Has Weber gone Ecofreak on Us? CoG Spoiler Alert!

namelessfly wrote:Exactly!

I expect to see megatowers on old Earth and on the older, more densely populated core worlds.

However; I would expect the more recently colonized planets to be populated by people who emigrated because they don't like the crowding. I would not expect each family to live on something comparable to Harrington land grant of (1,000 square kilometers?) or even 1,000 hectares, but I would not expect a hive.

Aircars using gravitic suspension and propulsion combined with modern communications would minimize the environmental impact of a less urban lifestyle. In fact dispersion makes air travel safer.

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.

The E wrote:

namelessfly wrote:Exactly!

I expect to see megatowers on old Earth and on the older, more densely populated core worlds.

However; I would expect the more recently colonized planets to be populated by people who emigrated because they don't like the crowding. I would not expect each family to live on something comparable to Harrington land grant of (1,000 square kilometers?) or even 1,000 hectares, but I would not expect a hive.

Aircars using gravitic suspension and propulsion combined with modern communications would minimize the environmental impact of a less urban lifestyle. In fact dispersion makes air travel safer.

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.

namelessfly wrote:We have to put the potential risks from fusion plants in perspective. Given Weber's parameters about fusion reactor bunkerage, Honorverse warship fusion plants must have a normal power output of about 1eex17 Watts in normal operation and much higher when used for reaction thrusters.

That seems very high. Fusion is about 1% efficient at turning mass into energy, so
1 e17 W -> ~100 kg/s ~ 300,000 tons/month. And that doesn't include losses converting the raw energy of the fusion reaction into usable power.

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.

Bill Woods wrote:

namelessfly wrote:We have to put the potential risks from fusion plants in perspective. Given Weber's parameters about fusion reactor bunkerage, Honorverse warship fusion plants must have a normal power output of about 1eex17 Watts in normal operation and much higher when used for reaction thrusters.

That seems very high. Fusion is about 1% efficient at turning mass into energy, so
1 e17 W -> ~100 kg/s ~ 300,000 tons/month. And that doesn't include losses converting the raw energy of the fusion reaction into usable power.

Let me check my math (actually memory of doing the math)

Fusion is about 1% efficient as mass to energy conversion so:

E = 1/100 x 1/2 x 1Kg x (3eex8)^2 = 4.5eex14 Joules per kilogram

1eex17 Watts then equals about 200 Kg per second or 720 tons per hour, or 17280 tons per day, or about 1/2 million tons per month.

Your estimate was essentially correct at 1/2 while mine was high by about an order of magnitude.

However; that still leaves a starship fusion reactor pumping out 1eex16 Watts or the equivalent of 1eex7 nuclear power plants! I assume that your average residential tower with 50,000 people and an absurdly high 100kW per person (including lighting for factory farming?)
would need only 5,000 megawatts or 5 nuclear plants. Icould see them getting by on a 500MW backup reactor in the basement and a big ass reactor farm remote from the city.

Ok there are many points in this thread that need addressing.

Someone once mention the spacing of the megatowers, with greenbelts and such, I suggest you look at the author's website on the Cassandra Kresnov series, he talks about that concept. That said, it appears that in most places that have towers, they tend to be closesly spaced, Towers are rarely torn down, and they tend, particularly in poorer areas, to be built in clusters, although I will note that even the Seccie towers had at least token attempts at greenbelts, and the industrial spokes that surround them would in full citizen areas not be there, though there is spacing. On another matter, Towers generally seem to lots of greenspaces, air shafts, atriums, and populations of up to a quarter million in an interconnected cluster, so don't think of them as buildings, instead they are communities in of themselves, it would not surprise me to discover that, in some places, they are full fledged municipalities, with all the headaches that implies.

As to people wondering why people ever left earth, remember these Towers are constructed with countergravity, although it is theoretically possible to build on this scale with 21st century tech, we run into the elevator problem, not to mention the fact that you'd have to build an onsite massive steel mill. So the CG Towers, although they've been around for centuries and were probably proceeded by a few Towers built with CG, and are an old hat, they are comparatively recent.

With regards to waste heat, it would not suprise me in the slightest to discover that the Towers recycle it at oh say, 90% efficiency (hell they might even power the enviromental systems by using the heat released by humans).

namelessfly wrote:The US defied this trend when we developed suburbs after WW-2.

