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nohwan27534 t1_j8h5jwm wrote

Reply to comment by SoylentRox in Would an arcology be conceivably possible? by peregrinkm

Again - space becomes the issue. You don't tend to easily make a giant fucking dome that big - screw the other stuff, structurally speaking this doesn't work well.

I've thought long and hard about this idea too, specifically in space - rather than bases on the moon or mMars, living in a Dyson swarm ish system with a acre of solar panels and a 1 mile diameter tube living space. That much solar energy will fuel about a million people, the tube could spin pretty slowly to simulate gravity, and it can be as long as needed.

But we don't have quite the strong resources for enclosing like, an 8th if NYC. It's spread around 300 square miles, and the entire state of New York has 7 million acres of farmland - and still only can grow like 30% of new Yorks food. And there's no way to just dome that shit.

It's an interesting idea. But atm we have the ability to do it, if unpleasantly, on a small scale (not just 4 people, lol), but we don't have the engineering capable of doing it on even a decent 50k sized city, really, much less a million people - and it's still not self sufficient. Even if it has enclosed and looped water, air, food, etc, it doesn't have self enclosed production of wood, plastics, fabrics, metals, industry, electronics, etc

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SoylentRox t1_j8h5omo wrote

Go check the numbers on spirulina. The math says you need a few LITERs per person of growing algae. Even if it's 10 times less efficient than that it's just not the problem you think it is.

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nohwan27534 t1_j8h6on5 wrote

Spirulina iirc is nutrient rich, but you still need calories - something a spoonful of algae isn't chock full of.

Not to mention you presumably also want to diversify your diet in other ways - waters a good idea for both aquatic plants and fish, potentially.

But this post wasn't about that. We literally do not have materials strong enough to easily dome a community this large. One of the biggest can hold like 55k people - not homes, not space for growing food, or businesses, storage, or any of the other minutia of a society, literally sitting space for bodies.

Underground and several story buildings can help magnify the usefulness of the space again, but it's still pretty impractical. It's a nice idea, it could potentially make for new city opportunities in desert or otherwise less than habitable areas, but there's not a good reason to do it, we can't do it very well, or to the degree you=e talking about, with current tech. - and even if we did force the issue, they still wouldn't be self sufficient in all ways.

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SoylentRox t1_j8hmnw5 wrote

You wouldn't use domes. Either many underground bunkers connected by tunnels with logistics transport, or many sealed surface buildings. Depending how hostile the surface is. Domes don't provide radiation or blast protection.

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nohwan27534 t1_j8jcv98 wrote

So, we'll all be mole people? Given the amount of land I already talked about, trying to put that all underground makes even less sense.

A small enclosed area propped up by the buildings themselves, would potentially make sense, you'd still be able to get sunlight for energy and growing food, it's just not that practical to do that for like a few dozen square miles. But it's a hell of a lot more practical than essentially doing exactly that but also digging out a few dozen square miles of underground territory...

As for blocking blasts - why. Radiation could be as simple as water, tbh. It's what we use in nuclear reactors NOW. Iirc a 30 foot deep pool with nuclear shit at the bottom, you'd be safe from the radiation on the surface.

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SoylentRox t1_j8jdry6 wrote

You get the energy from surface solar panels.

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nohwan27534 t1_j8jf3wn wrote

Yeeeeah, my mistake responding to you basically at all. I'm sorry.

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nohwan27534 t1_j8h85zy wrote

Looking at a calculator, 40 by 10 foot pool by 30 centimeters deep is like 11k liters, 11 cubic feet, 36 square feet. You can get around 6 to 15 grams per cubic meter per day. It's about 660 wet grams per day, 66 dried. Not really a nutrient difference, just the wet is mostly water, would be more filling.

Spirulina per 7 grams is 20 calories, about 3% of your daily salt, 2% potassium, 1% daily fiber, 8% protein, 1% vitamin c, 11% iron, 3% magnesium. Presumably 9ther shit. Doesn't have calcium, weirdly, vitamin d, b6, presumably other shit.

Let's round up to 70 for ease - you'd only have around a tenth of the calories needed, be done with protein and iron needs, everything else iffy. It's only about 10 tablespoons of slime dried out, 70 spoonfuls of spinach stuff otherwise.

Kinda the same issue with food pills - even if you can add all the daily vitamin needs in a pill, calories aren't that easy to condense. It can grow a lot faster, for sure, but it's more than a "few" liters per person, which is fine, but it's also not nearly enough to be the end all be all dietary requirements.

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SoylentRox t1_j8hmhvc wrote

You would use brighter than the sun grow lamps and genetically modify it to store calories and make b6 etc.

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nohwan27534 t1_j8jco4b wrote

And now it's being ass pulled.

Look, you're just not getting that kind of calories into that small, that fast growing a thing, and that's fine. Even lower calorie plants, aren't great - a solid carrot is still like 30 calories.

Surprisingly, these seemingly miracle foods, cures, etc generally aren't. If it's too good to be true...

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SoylentRox t1_j8jdkwn wrote

? So your argument is to compare actual biotech to late night informercials?

Ultimately your argument comes to energy. Each gram of algae can fix so much carbon as sugar per unit of time given max usable sunlight. How many grams of algae do you need to fix enough carbon to keep a human alive.

The algae has not been genetically modified to make more sugar because humans have not needed to do this yet, so I don't know why you have to resort to comparing to random scams.

To disprove my claim you would need to find at least 1 billion USD spent annually on this type of biotech. If it's not being spent this approach has not been tried, and you cannot claim it won't work.

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nohwan27534 t1_j8jeyxr wrote

Getting all this calories from a few tablespoons of material just isn't going to happen. We also don't have fucking light bulbs brighter than the God damn sun.

Besides, I've went and looked shit up, you're the one making erroneous claims and when I did the research you just shrug it off with "but i mean it COULD happen you don't know unless you can spend far more than most scientists use for research".

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