Slashdot Mirror
First Arcology?
vortmax(OU) writes: "OK, so it isn't that new, but I hadn't seen it posted on /. yet, so I thought I'd bring it up. According to World's Tallest Buildings, there's a proposal for a new supertall (3,700 ft) Bionic Building" in Shanghai, China. It will house 100,000 people as well as hotels, offices, cinemas, and hospitals -- a "vertical city" as the London Sunday Times put it. If actually built, it will dwarf the Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lampur and the Sears Tower in Chicago. It should be interesting to see if it goes forward... The complete story is here."
Why are they in the Sunday papers (or Saturday if you're in a part of the world where that's the bulky-paper day?) Because they're not really news. Rather they're mildly entertaining filler. Nobody seriously expects these projects to go anywhere, including their authors.
Rather they're explorations, a way of getting folks talking & thinking, a way of giving a bunch of students a project and a way to get a few news stories published.
Actual blueprints? Nothing of the sort. There's no real finances, no real backers, just some folks willing to make positive noises and to push their own pet projects.
A Bering-Strait Bridge (or tunnel), the tallest building, a mega-city in the wilderness, personal flying cars, etc. We read about these every month but how often do they pan out?
Oh sure there's a sorta-prototype of the flying car (though the kewl fiberglass chassis they always wheel out has never flown) & yes the Chunnel did get built. Indeed there have been some extraordinary bridges built & a number of very impressive civil engineering projects in recent years. Heck, the Petronas Towers were generally assumed to be a joke when announced (Kuala where?) but what percentage of these do pan out? 1, 2 percent, tops?
Sorry, but just looking at the sketch in the article one can see it's more of a theory then a practicality. 12 flat floors held up by columns with standard office blocks & parkland on each floor? Why not combine the columns & the buildins for efficiency/stabilty? Plus what's with all of the wasted space? Nobody builds a couple hundred stories in the air only to use a dozen floors & then allocate 50% of that floorspace for greenspace.
Mega-construction is a fascinating topic & there are lots of neat things going on but this, well it's hardly a serious effort. Lets spend some time on something a bit more likely to happen at least, a better candidate for the first arcology.
Anyone have any good links on more likely mega-projects coming up?
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
If terrorists want to kill thousands of people and wreak havoc, it's not all that hard. My guess is the only thing that stops it is that, as well as the efforts of the intelligence services, is those with the brains to plan such a thing realize that it's not not a particularly productive tactic.
Go you big red fire engine!
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
These days all tall buildings advise their occupants to go a few stories up or down & hope the 'fireproof' construction holds. Since the contents of these buildings are fairly well regulated there's not a lot of danger though it is a lot of eggs to put in one basket.
As to elevators Otis & other companies have been grappling with these issues for years. The first solution was to build high-speed elevators & express elevators. The came double-deck elevators as so to get double duty out of a single car in a single shaft. Also Sky-Lobbies were intoduced where folks going to upper floors change elevators part-way up.
The current hot technology is self-propelled vehicles using onboard electric moters & the equivalent of cog rails. The cars can be centrally controlled and are able to move both vertically & horizontally (yes, as in Star Trek's "Turbolifts".)
The reason horizontal motion is important is it allows cars to pass each other in the shafts, one simply goes onto a 'siding' or otherwise moves aside. This allows multiple vehicles to share a limited number of shafts saving building space & keeping costs down.
However my concern is more about the surrounding infrastructure. The resource-requirements of an ediface of this scale will be astounding. The sheer volume of water & sewage, food & other consumables, trash, electricity, even the transportation to get these basic materials, consumer goods, not to mention people in & out of this will be mind-boggling.
Essentially you're taking a good-sized city & placing it vertically in a few square blocks. This means that all of the support services that generally move in & around a city of that size will need to compress into those same few square blocks. Imagine the commuters, delivery vans, trucks, sanitation, pipelines, powerlines, telecomm, etc. that make up your part of the world compressed into something this (comparatively) small.
Even with extensive automation, advanced delivery systems, recycling, waste reduction & other 'impact-lowering' techniques it's going to be terribly hard to support something of this scale.
Building the tower may turn out the easy part, keeping it going may be the ongoing challenge.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
Yet another story on Slashdot that shows that Slashdot is turning into all-stoner news.
(Gurgles)So, dude, do you ever think about like, how wasteful cities are? Like, all those cities spread out, like, messing up the nature and stuff.
yeah, thats a total bummer dude. like, rats, and beavers and stuff need homes to
(Gurgles)Anyway, like, what if we built like a building that was , like, a mile tall? And then we could, like, fill it up with Chinese! and they would be able to chill there and everything! They would have like, movie theaters and everything.
(Gurgles)What would be even cooler, is, if we like genetically engineered Chinese people to be, like 3 feet tall, so we could, fit, like, 7 as many people in!
Dude, and we could like, grow, them hydroponically and stuff!
(Gurgles)Yeah, and we could run the whole thing off a nine-volt battery!
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.