What is the in-universe reason for having entire planets 100% covered in densely-populated cities which are entirely...

Foundation has some decent fabricators, but no profitable anti-matter or total energy to mass conversion replicators. Foundation is the first example of a city planet developing exactly as you described in your post. Corsucant was a copy. And 40k has it occuring on a regular basis with Earth being more of a planet Vatican and the solar system being multi-planet italy.

It forces them to remain obedient. After all, rebellious planets won't get food.

In-universe justifications for "city worlds" are rarely provided. When justifications are offered for hyper-urbanization, it's typically an end stage of resource exhaustion and extreme pollution. As industrial processes cause ecological collapses, the population withdraws into vast arcologies. These arcologies are designed to be self-sustaining, via hydroponics or food synthesizing technologies, but become over populated due to the availability of off world food resources.

>Anyone who replies "that's how it works IRL" does not understand how far a light-year is or how much energy is needed to lift cargo into space.

None of which are relevant give FTL, anti-gravity, and unlimited/vast energy resources.

If you haven't noticed yet, the Imperium strongly dislikes and discourages self-sufficiency. No single part of it, be it institution or planet or whatever, is given the capacity to 'do it all' and they must all rely on each other to be functional, let alone successful. At least, that's the idea.

...

youtube.com/watch?v=XAJeYe-abUA

daily reminder that humans are literally 100watt space heaters and city planets would just fucking cook themselves

Why have agrarian planets when you could have orbital habitats for that?

Fostering dependence is one of the first things a successful dictator should see to doing.

It's cheaper than letting industrial bases die.
It's conspicuous consumption on a vast level.
Everything is recycled anyway, so the only food shipped in is fed to the top 1% as delicacies.
Any land has long since been overfarmed and polluted to death.
In 40K, hives were constructed in orbit and dropped onto the planet, IIRC. There comes a point where you NEED that shit.

Planets are harder to smash into other planets. It's relatively easy to bombard a planet with it's own orbital farms.

>Planets are harder to smash into other planets. It's relatively easy to bombard a planet with it's own orbital farms.

It's the primary strategy of Zion.

40K lore was meant to be almost mythical and/or surreal in its scope and abundance of extremes, like shown in Blanche's work or read on Mahabharata.

If you want to rationalize the setting, you'll need fanon:
philipsibbering.com/wh40k/03-ecopolis.shtml
>The majority of the human population within the Imperium is housed in Ecoria and this offers a very high level of security. The walls are several (10+) meters thick and the whole lot is usually buried deep under ground.
>Those dwelling within an Ecorium live a rural existence. The Ecorium as a whole functions much like a large medieval market town, where each floor is like an outlaying village made up of tenements, and each tenement run by a family. All the 'villages' (floors) can interact with other villages (floors) within their own Ecorium via the markets in the top floor.
>Each Ecorium has it's own culture and own way of doing things, the variety is astounding as each Ecorium is isolated from it neighbours, so each culture can be vastly different.
>It is usual for children of 16 years or older to be inducted. The ships that bring 'food', are actually bringing replacement carbon blocks, salt and water to replace the humans that have been removed from the artificial ecosystems system and attempt to restore balanced. Each family that is force to give up a loved one to the Imperial Guards are given a bag containing base material equal to a human being (The Imperium usually burns the dead after a war and ships the ashes to the recruiting world).

Honestly, that sounds more reasonable than many conflicts in 40K. The phosporus scarcity is an issue for terran organic life.
projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/mining.php#id--Element_Bottlenecks

Not if they had orbital elevator-sized radiators. Which I have yet to see in 40K.

No user if it's set in space it needs to be scientifically accurate otherwise it is wrongfun

Part of the issue is that a lot of high-pop worlds aren't that habitable anyways - for example, if your world is a frozen hell that only exists to mine, then you might have a billion workers and little native food production. So then the fertile world over thataway sends you food, you send minerals to the forgeworls, and the forgeworld sends both of you manufactured stuff.

This is the most 40K things I've ever heard.

Idk. Cities like New York or LA are not capable of being self-sufficient should the need arise, yet they still exist.

