Veeky Forums, what's your opinion on planet-wide cities or ecumenopolises/ecumenopoleis? Do you like them...

>what's your opinion on planet-wide cities or ecumenopolises/ecumenopoleis?
It's an interesting sci-fi setting.

>Do you like them?
They're alright. Personally I would not want to live in one because they are usually associated with dystopia, but there wouldn't be much difference between a giant spaceship city and a city-planet except scale. You're going to be indoors all the time anyway.

>Do you think they're possible at all or just a sci-fi pipe dream?
Current manufacturing and power generation methods are incapable of supporting all required infrastructure. If you solved those problems, you'd have to solve logistics issues of food, water, waste, and waste heat. A city planet would be viable only in the cases of:
1) technical ability to create, maintain, and supply the infrastructure. A good REASON to have such a planet is secondary, but you could easily contrive one. For example, you would NEED a completely artificial arcology on inhospitable planets like Mars. Added bonus: Mars has no geological activity.
2) extreme population size. Exponential population growth is NOT a given.
3) lack of accessibility to off-world locations, including artificial space habitats. Easier to justify, but if you got past point 1, it seems like creation of space habitats could be viable.

Taken together, it makes the most sense to have a planet-wide city if it was built by advances precursors (same race, different race, AI, etc) and inhabited by people who had little ability to recreate the technology and reproduced quickly and consistently. So, the grim darkness of 40k is probably the most sensible setting to have planet-cities.

Every environment is going to have its hazards, creepy crawlers, and other concerns. Not even living out in vacuum is going to stop that.

To a pure city dweller the natural environment is the city. It's just a matter of perception. Plenty of city dwellers don't care for your concept of "natural environments" outside of a once a season camping trip in the nearby park.

>the worst concerns are someone breaking my window
Except he then climbs through your broken window with the rest of his melanin-enriched buddies and they proceed to murder you for your TV, all while you can do nothing because of restrictive urban gun laws (which didn't seem to stop your attackers from being armed).

probably Asians

You mean like in blame! ?

Isn't the megastructure world there like as large as the entire solar system, with the sun in the centre powering it.

But in Blame! most of the solar system has already been terraformed to an extent, and the citizens of the megastructure all have had centuries if not millenia to make adaptations to their new dyson sphere habitat. It's basically large exceeded the size and scope of what you'd consider an ecumenopolis, while at the same time lacking the social aspects and challenges that an ecumenopolis would provide. The science and logistic issues are nonexistent since the Builders are hyper-efficient and use a level of technology that realistically can't be achieved anytime soon.

When you have machines that can make a room the size of Jupiter, you're not talking about ecumenopolis anymore, it's a completely different beast.

they would heavily depend on constant shipments of food and resources

a planet-wide city that's currently under blockade could be an interesting mid-apocalypse setting

trees are also natural lightning rods that can kill if you hide under them during a storm.
This is true, but it can be solved with creative bedding. I've never had to deal with the issue, but rope beds and rubber-sealed mattresses exist.
It's mainly just a pain to clear them out and then move a new mattress in.
/k/ go home. I'm not interested in your agenda.
Repealing Stop and Frisk was a mistake.

I just love the fact it's so big and dystopic. Fucking searching a maze the size of the solar system for someone, it's a cool concept for MC.

Why stop at everyone having guns?

Let's give everyone the same rights as everyone else. Everyone can be judge, jury and executioner. Let's usher in a new age of the human condition, and destroy ourselves like we really mean it.

It's a very cool concept, and would make for nice freeform campaign material if a GM had an interested group. At the same time however a better example of an ecumenopolis would probably be Coruscant from Star Wars.

Alternatively Blame's prequel NOiSE does have an ecumenopolis, and it's closer to Coruscant while maintaining the same dystopian feel, but the strong focus on AI and electronic consciousness makes the ecumenopolis more of a setting device rather than a focus point.

It does a very nice job of conveying what a sci-fi Blighttown might be like though.

Guys
What if
Instead of a Planet-wide city
Get this
It's a Planet-wide small town

There was a great short story about a planet-spanning city. A man was informed his apartment was too large for a single occupant (it could be made to fit three families). He happened to use that space to host the last patch of grass on earth, the last rabbit and the last turtle. He touched and then burned the grass, pet the rabbit and snapped its neck, stroked the turtle's shell and poisoned it with cyanide, and then committed suicide.

