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Carbon-Neutral Ziggurat Could House 1.1 Million In Dubai
Engadget is reporting that a new pyramid-shaped city of the future, dubbed a "Ziggurat," is being touted by Dubai-based environmental design company, Timelinks. Claiming that their design allows for an almost self-sufficient energy footprint and, obviously, economy of space, the real trick would be getting 1.1 million people to live in such close proximity. "Martijn Kramer, managing director of The International Institute for the Urban Environment told WAN: 'As a general reaction the Ziggurat Project is viable from a technical point of view. However reflecting from a more sustainable holistic approach we do wonder if the food supply and waste system are taken care for, as the concept seems rather based upon carbon neutrality and energy saving.' Kramer's initial reaction to 'Ziggurat' also raises a very important issue: are people willing to live in a mega building of 2.3 sq km? Will the thought of living in a machine comfort people?"
Doesn't this mean that we're one step closer to Neuromancer?
Ubiquitously - A Ubiquity Developer Community
Will the thought of living in a machine comfort people?
Let's find out from some people who live in an actual machine. Morpheus, what do you think?
Morpheus: The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy. But when you're inside, you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it.
for an opposing viewpoint, let's ask Cypher. Cypher?
Cypher: You know, I know this steak doesn't exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realize?
[Takes a bite of steak]
Cypher: Ignorance is bliss.
and, finally, for another insight, we'll ask Agent Smith:
Agent Smith: Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from. Which is why the Matrix was redesigned to this: the peak of your civilization.
My blog
Someone crashes a A340F full of explosives into it. Or sets fires in it, or...
Well you get the idea. Good idea but a great target.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Dubai considering building Arcologies! =)
Who cares? Show us something real.
People can live in very different conditions if their basic needs are met, if there is a cultural web to participate in, and if they have control over their personal space and possibility of advancement.
I see challenges of propinquity here, but there are very crowded, thriving urban environments to use as examples.
The key question to answer is: What is the reason for the people to live there, rather than somewhere else? That's the question that builds cities - or ghost towns.
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
"My life for Aiur! ... Uh I mean Ner'Zhul."
Carbon and energy neutral food I mean?
Deleted
Then it probably has just about everything you can do in Dubai (except the Gulf)
For all the billions Calif* spends propping up worthless mortgages, it could build gigantic ziggurats & actually house people.
are people willing to live in a mega building of 2.3 sq km?
Sure, why not. It's not like there won't be parks, squares, expedition, lanes, views.. dense cities are essentially one mega building already.
This question makes no more sense than the question whether people would like to live in residential buildings with dozens of stories.
I'm sorry, the number you have dialed is an imaginary number. Please rotate your phone 90 degrees and dial again.
People live in large ships today which are much more of a machine and where there is decidedly less personal space, and, while on cruise, there is no chance for a change of scenery whatsoever.
People live in large blocks of flats today, and would anyone really prefer ugly, grey, and box-shaped over clean, high-tech, and pyramid-shaped?
The grass is always greener on the other side of the light cone.
Well, that's great. Culturally sensitive - as always. :-)
In Dubai, you might better describe things as "won't be Halal", no? Or is Israel's plan to own everything on earth expected to be complete by the time they break ground on the project?
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Resistance is futile. We are Dubai.
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
I agree there is no easier target than a single building with 1M plus people in it. I haven't seen the structure, but I am pretty sure a pyramid can be easily unbalanced. It would be cool though.
I hope they have enough lumber...
...for a suite with a window seat when the arcology launches into space?
-oh wait, this isn't SC2k.
I don't remember much else about this book, but the idea of a giant city-building stands out.
_Oath of Fealty_, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle.
http://www.amazon.com/Oath-Fealty-Larry-Niven/dp/0671532278
I got not particular problem with spending a substantial amount of time indoors. I like to get out in nature now and then too, but within a city? Who cares?
I do however like decent view.
If the hallways are design appropriately, and there are some largish open spaces within also designed appropriately it's an easy sale.
All predictions aside, I'd be surprised to see this ever happen. After all, the first one built in Arizonba never did fare that well.