People like to live in cities. Cities produce culture and art, which people like. If you give people freedom of movement at all, you'll get big cities.

I'd imagine you could get away with this by using Arcologies.

The whole planet can be self-sufficient when each city is self-sufficient in and of themselves.

If that won't keep law and order, then add in brutal police state tactics like Judge Dread.

Came back to say that this was an interesting watch

>Not if they had orbital elevator-sized radiators. Which I have yet to see in 40K.
What do you think hives are for? Why do you think the surface between them is so blasted, and why they're so far apart?
They're huge heat sinks and radiators, spewing waste heat out into the environment and into space.

>phosphorus scarcity
It can be shipped in just like everything else.

Cities came about during the industrial revolution, because people wanted to live close to where all the new jobs are.
Suburbs evolved out of a desire to NOT live right next to work, and have gardens and room to move in.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_farming

a massive city need not completely discount farming

I think there's mention of large-scale elevators on Mars in Mechanicus (which, while not "good", is "good by the standards of HH" and underrated by Veeky Forums).

>into the environment and into space
except the only way it can escape to space is through infrared radiation, and the atmosphere is very good at reabsorbing and preventing it from escape

city planets dont work unless you build megastructure radiators above the atmosphere, and at that point there's not much reason to not just put your population in the structures instead tbfh

They probably do, or they have city-sized hydroponic greenhouses where specialized lamps and automated farming machines produce food for the population, or they grow food in orbital greenhouses (seeing as we never see much of orbital space around Coruscant outside of a few brief shots and the space battle during Ep3). Come on OP, use your brain just a little bit, there are much more pressing issues for a planet-city/city-planet than food.

In reality, it's completely plausible that a species with fusion power or greater (some kind of energy-cheap antimatter creating device to fuel antimatter reactors, or dyson swarms that can absorb a few % of a star's power) could easily strip-mine their solar system for the metals and minerals necessary to coat their entire home planet in miles-high mega cities. They'd actually run up against the issue of dumping heat long before they ever ran out of raw power, food, or living space, that much energy generation and that many living and dying beings would (if you filled a planet-wide city to capacity) generate enough heat to raise the surface temperature close to that of Venus or Mercury.

You would need gargantuan radiators, or you'd have to slowly boil your oceans by using them as heat sinks, or you'd have to beam that energy out into space, that or you'd simply have to not build such a gargantuan fucking city.

In all honesty, having read up a while ago on Ecumonopoli, I now assume that all those glowing orange lights are high-atmosphere/low-orbit radiators blasting Coruscant's excess heat off into space.

It's the same reason why we have cities that import food from rural areas. It's really not that different. It's just that in those other settings the technology/fantasy is advanced enough that crossing a lightyear is as easy and common as crossing the street for us.

Robots don't need food.

Indoor, environmentally controlled, highly efficient vertical farms.

It's just specialization at a scale you're unused to.

I mean, a person (or any high-order organism) is a remarkable case of specialization - you're built from billions of cells that have no way of acquiring food or oxygen without the help of (several) other cells, or of removing their own waste from the environment, or even of knowing when their current environment (oxygenation, warmth, toxicity, etc.) is dangerous to them. Yet summed together, those billions of cells interact and reproduce for sometimes many decades or even a century - though no one cell lives that long - to produce a coherent colony (creature) that is far greater than the sum of its parts.

The distinction between a single plant or animal and a galactic empire is trivial at best. Do you know how inefficient it is to have a single cell that's completely self-sufficient?

>it would still be more efficient and reliable to produce the majority of food from trash using molecular replicators.
That's a completely arbitrary advance from space travel on the technology scale - there's no proof that it could ever be reasonably done for basically any given energy input. Certainly not compared to space travel (hint: we've managed to invent one but not the other, so far).

Also, 40K is the most horrible possible example, as it is pretty much the one setting where human societies actively desire and rely upon constant reproduction, or at the very least are completely ineffective at enforcing contraception. Sensible collective decisions for organizing resource and consumption are superseded by unchecked crime, internal wars, external wars, and colonial plunder.