How would that work? Like the entire planet has the aesthetic of a small town?

>it's a small town that you can never leave

How will you get rid off all that heat?

lapresse.ca/la-voix-de-lest/actualites/201607/15/01-5001519-horreur-au-parc-miner.php

Actually happened to one of my colleagues.

>French
Quebec is a joke

What's funny is the mangaka admitted he barely knows how to draw character faces and human anatomy, write characters, and how to do the plot and pacing, even symbolism. He's just really fucking ridiculously good at drawing sci-fi landscapes and their structures. It's a baller of a setting, and really more like an artbook than a manga almost, what with the silent protagonist and huge areas devoid of any life or interaction.

It would be hard to make a campaign for it, but the virtual world, which the mangaka never really showed or expanded upon, might make things easier. You could have it as a meeting point with other people, and then go into the real world looking for remnants of humans.
>So do you make a right or a left at this junction user?
>right
>Ok, you walk 5 light years and find a dead end.

Is one trillion people a good population estimate for an ecumenopolis? I think Coruscant has about that much, but don't quote me on that.

I would agree that speaking french in North America has its drawbacks. On the plus side, it separates idiots from those who are able to learn english.

IIRC in a book called Capital about a planet-sized city they were pushing 4.5 trillion but hadn't used the oceans for anything more than food

yeah, basically. Some areas are more densely packed with buildings and others are spaced far apart, with woods and farms between homes, but it all has that 50's American small town aesthetic wherever you go.

Shit, now I wanna worldbuild

Is terra in 40k how a real city wide spanning city would be? A complete mess of layers upon layers of structures and people.

Not like I'd expect anything else from an architecture student/drafter to be honest. In Blame! Killy is the device and the journey through the Megastructure is the heart of the matter. In NOiSE the City is the device and not!Sanakan's investigation into corruption is the heart of the matter.

A campaign is better set in the City rather than in the Megastructure proper, given that the City actually has more people, a proper conflict between the Proto-Silicon Life/ Proto-Safeguard, and some semblance of a society.

>despite being generally pleasant and full of nice friendly people, you just can't shake the feeling that the whole planet is hiding something

>Planet wide*

Well, that would give you a population density similar to New York City, with 2,000 people per square kilometer.

But the thing is, most New Yorkers live in the boroughs. If you want to see a modern city where everyone lives in the city, look at Shanghai, with a population density of 13,000 per square kilometer.

That would give you about 6.5 trillion people. And since "ecumenopolis" worlds tend to have buildings that are uniformly kilometer high or higher, even that density would make things pretty sparse unless there were large uninhabited parts of the world.

No. It isn't. A "real" ecumenopolis wouldn't even reach the point of the first "layer" before it starts running into issues, whether those are logistic, scientific, or social issues. You'd need 40k Handwave Tech in order to make something like that.

Yes.

To a depth of about 20 miles.

There are people down there who haven't heard of the Emperor, the Imperium or that the Age of Strife is over.

You want to know what happens to your nation in 40k? It got paved over. And there ware still people(?) living there.

I imagine large parts of the planet would be used for storage and factories. Maybe they'd be fully automated or have a comparatively sparse population.

Still, i think the network world or whatever they called the virtual world would make for a nice hub spot. Presumably you could download yourselves into vessels to accomplish an physical tasks. Could also make for some nice mindfuck

>heat reasons
SW Universe has climate control... Yes, pure bullshit... but we are traveling on the speed of light here.

The concept is sound, the actual lore prevents it unfortunately. The Netsphere proper by Killy's time is essentially locked out, with the core AI slowly losing access to even hook up with the actual humans still living in the Megastructure. By the time Sanakan dies again, the Netsphere is revealed proper, and it's essentially a wasteland with babies in it.

Part of the irony behind the Silicon Life trying to reclaim the Netsphere is largely that there's actually nothing left to reclaim. The majority of the humans in the Megastructure will never be able to breed the genetic code necessary in order to access the Netsphere again, and the gene that Killy possesses is actually a kill switch rather than an access code.

I don't like them, but yeah. They'd be possible with sufficiently advanced tech. Algae vats, hydroponic farms, cultured proteins for sustenance.

Dealing with the heat wouldn't be too bad as long as it was taken into account from the start. It'd lead to some amazing HVAC and heating/cooling setups.

