Quote:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Astromancer View Post
Where are Spindizzys when you need them. The US cities could fly away with Blue America taking their freedom and dignity with them, and Red America could get the land and the nukes. At last Europe would have an America that fit its preconceptions.
Everybody would be happy.
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No, they'd rapidly transform into things unrecognizable, 'red' and 'blue' America are two parts of one thing, and neither can function or exist without the other. Separate them and they may physically survive, but neither will be anything like what their dreamy partisans envision, because they'll both have to change into something else to function.
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This actually deserves more attention because it touches on the actual topic.
The concept of a city-state is misleading, at least to modern westerners, because it doesn't (and never did) mean quite what we tend to think of as that.
The Greek city-states, for ex, were not just cities, they also included a surrounding valley or zone of controlled territory. Cities require external support to live, and this gets truer as the tech level rises (at least it has so far and is likely to keep doing so up to THS levels).
New York City, for ex, doesn't stop at the city limits, or even the edge of the NYC metroplex. It extends up throughout much of New York State and beyond in its water supply, it draws in energy from all over the east, its food-network is global.
Los Angeles is even more so. Just using water as an example, LA reaches out hundreds of miles to the Owens Valley and the Colorado River, and has often looked longingly at the Columbia River, three States away.
Trying to isolate a city independently of its support structure makes little sense. A genuinely independent Los Angeles, for example, needs reliable water supplies. That means they probably need to control the territories around their aqueducts and dams, which also means they need to control the territories that feed those.
A political divide that ignored that would produce results other than a free-standing L.A.
THS tech could change some of this. Cheap fusion might make it practical to desalinate enough sea water to relieve some of the dependence on the water networks that lead into the mountains. A combination of cheap power and a lot of greenhouse space and the food-tech used in space
might make LA more independent of imported food, too.
But that matters in other ways. A lot of the water drawn toward LA gets used in agriculture. Without LA's population, southern Cali might not have the political clout to arrange for that steady inflow. OTOH, lacking the south Cali agriculture, the shape of the food industry changes nationally and maybe globally.
My point is that trying to consider high-tech cities in isolation from their environs just doesn't make sense.