Yeah humans putting off heat is one issue, but long before that I think we have to worry about running out of Oxygen. I mean, think of Armageddon. Massive cities, industrial centers and in between them is barren sandy desert. They are going to have air pollution on a scale we could never imagine because they have no forests to turn CO2 back into O2. Also most of the vertical farming people have mentioned has been basically to suplement shipments from Agri-worlds and bio-recycling. That isn't enough they're going to need to farm pine trees or something for Oxygen.

>Air pollution problem.
The kinds of power necessary to construct and maintain Ecumonopoli must come from some form of nuclear or beyond power, fossil fuels being non-rapidly renewable rules them out completely. Fission probably wouldn't even cut it, fusion and above or bust. That circles back to issues of thermal pollution. Also last I had checked it's not actually decisively known whether forest soak up more heat and greenhouse gas than they generate (huge quantities of compost, dead animals, etc put heat and waste gas right back into the atmosphere).

The easiest solution for oxygen production without sending ships to icy worlds to harvest would be to simply GMO large leafed plants to become carbon guzzling oxygen farms.

>using molecular replicators.
They do not have molecular replicators. There, you're welcome.

/thread

>And 40k has it occuring on a regular basis with Earth being more of a planet Vatican and the solar system being multi-planet italy
From what i've read it looked like only 3 worlds were really built up in the Solar System.
Earth-capital city planet
Mars-biggest industrial world
Luna-huge ass fortress/space port
Wheres it mentioned that the rest of the solar system is heavily built up like the itlaian city states.

where there is demand, someone will supply it
there are obviously giant O2 factories, who are paid for by taxes
not to mention giant thermal regulation plants, also paid for at public expense

>kind of like Star Trek
It's straight out of 2000AD's resyk. Hive cities are megacities.

All of the Sol system is pretty built up - Jupiter (or the area around it at least) is home to one of the largest shipyards in the galaxy, and is actually a forge world in its own right (though admittedly one that "only" dates back to the great crusade

I read years ago an article about igniting Jupiter into a star to warm up Mars. Granted I can't remember the source but if it is true then why didn't the AdMech do it? Mars might have maintained it's ecosystem or atmosphere even after the age of strife.

In this very thread, multiple other alternatives have been mentioned, all of which make more sense than keeping all your farmland in another star system.

>why didn't the AdMech do it?
Probably hadn't been thought of at the time the first lore on Jupiter got made

And that's not something you want to test in proximity to your capital, just on principle of the thing.

Also if you want to harvest anything from Jupiter it'd be kind of annoying that it was a star

That said, a lot of Jovian colonies and stations use the radiation given off by it for power, maybe they lit it up a little bit

>having entire planets 100% covered in densely-populated cities
that's not how it works

but anyway, a dependent planet is more easy to control than an independent one I'd say

For resource recycling, it would be much more efficient to use bacteria than plants, and in most cases fungi would do a better job than bacteria.

Bacteria for gasses and mushrooms for the food and bodies--you'd have a much wider range of conditions you could perform the recycling in, wouldn't necessarily need light, and designs would focus on maximizing surface area and pretty much nothing else.

Still leaves heat as a problem, but at least there isn't any being generated by your recycling

It works in star wars because crossing the galaxy takes about as much time as a plane ride across an ocean today. Moving cargo to the planet is sufficiently easy.

It works in 40k because they're supposed to be grim dark industrial hell holes that turn into anarchy and cannibalism in the even of a cargo ship being a day late.

sci-fi writers cannot into realism

/thread

Wouldn't doing that IRL like bend the asteroid belt back out around Jupiter/Sol Novo/Hot Jupe/whatever and strip Terra of one of it's main defense against rocks?

I mean nobody is going to give a rat's ass about a highly sober, very sensible, practical vision of the far-flung future.
Especially if you spend time writing about all the details that you had to think through that prove how realistic your take on the future is.
Instead you're using different kinds of societies and cultures as stand ins for ideas and institutions in the real world and using those to force the reader to think, however indirectly, about things that are happening around them.
Like nobody fucking cares how big starships are or how many generations would have to pass for you to cross the galaxy, they want to hear the next part of the *fucking story* not your practical worldbuilding.