How high would be the electromagnetic fields in that thing. Wouldn't it be like living under a power pylon?
Because of all the sand which is there.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
Think of it as evolution in action. Obscure reference to a major author.
Culture obviously plays into whether or not folks would be willing to live in something that is hyper-dense or not.
OTOH, something that doesn't seem to be taken into account is, what happens when families change? A single guy only needs 'x' amount of space. Now when that single guy gets married*, has 4 kids, and a parent becomes decrepit/disabled and decide to move in...? Obviously there's going to be a lot of change in how much space the guy can be comfortable living in, no matter what culture we're talking about here.
Also, what happens when some fatal communicable disease starts making the rounds? shutting folks into their 'homes' will only work for so long before even the most gregarious human being starts to get cabin fever (for lack of a better term).
There's also the chance that the local economy could contract as well - you can only fit so much stuff into one space, and it's not like, say, Home Depot could do a whole lot besides sell wallpaper, paint, and light fixtures to the folks (just as example).
Some folks here will happily cry against the "McMansion!" and think they're being the smartest guy in the room, but consider this: those things do get sold for a reason, especially as our society gets more and more 'crowded'... Suburbs, as much as they're derided, are actually a compromise between the comfort of wide-open spaces (and a buffer from 'the world'), and the conveniences of living in a city.
From that point, it begins digging deeper into some fundamental human psychology - how does a human being deal with being more and more crowded in society?
* yes, we could pack the city with programmers and handily solve the marriage problem, but we're talking people here...
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Seriously. Self sustaining enviornment = future space homes. A well thought out design could be carried over into space. Lets start experimenting here on earth first.
This ain't new, the Tyrell Corporation built one back in 2019(1982) as seen in Blade Runner...
http://bladerunner.wikia.com/wiki/Tyrell_Corporation
It would be a superb target for a suicide bomber. These things must be taken into account.
as are varied views within the structure. No one wants to live in a big, faceless glass box, nor look at big, faceless glass boxes. But if you have a large structure with integrated greenspace and human-scale details within the superstructure, to help fix the eye and give a sense of place, then it's not hard to imagine a million people living within it happily.
Think Central Park--There are tens of thousands of people in it at any given time, but because it's made of little hills and dales and stands of trees you never see more than 20 people at one time and it doesn't feel crowded. If you did a similar thing in three dimensions it could work.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
That's right. Arcologies are supposed to be built so that you don't need a car. That means you could use public transportation to get everywhere in the "building". Since an arcology is self sufficient, these would be the greenest cities on earth.
what happens if someone farts in it?
slides.
Will the thought of living in a machine comfort people?
Not if they've read the short-story The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster.
I'm not sure how that would work. A family of four would have a total of 99 square feet, IF the entire thing was devoted to living space, which it won't be. Otherwise, it's down to 24 square feet if you have individual places, and I don't know many people who want to live in a 4x6 room, about the room of a small bathroom.
Gonzo Granzeau
"Nothing the god of biomechanics wouldn't let you into heaven for.." -Roy Batty
That is an empty, unsubstantiated pipe dream. I challenge you to demonstrate that it is even remotely feasible with hard numbers for volumes of air, water, energy, and food inputs, and waste air, sewage, and garbage outputs. Where will they come from? Where will they go?
This is little more than a cute fairy tale.
> The blurb is certainly buzzword compliant, but where are the specs and data?
Yea, but utter BS. Which greens eat up without question, notice the Slashdot editors did.
Carbon neutral my ass. That sucker is going to need either a huge electric feedline or an internal nuke plant and since it is a 'green' project nukes are out of the question. (Half of a tech site such as this are dead set against anything with the N word attached, in the general green crowd it approaches 100% enough to egnore the outriders.) Then it will need a major railhead to bring in the food.
This isn't hard people, even with efficient solar power the population is a 3d volume powered from a 2D surface. And if you cover the whole surface with photovoltiac collectors where to you get the sunlight for a food source?
