Sustainable Systems and Nuclear Energy

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GeoModder
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Sustainable Systems and Nuclear Energy

Post by GeoModder »

NOMAD wrote:
ed_montague wrote: as for hairy eatable things, the list could include deer, bears, mouse, buffalo ( very hairy) and other mammals as well.

as for a hunter society, I don't they would be picky ( except if the spider were HUGH)
With 25 billion people roaming around Earth (circa 2160), I have a hard time imagining too many other hairy edible things running loose in reserves or something...
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Re: Some questions about outsider

Post by Michael »

farming worlds maybe?
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Re: Some questions about outsider

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Michael wrote:farming worlds maybe?
Farming worlds? :lol:
Mars and Alpha are out. Proxima too cold. Esperanza too young a colony. Perhaps Aldea has land set aside for wildlife preserves.
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Re: Some questions about outsider

Post by Mr Bojangles »

GeoModder wrote:
Michael wrote:farming worlds maybe?
Farming worlds? :lol:
Mars and Alpha are out. Proxima too cold. Esperanza too young a colony. Perhaps Aldea has land set aside for wildlife preserves.
I thought that humans on Earth lived in massive arcologies? Not sure why I'm thinking that (maybe it was a passing mention in the forum), but it would make sense when you have 25 billion people on a single planet. Self-contained arcologies would be one of the better ways to make use of limited space and resources. Everyone could live in a relatively small number of huge cities (the size of Tokyo or NYC, with miles-high skyscrapers, but orders of magnitude more efficient), thereby freeing up vast tracts of land to be used for farming.

There's a good chance that Earth is the breadbasket of the Six Worlds.

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Re: Some questions about outsider

Post by ed_montague »

Mr Bojangles wrote:
GeoModder wrote:
Michael wrote:farming worlds maybe?
Farming worlds? :lol:
Mars and Alpha are out. Proxima too cold. Esperanza too young a colony. Perhaps Aldea has land set aside for wildlife preserves.
I thought that humans on Earth lived in massive arcologies? Not sure why I'm thinking that (maybe it was a passing mention in the forum), but it would make sense when you have 25 billion people on a single planet. Self-contained arcologies would be one of the better ways to make use of limited space and resources. Everyone could live in a relatively small number of huge cities (the size of Tokyo or NYC, with miles-high skyscrapers, but orders of magnitude more efficient), thereby freeing up vast tracts of land to be used for farming.

There's a good chance that Earth is the breadbasket of the Six Worlds.
Aw. There goes the idyllic rural lifestyle. Something of a shame, no? (Of course, you've got to have people tending to the farms and stuff, which preserves some hope for good ol' country living.)
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Re: Some questions about outsider

Post by Absalom »

Michael wrote:farming worlds maybe?
Ha, funny! No, farming stations perhaps, but this isn't some massive, sprawling setting like WH40k, so for Terran-space farming worlds (with the exception of Earth itself) seem unlikely. Even with stations, I find it easier to imagine zoo stations than to imagine stations dedicated to feeding planets, most of their output would probably be directed to other stations (you have to do something with organic wastes anyways, so it's simply a matter of efficiency for any large stations to have dedicated green house facilities).

The Loroi (and maybe the Umiak, though there's no available info on the interior of their space) have at least one, but that was developed AFTER they obtained FTL, and is accompanied by a natural choice for a high-population world.
Mr Bojangles wrote:I thought that humans on Earth lived in massive arcologies?
I wouldn't expect them to all be massive (it's quite possible that most of the INDIVIDUAL BUILDINGS considered arcologies wouldn't even cover half a square mile, since the arcology concept applies just as easily to small geographical areas as to discrete buildings), but arcologies do seem like a logical result of our current trends towards urbanization.
Mr Bojangles wrote:Not sure why I'm thinking that (maybe it was a passing mention in the forum), but it would make sense when you have 25 billion people on a single planet. Self-contained arcologies would be one of the better ways to make use of limited space and resources.
Space isn't as limited as it's often thought, we could reasonably house the entire current population of the planet in an area the size of Texas if we spent the time and resources to make it work (it's mostly an infrastructure issue, but you'd also have to design & build the actual buildings).