Like if you want to get into 'realism' you write a story about the world you've lived in and the world around you because it's quite honestly the only thing you really know can be real and everything future is speculation. Of course sci-fi writers don't into realism. As a category they must be rejecting realism for some reason. Are you dense?

No, because jupiter won't magically gain or lose mass.

It would have to affect something if it's emitting enough heat to change the surface temp of Mars

>What is the in-universe reason for having entire planets 100% covered in densely-populated cities

Because it's COOL.

>What is the in-universe reason for having entire planets 100% covered in densely-populated cities

Assuming you're specifically referring to Star Wars, a lightyear actually IS nothing. The average starship in Star Wars can cross from one end of the Galaxy Far Far Away to another in about a week at most, so about three and a half days from the Outer Rim Territories to the Core Worlds.

Assuming The Galaxy Far Far Away is about the size of the Milky Way, that's 100,000 light years in 1 week, or about 595 light years per hour, or about .16 light years per second, or about 1 light year per 6 seconds. At what amounts to "cruising" speed.

Hop in your car and drive for 6 second at 40 miles per hour. The distance you have just covered is the rough equivalent to what the Star Wars people think of a light year.

More to the point, interstellar travel has become so common and easy over the 25,000 years of Galactic history that a frequently penniless smuggler can still afford to fuel and maintain the fastest ship in the Galaxy, the Millennium Falcon, which is twice as fast as the average Star Wars vessel.

>I read years ago an article about igniting Jupiter into a star to warm up Mars

Jupiter's big, but it's not nearly massive enough for that. The smallest star we know of is only about 7.5% the mass of the Sun, but that's still 80 times more massive than Jupiter Or in other words you'd need to crash 79 Jupiters into the extant Jupiter to make a star.

There just isn't enough extra mass in the solar system to add to Jupiter to make it a star, and even if there was, if we were at a point where we could actually go around gathering up and moving that much mass in a reasonable time scale, we'd almost certainly have other, easier ways to heat up Mars.

(Oh, just "setting it on fire" isn't viable either for reasons I don't feel like going into, and wouldn't give the desired effect anyway)

Oh, you could make Jupiter into a brown dwarf rather than a red dwarf, but the smallest brown dwarf we know of still has 13 times the mass of Jupiter. You know where we could find 13 Jupiters?

The total mass of the asteroid belt is only about 4% the mass of the Moon, so, no, that's not an option, in case you were wondering. Besides, I like Ceres (the dwarf-planet in the Belt that accounts for 25% of its mass and was for a time considered a true planet). I don't want Ceres to be fed to Jupiter.

Maybe the housing costs were basically nonexistent and everyone else fell for the cheap house meme?

What's the pic from?

The Expanse.

Because Larry Niven did it in Ringworld and people like that piece of shit book for some reason.

No, only one planet, and that realistically addressed the issues, had agri-worlds in the same system, and relied on recycling and teleportation for everything.

You're just a contrarian.

I just genuinely dislike Ringworld.

It was hyped up for years, only for it to be them basically going from one fantasy set-piece to another, only for it to end up with a stupid "the way out was there the whole time" contrivance and them sequel bating like a motherfucker.

I'm sure, as a whole, the entirety of the Ringworld books tell an okay story, but it didn't feel like this seminal piece of SF that's a NECESSITY to read.

The original city-planet is Trantor, though. Which is from Foundation.

The out of universe reason is because it's easier when designing an entire system of planets to treat them as of they were individual counties of a kingdom rather than as complex planets. It's easier when designing to say this whole planets a city rather than having to actually map out an entire planets worth of industry, agriculture, cities , geography and so forth.

No, you're just a contrarian who dislikes popular things because they're popular.

And you apparently don't understand foreshadowing.

Excluding the military, the federal government of the United States employs about 1% of the population. At that rate, you'd need about 70 million bureaucrats to manage modern day Earth alone. Now, if you've got thousands of worlds with trillions of people, you're going to need hundreds of billions of bureaucrats.

