So, Let's imagine that you live a couple thousand years from now and you stumble upon some super old

documentation about a journey to the stars that your ancestors took. They built a spaceship and they went to some planet somewhere

to colonize something or something. Yeah, just roll with me. But you don't really have

all the details about this journey. A lot of that knowledge has been lost to history but what you do have

is a flight manifest you've got a list of the people who went where they're from and how many

of them went and what they did what they were good at.

Then initially you're like, oh, it's boring. I was hoping for something more like Star Trek

where it's a story about people find through space and their lasers and you know like action kind of stuff I

always want a list of names but then you look a little bit closer and you realize

that the list of names actually kind of tells the story of what this journey was about, what people were thinking

back then, what they were trying to accomplish, because as you go through it you see that,

oh, dang, there were 3,000 horticulturists who were going to go on this trip and oh another thousand people

who specialize in raising fish and doing hydroponic stuff.

And then you see that there's a thousand people who specialize in stick-built structures and whoa

there's another thousand people who do art and philosophy and sculpture and music and acting. I mean even just from that

hypothetical list that I'm throwing out you could reason to several things. You could

figure out that the people who are going to this planet, they were going with the intent to be there for a while.

You could reason to some things about what the planet was like. The people who were going, there were no ranchers. They didn't think they could raise terrestrial animals or

didn't know how, so they didn't bring any ranchers along, but they did think that

the water that was there, there must be water there, would work for raising some kind of

fish, that that would be compatible

and they believed that they would be able to raise plants there and to sustain life

...