Energy is a slightly different issue right now, but by the time of Outsider we presumably have affordable fusion (and if we don't, then we do have the space industry required for affordable solar-power-satelites).

The REAL reason is convenience: the biggest single reason why we have mostly been living spread out is need: most of us needed to be within walking distance of farmable land, and drinkable water (or at least water that could be made drinkable). That severely restricted sustainable population densities during most periods of time (consider Rome during it's heyday: it was large enough that it required grain shipments from elsewhere, otherwise there would be severe famine). With modern technology these issues are no longer real issues, and thus convenience, cost, and variety become the dominating factors over decades and centuries.
Mr Bojangles wrote:Everyone could live in a relatively small number of huge cities (the size of Tokyo or NYC, with miles-high skyscrapers, but orders of magnitude more efficient), thereby freeing up vast tracts of land to be used for farming.
Miles-high skyscrapers probably aren't common. For places like Tokyo & NYC they may seem natural paths forward, but Tokyo is on a high-population island and thus governed by special circumstances (and also has a tendency to build artificial islands when it wants to grow), and NYC is currently overrated because people haven't fully adjusted their analysis to modern technology (even a few decades ago, wanting to get into NYC certainly made sense, but with telepresence outlying areas, and even areas on the other side of the country, make more sense because they're cheaper). I expect that there will be a number of very large cities (with many modern second or third tier cities having become first-tier cities), and a very large number of ranches/rural-farms/farming-villages, with a comparatively small number of intermediate cities in the low-population areas (the Dakotas seem a likely example for intermediate cities).
Mr Bojangles wrote:There's a good chance that Earth is the breadbasket of the Six Worlds.
Almost guaranteed.
ed_montague wrote:Aw. There goes the idyllic rural lifestyle. Something of a shame, no? (Of course, you've got to have people tending to the farms and stuff, which preserves some hope for good ol' country living.)
The rural lifestyle would indeed still be around, but how many people (at least in America & western Europe) have even experienced it? Most of you (I've lived in the country side, where the nearest town was indeed small, and the nearest after that was so small that it was often refered to in conjunction with another nearby town; it was mostly notable as a 'speed trap') have probably only experienced suburban living, or maybe living in a small town.

To put it another way, how many of you have seen a coyote (or regional equivalent) rolling a watermelon across the road, with at most three houses within shouting distance, and less than two dozen within sight?

Experience with the rural lifestyle (at least in the West) is primarily confined to the older generations.

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Re: Some questions about outsider

Post by ed_montague »

Absalom wrote: To put it another way, how many of you have seen a coyote (or regional equivalent) rolling a watermelon across the road, with at most three houses within shouting distance, and less than two dozen within sight?

Experience with the rural lifestyle (at least in the West) is primarily confined to the older generations.
I grew up with no more than three houses within shouting distance, probably a dozen or so within sight (if "across a mile-wide river" counts as "within sight"). Never got to see a local animal rolling fruit down the road, although there was plenty other wildlife hanging around. So...yeah.

Problem is, with the responsibilities of life and all that, living out in the middle of nowhere isn't really always practical. Much easier to live 15 minutes away from three supermarkets and a shopping mall.
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Re: Some questions about outsider

Post by Mr Bojangles »

ed_montague wrote: Aw. There goes the idyllic rural lifestyle. Something of a shame, no? (Of course, you've got to have people tending to the farms and stuff, which preserves some hope for good ol' country living.)
To feed 25 billion-plus people, I imagine massive automation and controlled conditions for food growth. I'm envisioning aircraft carrier-sized aero-/hydroponics farms tended to by robots. On the other hand, all those people would need employment, and you'd need lots of farms to meet demand.

As for good ol' country living, well, who's to say the population hasn't become incredibly agoraphobic, à la The Caves of Steel? But, if everyone lives in kilometers-high arcologies, what land isn't being farmed would likely be preserved. I would imagine camping would still be a possibility.

This makes me curious. Just how do humans live on Outsider Earth? There isn't much info in the Insider.

