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Old 05-06-2015, 09:23 AM   #31
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Default Re: What TLs you need to have and sustain a ecumenopolis

For a superscience setting imagine a device made of unobtainium which allowed an energy GATE!

Picture clouds of deep-space arrays collecting solar energy for the ecumenopolis and shedding its heat. A perfectly allowable superscience gizmo which would make the worldwide super-city viable with a technology otherwise not more than two tech levels beyond our own.
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Old 05-06-2015, 10:33 AM   #32
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Default Re: What TLs you need to have and sustain a ecumenopolis

Giant beanstalks whose only purpose is to shed heat into space?
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Old 05-07-2015, 09:35 AM   #33
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Default Re: What TLs you need to have and sustain a ecumenopolis

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Originally Posted by Flyndaran View Post
Giant beanstalks whose only purpose is to shed heat into space?
Viable. But my energy only superscience gates idea requires less tech.
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Old 05-07-2015, 10:00 AM   #34
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Default Re: What TLs you need to have and sustain a ecumenopolis

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Giant beanstalks whose only purpose is to shed heat into space?
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Originally Posted by Astromancer View Post
Viable. But my energy only superscience gates idea requires less tech.
have them use the waste heat to power the lifts on a Space elevator then you have a multipurpose heatsink and population control(get them into space cheap and make it expensive to come back)
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Old 05-07-2015, 05:06 PM   #35
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Default Re: What TLs you need to have and sustain a ecumenopolis

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Viable. But my energy only superscience gates idea requires less tech.
Sure, any problem can be solved by "a wizard did it." I assumed Op wanted more techno-babble pseudoscience than overt magic like teleportation gates.
We each draw that line in different places.
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Old 05-11-2015, 10:44 PM   #36
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Default Re: What TLs you need to have and sustain a ecumenopolis

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Urban densities are generally given as population inside some political boundary. For purposes of this discussion, you really need to include the support systems for the city, which is a lot harder to look up. Farms, water supply, waste disposal, and so on, are often outside the city boundaries, but ought to be figured in.
This^^^^.

Cities are machines, constantly changing, constantly modified, but machines, and they spread far beyond their formal boundaries, esp. the big ones. NYC's water, food, and power infrastructure extends all over the region, and by some definitions up into Canada. Los Angeles is worse, or at least bigger, their water supply system reaches all the way to Colorado, their power system run far beyond the city bounds as well.

In some ways, the modern high-tech world is already a globe-girdling supersystem, or at least a set of continent-sized systems.

This isn't new. At the height of the Roman Empire, the support system for urban Rome spread far and wide, too.


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A planet-wide city doesn't preclude farms; you just put the farms on the roof. Still, about 40% of Earth's land area is currently devoted to agriculture. So you could get ten times the production without improving the density of agriculture at all. Trantor's 45 billion could be fed without any sort of internal / underground hydroponics setup or fleets of ships from granary planets.
Asimov was inconsistent on Trantor and exactly what it was. Sometimes he spoke of all the land surface being covered, sometimes he talked about the oceans being contained and presumably roofed over in 'cisterns', in a later story he (IIRC) mentions the oceans being released from their cisterns during the final bombardment and flowing back into their old beds.

(Imagine the 70s-style disaster movie scenarios implied by the bombardment of Trantor! Whole oceans spilling out across the planet at once...)

Of course the food-fleet thing was an example of poetic allusion. Trantor is a high-tech Rome, with a space fleet taking the place of the semi-legendary grain fleets that supported Rome and agricultural worlds taking the place of the plantations and Egypt.

Of course that made no logical sense at all. James Nicoll once made the point that Trantor, as described by Asimov and with the stated 45 billion population, would seem deserted if you found yourself randomly teleported there, you could wander for days or weeks and not meet another person, assuming all the surface is covered in city and there are dozens or hundreds of levels, that makes Trantor the equivalent of dozens or hundreds of ordinary planets.

Asimov was always once of the SF writers who had an irrational overestimation of populations, it turned up in his Caves of Steel stories too.

From a technical POV it makes more sense to look at Trantor as a giant space habitat, rather than an inhabited world in the usual sense. It would be possible to do farming and hydroponics indoors, while covering a smooth, spherical outer surface with solar panels to get power, though you'd probably need more than what you'd get that way. You'd still want to do it, though, because every watt you draw from incident sunlight reduces your heat radiation problem by that much. You'd want to harness every calorie of geothermal heat that you could for the same reason (as well as reducing issues with volcanoes and earthquakes).
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Old 05-12-2015, 12:02 PM   #37
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Default Re: What TLs you need to have and sustain a ecumenopolis

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...
Asimov was always once of the SF writers who had an irrational overestimation of populations, it turned up in his Caves of Steel stories too.
...
Excessive pessimism to not realize that even super breeder zealot cultures won't continue to pop out babies like pez dispensers if they're living like sardines.

It's a little counter intuitive with how short sighted and self destructive humans are for the most part. In the end, I think, it's merely classic un-enlightened self interest.
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Old 05-12-2015, 09:45 PM   #38
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Excessive pessimism to not realize that even super breeder zealot cultures won't continue to pop out babies like pez dispensers if they're living like sardines.
That, and a tendency to overestimate the effect of a given population. For ex, IIRC he put the population of Earth in the age of the Caves of Steel as being about what it really is today, in the early 21C. Likewise, he thought 45 billion would make Trantor crowded, when in fact it would leave it sparsely populated.

He's not the only one. Larry Niven, for ex, thought that an 18 billion population would leave Earth with almost no countryside. In fact, it wouldn't be a lot different than reality today.

The limiting factors on population aren't room, it's things like fresh water and energy. Any given Earth-like world has lots and lots and lots of room.
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Old 05-12-2015, 10:51 PM   #39
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Default Re: What TLs you need to have and sustain a ecumenopolis

Lots of room if you count ONLY raw square footage. No trees, lawns, rivers, oceans, mountains, deserts, etc. and make a true asphalt and concrete planet.
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