Has Weber gone Ecofreak on Us? CoG Spoiler Alert!

TheMonster wrote:

Northstar wrote:If one doesn't mind the population density, I could see city towers with internal agriculture being a thing of the not too distant future, actually. Needs sunshine replicating practical lights for the ag levels, park levels, whatever like that. Imagine how much fresh produce could be grown on the roof of your average supermarket.

With the fusion plant providing plentiful, cheap energy, that's exactly what I'd expect. The crops could be bred/genetically-modified to live in 24/7 light and grow faster than natural sunlight could do. You'd have vertically-stacked hydroponic tanks with the lights between them, providing very dense "farmland". Then you arrange for the crops to slowly move down the line, seeding at one end and harvesting at the other.

If we assume the technology to produce membranes that can allow O2 and N2 molecules to pass, but not CO2 (and others that filter impurities out of water) we can have air-handling systems that pull the latter out of the air and heavily concentrate it into the hydroponic tanks, which would boost the growth rate of crops while making the air healthier for the humans and their pets living in the towers. It might even be popular for individual residences to have smaller-scale "garden" units, especially for herbs and spices.

I've long thought that ships with similar arrangements ought to be part of the fleet train, if not integrated into the warships themselves to save having to transfer food/oxygen/water for waste periodically. There might be some kind of algae that's insanely proficient in processing the waste products back into consumables to let this be done in very little space. With two millenia of bioscience progress, the algae might even produce special flavors and textures, such as "meat" that feels and tastes like the real thing.

This is almost exactly the same thing accomplished in Kim Stanley Robinson's The Mars Trilogy . Red, Green, Blue Mars. It is one of my most fascinating reads.

Alternate Reason: Megatowers are off-the-shelf SF Tech!

Asimov's Caves Of Steel were actually Second Use,
after "The Machine Stops" by E M Forster (or Kipling?),
although in TMS the "towers" were underground.
Then McCaffrey used a Megatower in "Doona," as the
original home of the Migrants to the open planet.
Enuf other writers have done this to make it Standard.
Let's see how many we can remember: Stashef, Bradley.

HTM

Potato wrote:

I just do not understand the willingness to live in a hive. Ancient cities were densely populated because of the need to limit the ratio of defensive wall per person protected. In later eras cities tended to be dense to limit transportation and communications distances and time. Thetelephone and automobile enabled less dense suburbs. Honorverse air car technology should enable even greater dispersion.

Up until last year, I was living in an honest to goodness shopping mall. First floor had the stores, second floor and up had apartments (studio up through 2 bedroom) in some buildings, business offices in other buildings. It had almost everything I needed: a bookstore, movie theater, various clothing stores, restaurants, even a dentist. Nor was I particularly pressed for space in my apartment. If not for the lack of a grocery store, I would never have to leave except for work. The only real constraint was the mall is a bit on the small side, so it could not expand to fulfill every single need no matter how niche (such as a computer parts store).

I could see someone taking this to the logical next step in the future, building one whole integrated community into a single tower. A Honorverse tower does not have to mean living packed cheek-to-jowl (although our experience with megatropolises in China, Japan, and India suggest that humans can adapt regardless). It just means you can hop in the grav lift and get somewhere in 5 minutes, instead of hopping in your air car and get there in 15. It is all about the convenience.

The idea that they had fusion power plants under the ceramecrete towers gave me pause.
That would be a very nasty target of opportunity for terrorists or just plain crazes. Gives a whole new aspect to "industrial accident".

On the other hand, some small (and I don't know how "small" would be practical) as an emergency or maintenance site would be workable as a power room in the event of a grid failure. We have LACs with fusion plants (at this point only non- Manticore & Grayson ones) and certainly DBs and DD. Still, it is a far cry from a gasoline or diesel generator set-up for potential problems if it were set up to self-destruct. A “little” nuclear explosion under a very large building is going to make a substantial hole and fireball and “just might” cause some structural damage to said structure.

As far as providing things like water, sewer, communications and other things, really bid residential or residential/commercial/retail building have an appeal. It does cut down on potential transportation needs and it does concentrate people in the cities. Would have to watch out for the slum aspect or the company town syndrome but we are dealing with people here and this idea (including company town and slums) has been around for a long time.

Somehow I would expect- given that description of service core/trunk with spokes- that almost any size KE weapon is going to be a catastrophe in a ceramicrete building set up this way. Set weapon for maximum penetration and slam it into the central maintenance/services core and the actual results are going to more probably blow the crap out of much of the interior of the building at X level and probably let it fall over in the direction of most damage. These things don’t seem to be actually built with the blast bulkheads/hatches and cofferdams of a warship. A lot of the building (except for where the KEW comes in) could survive but the “stuff” and people are going to be caught in all sorts of blast and fire related effects.

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. If we assume such reactors mass 100,000 tons, then that works out to a power density of about 1 Terrawatt per ton of reactor. You need hellacious plasma density to get that fusion reaction rate therefore intense pressures comparable to a planetary core.

In contrast, your average urban tower might have 25,000 people who might be consuming 100 kW per person (this is huge!) or a total 2.5 GW. I assume that your in house fusion reactor masses 1,000 tons and your power density is then only 2.5 Megawatt per ton which is comparable to a car engine. The lower power density requires a much lower plasma density so the potential explosion when containment failure occurs is not alarming.


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?