Merely following on from Britain!

We started developing them in the 19th century:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suburb#Origins_of_the_modern_suburb

General pattern: Upper Class and upper Middle Class prior to WW1, the rest of the Middle Class between the wars, Working Class after WW2.

Mike.

namelessfly wrote:My philosophical objection to these towers is that if this type of living is acceptable to you, why colonize other stars. The Earth could accommodate Trillions of people at these population densities, so why bother?

Politics, philosophy, religion, desire to make more money; all the usual reasons people have migrated. Plus even if the first generation colonists are frontier types, that says nothing about what the general population will want 300 years later.

Rather than adding my 2 cents to the discussion on power, waste, and why build them on a newly colonized world with plenty of room for expansion, I figured I'd bring up some ideas and examples of other previously thought of ideas regarding megatowers and the social dynamics involved. (And how it may be possible to have that level of population density without living in a 'hive'.)

An interesting take on the concept of megatowers I've seen recently was from the movie Dredd with Karl Urban. Although the underlying concept was a dystopic future with rundown towers in the midst of urban decay, the visual representation with the tower spacing and overall design was still quite believable. For that matter, the Peach Trees tower would be an excellent example of one of the Seccie residential towers... If you haven't seen the movie, the towers were spaced what appeared to be every half-mile apart or so though surrounded by urban decay of rundown 20th Century housing and roads. Peach Trees was a subsidized housing project inhabited by mostly poor unemployed people and was very run down.

Namelessfly mentioned the novel Oath of Fealty from Niven and Pornelle, (another favorite book of mine), which had another believable interpretation of a megatower. Todos Santos was a square 2 miles a side and 1000 feet tall. It had 4 pyramidal (larger than the Great Pyramid IIRC) light wells allowing all of the residences to have balconies with access to natural light while the interior space was dedicated to commercial and industrial space. The entire roof was a park with gardens, baseball fields, etc. and the entire facility was surrounded by a greenbelt with more parks, golf courses, and even farms. There was little or no feeling of living in a hive (though there was a strong subplot regarding the erosion of privacy) and my impression is living conditions would actually be better than some of the larger city apartment projects that already exist. (I'm thinking of pictures I've seen of housing in Moscow as well as Chicago.)

In any case, although these 2 examples of megatowers are science fiction, both are actually believable and show that in the future might even be likely. The second example (Todos Santos) could theoretically make the case that a good design could just about eliminate the look and feel of living in a 'hive'. In the more affluent areas at least...

The concept of megatowers keeps coming up in different science fiction universes, so the idea must be pretty popular. And the initial concept of an arcology (megatower) was proposed well before the trend of 'Green Environmentalism' became popular.

True, there are still a lot of people who are more concerned with open space and not bumping elbows with their neighbors, but if you think about it they are becoming a minority. Despite suburban sprawl, there are still very densely populated cities. After all, 1 in 15 people in the U.S. live in the New York City metropolitan area so population density can't be that much of an issue.

In continuing to contemplate the tower issue, I thought it was foolish of the Mesans to allow the Seccies to live in towers that are such effective fortifications. Then I thought that these towers were originally built for the upper class Mesans who then handed them down to the Seccies when the moved into the even taller towers at the city center. Then it finally occurred to me that the fortification potential of the towers was originally a feature rather than a defect.

If you are a bunch of genetic engineering rebels who intend to uplift your progeny while creating slaves as experiments, then you need to expect episodes of violent opposition. While the idea of yoemen living in disbursed housing depending primarily on themselves for protection appeals to me, it is improbable. The historic paradigm of the privileged elites living in a walled fortress where they could cooperatively defend themselves from angry peasants would be valid for Mesa.

The stupidity of Mesa was allowing the Seccies to reside in the older, smaller towers which were defacto fortresses rather than forcing them to live in dispersed housing where they would be more vulnerable to reprisal raids. The only mitigating factor would be their vulnerability to KE strikes. A security forces commander who was smart enough to use repetitive smaller projectiles rather than an Alpha strike could expect to defeat a rebellious tower without damaging the surrounding city. They would of course conduct such an operation with the expectation that Adm Henke would not be showing up with a squadron of SD(P)s to object.