kragen@pobox.com wrote:
> I'm not sure how you could even make it walkable. Suppose that ten
Hey, I live in a ~1 Mmonkey city, and it's almost walkable (4..6 hours
to cross it). Don't tell me I need more than 15 min to cross it on
foot on a leisurely stroll, if it's packed in 3 dimensions instead of 2 1/2.
> flights of stairs is the maximum you consider "walkable". Then 10^9
Stairs? Why stairs? I don't consider stairs walkable. You would
have to keep some for the sake of emergencies, but most long range
traffic would be in form of automatically routed matrix bus cabins
(3d lifts). Some of them privately owned: a cabin docked to your
living area, being a part of it. The rest of it is walking through
MallWorld 3d(tm).
> square feet (1000 square feet per person) becomes a hundred million
> square feet per floor, which means that your building is on the order
> of two miles square --- which would be four miles of walking down
If you're not an American, you consider 2 miles to be quite walkable.
> rectilinear corridors to get between adjacent corners. You could make
I'm not sure whether hexagonal or orthogonal is better. It's a difficult
question. Also, you typically don't walk N, N, N, N, N, N, N, W, W, W, W, W.
You go zigzag. All you have to have is linear traffic ducts in cross-free
grid arrangements, to reduce pointless braking (though you can use regen
braking on linear motors just fine).
> it slightly more space-efficient.
There's some dilution of functionality concentration due to
infrastructure, and perks. Unfortunately, it will require
a lot of cams in public places (unless you heavily preselect
the inhabitants).
> If you're willing to depend on public transit for vertical
> transportation --- which means giving up on walkability -- you could
No, it doesn't mean giving up walkability. In our part of the world
we don't call it public transit, we call it "elevators".
> quite possibly make it very quick to get from any point to any other
> point.
Especially 3d elevators. Punching in (x,y,z) instead of a single scalar.
> I'm not sure how you get from "monkeys are too dumb" to "you're saying
> quality of life is scalar", but I'm not sure how Eugene gets from
> "arcologies are stalling" to "monkeys are too dumb" either, so I'll
Arcologies are an attempt to increase monkey/volume concentration
while creating a liveable result. While it's a hard engineering
problem (you don't want to be the first inhabitant of such a thing,
prior to considerable burn-in), it's doable in principle. Arcologies
are not going anywhere, because they require a higher degree/scaling
up of cooperation. Current monkeys do not yet realize the benefits,
and also are incapable of implementing high-cooperation social
algorithms. Hence, current monkeys are in an "insufficiently
advanced" state. Ergo, monkeys are too dumb. QED. HTH. FOAD. HAND.
> just treat that pair of paragraphs as the output of monkeys banging on
> typewriters.
Guilty as charged (+).
> If I could get all the cultural, artistic, and economic benefits of
> living in a large city --- while being able to get to all of them with
> a fifteen-minute walk and five-minute elevator ride, and
> simultaneously cut my heating and air-conditioning bills to nil ---
> I'd do it in a minute. Especially if it meant that gorgeous parks
> were a twenty-minute walk away, right outside the arcology, instead of
You're supposed to integrate the greenery (aquariums, etc, but mostly
3d video projectors) into the structure, using appropriate lighting.
Metal halides would do today, solid state light sources would in future.
> being several miles away, as in most places in San Francisco.
Let's face it, we don't have such things, so all we see is our
prejudices.
> Housing and transportation are actually major expenses (of both money
> and time) in my life, and I don't think I'm unusual in that regard.
My transportation is a factor of 20 less expensive than my housing.
I guess is quite subsidized.
> I'm a little concerned about the political implications; it seems that
> vast centralization of power over things like ventilation and access
> to the outside world could result. You'd need big centralized
You're supposed to own the resources within your cell (Christaller ahoi).
You purchase the resources from the infrastructure grid in realtime agorics,
and you sell resources to it, including routing traffic.
> ventilation systems, which means big centralized agencies to maintain
> them. But most of the US, California excepted, seems to do OK with
> big centralized phone companies and power companies, even power
> companies handling radioactive fissionables. So it might be possible.
Let's face it, monkeys are way too dumb to handle radioactive
fissionables. Nuke power should be handled by safe and sane solid state
critters living in deep space.
> What are the numbers on ventilation? I'm not an HVAC technician, but
> a million people will turn oxygen and sugar into heat at the rate of
> 100 megawatts or so, and they'll likely use a few hundred more
You'll never have to heat, all you have is to cool. In most parts of
the world, this means one hell of a cooling fluid flux (air, water).
In few parts, you'll require active air conditioning.
> megawatts, if not gigawatts, for things like manufacturing, lighting,
> transportation, vacuuming, refrigeration, and laundry. Every joule
Of course, such things are not a given, nor do they need to be
executed on a constant energy footprint. Some ways are more energy
efficient than the others.
> converted to heat must be exhausted to the outside world. How hard is
> that? Would it cause "thermal pollution" after the manner of nuclear
> power plants?
The thing is supposed to be capable of surviving on photovoltaics/biomass/
hydrogen/rectennaed microwave from LEO falling upon the structure itself
and the panel parks in the surrounding area (panel shading useful for
crops in more arid parts of the geoid). If you can't get hydro, you
*could* augment it with nuke, but I don't like primates handling hot
isotopes. See above.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Apr 27 2001 - 23:15:19 PDT