I am right now designing a place that can hold 275,000 people/ families, comfortably (151512 feet), in about 1.5 square kilometers. I calculated that if 47,000 of these the building could hold about 6 billion people. That’s 70500 square kilometers. The United States (3rd largest land mass in the world) alone is 3,794,101 square miles (9,826,676 km2).
If you see the numbers the same way I do, then you can see we as a society are really wasting a lot of resources.
Money is crippling anything like my idea, and society is the thirty foot tall wall it has to climb over.
I have talked to a few people about it and they always come back to the same things. Not enough money, sharing bathrooms is gross, and people are not ready for something like that.
Why are people so diluted and stuck in the delusion of money? We have the resources the shelter, feed, and educate the world. And the best part, we don’t have to do it alone… but, simply we don’t.
OK, so I’m going to ignore questions like who pays for this, who builds it, why are people living in a 1.5 kilometer compound with razor thin walls that you can hear all 275,000 neighbors, is there plumbing, what’s the ventilation system like, what happens if there’s a smallpox outbreak or even just a run of the mill case of the measles, what happens to everyone’s houses that are now unoccupied, what happens to everyone’s stuff that can no longer fit inside a 225 square foot room, what incentive does anyone have to bettering themselves knowing they’re coming home to a compound like this.
Nope. Not asking any of that. We’re all living in the box and we’re all deliriously happy. Halleluyah and kumbayah.
Now what?
Building suburban sprawl over good cropland is indeed a waste of resources. I think we can stop doing that without resorting to putting everyone in stacked shipping containers, though.
I’m not sure what you imagine that, say, moving the entire population of Mali into 53 of your buildings and leaving the rest of the country empty is going to accomplish. You’ve moved 10+ million people further from food and water, created a massive waste disposal problem, and are well on the way to driving almost all of them insane because humans don’t want to live like that. In a density 9 or 10 times greater than Union City, NJ. How is this going to save money, exactly? Wear and tear on shoes?
Come on now, really that all you have. You didn’t motion the earth quakes and other natural disasters. Shame on you!!! Disease control is easy enough if people do their part… yeah. Minor issues like plumbing and air ventilation wouldn’t be hard to manage or even find ways to make extremely efficient and safe. Razor thin walls, I’m not stupid, privacy and security would be a priority, over cheapness, But then again, who was talking about money, I said we have the resources, and they were her long before money, F*$% money. And they design was just a template; even if I tripled the size of the room, there would still be more than enough room. I made extra room for all the goofy stuff people love to put on their doors and in their hallways. Big wide open areas that screams, I don’t want this to feel like jail.
Plainly, where’s your imagination man.
Yeah, some of us like our sanity…space between us seems to be very helpful in retaining it.
Really it is just an Idea to stop wasting so many resources, and it could hold probably 10 as many people if my main concern was cramming a lot of people into a tiny space. in fact 250,000,000+ people could live in the structure if they were allotted a bunk(633 feet) and a small place for belongings(123 feet).
All this has already been done. Google Arcology. Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle novel Oath of Fealty is one of my favorites. You don’t even need Arcologies. I once calculated if you built cities with the population density of Manhattan, then the entire population of the US would fit on 1/8 of one percent of the area. the 99.88% could be farms, mines, factories and wilderness.
Imagine 200 Manhattans scattered about the country with a ring of factories around each one of them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oath_of_Fealty_(novel)
You don’t need high tech. Just a lot of 20 story apartment buildings.
That awsome, But why does everybody always want to build upward. A big hole in the ground can work just as well.
This looks like a case of “If we studiously ignore all the problems, what’s the problem?”
Actually most people like windows and I live in Central Florida and anything over 10 feet down is an indoor swimming pool. Here is an example of what I talking about.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuyvesant_Town%E2%80%94Peter_Cooper_Village
Stuyvesant Town—Peter Cooper Village is in Manhattan and has 25,000 people living on 80 acres. That works to 200,000 per square mile. Of course, that is realistic since that is only residential space, but even after you add offices, schools, stores, theaters and parks you probably won’t be much worse than 100,000 people per square mile.
The trouble is that high rises like this are very expensive unless the real-estate costs are very high, so so rarely see them outside downtown areas.
What I’ve interesting is methods of converting cargo containers in cheap space efficient housing.
http://inhabitat.com/prefab-friday-keetwonen-container-student-housing/
This is becoming popular on the west coast, since they accumulate a lot of empty cargo containers that aren’t worth shipping back to Asia empty.
Here is a better link on the cargo container housing.
I spent some time looking into this after the Tsunami in Japan. I figured a few container ships could have provided housing for everyone for everyone left homeless by the Tsunami.
Displacing air is cheaper and easier than displacing dirt.
Simple. stop having so many babies. Problem solved and only takes a condom.
:rolleyes: No way on earth I could live like that. I’d prefer a coffin.
The question really is “why”???
In countries where people have the money they build what they can afford. In most countries the problem is not enough money; development is a completely separate issue. Rarely is the problem “we have too many people for the land, we need to crowd in”.(Except maybe Hong Kong). Even one of the densest wealthy countries in the world, Netherlands, has a reasonable amount of agriculture. Of course, what a crowded country cannot grow themselves, they can buy from an uncrowded country - Canada, Argentina, USA, and Australia were huge exporters of grain over the last few decades despite being large meat producers too. Even China imports a lot less grain since it went back to a profit system for agriculture.
The solution to Somalia, Darfur, Bangladesh or Zimbabwe is not to drag everyone down to the lowest common denominator. It is to get those places to a higher level where they can feed themselves.
Besides, if space is not the issue, a plethora of small 1-story villages is just as useful as a giant arcology; plus, this puts everyone near their plot of land so they can farm for food.
Oh, goodie…I can at least sleep diagonally in my bunk…thank goodness. And wifey can have her own bed to hereself…JOY!
Human Broiler Farms…yeah, that’s a future I want to be a part of. :rolleyes:
People spend most of their lives trying to be better than and outdo other humans. Better car, bigger TV etc. This just goes against people’s goals.
I think you have a limited vision; why not just make one large building, 47,000 times larger than the one? That way, all of society could be together as one, in love and harmony.
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Suppose everyone lived in a few mega cities. You do need quite a bit of room to grow food for everyone, and that means people would want to live out there in the middle of nowhere on their farms, growing stuff. Then people would want to move out there and open businesses to sell to those people. Others would have to be out there to mine minerals and more people would be there to support them. You need a way to bring supplies in to the mega-cities, so you’ll need airports everywhere there is agriculture or industry. Before you know it, you’ve built a whole country to support the city.
Thread moved to MPSIMS.
Contrats!! You have just invented the chicken coop!