Brigade XO wrote:The idea that they had fusion power plants under the ceramecrete towers gave me pause.
That would be a very nasty target of opportunity for terrorists or just plain crazes. Gives a whole new aspect to "industrial accident".

On the other hand, some small (and I don't know how "small" would be practical) as an emergency or maintenance site would be workable as a power room in the event of a grid failure. We have LACs with fusion plants (at this point only non- Manticore & Grayson ones) and certainly DBs and DD. Still, it is a far cry from a gasoline or diesel generator set-up for potential problems if it were set up to self-destruct. A “little” nuclear explosion under a very large building is going to make a substantial hole and fireball and “just might” cause some structural damage to said structure.

As far as providing things like water, sewer, communications and other things, really bid residential or residential/commercial/retail building have an appeal. It does cut down on potential transportation needs and it does concentrate people in the cities. Would have to watch out for the slum aspect or the company town syndrome but we are dealing with people here and this idea (including company town and slums) has been around for a long time.

Somehow I would expect- given that description of service core/trunk with spokes- that almost any size KE weapon is going to be a catastrophe in a ceramicrete building set up this way. Set weapon for maximum penetration and slam it into the central maintenance/services core and the actual results are going to more probably blow the crap out of much of the interior of the building at X level and probably let it fall over in the direction of most damage. These things don’t seem to be actually built with the blast bulkheads/hatches and cofferdams of a warship. A lot of the building (except for where the KEW comes in) could survive but the “stuff” and people are going to be caught in all sorts of blast and fire related effects.

TheMonster wrote:

Northstar wrote:If one doesn't mind the population density, I could see city towers with internal agriculture being a thing of the not too distant future, actually. Needs sunshine replicating practical lights for the ag levels, park levels, whatever like that. Imagine how much fresh produce could be grown on the roof of your average supermarket.

With the fusion plant providing plentiful, cheap energy, that's exactly what I'd expect. The crops could be bred/genetically-modified to live in 24/7 light and grow faster than natural sunlight could do. You'd have vertically-stacked hydroponic tanks with the lights between them, providing very dense "farmland". Then you arrange for the crops to slowly move down the line, seeding at one end and harvesting at the other.

If we assume the technology to produce membranes that can allow O2 and N2 molecules to pass, but not CO2 (and others that filter impurities out of water) we can have air-handling systems that pull the latter out of the air and heavily concentrate it into the hydroponic tanks, which would boost the growth rate of crops while making the air healthier for the humans and their pets living in the towers. It might even be popular for individual residences to have smaller-scale "garden" units, especially for herbs and spices.

I've long thought that ships with similar arrangements ought to be part of the fleet train, if not integrated into the warships themselves to save having to transfer food/oxygen/water for waste periodically. There might be some kind of algae that's insanely proficient in processing the waste products back into consumables to let this be done in very little space. With two millenia of bioscience progress, the algae might even produce special flavors and textures, such as "meat" that feels and tastes like the real thing.

Interesting and I agree with you on this being something that should be in the fleet train. Though, if IIRC, there are some brief mentions/ allusions to growing things on Mantie warships.

I'm no kind of expert in this stuff but there are plants that do an excellent job of filtering and cleaning water. Water hyacinth comes to mind as one.

It should also be possible to stack ag decks in an ag butte or some such thus raising many times the crops/ critters possible on a similar footprint of natural ground. Various decks could have their light and internal /seasons tuned to best for what is being raised in them. This eliminates assorted weather disasters and hopefully various infestations etc as well. Maybe not too far away so what could it be after a couple millennia?

Perhaps ag towers interspersed with people towers to cut the transport way way down and yet keep the ag towers isolated from human borne bugs etc.

Hopefully still park decks in the people towers and, as you suggest, personal yard/gardens as well, for those who want them.

Here's a link to a thread I started in General Topics:

http://forums.davidweber.net/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=5575

I think the Bruce proposals, suitably scaled up, might give people some idea what a Sci-Fi city might look like in practice.

Mike.

For the physicists out there, if you haven't read Tom Murphy's blog at http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/201 ... rowth-last you should. This scale of terrestrial power generation needs a reality check. (Yes, I am unable to figure out how to make a proper hot link from the site descriptions. Insert imprecations upon the blog system's alleged HCI designers here.)

quote="namelessfly"]
Intras, your average urban tower might have 25,000 people who might be consuming 100 kW peperson (this is huge!) or a total 2.5 GW. I assume that your in house fusion reactor masses 1,000 tons and your power density is then only 2.5 Megawatt per ton which is comparable to a car engine. The lower power density requires a much lower plasma density so the potential explosion when containment failure occurs is not alarming.
[/quote]
If you are not producing the power density that requires a fusion reactor, then why are you using a fusion reactor? Plus the lower power fusion reactors we have seen in the books are both much smaller than 1000 tons and produce much more power than 2.5. GW, as the energy you need to accelerate shuttles is greater than that.

For the same reason that not everyone lives in a city today. There will probably always be a percentage of the population who couldnt live as anything but frontiersmen/women or live away from the increased challenges of life living somewhere new. curiosity and the drive to explore or do something different to the herd is why other planets will be colonised.

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?

Spacekiwi wrote:For the same reason that not everyone lives in a city today. There will probably always be a percentage of the population who couldnt live as anything but frontiersmen/women or live away from the increased challenges of life living somewhere new. curiosity and the drive to explore or do something different to the herd is why other planets will be colonised.

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?

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.