Star Wars is science fantasy. I assumed that, despite the image, OP was angling for a more realistic representation. Otherwise, why would he even make the thread?
>...
>...
Why are you typing like this?

really? It's been years since I read it, and I did it mostly in one go so I missed a lot. I thought the last frames of the baby / pregnant girl or whatever floating to the top of the sea (from underneath) was symbolic of entering the netsphere?

>idiots from those who are able to learn english.
in the 'states i can tell you those groups are not mutually exclusive

>The spaceport blends in with the area, it's advanced tech hidden under a woodlike material and a simple building structure, since travel to the planet is relatively unheard of and travel from it is even rarer
>News is still printed on paper and delivered by youths on a paper route
>There are no factories anywhere on the planet, even though there seem to be mass-produced products on the shelves of mom and pop shops
>There are mom and pop shops at every crossroad, no exceptions, and they are always on the corner that would be the top right if you faced north
>All of the businesses are locally owned, and no corporations or companies own a business or property there, not even the hyperaggressive types that have a foothold on every civilized planet
>The suburban areas have near-identical houses, and each family has a father, a mother, a son, and a daughter, no more, no less.
>Rural areas have larger homes with larger families, who seem to be considered a higher class of citizen than the suburban citizens
>There is a strict curfew, the punishment unknown

Pregnant girl was offed, gave her crystal embryo to Killy. Killy basically just let the baby go free into space so the Builders could detect it.

The baby is the gene code set to tell the Builders that they can finally stop. Killy releases it as job complete. The epilogue chapters confirm that essentially nothing changed, except Killy isn't as trigger happy anymore, and Silicon Life are the new hope for humanity as they drift off into deeper space. The Safeguards continue to kill indiscriminately mostly because their protocols aren't changed by the gene activator, only the Builders are.

The driving reason apparently for the Authority to stop the Builders is because their excessive construction protocol is actually weakening the network, and contributed to why the Authority has been steadily losing control in the entire Megastructure as well as why the Authority has basically no say over the Safeguards.

Because Killy himself is Safeguard, presumably he could access the Netsphere, but he's never actually shown to, though he can establish communications with the Authority in the Netsphere without hassle.

>20 miles depth

20 miles/30 km is well into the lower crust where rocks are ductile

HVAC is just moving heat around. If the entire planet is BUA then you don't have a heat sink anymore so HVAC doesn't work.

I had a paper by a German researcher from around 2008 that I can't find right now which pointed out that even if we fix global warming, increasing heat output as the world modernized is going to be a problem even if it's all cannon neautral

Who says no trees?
Cities can have greenery throughout.

That's all fine and dandy.

They built up as well.

Who the fuck knows where the ground level should be by this point with nothing to measure it by.

The "problem" is very simple from the scientific perspective. If the heat loss from Earth into space is not at a sufficient rate to counter the amount of heat generated on Earth from conversation of other forms of energy, then naturally over time heat accumulates on the planet. A thicker atmosphere makes it easier to insulate the planet, thus decreasing the rate of heat lost to space, but would be counterproductive to the purpose of controlling heat in the planet's environment.

Of course it's a simplification of the problem's full scope, but it's a nice way to see the problem in terms of a simple system with system parameters.

user, I might be wrong but I think he meant that with the rocks being ductile you wouldn't have a good foundation to build on to begin with.

Woah there soccer mom. Don't make this a "This extremes and this other extreme are the only options and nothing in between" argument.

The issue of the Astronomical Journal that came out on Wednesday purports to show evidence of stellar engineering.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but as I'm familiar with it, the heat lost from satellites into space is very low due to the lack of molecules to transfer heat into. Hence all the radiators to increase surface area. Would I be correct in assuming the same applies to planetary bodies, and thus, by building skycrapers like the intestinal villus, surface area of the planet could be increased to aid in radiation of heat?

Or does increasing the surface area of the physical landmass do nothing, since it's the surface area of the planet that matters?

>Hey, user, what do you see at the logical end of this path?
>Oh, just mass destruction and the genocide of humanity
>Cool, i'll take the first step towards it.

>wanting to commit genocide
Why?

So, shaman Ugh. Me think me invent fire. Keep warm. What portents say about this path?
>We all die in nuclear fire.
Me understand. Will not invent fire.

>all humans which are are applicable to get guns are of good alignment,
I see no problems with this.

>How can the net amount of entropy of the universe be massively decreased?

Concern for heat management is a highly overrated focus in "hard" sci-fi.

