How to Take Over the World

Your main concern here is self-sufficiency: if your base is to support you and your henchpeople without having to rely on the outside world, it will need to be a certain minimum size. The precise nature of that minimum size depends on how you answer the question of "wait, how much space do we really need to keep a human being alive indefinitely?"

 

Various authorities have attempted to answer this question throughout history. In the 700s CE in England, land was measured in hides, which reflected the amount of land thought necessary to support a family. Hides ranged in size from around 240,000 to 728,000 square meters (m), depending on the productivity of the land, but around the Norman conquest in 1066 CE, they became standardized at around 485,000m: slightly less than half a square kilometer. Whether families at the time included just immediate family members or also extended family is now unclear, but if you assume a small family of just four people, that works out to 121,250m of arable land per person.

 

Factoring in the modern farming technologies developed over the past millennium, a more recent 1999 calculation determined that a diversified and sustainable European (meat-eating) diet demanded 5,000m of farmland per person, further calculating that if you assumed a largely vegetarian diet; no soil degradation, erosion, or food waste; ample irrigation; and godlike farmers who both planted and tended to their crops perfectly, you could probably get that number down to just 700m a person. Lower numbers are better here: they help keep your base reasonably sized and have the side effect of making it easier for the rest of the world not to starve to death. That's a good thing, given that the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization's measurements of global arable land per person have been trending downward for decades: in 1970, it was 3,200m per person; in 2000, it was 2,300m per person; and in 2050, the global arable land is projected to be down to just 1,500m per person.

 

But even these calculations are still just estimates and educated guesses: they're not facts. Supervillains ponder and plan and scheme, yes, but they also reach a point where they

capable of it. And now, thanks to reading it so am I. Elan Mastai, author of All Our Wrong Todays
 
I can attest that How to Take Over the World is both a) filled with actual science (including linguistics!) and b) hilarious. Gretchen McCulloch, New York Times bestselling author of Because Internet

How to Take Over the World lays out a hilarious, but totally factual, blueprint for all the ways aspiring supervillains could seize power, control minds and dominate the earth. It s a little dangerous, but all in good fun so long as Pinky and the Brain don t catch wind of it." BookPage