[10.22] A tall order
on April 28, 2022
at 12:34 am
10.22 Transcript
Daisy: I’m not trying to be harsh. Look at me, I’ve made zero effort to help anyone at camp since I got banished.
Daisy: Your effort is respectable, and I just don’t want you going about it wrong.
Kiro: If you still can’t show your face to them, Daisy, at least you can help me.
Kiro: Teach me how to survive and I’ll teach them.
Ah, so Daisy was just trying to prove her lesson. But the title is right, it’s still a really tall order. I have a bad feeling things are going to go very sideways before they go right.
Wait, I thought this conversation already happened (The teach me, so I can teach them part). I thought that was already happening?
“Teach me, Sensei!”
Kiro isn’t letting her hopes go down with the ship and is adapting to the new circumstances. Daisy’s advice will serve her well both now and in the future and will make her goal of helping the campers survive the winter attainable.
Admittedly, I think she does make a decent point in saying “if you’re gonna do it, do it properly.”
Daisy is, despite a large number of technological advantages, a hunter-gatherer. The lifestyle she is leading requires about the same amount of personal space as an adult bear or wolverine needs, i.e. 40-100 square kilometers. The hundred to two hundred youngsters in the camp would occupy, at such a density, an area that you could draw on a small map of Alaska.
In fact, there is a way to survive: start a trek through the wilderness towards civilization, preferably in groups of dozen or so, so foraging becomes easier. Perhaps, you might get even a dozen survivors.
Daisy would take offense at having her nutritional needs compared most adult bears’ 😉 . If there were 80,000 indigenous people in Alaska before Europeans arrived, mostly hunting and gathering, then that’s 20 square km of land per person on average, with higher densities possible in coastal areas and below the Arctic Circle (inland densities are awful though – https://live.laborstats.alaska.gov/pop/estimates/pub/pophistory.pdf). 100 people (according to Daisy) is not unheard of for pre-contact northern settlements, and we even know that a village existed in the same place.
Of course, with just one competent hunter in the camp, your second paragraph is exactly right.
I disagree. Hunter-gatherers originally banded together to form tribes. Now, warring tribes is a problem but a tribe is basically a group of people that can hunt or fish together.
Give a man a boat out in Alaska, they harvest food from it until it falls apart, teach a man to hunt and fish, they don’t bother you anymore. I think that’s how that expression goes.
In any case, if they can get out of dormitory politics, and all invested in trying to survive, things will go much more smoothly. Though we’re not sure everyone’s not doomed by one person or two dying here or there (if there is a curse). The odds are higher if they as group learn to use the plentiful resources of the area.
Or do you believe the Inuits couldn’t make it? Because that’s pretty much exactly how they developed.
Meanwhile, a group of untrained teenagers wandering in the snow without ANY idea how to acquire food? Yeah, civilization won’t help them. Even if they make the trek before you can say “Donner Party”, these are kids sent here for tech addiction. The nearest town in Alaska might not even have Wifi, and they have no marketable skills. No job, they’re moochers, they’re probably toast. Ask Chris McCandless how his little adventure went. And he at least could hunt (he was terrible as a potato farmer though, and lousy at preserving meat).
Even if they can’t get along, they now can team up with people they can get along with. Away goes the politics, and instead you have hunting cliques. That’s not so bad.