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Re: Some questions about outsider

Post by ed_montague »

junk wrote:
Mr Bojangles wrote:
ed_montague wrote: Aw. There goes the idyllic rural lifestyle. Something of a shame, no? (Of course, you've got to have people tending to the farms and stuff, which preserves some hope for good ol' country living.)
To feed 25 billion-plus people, I imagine massive automation and controlled conditions for food growth. I'm envisioning aircraft carrier-sized aero-/hydroponics farms tended to by robots. On the other hand, all those people would need employment, and you'd need lots of farms to meet demand.

As for good ol' country living, well, who's to say the population hasn't become incredibly agoraphobic, à la The Caves of Steel? But, if everyone lives in kilometers-high arcologies, what land isn't being farmed would likely be preserved. I would imagine camping would still be a possibility.

This makes me curious. Just how do humans live on Outsider Earth? There isn't much info in the Insider.
You technically don't need employment for those people. You just need to keep them busy. There's a lot of ways how to keep a lot of people busy as long as they get their 3 meals a day and entertainment.
*ahem* *wink*

Um...hopscotch? :P
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Re: Some questions about outsider

Post by Mr Bojangles »

Absalom wrote:...a very thorough response...
Forgive me for not fully quoting you, but I wanted to avoid a wall of text.

That being said, what you say makes sense. Arcologies do not have to be huge, but my comment about size was that they would likely be vertical, rather than spread out. They could even go underground, in addition to, or rather than, going towards the sky. And as to the size of cities, that actually relates to your comment about how everyone currently living could fit into Texas. I was aware of that statistic; I was just thinking people would tend towards the nearest conurbation. But, as you said, Earth does not need to become a WH40K hiveworld.

After typing my earlier comment, I had thought that what it really boiled down to was efficiency. That's a big problem we deal with now. Relatively inefficient production, inefficient distribution, and inefficient reclamation of material necessities, energy and waste. I think this is the ultimate gist of your response. By tightening up loose ends, and improving upon our communications networks, a world with the distribution you describe would be possible. Likely even preferable.

If I misinterpreted what you said, or left anything important, my apologies. But, just the same, thank you. I recently joined these forums for the conversations, and it seems that I'm getting it. :)

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Re: Some questions about outsider

Post by Mr Bojangles »

junk wrote: You technically don't need employment for those people. You just need to keep them busy. There's a lot of ways how to keep a lot of people busy as long as they get their 3 meals a day and entertainment.
You are right, but that was exactly what I was thinking. Not about employment, but as you said: you need to keep people busy, and gainful employment is a pretty common way of doing that. (I'm assuming employment would be gainful; I don't think Outsider humans have achieved a Star Trek-like world just yet).

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Re: Some questions about outsider

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junk wrote:You technically don't need employment for those people. You just need to keep them busy. There's a lot of ways how to keep a lot of people busy as long as they get their 3 meals a day and entertainment.
Theoretically. Pratically pretty sure this will result in angry masses. "We are the 99,99%" anyone?
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Re: Some questions about outsider

Post by ed_montague »

Trantor wrote:
junk wrote:You technically don't need employment for those people. You just need to keep them busy. There's a lot of ways how to keep a lot of people busy as long as they get their 3 meals a day and entertainment.
Theoretically. Pratically pretty sure this will result in angry masses. "We are the 99,99%" anyone?
At least they're busy. Rioting in the streets is better than sitting at home in front of the boob tube, right?

...right?
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Re: Some questions about outsider

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Another method of feeding the world would be upping crop efficiency.

Prior to the Green Revolution it was imagined that the world of the year 2000 onwards would be one of war and famine. As it stands, not only did our population explode far outside what early predictions indicated, so too do our food production capabilities.

Take a gander at this graph.

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That should illustrate just how magnificently we've upped crop yields in wheat production alone. Granted, there are regions where the Green Revolution didn't have as marked an effect such as Africa.

If we continue the trend in addition to automating farms, aquaculture, and new techniques that I can't even begin to fathom, we should easily be able to feed 25 billion people. This is ignoring the development of crops that could handle soils that are today generally regarded as too poor to bother farming with.

Couple that with increasing population densities in cities, and I imagine the Earth of the future looks much the same. The cities are denser, there may be some extra land set aside for farming, but overall, much the same.
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Re: Some questions about outsider

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ed_montague wrote:
Trantor wrote:
junk wrote:You technically don't need employment for those people. You just need to keep them busy. There's a lot of ways how to keep a lot of people busy as long as they get their 3 meals a day and entertainment.
Theoretically. Pratically pretty sure this will result in angry masses. "We are the 99,99%" anyone?
At least they're busy. Rioting in the streets is better than sitting at home in front of the boob tube, right?

