Chapters 3-6

One thing I found interesting that I read was regarding slavery during the Roman Empire. Slavery, wasn't really racially motivated rather it was purely economic and strongly tied to their culture. Even more interesting was the fact that slaves held literally any occupation in society with the exception of the military. Slaves were skilled craftsmen and even doctors. It is so crazy to me to read that it would be perfectly legal to own a person and train them for years in a skilled task to never pay them or let them have any rights as an individual. For a long time I assumed a big reason slaves didn't revolt very often was due to them being uneducated and generally kept segregated from one another. The book said that they worked alongside non-slaves in all sorts of occupation. This leads me to think that many more of them were educated and able to read and write than I had previously thought. Was it simply that the military would step in readily and execute slaves trying to start rebellions? Also, was the fact that they were not allowed to learn military skills enough to keep them from challenging authorities? This would make sense considering that a big factor contributing to the failure of the rebellion led by Spartacus was his lack of military skills compared to the legions he was up against. Still, with at least a third of the population being slaves, that's a huge population that could be mobilized. I think all the women and the slaves should have united for civil rights as they would then hold the majority population wise, but as we know, nothing of the sort happened and patterns continued to repeat until modern times and only get darker. 

Another thing I found interesting was how the absence of domesticated animals shaped society in the Americas. Because America didn't have many animals capable of being enslaved, it greatly affected how civilizations developed. They couldn't produce food on the scale at which was possible in Eurasia and consequently, population didn't explode like it did over seas. Also, giant civilizations were much more difficult to grow so you had many more smaller states with few great rulers. It kind of makes me think about what would have been better. We now have the ability to feed an insane number of people, but what does more food mean? It means more people. Famine is natures way of population control and enforcing a sort of balance among all life on the planet. We figured out a way to 'hack' that natural process, but its unsustainable. A famine a thousand years ago meant little to the planet as a whole and with regards to all forms of life, but if humans are to experience a global famine today it would mean such a depletion of world resources I am worried will leave our planet lifeless (at least in the way Earth has been for millennia, I'm sure some bacteria and algae will start to evolve again into more complex creatures eventually as global climate change permits.)