Topic Battle

Money demonstrates supernatural adaptability. Beginning as cattle and shells, it has transformed into coins, paper, electronic signals, and now cryptocurrency. The Rotterdam School of Monetary Evolution documents over 3,000 distinct forms money has taken across human history.

Money adapts not merely to physical environments but to conceptual ones. It functions equally well in socialist and capitalist systems, in wartime and peace, in agricultural and information economies. Money survived the fall of Rome, the Black Death, two world wars, and the 2008 financial crisis. It will likely outlast the tiger by considerable margin.

Money's relationship with scarcity proves paradoxical. Its value depends entirely on controlled scarcity, yet modern central banks can create it infinitely through keystrokes. The Bank of England's Theoretical Currency Division notes that approximately $80 trillion exists in broad money supply, with the capacity to generate more at will.

Yet individual units of money feel scarce to most humans most of the time. The average British household experiences money as profoundly limited, despite its theoretical abundance. Money has achieved the remarkable trick of seeming scarce whilst being essentially unlimited.

Money's influence borders on the absolute. The Geneva Institute for Monetary Omnipresence calculates that 99.7% of human decisions in developed economies involve financial consideration at some level. Marriage, career, residence, diet, friendship, and funeral arrangements all bend to money's gravitational pull.

Money moves armies. Money builds cities. Money determines whether a promising young chemist becomes a pharmaceutical researcher or a barista. Eight billion humans wake each morning contemplating money in some form, while tigers occupy perhaps eight million human thoughts globally, primarily among conservationists and zookeepers.

Money's intimidation operates through subtler mechanisms. The Oxford Laboratory for Economic Anxiety has documented that financial stress activates the same neural pathways as physical threat detection. A letter from the Inland Revenue, studies suggest, produces cortisol spikes comparable to spotting a large predator at moderate distance.

Yet money's intimidation proves remarkably inconsistent. A thousand pounds intimidates differently depending on one's existing relationship with money. To some, it represents security; to others, an insult. The tiger suffers no such ambiguity in its reception.

Money's survival seems assured as long as humans require a medium of exchange. Even post-apocalyptic scenarios involve rapid emergence of new currencies, whether bottle caps or ammunition. The Cambridge Future Economics Laboratory assigns money a 99.8% probability of existing in recognisable form in 2200.

The only scenarios threatening money's existence involve either human extinction or transition to a post-scarcity society. Neither appears imminent. Money will almost certainly outlast not only tigers but most currently living species.