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Chinese Eco-Cities
opencity writes "The Guardian is reporting on a deal by Arups, a British consulting firm, to build four eco-cities in China. The cities are to be self-sufficient in energy, water and most food products, with the aim of zero emissions of greenhouse gases in transport systems. The press release hints at some of the technology."
Not without a spindizzy
Seriously though, what's wrong with designing a generation ship by first designing a self-sufficient arcology?
as soon as you have a more or less closed system (bio-sphere anyone?) that only requires a little energy from external sources.. you can send generation ships..
say.. they find a planet with no ability to support any but cellular life, and leave a few microbes.. wait milennia, and kerzham!
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
"but only when a country is rich and the people have decent quality of life will it have the means to stop polluting."
Do you know any countries like this? Me neither. Great theory.
China is trying to industrialize and modernize without the same harships and human suffering.
Yeah, China is a real beacon of freedom and fairness. Oh, no, wait - China actually has a long, brutal history of tyranny and oppression, with a history of more "slaves" than the West ever had in its worst moments. Moralizing about that is, quite simply, remarkable.
China's current economic wealth is of course slingshotting on the backs of the West - it hardly occurring in a vacuum.
India is much worse, and per capita Canada is one of the worst with America coming in second.
Canada 1/40th the number of people over more land than China - saying we're "worse" is lame given that the "per capita" consumption is largely the creation of resource wealth for the world.
Of course China is cleaning up, as all economies do when they become more wealthy - suddenly living in a shithole doesn't seem as appealing, and you start to want to have clean air and clean cities. Just look at the industrialization of London, England as a great example of this.
I'm saying that if you have 1 country with 300 million people, who all drive SUVs, Turn their heat up to 25 degrees in the winter, and their airconditions down to 15 degrees in the summer, as well as leaving all their incandescent light bulbs on 24 hours a day, then they are going to produce much more pollution than a country of 1.2 billion who mostly don't own cars, don't have air conditioners or heaters, and don't have all that many lights to turn on. I'm pretty sure the earth could support 30 billion people if we didn't generate the amount of pollution we currently do. We have created some good things like treating sewage, but most of the inventions of the last 100 years have reeked havoc on the environment.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.