But as for getting people into it were it to actually be built, this is Dubai we are talking about; the government tells people to live in it they will live in it. Actually I'd like a few built here.... solve the low income housing problem overnight. Just tell people their choice is to get off their ass and fend for themselves or accept the 'free' government (ware)housing. I suspect most would be horrified enough at the concept of being forced to live in such conditions they would find the motivation to get their life into order. Be a great boost to the economy. And ones who did go in, well out of sight out of mind.
Democrat delenda est
Ziggurat?
I saw this before in one of HR Geiger's books, I think in Necronomicon I or II about 15 years ago. He proposed something like this to Sweden's Parliament and they thought he was insane, which he is but he's always been a visionary. They labeled him as a "horror artist" and didn't take his idea seriously. Who's laughing now huh?
WHATS UP SCROTE?
For some reason I look at this and that's the image I get. Killing all the residents as they reach age 30 would sure go a long way towards remaining carbon neutral. Especially when you add in a little "Soylent Green" action.
Greatest. House-warming party. Ever.
are people willing to live in a mega building
Sure. Who wants to join me?
This sounds like an intentional community.
I wonder if it will go the way of Biosphere 2, another attempt at a self-contained living environment from the 90's
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
KRAMER: Levels.
JERRY: Levels?
KRAMER: Yeah, I'm getting rid of all my furniture. All of it. And I'm going to build these different levels, with steps, and it'll all be carpeted with a lot of pillows. You know, like ancient Egypt.
Make it a prison. Of course that would only hold 1/2 of the U.S. prison population of 2.3 million (first in the World - go USA!), but almost 2/3 of Chinia'a of 1.6 million (not counting, umm, "administrative" detainees). Using recent stats, about 9 Ziggurats should hold them all.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Gibson, Niven, Pournell, the Matrix, they're all 'Jonny come lately's. The earliest mentions I recall are Asimov with "City" and "Caves of Steel" and Paolo Solieri with his archologies. Who was really first?
...had an episode on something similar check it out...really cool stuff.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I35RApAByXM/
The difference being, that people are free to leave at any time, even for a day trip!
But will it run Linux? I'm serious. I'd be afraid to live inside that "machine" if it ran Windows. I'd rather live in a cave.
Yaknow, plants take in CO2 and water, and turn it into sugar and oxygen?
My advice: Try taking a cruise on something other than a docked riverboat casino.
Say hello to my little sig.
I wonder how long it will be until they're feeding people with vats of yeast, algae, and/or bacteria.
this is the job for engineers... and don't say it can't be done, I dunna wanna hear it! man on the moon Man ON THE MOOOOON!!
Why this effort to continually force ourselves to live like bees? Or even better, free tubal ligation, as well as vasectomies.
...a castle when you see one? It even has a moat. Rich people inside, starving peasants with pitchforks outside.
anime for real!
I can answer his question about whether "food supply and waste system are taken care for" the answer is NO. Dubai sewerage system has been operating at twice its capacity for a couple of years and the new plant which is due in a couple of years is already not enough.
For a quick overview of how glitzy this town really is you can check those:
2 weeks sewerage flood
http://www.gulfnews.com/Nation/Society/10225546.html
This was only one "small" issue amongst too many to list. The government and whatever service in charge were overwhelmed and incapable to do anything to fix it. Or didn't care. Let's note that the residential complex has been built about 250 meters away from the sewerage treatment plant. Smell of shit can be enjoyed night and day there even where there is no flood. glitzy..
Dubai is about glitz and money, big tower and man made island but all that is nothing but smoke and mirror, the reality is that the town has not much to live up to the reputation it is trying to build for itself by announcing mega-project over mega-project while finishing none of them.
I could go on and on with my rant. I just want to add that we live behind a filtering proxy that bars any website that dares commenting against the UAE and it is very well possible that slashdot will go bye bye for a few days because of this comment. Just as it already did last year.
Forget about mega-projects announced by Dubai Gov or related entities. It's nothing but an attention whoring press release from a city that would love to play in the big league.