...right?
Hehe. Staged riots for controlled steam-off? Could work.

Of course, in the long run a system which values humans over capital would be safer for everyone. But that means to overcome our current turbo-capitalism.
sapere aude.

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Re: Some questions about outsider

Post by Mr Bojangles »

Razor One wrote:Another method of feeding the world would be upping crop efficiency.

Prior to the Green Revolution it was imagined that the world of the year 2000 onwards would be one of war and famine. As it stands, not only did our population explode far outside what early predictions indicated, so too do our food production capabilities.

Take a gander at this graph.

Image

That should illustrate just how magnificently we've upped crop yields in wheat production alone. Granted, there are regions where the Green Revolution didn't have as marked an effect such as Africa.

If we continue the trend in addition to automating farms, aquaculture, and new techniques that I can't even begin to fathom, we should easily be able to feed 25 billion people. This is ignoring the development of crops that could handle soils that are today generally regarded as too poor to bother farming with.

Couple that with increasing population densities in cities, and I imagine the Earth of the future looks much the same. The cities are denser, there may be some extra land set aside for farming, but overall, much the same.
This. This is what I was trying to get at. Efficiency is key. In production, distribution, and reclamation. And while I knew the productive capacity of modern farms was large, I didn't realize it was quite as large as that graph indicates. But, a Google search shows that yields have indeed significantly increased over the last sixty years.

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Re: Some questions about outsider

Post by fredgiblet »

Trantor wrote:Theoretically. Pratically pretty sure this will result in angry masses. "We are the 99,99%" anyone?
If we've reached a economic singularity then there's no reason that "unemployed" must mean "living in a box eating dry ramen".
Razor One wrote:Another method of feeding the world would be upping crop efficiency.
Of course the concern there is how much can you sustainably increase efficiency.

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Re: Some questions about outsider

Post by Absalom »

Post of doom!
ed_montague wrote:I grew up with no more than three houses within shouting distance, probably a dozen or so within sight (if "across a mile-wide river" counts as "within sight").
Yes, it does. I myself was thinking of various houses on distant hills.
ed_montague wrote:Never got to see a local animal rolling fruit down the road, although there was plenty other wildlife hanging around. So...yeah.
Yeah, it was kinda surreal. It was also the first time that any of us had seen a fat coyote (we initially thought it was a weird looking dog). The thought of a coyote that wasn't starving (or even that most of them were) had never crossed our minds.
Mr Bojangles wrote:
ed_montague wrote: Aw. There goes the idyllic rural lifestyle. Something of a shame, no? (Of course, you've got to have people tending to the farms and stuff, which preserves some hope for good ol' country living.)
To feed 25 billion-plus people, I imagine massive automation and controlled conditions for food growth. I'm envisioning aircraft carrier-sized aero-/hydroponics farms tended to by robots.
You'll certainly see some of those, but I imagine they'd mostly exist on orbital stations. No, for primary crops we'd still use in-dirt open-air farming, maybe with strong nets to catch hail in some regions (it's cheaper, and thus more practical). The equipment would most likely be towed, likely by some sort of tractor (that way if you have an equipment failure, then you can either pull the equipment out with the tractor, or swap the tractor out with another one, the later of which you can't do with a 'trolly car' system). That having been said, the tractors themselves could be electrically powered, and modern-production tractors are already mostly automated (they even drive themselves). There exist big 'walking' watering arm thingies (I don't know the proper name) in some fields here, and the idea of adapting that basic idea to provide in-the-field power instead of water doesn't sound too unlikely to me. Additionally, the hinge-point would almost require the arm to be removable too, so probably the only fixed infrastructure would be a powerline, and a tower to hook the arm onto.

