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Vermont City Almost Encased In a 1-Mile Dome
destinyland writes "A Vermont city once proposed a one-mile dome over its 7,000 residents. (They paid $4 million a year in heating bills, and HUD seriously considered funding their proposal.) The city's architectural concept included supporting the Dome with air pressure slightly above atmospheric pressure. (Buckminster Fuller warned their biggest challenge would be keeping it from floating away...) There would be no more heating bills, fly-fishing all year, and no more snow shoveling. And to this day, the former city planner insists that 'Economically it's a slam dunk.'"
Then again, if you put a dome over it, the city's residents could just gas each other to death, which would effectively stop them from polluting.
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Didn't they try something like this in Springfield? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpsons_Movie
Birds that fly south?
Ah, the gentle thud of the returning swallows....
Blank until
At just one percent of glass, ETFE is described as 99 percent nothing.
Then why didn't they name it "Congress"?
i think it's not so much about the need to heat the whole dome, but rather the fact that the dome would trap all the heat (and pollutants) inside the dome. The lack of air exchange would trap alot of the heat, pretty much exactly how a greenhouse works.
Frankly, I encourage these people to complete their dome. It'll reveal insight into how bad (or maybe good too?) the idea is and what can go wrong with them.
Also, it'll be good practice for when/if we decide to colonize extra-terran bodies. I don't think anyone has tried a larger-scale enclose ecosystem like this before (yes I know it won't be entirely enclosed.. but gotta start somewhere).
If you want to make little science, occasionally you have to break some beakers.
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Why would they have to pipe all the water in? You can just as well channel it through the dome? Even channel it throught at night. What about insects and pollinators? They live fine in greenhouses. Why shouldnt they live in a dome. And who cares about migrating birds for such a small area?
Remember, it is still raining, just above the dome. It should be trivial to put collectors at teh base of the dome. I would hazzard a guess that it would provide the city with more water than they have currently. My concern would be the long-term durability of the "glass". After 20 years, will it yellow? Will it be so scratched up that everything outside will be a blur? Who is going to climb up there and clean all the bird poop off of it?
The Eden project in Cornwall, England contains the world's largest greenhouse (panorama), and it's made in a buckminsterfullerene-like way with ETFE.
It's definitely worth seeing if you're in south west England (relative to the rest of England it's quite remote area).
I think this is one of those things that look good on paper, but...
There are so many ways this could go wrong. It might be a way to breed viruses into an entire city, or keep carcinogens trapped for all to breathe. The Biosphere II was a fairly disastrous small scale experiment along these lines. Just imagine having an "oops" moment for a city of 5.7 million.
"Before God we are all equally wise - and equally foolish"
Albert Einstein
I'm not a mechanical engineer nor did any of my college coursework overlap with that but my gut feeling was pure skepticism and doubt.
I just get a blank page when I click on the link, so I'm not sure what the physical footprint of the town is, but when you consider modern sports stadia the ability to cover an area say 1 km across doesn't seem out of place. Modern materials are incredibly strong, and I would expect this dome would be designed as something like a kevlar rope net with panels in the holes to seal it. The internal atmospheric pressure will then keep the net under tension, and everything is good.
There is one big problem with it, which is that any failure is a catastrophic failure, albeit a catastrophe in slow motion. Unexpectedly high snow load, hurricane force winds, rocks falling from the sky and human error can all take structures of this kind down. I've seen two soccer domes fail under snow load (one was patchable and reinflatable) and know of another that was in the general vicinity of a tornado (nothing remained, although it was not actually hit by the tornado, it was just in the general area.)
As every engineer knows, if something can fail, it will. Domes like this can fail, therefore this one will. If the mean time between failure can be made long enough, it could still be worth-while, but I'd want to be sure that there was a re-inflation drill once a year or so (which policy would last for about a decade until some idiot in a suit realized they could pay themselves more today by leaving the people of tomorrow unprepared.)
There's also an interesting ecological twist: the ecosystem under the dome obviously can't be the local one, so you would have to replace a lot of vegetation with stuff that can survive without winter, and since the dome would inevitably become home to various exotic plants and animals it would be a continual source of invaders into the local ecosystem (which wouldn't survive the winter, but which would make every spring and summer a new surprise.)
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
Are all of you finished making up problems? When was the last time people suffocated because the oxygen level in skyscrapers without openable windows got too low? What, they actually live in there? Blimey! They must be using magic to ensure a constant supply of fresh air!
Dude, it's a town of 7,000 people, the old ladies sitting on the porches will be sufficient to enforce any ban.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Actually the dome would have less surface area than the town. Take all the surface area of all the buildings and add it up. You will find that at makes a pretty good heat exchanger compared to a nice smooth dome.
Rain water? What a great resource. You would catch it falling all the dome and and use it. I could even be used for the drinking water. Same for the snow melt from the dome. If nothing else it could be used for irrigation.
Air Quality? Yes you would should ban cars from inside the city as well as fire places. You might not need to but it would probably be for the best if you did. For the dome to work you would want to have some pretty powerful air blowers to keep it pumped up. That should provide enough airflow for the air quality to be as good as a none domed town. Us air to air heat exchangers to allow for even more air flow when needed.
The one huge danger I see is fire. What is a building catches on fire? Is the dome fire proof? That risk could be reduced but if you are doing to dome an existing town you would have a lot of older buildings that may not be as fire safe as you would like.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Put a dome over the dome as a windbreak.
There is a similar idea which actually carries some currency, though; put a greenhouse below a house and vent it into the house, then vent the exhaust from the house through a chimney. [...]
Pot growers have been already been testing this for decades. You use HPS for overheads and fluorescents on the side. Solar panels on the roof. See, this certain crop isn't exactly "legal" in most states yet.
It would work on Mars, because you can reasonably outlaw combustible gases.
But, wouldn't you want to test it out on earth first before you built one on mars?
music lover since 1969
A real "nerd" would recognize that the distinction between city and town is essentially a nebulous one, and do more research to determine what the distinction would be before calling something an "elementary mistake" or labeling people they don't know a "sensationalist manipulator".
For example, in the US, the designation of "city" is controlled by state laws, and as such is determined by any of a number of factors, such as type of government or incorporation status of the community. Vermont has nine cities, the smallest of which has fewer than 3000 people.
At just one percent of glass, ETFE is described as 99 percent nothing.
Then why didn't they name it "Congress"?
Because unlike Congress ETFE is transparent.
Mark S Twitter/AIM/Skype:ekivemark B: http://ekive.blogspot.com
I'm not a mechanical engineer, but I have built most of an airplane and studied a lot of aerodynamics in the process. The one thing I can say for certain is that ETFE cannot withstand a wind of 180mph, nor can any other "material". Materials don't withstand forces. Structures do. I can stick a cube of this stuff on the nose of an SR-71 and claim it survives Mach 4.5. Or I can make a sheet so thin that it comes apart in a slight breeze.
The statement you quoted is quite as meaningless as you surmised.
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Not on your life my Hindu friend.
City = Settlement + 3 ore + 2 wheat