If you care to come around to verify that by yourself you're welcome but be careful what you pack though: http://thetruthaboutdubai.com/?p=4
"All hail Ziggurat!"
If you quote this signature there'll be 72 copies of Windows ME waiting for you in Heaven.
Well it sounds like your never more than half a mile from the outer wall (assuming you're on the ground floor). So that raises the question, can I go out for bike rides and some jogging?
If I can I wouldn't mind living there. After all, I'd barely have to spend any time commuting to work.
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
This sounds familiar. Ah, yes. The Utopian Victorian society. The Titanic - rich opulence above, steerage and boiler stokers below.
Seems like it led to general dissatisfaction of the working classes and nasty things like Communist revolutions and Fascism.
"the real trick would be getting 1.1 million people to live in such close proximity ... are people willing to live in a mega building of 2.3 sq km? Will the thought of living in a machine comfort people?"
There are well over a million Slashdot subscribers. I'd bet a majority of them - perhaps a large majority - wouldn't care about the proximity if you could deliver a fast internet connection to all the units. Well, as long as they didn't have to actually see the other inhabitants anyway.
And as to all the windowless units necessitated by such a structure? The aforementioned Slashdot Majority would likely prefer to avoid as much direct solar exposure as possible anyway...
#DeleteChrome
'nuff said.
This is very reminiscent of the novel Oath of Fealty by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. It would be interesting to see of some of the ideas they came up with would be used in this, and whether ir not some of the problems they identified would be solved by the designers.
Now we only have to use a tiny nuke or a smidgen of VX gas.
We all know how the last ziggurat turned out.
Yes but what will the plumbing be like?
A civilisation is only as good as the toilets.
Anyone here Read SLant?
are people willing to live in a mega building of 2.3 sq km?
Sure, why not. It's not like there won't be parks, squares, expedition, lanes, views.. dense cities are essentially one mega building already.
I've lived in some dense environments, and I could always open a window and let in the actual outside air. I could step onto my balcony and actually be outside. I could walk down a few flights of stairs and out the front door, and be entirely outside of the building.
Put me in an arcology and I'd go nuts before the first day was out. No open sky? No thanks. Not for any amount of money in the world.
Sure, it'll be all fun and games ... until a Goa'uld ship lands on it. Then, not so much.
Come on, look at it! "We're off to see the wizard, the wonderful wizard of Oz..."
I could win a Nobel Prize. I could... really.
Jeez, am I the only Slashdaughter that realizes that this is not meant to be a 'city in a building' or a theme park or an oasis, it's meant to be a prison.
The Wackenhut of the world. Every country in the world can send their political prisoners, their purse-snatchers, uppity minorities, and urine-test-failers to Dubai. Where, for a small fee, they will be housed in the biggest, meanest, most-escape-proof, hope-for-humanity-crushing, prison that world has ever seen.
And if the payments stop coming from the original country for the prisoner, they just get chucked outside. Naked. To die in the 120 degree F sun! No mess, no fuss, no packed airplanes dumping political prisoners into the South Atlantic Argentina-style!
Hell, Dubai will even pick-up your prisoners in their old surplus Emirate Airlines Boeings! Tell 'em that they're going to Sweden on an Amnesty International 'Flight to Freedom'! Hell, no one will ever know! (Amnesty International workers are sure to be the first 'guests').
Am I the only Slashdaughter with an evil mind? Or more mature, historically-accurate world view?
And why is Dubai building all this architectural bling in the first place?
I live in Chicago. I use public transit or my bike for most of my longer inter-city trips, and I can get almost everything I need within walking distance in my neighborhood. I could pretty easily limit my travel to within walking distance of my apartment for a long time. I'd say it's pretty self-sufficient from a personal perspective (although goods are shipped in from the outside, and waste dumped elsewhere, of course).