Thermoelectrics are getting much better, and there is promising research being done into converting heat directly into electricity without the need for a hot/cold differential.

In the end, heat is just vibration; it's the movement of particles on a particularly small scale. While we struggle to extract this energy efficiently right now, we also aren't anywhere near able to build a city-spanning city either.

Normally if we assumed that all skyscrapers and such made no net contribution to heat, then the logic is sound that the skyscrapers should count as increased surface area, if we just considered the heat transfer equation alone.

I'm not an astrophysicist mind you, but the presence of the atmosphere and its relative thickness should however make a substantial difference in terms of heat transfer. Logically, if the atmosphere is thick it could be seen as a membrane that facilitates heat transfer from outside in (capturing the sun's energy) and inside out (heat released by the Earth). What I'm not sure on however, would be the relationship of the atmosphere if you were to plot it out in terms of an equation for its effect on heat transfer. I suppose if you searched for it on google or some astrophysics textbook there might be an existing equation for it.

But in the event that skyscrapers themselves generate heat, that would add a bit of complexity to the equation, since now you have multiple sources of heat generation if you don't make the simplification that Skyscrapers and Earth are all a single variable.

So, shaman Ugh. Me think me invent fire. Keep warm. What portents say about this path?
>give everyone sharp sticks and rocks

The core has cooled maybe user?

>wanting people of a different faith to have guns
You disgust me.

>implying sky ancestor not give us right to hold sharp sticks and rocks as much as want

Fine. Kill each other.

So, shaman Ugh. Me think me invent fire. Keep warm. I do empirical testing now. What say you?
>Skylord stone tablet has all knowledge we need, you commit blasphemy, die mongrel

It's a matter of scope and necessity. For a city-wide planet to make any kind of sense, it would have to be the most practical option for the setting it's in vs, say, several smaller cities in an asteroid cluster, or a group of more reasonably populated planetoid moons orbiting a gas giant.

The Foundation Trilogy had one that made some sense: it was the capital planet of the space empire, and the entire planet and its giant city was used for dealing with bureaucracy on the scale of maybe a hundred planets. It had layers too, so the whole thing was basically one giant, round skyscraper full of politicians and bureaucrats. But, being entirely city, it had a lot of needs that could only be produced off world, and when the empire collapsed it went down super quick.

Planet-sized cities are less practical than something like the Death Star, though. You'd get more living and building space from a hollow sphere than you would across the surface, not that you couldn't also put buildings on the surface too.

Depending on how they're done, either awesome and beautiful, or awesome and terrifying.

Pics like OP? Awesome and terrifying; the world has been turned dirty and grey and the lights are so bright the world looks like it's on fire.
Mega-scale transportation lines light up the world like hundreds of glyphs, untold billions upon billions of meaningless lives pulsing through their strokes.

On the other hand, we have awesome and beautiful:
The world is criss-crossed by great circles of transit routes, but they are planned and artistic in their design; they spiral ever downward in scale, like a planetary fractal, until they coalesce into very dense but small micro-supercities; each a collection of arcologies with millions of people.
The rest of the world is nothing more than the planetary equivalent of a park; from the very highest peaks of the city-arcologies you can see other such cities on the horizon, but they are always seperate by hundreds of miles of carefully tended "wilderness".
Beyond the great arcology-clusters are smaller, lonesome arcologies, the equivalent of charming towns.

The entire world has been turned into a work of art; spiraling and graceful white stone, silver and chrome metals, and sparkling crystal glass, balanced among vast expanses of greenery and the wild.

In Star Wars' Legends continuity, Coruscant had an official population of one trillion, but that's only the people who registered for the census. Including all the transients, migrant workers, and general folk who fell through the cracks (either on purpose or by poor luck or whatever), however, it's estimated that the planet's population was probably closer to four trillion.

And as brought up, large portions of Coruscant is covered in factories, barely occupied as we saw in AotC and TCW.

Still, with the majority of the planet's skyscrapers being well over a thousand stories tall, it's probably got large swathes that are mostly uninhabited.

The second part almost sounds like you're describing various types of fungi and mold from the perspective of a very small person.

>Do you like them?

My personal idea of heaven. My favorite places to live are the huge, sprawling cities. Skyscrapers - mass transit for long distances and sidewalks and skybridges for short. I adore towers tall enough to block out the sun during all but high noon, and lights bright enough to replace the sky.

>Do you think they're possible at all or just a sci-fi pipe dream?

