True.
Historically, most societies had about 90% of people living on farms and/or villages with about 10% living in cities. The farmers/villagers provided food and fiber to the city dwellers. While honest trade was not uncommon, the City dwellers more often than were parasites.
This trend changed when the industrial revolution enabled city dwellers to produce the vast majority of a societies wealth. The vast majority became city dwellers who traded with the farmers rather than merely took from them.
The US defied this trend when we developed suburbs after WW-2. The living pattern is neither rural or truly urban.
I can understand the efficiencies of megatowers if they are scaled so that people can enjoy an exterior apartment with view of parkland rather than another building and perhaps have a large, private balcony.
Imagine a building where the average dwelling area is perhaps 1,000 square meters or 10,000 square feet or 1/4 acre and 6 meters or 20 feet or two stories tall. This is the American dream. Assume that 3/4 of the dwelling area or 7,500 square feet (big yard and patio area) is either external balcony for a yard or patio or some type of flex space with movable roof. This leaves 2,500 square feet is internal but with part of the area built out to two stories, giving perhaps a 3,500 square foot or 350 m^2 house. Now imagine that there are 10,000 such dwelling units in a megatower. Given 30 meters of external frontage per dwelling unit and 1,000 dwelling units per flloor, then you need a building with a circumference of only 3 kilometers and a diameter of one kilometer, and about 60 meter tall. This is enough diameter that many people wouldn't mind having an interior dwelling facing inward to a large, 1 km diameter atrium but it would be great for offices too. You would have parks and athletic fields on the floor of the atrium, including a HS football stadium. Have the space between the inner and outer ring infilled with transport mechanisms, (gravity shafts and horizontal mechanisms), shops, utilities and what not. Schools, bigger shops, bigger offices, manufacturing areas, warehousing, major utilitities are in
the building core and sub basement areas.
The bottom line is that you get may be 40,000 people per square kilometer which is incredibly dense but without having to endure concrete canyons. A big city might have many of these one kilometer diameter buildings spaced about 2 kilometers apart with one kilometer of park land between buildings (you might've stuff under these areas between the buildings including factory farms) Your average population density would be 10,000 people per square kilometer but with a far more humane ambiance. A population of ten billion would easily fit in an area only 1,000 kilometers across or 1% of the planetary surface.
Hutch wrote:The E wrote:
Assuming, of course, that everyone involved shares your ideal of a good community. If you have a population that expects hive-like living, and that is conditioned towards hive-like living over a couple of generations, what does that do?
Mesa, as an example, wasn't founded by people who were fleeing overcrowding. That colony was heavily influenced by a group of people who, at some point, decided that they wanted to build their society on the backs of a large slave caste; would it really be in the best interest of those same slave owners to allow slaves to roam free over the planet?
What I mean to say is that you're probably right for most human colonies out there. But that does not mean that there can't be other models out there too, and assuming that the things we associate with terms like "Colonist" or "Settler" are universally true is a big leap to make.
Just a couple of things--I cannot discuss the power requirements so I will leave that to the engineers among us.
I would note that to provide 25,000 people residence, assuming 8500 livings spaces (or about 1 residence for every 3 people) at an average of 3,000 square ft of living space per residence (as an example, I live in a 3-BR, 2 bath home with 1620 Sq ft.), you need 25,500,000 square feet. Add in space for corridors, grav shafts, and the other add-ons of living, and call it 40,000,000 square feet. Spread it out over 200 floors and you have 200,000 sq ft per floor, which computes to a footprint of about 450' x 450'. Add in 100 floors (one between each two occupied ones) for shops, aircars, maintenance, security, et.al to bring your building to about 300 floors. Add ten stories at the bottom for schools, gyms, auditoriums, mass transist connections, et. al., and...
Most massive living blocks today are not built to be habitable, IMHO--they are built to stack people in. In a gravity-controlled world with lower building costs and cermacrete, planning and constructing
livable buildings are possible.
And while the dream may be of open and wild spaces, history has tended to trend towards people moving to cities, to cluster together, even when it might not be in their interests (disease, poverty, crime). That, 2,000 years in the future, might be so ingrained in the human mental processes that living in large groups in the same building is considered quite normal.
Or maybe not--we shall see.