Suppose an efficient and inexpensive method of digging tunnels is invented. How easy would it be to design an entire underground city where the predominant mode of transportation is slides?
Replace all roadways and sidewalks with nice roomy slides and elevators. Would people go for this, or is it just a childish fantasy?
What sort of environmental impact would this city have? More carbon neutral due to less gasoline usage? Perhaps the increase in living space just gives humans an excuse to increase population and tax the planet even further?
True, thankfully, elevator / lift technology has already been invented and pretty much perfected by man. For the health-conscious, stairs are also available.
Another thought, would there be a standard angle of incline, or varying ones? I suppose bike lanes might be interesting, too.
You can’t get something for nothing, thermodynamically speaking. Those elevators are going to use energy to lift people. But that energy could come from whatever source would generate it most efficiently. And even if you used oil-fired electric-generating plants, that central plant can be designed to be more efficient than lots of little engines moving their own weight around.
But I think the energy savings from transportation would pale next to the change in heating and cooling. That much dirt overhead would be a great insulator. If it’s just one person underground, or a small dwelling, the need for heating or air-conditioning is greatly reduced. But a full-blown city underground would be a different thing. All those elevators, and whatever means you use to power them, will be generating waste heat. Managing that would be the biggest factor for the environmental impact.
Despite the appearance of slidewalk cities in the work of Heinlein and Asimov and others, they’ve never seemed convincing to me. Each moving belt represents a huge amount of energy being used up. The heat generated by all those motors and rollers must be phenomenal (and the Noise! Nobody evers talks about the noise!). And all those belts and rollers must wear out at fantastic rates, and be replaced.
I’ve wondered what the angle has to be so that you keep moving forward on a slide. If everyone had their own friction-reduction pad, or better yet, a roller-luge, to slide on, I imagine the angle could be quite low and still be slidable.
I’d imagine you’d get even greater energy efficiency than a bicycle, as all you’d have to do is walk up 100 feet with your toboggan and be able to slide…how many feet again?
You’re still going to have to move lots of stuff around, so those slides and elevators will have to accommodate wagons. Moving these wagons over level ground will require small motors.
I would imagine the angle of incline can be made safe for people in wheelchairs.
And freight elevators already exist. As to complexity: isn’t building a giant infrastructure of roadways with traffic signals, etc. already pretty complicated? Yet we somehow managed to construct those.
People on crutches
Pregnant women
Very small children (less than one year)
Old folks
It sounds like a fun city. I mean, I could live there, but I have use of both of my legs and would say Whee! every time I went down a slide. But I don’t think it’s good for everyone.
The way to make it, then, is to make it exclusive. Make people pay high prices to get in. That’ll pay for at least some of the stuff. So it’ll be like your own country with very strict immigration laws.
Hmm. There are no laws, are there, against countries accepting money to emigrate to their country?
It is rumored that there was an ancient Indian city built in such a fashion, known only as “Dasapada”. The 19th-Century British explorer Jake F. London claimed to have discovered it, and attempted to build a recreation of the city, with all its temples, in the hope that it would bring an era of peace and harmony to England as it reputedly had in India. Unfortunately, due to an error in translating from Sanskrit, Mr. London believed that the Dasapadans had developed an elaborate snake cult, and that sacred snakes were required for every person to descend one of the town’s hills. In some cases, residents were expected to use the snakes themselves as ropes or to even slide on them. Needless to say, this language error proved disastrous, as the snakes grew out of control, eventually causing the death of most participants.
In the 20th Century, another utopian society formed to build such a city, this time in the USA. Founded by the Hassenfeld family in New Jersey, it was a more modern interpretation (no snakes) but building on London’s work and belief, and promoted the ideals of harmony and peace that his sliding society aspired to. It, too, proved unworkable, but for more practical reasons. Some of the city’s residents, especially young children, had great difficulty navigating the often steep slides of the town. After many incidents of broken dishes, pots, and even bones (though some said the last was most often due to careless behavior) the city was closed down and abandoned.
Because the city was located near the shore and is now mostly flooded, there are some who consider the recent PC game “Bioshock” to be partly inspired by the Hassenfelds’ experiment.
Interesting bit of trivia : One of the more unusual laws in the New Jersey city was that purse thieves were rewarded with ice cream. It is unknown what the origin of this was, but photographic evidence shows it to be the case.