I would say that it's possible with a few key developments: extremely efficient materials recycling; cheap, fast, and easy interplanetary/interstellar transport (obviously the most far-fetched); effective bureaucracy.

What would be the point? Wouldn't you end up having to just import mass amounts of food? And if it's some kind of climate issue I'd presume you'd have the ability to terraform worlds as you pleased by that point.

Perhaps, an interesting way to look at it.

Can you imagine it though, user? You depart from one of the great clusters, a hundred or more thousand-story-all arcologies, home to ten million or more citizens.
You travel upon one of the great-circle routes, a singular band of high-capacity transportation, and you see thousands of miles of virgin wilderness pass underneath you in a blur.
Every so often you see a singular arcology blur past, the equivalent of a rural town, and you can even see the major-spire of one of the planetary capitols far away on the horizon, a cluster of towers a hundred times larger than your own.

>Wouldn't you end up having to just import mass amounts of food?
I imagine they'd have indoor farms.

Massive underground high-density agriculture, as well as manufacturing.

What

Virgin and wilderness are contradictory with artistic and sculpted world. After terraforming, nothing is untamed or unplanned.

Generally the mindset behind people staying on a single planet is a fear of moving into the unknown. Terraforming and space colonies tends to create a sense of isolation, so you're bound to have people who would rather stay on Earth, even if Earth begins to get crowded. A lot of the time this is dependent on many factors, like terraforming speed, the quality of life, general tech, and so forth.

If VR is plausible for instance, then for some people living in a massive city doesn't matter, and they might even see benefit to it, especially if the city's infrastructure is better set up than say, the country side, or the lunar colony, or wherever else.

Food is more of a population/nutritional content issue, but technology usually addresses this problem when it shows up in sci-fi.

Plus ambient conditions are around 700-800 C in addition to there not being anything solid to put your foundation on. Additionally you need to worry about crustal loading if you put a 30km tall building up.

No you just have what they are doing in Japan, robotic aeroponics. Vast swaths of the basements are set aside for the food needed in the buildings above.

This helps by reducing the time to table, with food moving "up the food chain".

The lowest basements grow feed and vegetables, as you go up you either have animals which feed on the grown vegetation (for the rich who don't want to eat the more common vatmeat).
On other levels you have vats fed with the feed producing a protein slurry/ hamburger meat.
Down in the sub basements you would also have your other forms of factories, both automated and manual, producing goods for the city above and the food factories around it.
As you get to ground level you start seeing shops and services.
As you go higher up the building this transforms into offices, the top levels reserved for housing , cus them views.

Is a walled garden any less wild if no gardener tends to it?

It may not be truly "virgin", but the signs of artifice are very hard to see.

Honestly by the time several generations come and go, and with a fair bit of society manipulation, the kids growing up won't know the difference. Sure they can see pictures of forests and whatnot, but how could a kid growing up in a terraformed ecumenopolis ever know what it feels like in a "real", "natural" forest versus an "artificial" forest?

>the natural environment is the city
Wow you are sheltered.

If you're going to misinterpret a post this hard, you may as well go shitpost on another board.

Yes user, many people in the world are sheltered. What of it?

>planet wide small town
>somehow everybody still knows everybody

>sheltered city dwellers

You haven't seen sheltered until you've a country bumpkin stumble into you 7eleven near the local red light district and homeless shelter 03:00 with a shocked expression in his face desperately wanting to know if this is just how things are and how people are okay with it.

Honestly, I would imagine these "wilds" to actually still be wild.

When you can pack a hundred billion people into high-density clusters of arcologies and still have 90% of the world's surface left over, you're perfectly fine leaving nature to do its thing.
Especially when all your highways are a mile high in the air and your cities are surrounded by walls.

If anything, the only "artificial" forests and such would be the proverbial margins on their super-highways, and all the greenspace in their cities.

Fuck globalism. Literally hell.

...

Oh, and I support Zeon.

Veeky Forums and /pol/ are allies. We are one

just because they brigade and derail threads enough to be part of the furniture doesn't mean they're "allies" or even liked

Imagine a world where everyone was a genetically engineered perfect hybrid of white and Asian, worshiping a unified syncretic religion blending Orthodox Christianity, Buddhism, and transhumanism, government was modeled after the Venetian aristocratic elective monarchy, and the poor had been eradicated in favor of automation.

If that sounds like hell, I just don't know what to say to you.