Honestly, most of the people working agriculture are harvesting, just about everything else is already done by towed equipment. Even with harvesting, it's mostly just for grocery-store produce. They have these giant 'infinite finger' contraptions that they can pull through just about any tree or bush: the fruit gets caught between two of the fingers, pulling it loose; it then falls onto some sort of netting at the bottom of the tree/bush, where it gets collected. Unfortunately the fruit gets damaged in the process, and customers don't like to buy damaged fruit (they worry that it's gone bad), so it's only used for juice & such.
Mr Bojangles wrote:On the other hand, all those people would need employment, and you'd need lots of farms to meet demand.
Harrah used to be the 'blackberry capital' of Okahoma, but a few decades ago it dried up because none of the locals wanted to go picking in the fields anymore. My point? Most people want cushy inside jobs, not outside jobs. Farming is not a good way to get your population working.
Mr Bojangles wrote:That being said, what you say makes sense. Arcologies do not have to be huge, but my comment about size was that they would likely be vertical, rather than spread out. They could even go underground, in addition to, or rather than, going towards the sky.
I, in turn, was mostly pointing out that 'individual arcologies' would likely be groupings of buildings, likely even with different owners, rather than a single building. The points mesh, and I think do so pretty well.
Mr Bojangles wrote:And as to the size of cities, that actually relates to your comment about how everyone currently living could fit into Texas. I was aware of that statistic; I was just thinking people would tend towards the nearest conurbation.
Likely enough, but it's also something that would lessen over time. In 100 years Calcutta may be truely immense, but in 200 years you'll see a smaller Calcutta (or rather, smaller than Calcutta in 100 years), with distant but linked cities of a comparable size scattered around it's surrounding area (note: I just choose Calcutta because I know it's name, if it isn't already big then that probably won't change much).
Mr Bojangles wrote:After typing my earlier comment, I had thought that what it really boiled down to was efficiency. That's a big problem we deal with now. Relatively inefficient production, inefficient distribution, and inefficient reclamation of material necessities, energy and waste. I think this is the ultimate gist of your response.
You're partially wrong: after a certain point, you don't realistically get additional economies of scale. Thus, after a certain point, there isn't a lot of reason to increase density, since it starts becoming a cost instead (which was my point with NYC). At the same time, you're right that efficiencies of scale do keep going for a while. I was basically saying that we'll see cities that are simultaneously huge & dense, but we'll also see a lot of them, because efficiencies don't always scale with infinity.
Mr Bojangles wrote:By tightening up loose ends, and improving upon our communications networks, a world with the distribution you describe would be possible. Likely even preferable.
Indeed, something that I was getting at (but not actually saying) is that dense populations somewhat inevitably spawn diversification. By my understanding, Lubock, Texas (note: I may have misspelled that) is a good example. It's a city out in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by fields, but has a respectable population, and as a result the surrounding area has more services available through Lubock than if the population had a more uniform dispersal: the trait of being densely populated provides economies of business, since you can easily get away with e.g. 3 grocery stores that have a large selection instead of 20 that have a small selection.
Mr Bojangles wrote:If I misinterpreted what you said, or left anything important, my apologies. But, just the same, thank you. I recently joined these forums for the conversations, and it seems that I'm getting it. :)
No problem.
Razor One wrote:That should illustrate just how magnificently we've upped crop yields in wheat production alone. Granted, there are regions where the Green Revolution didn't have as marked an effect such as Africa.
Also Australia. Apparently, most of Australia's land has pre-Aboriginal salt problems.
Razor One wrote:If we continue the trend in addition to automating farms, aquaculture, and new techniques that I can't even begin to fathom, we should easily be able to feed 25 billion people. This is ignoring the development of crops that could handle soils that are today generally regarded as too poor to bother farming with.
I think that aquaculture is probably the biggest one. Our current aquaculture practices are equivalent to hunting down thousands of deer, and herding one or two goats. Not only is it unsustainable, it's also likely to be low-yield. Geo-engineering is also likely to be a big factor. There's a massive natural infertile zone in the Pacific, that can probably be dealt with by just drawing up deeper nutrient-rich water to the surface.

