#arcologies

arcologies - softpulse (10bit)

this is an ambient IDM album made entirely with the first VSTi ever made, the Steinberg Neon from 1999. ALL sounds coming from neon, fx plugins used were valhalla supermassive and that native instruments choral plugin. tracks were sequenced with a yamaha rm1x with some generative pipelines from blokas midihub. tracks resampled to 10bit and then pushed the gain a bit. the sequences on the rm1x are very basic, the midihub is doing a lot work to spice them up a bit :)

Whittier, Alaska, is a small, remote town 60 miles south of Anchorage that is commonly referred to as the "town under one roof."

How small is Whittier? About 217 people live there, and it's accessible only by boat or a one-way, one-lane tunnel.

There’s a couple significant differences between the two.

A fortified city is city walls and maybe a citadel around a regular, civilian city with the usual streets and alleys, buildings both public and private, and other urban spaces. 

By contrast, a "medieval city that’s built into one giant castle" would be much closer to a fantasy version of an arcology, in the sense of an entire community that’s all living in the same building. 

See, there aren’t that many separate structures in Harrenhal - five enormous, interconnected towers, the Hall of A Thousand Hearths, the kitchens building, the armory/barracks hall, the armory, the Hunter’s Hall, the fews, the stables, and the bathhouse - but they’re all ridiculously over-sized. The kitchens is the size of Winterfell’s Great Hall, the Hall of Hundred Hearths is big enough to hold the whole of the political class of Westeros, the armory is big enough that its second story is the barracks, and so on and so forth.

Firstly, I don’t recall seeing a single POC in the preview. Someone less pasty White than me can and probably already has done a better job than me of explaining why an apocalypse where only White people survive is problematic, but let me just state for the record: Seriously? …Seriously???

Anyway, time to blow a giant hole in the entire premise of the movie: overpopulation and having no resources left is not a thing that’s going to be a problem. Oh, don’t get me wrong, we could squander our renewable resources by electing a few generations of Captain Planet villains–something the election of Lord Dampnut ought to show is is far from outside the realm of possibility–but that would be a product of willful stupidity, like a nuclear war, not something that occurs inevitably as a product of having “too many” people on this planet.

This has also been explained earlier and better (see videos at the end), but let me just say this much: the limiting factor for how many humans we can have on this planet is waste heat. If we block the sun’s infrared and ultraviolet light from reaching the planet (something we could do with today’s technology), that means we have 10^17 Watts to play with. Assuming we have a power source that’s clean, reliable, powerful, and efficient, like beamed solar or fusion, we can create a ridiculously luxurious society for 10,000 Watts per person--in other words, our upper population limit for the Earth is ten trillion people, barring the invention of some sort of thermal superconductor.

But surely that’d be cramped, right? No. Imagine an arcology with 10,000 square feet of floor-space per resident (to be fair, this does include common spaces and super-efficient indoor farms). If it has five thousand residents, that’s fifty million square feet, and if its a hundred stories tall, that’s five hundred thousand per floor; if it’s a rectangle twice as long as it is wide, that’s a footprint of 500 by 1000 feet. If you average eleven of these buildings per square mile of the Earth’s surface (and it’s worth noting that you can have these on the oceans and in the arctic, because they’re arcologies), you can house that entire ten trillion population above and still give eighty percent of the Earth’s surface to nature.

Now don’t get me wrong, there’s any number of reasons that might not happen, but the point is that it’s possible. And the fact that it’s possible means that all this hand wringing about there being too many people on the planet is utter bullshit.

Anyway, the videos I promised above: