City design · 1:00pm Jul 8th, 2016
So I'm still thinking about the Yako Mamma idea and the snag I'm hitting on is that snakes like this are only known in the equator rain forests, keeping one would obviously require a very advanced civilization, and there never have been any great civilizations in the Amazon or the Congo.
It seems ironic since the equator naturally gets more rain than anywhere else, and rain means food production which is the foundation of civilization; but food production also requires wide open spaces for mass agriculture and/or livestock. The other thing is that the Amazon and Congo water levels vary dramatically with the seasons, so any major city there would need to deal with it's river being 20 feet higher in the wet season than the dry season.
To have a major city there you would either need to have one epic drainage system, or have everything on stilts, have a city of houseboats, or else a city where large parts of it disapeared for half the year.
There have been some reports of snakes almost this big in India, but I think those were older, and it's highly unlikely snakes this big could live in India now and be undetected; but Ancient India/ south-east Asia did have advanced civilizations in climates that could almost sustain Yako Mamma type reptiles.
There was the Khmer Empire in modern Cambodia was one such highly advanced civilization on the floodplains that made massive irrigation systems, but they ultimately were destroyed because they had about 30 years of having less rain than usual, during which they restructured their canals to handle less water, and then started having massive monsoons that flooded their capital every year, forcing them to abandon it and ultimately ending their civilization.
I'll probably look more into Khmer and Indian history to get some ideas, but does anyone want to talk about city design in rain-forests/ floodplains?