But I have friends and family currently located in such places as: Elmhurst (a suburb, 18 miles away as the bike flies), Woodstock (a farther-flung suburb, probably a 50-mile trip), Paxton (a small town in east-central Illinois, 120 miles away), the Quad Cities, Urbana, Kalamazoo, Ames, Sioux Falls, Syracuse, Washington DC, and Seattle, to name a few. And my network is substantially smaller and more centralized than many people's. I've seen all of them (some have come to visit me, and I've visited some of them) within the past year. Furthermore people frequently move, go to college out-of-state, travel on business, etc. And that's just for personal transportation. No city, even those much bigger than 1.1 million people, manufactures all of its goods. Even if it had the ability, its people would want imports from other places. Bell's Brewery, for example, recently resumed distributing in Illinois after a significant hiatus. There are more than 1.1 million people in Illinois, and plenty of them can and do make very good beer. But Illinoisans are still excited about the return of Bell's.
That's not to say that it couldn't be much more efficient than current cities. Just that you can't declare a place self-sufficient, wall it off, and say that the transportation solution is solved. Intra-arcology transit would still exist, just as intra-city transit exists today. Transportation takes space, limiting how close arcologies can be placed to each other, and takes time and energy, limiting travel between far-flung ones.
Energy self-sufficiency is a problem in Dubai?
Of course, that applies to distopias too.
(Logan's Run, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074812/ ,
THX 1138 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0066434/ ,
Fahrenheit 451 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0060390/ and even
Metropolis http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0017136/ )
There's nothing stopping Dubai except the fact that the surrounding countryside couldn't possibly support that many people and the peak oil scenario would make transportation impractical (not impossible but impractical.)
That being said, it could be done elsewhere (Like population rich and land resources poor Bangladesh [where it would represent a tremendous rise in living standards {and they literally won't have any choice.}])
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
I've been modded down to troll for pointing out the sappy superstitions of my fellows. Oh well...
Have you ever tried living in a small town, or out in the country? I've tried everything except the suburbs, and I like small towns the best.
which would let light bounce to the bottom of the light pipe.
In addition, there would definitely be 'solstice celebrations' which would be great Bacchanals. ("Tout l'monde tout nu!" :-)
Also the "objections" that everybody seem to be raising are all design points, not objections.
And to anybody who strenuously objects, they don't HAVE to live 'in town.'
Buckminster Fuller had a tetrahedral pyramid which could be built 'one slice at a time', with each expansion giving greater and greater living area and which could FLOAT, anchored on New York's East River. We wouldn't even need to chew up valuable real-estate.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
We can always supplement the ziggurat nexus supply by having probes construct pylons.
Why build a prison in Dubai when you could build it in China with much cheaper labor costs or in Russia with much cheaper land?
The real reason they are building this in Dubai is for climate controlled year round luxury tourism. A disneyland for very wealthy adults. The average high temperature between may and october is over 100 degrees there so climate controlled living has lots of advantages.
I just wanted to point to you that it's not because we didn't create a self-sustaining arcology that it's impossible to do so.
The earth is self-sustaining so the concept works. Also, small villages were self-sustaining in the past. So I don't see why something between the size of a village and the earth couldn't be self-sustaining.
I never said it would be easy though...
The government is "us". It's a democracy. If a corporation owns a city, then we're talking about a dictatorship. It's harder to fight corruption amongst the leaders when you don't elect them...
Does it come with a Psycopath AI?
Giant City - Check
Lots of people in the middle of nowhere - Check
Embedded technology to keep track of biometric data - Check
Extermination after 30 years of life - Working on it
Why does this remind of Logans Run?
According to Wikipedia, there are only three countries in the world that have a population density of more than 5000 people per sq. km. Worldwide, it is under 50 people per sq. km.
Even if only 1/10th of the land on earth were habitable, that's still plenty of room, with plenty left over for agriculture, recreation, etc. A city like London fits 5000 people per sq. km. San Franscisco fits more that 6000 people per sq. km. Mexico City stuffs nearly 15000 people per sq. km.
We should work on spreading out a little, not condensing. Instead of collapsing the population of an entire continent into 25 major metropolitan areas, why don't we spread it across 250 smaller, self-sufficient cities?
Has anyone ever seen Eastern Washington state in the U.S.? The entire population of Singapore could get lost there. What about Gifu prefecture in Japan? If you dumped half the population of Tokyo there, you'd add less than one person per sq. km.