As for land-based agriculture, while we can expand production once we get more drought/flood/salt -tolerant plants (this will, in fact, be the first genuinely useful thing that genetic engineering does for us: it's current impact is actually very small, since it's just been aimed against areas with 'push-back', like crop pests), I actually expect better land-management and improved fertilization practices to produce more gain, I expect genegineering to mostly maintain our current land-use.
Trantor wrote:Of course, in the long run a system which values humans over capital would be safer for everyone. But that means to overcome our current turbo-capitalism.
I'd call it bean-counter capitalism: gets closer to where I think the problem is. Lots of companies are expected to grow their profits infinitely, because the investors don't understand the market (and because the bosses only give raises & bonuses for more profits, and this, and that...). This, suffice to say, causes problems due to it's impossibility (only governments can pull this off, and that's called 'inflation').
Mr Bojangles wrote:This. This is what I was trying to get at. Efficiency is key. In production, distribution, and reclamation. And while I knew the productive capacity of modern farms was large, I didn't realize it was quite as large as that graph indicates. But, a Google search shows that yields have indeed significantly increased over the last sixty years.
Yeah, mostly through improved crop strains. Unfortunately, some crops (the pre-Stalin Russian farmers had a wonderful cold-resistant wheat that is no longer known to exist) have disappeared, much of the US production is linked to unsustainable use of fertilizers & pesticides, and the primary varieties are few in number, causing worries about crop diseases. Crop 'breeders' are trying to deal with that last problem (and some of them with the second problem, and some other folks with the first problem) before it becomes a threat.
fredgiblet wrote:
Trantor wrote:Theoretically. Pratically pretty sure this will result in angry masses. "We are the 99,99%" anyone?
If we've reached a economic singularity then there's no reason that "unemployed" must mean "living in a box eating dry ramen".
The only general-purpose meaning of singularity that I know of is "a point beyond which we can't make predictions". Which kind of 'economic singularity' did you mean, one related to production? I think we've long since passed that point, and that the current problem is mostly systemic (unrealistic expectations, people gaming the system, fallout from those two, etc.).
fredgiblet wrote:
Razor One wrote:Another method of feeding the world would be upping crop efficiency.
Of course the concern there is how much can you sustainably increase efficiency.
Terra Praeta looks like part of the answer, since it produces long-term fertility improvements. Perennial crops (perennial wheat, etc.) are another one, since they create much more impressive root systems.

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Re: Some questions about outsider

Post by Mr Bojangles »

Absalom wrote:...wow...
That was an impressive response. I can only try to respond to it cogently, and hope I hit on the relevant points...

To farm automation: I am indeed aware of the fact that modern farms are already heavily automated. I have seen those walking watering frames and self-driving combines when driving through the Midwest. Frankly, the scale of it all was rather awe-inspiring. My thought was that by the late 22nd Century, that automation would be taken much further, especially with such a large population to feed.

To harvesting: Yup, people definitely prefer cushy, air-conditioned office jobs to doing heavy labor outdoors in the elements. I know I do. My point was mostly about "keeping people busy." Economics is not my field of understanding, and I have no idea how one would setup an economy that could support 25 billion people.

To arcologies: The points do mesh, and I think in the future, arcologies of the types you and I describe will exist. Where they will be used will depend on the people and what is needed.

To efficiency: You are right, things can only scale so far. I did not mean to imply things could scale ad infinitum, or even necessarily sustainably. I only meant to say that in order to sustain that many people on a single planet, your production, distribution and reclamation systems would need to be as efficient as possible. Certainly more efficient than they are today.

To crop yields: I didn't know about such a cold-resistant strain of wheat existing, let alone that pre-Stalin Russian farmers produced it. I was given to understand, though, that crop production centered around only a relative handful of different strains. As you pointed out, disease is a serious concern.

To "economic singularity": I must also admit to being at a loss as to how to interpret that.

Overall, I think what we can take from this are two things - one, that I should not be a central planner of economies, or farming systems; and two, I should perhaps be more expository with my comments. "Do not fear the wall of text," as it were.

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Re: Some questions about outsider

Post by Trantor »

fredgiblet wrote:
Trantor wrote:Theoretically. Pratically pretty sure this will result in angry masses. "We are the 99,99%" anyone?
If we've reached a economic singularity then there's no reason that "unemployed" must mean "living in a box eating dry ramen".
Um, never heard of that over here. Can you please explain with a few words?

At large, with a population of >25 billion and our capitalistic system, i can only imagine a dystopian future. -> "Soylent Green is People!"
sapere aude.

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