sea monsters right this second if they could film it and tell everyone without getting arrested? What about if the sea monsters were fifty feet long?
Or shit, what if they weren’t even sea monsters? The biggest thing you can kill someone with these days is a grizzly or some shit, maybe an elephant if you want to train it to. What about having a pet t-rex? Bet that’d make all those fuckos who brag about their tigers or horses or yachts shut up, huh? And it’s not like that’s the only available option here; we’ve got worldwide megafaunal ecosystems, untouched. So many choices, so many options. You could have pit fights that make dogfights look like ant wrestling.
And of course there’s the benefits to spectacle in general. Film crew needs a pristine wilderness? A fantasy forest? A reef that ISN’T dying of climate change and may or may not be made largely of weird prehistoric clams? Why spend money on burning a CGI studio or three to the ground when you can just pay some meatheads ten bucks a day to lug the cameras over here? Why ask an artist to imagine an exotic bird when you can pull four of them out of that bush over there? Why ask an artist to imagine a BUSH when you’ve got that bush over there? Imagination costs money, and we’ve got a fresh new world to use instead of working that particular mental muscle.
The clouds are getting heavier. That’s water, that’s good clean fresh water. No microplastics, no heavy metals, no acid rain, no ‘toxins,’ no phosphates no lead all-natural organic AND fresh. Every single word I just said in that sentence was an extra 10% price hike per bottle. Multiplicative.
Now let’s go back before that cloud breaks. I don’t care how much the water costs, I’m not squeezing it out of these pants.
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Charge paleontologists for trips? I thought we were looking for ways to make money.