I'm not convinced that a city with a population over a million benefits from any economy of scale. That includes the major factory-cities of Asia.
Or to put it another way:
-You must play the game.
-You can't win.
-You can't break even, except on a very cold day.
-It doesn't get that cold.
Thermodynamics FTW
The meek may inherit the earth, but the strong shall take the stars.
Surprisingly - I don't see anyone calculating volume per person...
2.3sqkm base means it's about 1.5km wide at the base. Looks like it'd be about 1km high from the picture. 1/3 base area * height = 0.767cu-km, or 767 million cu-m. Looks like the thing is about 3/4 open or shared space (streets, parks, corridors, elevators, theaters, stores, etc, etc), so about 190 million cu-m of living space.
So each individual would have about 175cu-m. A family of 4 could have 700cu-m, or about 200sq-m of floor space with high ceilings - a pretty large apartment. So it isn't quite as cramped as people seem to think.
Still, the mega-scale design is a monument to the ego of a poorly educated architect. Building collossally big is fine. Failure to build within that on a livable "human scale" is just arrogantly ignorant. It treats people as identical units to be slotted into storage compartments optimized to fit within the glorious "structure" designed by the architect.
Toxic atmosphere, high populations, no energy supplies, war and/or political instability/lawlessness -- 3-4 generations down the road its probably going to be about the only viable living option.
I could see it as some kind of military outpost or megabase. An institutional design with dorm-style accommodations, a food service, and larger, shared spaces makes much more sense than impossibly small private apartments with their own bath, kitchen, etc, and shared space allows for a lot greater economies of scale.
The downside is you'd have to put up with a pretty all-encompassing political and social system since you'd be living like an ant more or less.
The first post speculates a future with planes crashing into futuristic buildings, lets talk about a better future via science fiction. The article reminds me of the movie "Blade Runner". That's all I wanted to say.
There are too many lemmings.
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
Why was this modded funny?
slides.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Sounds like a great idea. Now all we need is an artificial intelligence to operate this complex arcology. I vote we name it Deus.
It's finally coming true!
What could be more carbon-neutral than powering your uber-city with the charred corpses of the old and unattractive?
The correct title for your post was Obligatory...
Having lived in an apartment and a house with little or no exposure to sunlight, it strikes me that this design has that as a problem. That is, half the people will always be living in shadow. I'm pretty sure that's not a good thing.
Even if it's 'piped in,' indirect sunlight is no substitute for the real thing. Of course, by the time a concept like this is practical, UV radiation might be off the charts.
BTW, does this remind anyone else of Blade Runner?
An effective "democracy" creates the illusion the people have a say in their government.
You must play the game.
Thanks a lot man, I just totally lost. :/
Me lost me cookie at the disco.
Philip K. Dick?
During the glory days of Japanese business, when Tokyo real estate was quoted at insanely high prices, an engineering firm came up with a design they called the 'Try 2004' which was essentially along the same lines. The idea was that it could fit into Tokyo bay and house around 750,000 people.
Their calculations suggested that it cannot be done with currently available materials. You need new materials with higher tensile and compressive strength than steel or concrete (I'm not a civil engineer, so forgive me if I've mucked up the terms). They suggested at the time that nanotechnology would bridge the gap.
This was in the early 90s. There was an even more ambitious plan circulated in the period called the X-seed, I think, which was essentially a man-made mountain.
Then the Kobe earthquake began the chain of events that plunged the Japanese economy into recession ... and well, here we are, with this century's suddenly uber-wealthy economies talking about giant pyramid cities.
Classical Liberalism: All your base are belong to you.
Wasn't a pyramid shaped building used in a scifi book? Think of it as evolution in action.
Food alone is enough of a reason to say that an arcology holding 1+ million people cannot be self sustaining. Unless the arcology is built to a massive scale, it will not provide all the food for the people living in it to eat. Just as todays cities have to import food, so too would one of these. It just isn't economical to try and grow/raise all your food in one of these things. While technically a massive structure could grow all that food, it doesn't make sense to do it.
