Books, Brochures, and Chapters>Book: Vonnegut , Kurt (1985), Gala'pagos, Delacorte / Seymour Lawrence, Retrieved on 2011-03-12Source Material [books.google.com]
Folksonomies: politics evolution culture fiction science fiction darwin Memes
12 MAR 2011
How An Idea Makes Something Valuable
White people discovered the Galapagos Islands in 1535 when a Spanish ship came upon them after being blown off course by a storm. Nobody was living there, nor were remains of any human settlement ever found there.
This unlucky ship wished nothing more than to carry the Bishop of Panama to Peru, never losing sight of the South American coast. There was this storm which rudely hustled it westward, ever westward, where prevailing human opinion insisted there was only sea and more sea.
But when... 1 
notes
notesVonnegut relates how the Galapagos Islands were worthless until Darwin's revolutionary idea made them a huge tourist attraction.
12 MAR 2011
What If People Stopped Valuing Money?
Mexico and Chile and Brazil and Argentina were likewise bankrupt--and Indonesia and the Philippines and Pakistan and India and Thailand and Italy and Ireland and Belgium and Turkey. Whole nations were suddenly in the same situation as the San Mateo, unable to buy with their paper money and coins, or their written promises to pay later, even the barest essentials. Persons with anything life sustaining to sell, fellow citizenes as well as foreigners, were refusing to exchange their goods for mo...
1 Vonnegut describes a fictional account of the currencies of numerous countries in the world suddenly being no longer valuable, making them just pretty paper.