Phil
No, I didn't RTFA. Didn't have to, I did the math instead.
1.1 MILLION people in 2.3 sq km?
Just *think* for a moment.
Tokyo = 12.8 million people in 2187 sq km = pop density of 5,852 people / sq km.
Manhattan = 1.6 million people in 60 sq km = Pop density of 26,666 people / sq km.
Ziggurat = 1.1 million people in 2.3 sq km = pop density of 470,260 people / sq km.
(If you prefer miles, that's 1.1 million people in 0.88 sq miles = pop density of 1,250,000 people / sq mile.)
Now think about power, sanitation, food, water and air supply. Think about what that kind of population density would do to the average mind.
Now imagine a blackout. No ventilation, no plumbing, no elevators, no lights, no security.
Sounds like playing DOOM.
This is a pipe-dream.
... we do wonder if the food supply and waste system are taken care for...
Anyone who has ever travelled in the middle east (outside of Israel) will laugh at this one.
Why change the habits of millenia ?
Only in Dubai. Big deal - an eco-friendly pet project of a bunch of select few oil billionaires of the Mideast that can afford to spend their cheap dollars on something extravagant and exclusive and trendy like this. It maybe eco-friendly, but I seriously doubt it is even in remote proximity to cheap.
So, no point of paying too much attention, before this comes to the poor rural communities scattered all over the world for a price affordable to someone in say New Orleans and Russia.
Talk about reading between lines.
What, exactly, happens in this structure if the population grows ? Doesn't Dubai have like 9 kids per family or something like that ?
It's going to start looking like a balloon pretty soon.
Food is really just a form of energy. Typically we use solar power to produce our food, and this requires a lot of land. A dense structure like this would be able to use less solar power. If it contained a nuclear plant at the core then it could be pretty much self-sustaining, however.
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"Ziggurat" is a funny way to spell "Matrix". The real question is will that many people mind having their spines jacked into the national grid ??
If I own 4 houses, can I replace them with a hotel? I wonder who is unfortunate enough to live on kent road :)
It's the Middle East. They're used to seeing things get blown up. They must love it, because for the better part of history it's been fellow A-rabs doing the blowing up. Jihad, jihad!!! Mullah mullah fatwah mohammed!!! I'm just looking forward to the day when we no longer need to pump their diabolical product into our gas tanks, and we can tell them to fuck off. Then their entire culture will devolve to the 12th century or so. That is to say, their entire culture will devolve about 3 years.
Need a Job? John has an oppuritunity for you. Only those in the shadows need apply.
What a great way to see exactly how long a zombie infestation will take to spread through a closed environment.
Go look at "Oath of Fealty" - a classic Niven & Pournelle novel (before they went gaga) - describes an arcology called Todos Santos, which sounds remarkably like this.
More like one of my favorite books "The World Inside".
http://www.amazon.com/World-Inside-Robert-Silverberg/dp/0385036213
Nevermore.
According to multiple web sites, the entire population of Dubai is only (about) 1.5 million. So, if you put 1.1 million in this single structure, what are you doing to do with all of the other buildings? Tear them down and convert the land to either energy harvesting, or growing food?
A stepped pyramid is a ziggurat. No "dubbing" required.
True, food is basically just energy that we need to survive. But last time I checked, the only way we can affordably make food is by growing/raising it. Also, human nature means that we want to eat the foods we like, and not synthetic stuff. Last time I checked their was no way to grow corn, wheat, cows, pigs etc using nuclear power. I guess you could create artificial lights and greenhouses for the crops, but that still requires a lot of area to be done. Raising animals would require even more "land", and just wouldn't be feasible in such an environment.
Phil
It does so in a carbon neutral way by starting with food production -- ending with a form that could quite easily be interpreted as a 1,000 meter high Minaret rising at the center of the population.
Net present value of all outputs of such a "Minaret Biosphere": $3.5 billion.
Seastead this.
Ivo Shandor?
If not, I'm not interested.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on