A centralized capital world would pretty much have to be a global city to support that.

There is no reason for 100% city, other than BLAM!, where it's accidental. In few settings though does city planet really mean city planet, it more means a planet that operates like a city, where the vast majority of the industry is tertiary, with a bit of secondary. In 40k for example there are no ecumenopolises, even Tera has great uninhabited stretches of cursed earth. Most "Hive worlds" are only named as such because city industry is their thing, the farming section is too minor to pay attention to.

>foreshadowing
He worked on at least 12 other novels between Ringworld and Ringworld Engineers. You don't "foreshadow" as heavily as he does at the end of Ringworld when you're nowhere NEAR the prolific author that he would eventually become, because it comes off as embarrassing.

I like some of his other works, but I just hate Ringworld because it's incredibly disappointing for all the hype its given.

Just read 2 articles about Jupiter so no it can't happen. I always had a fantasy about shooting all of the nukes has into Jupiter. World peace plus Mars heats up for colonization. Again not possible, but wouldn't that be great if it could work?

Nonsense. Always.

They're thermodynamically impossible. All the heat from just the traffic would make the surface hot enough to boil lead.

>I mean nobody is going to give a rat's ass about a highly sober, very sensible, practical vision of the far-flung future.

Right because nobody actually cares about the future.

Niven is highly overrated, and science fiction fans are all autistic.

They think FTL is possible, ffs. That's just as bad as being a flat earther.

Because they don't have molecular replicators to work with and letting trillions of people starve to death and deal with the consequences of that isn't a real option.

If you have FTL and efficient engines to move stuff off-world, there's no problem with feeding a world with limited to no agriculture. You don't see many universes where city planets are fed from a different star system via non-FTL ships.

*Earth has. I always miss 1 typo at night.

>All the heat from just the traffic would make the surface hot enough to boil lead.

>25,000 years of history
>Casual faster-than-light travel on a galactic scale
>Technology is nevertheless so simple that a penniless smuggler understands it and can maintain the fastest ship in the Galaxy
>Thinks they haven't figured out how to deal with heat.

see
They have cheap FTL travel, but no vertical farming?
Sure it's in different fields of science, but isn't that like inventing the cell phone before the wheel?

There are also mention of the many space stations that are doting the solar system, along with a HUGE part of the Segmentum Solar fleet meant to protect Terra.

Mercury has orbital docks so I guess there is some kind of colonization.

Venus is a colonized world which was reconquered during the Great Crusade.
It housed enough industrial and technological basis to field entire armies of golems.
No idea how it is by M40.

Jupiter's orbit is full of space stations and orbital docks.
Most of its moons are inhabited, though only Europa had been fully terraformed into an ocean world.

Saturn and its moons are basically a forbidden zone under control of the Ordo Malleus.

Uranus was never colonized but there were a few stations in orbit.

Neptune was "full of mutants" during the Great Crusade.
This means Humanity did colonize its orbit. No idea if it has been re-colonized by M40, though.

The moons of Pluto have subterranean colonies while Pluto itself is used as a relay station to monitor ships coming out of the warp.

The Gods of Space mandate each world must have a single biome. Small deviations are acceptable, but anything more will invoke their wrath. Therefore, if you want to have any real cities, then your world's biome must be city.

Unless we assume Applied Phlebotinum or similar plot device which boils down to "shut up, it's magic !!", one needs a conciderable mastery over energy and matter to travel the stars at faster-than-light speed on a common basis.

Such a mastery supposes that it is possible to make food on a vast scale without needing a whole planet to do so.

Seriously, why cross half a galaxy to grow vegetable when you can build orbital glasshouses ?
This is just a silly exemple but you get the idea.

Same reason Rome was unsustainable without a fleet of barges to bring it food and supplies from the rest of the empire.

Also I'm sure hydroponics are a thing.

It's a question of scale, really.

Mumbai has a population density of 28.500 inhabitants per km2.

If Earth's emerged ground was covered entirely by copies of Mumbai, that would mean a population of 4.245 billions people (148.940.000 km2 x 28.500).

If we dried the oceans and filled them up with cities the same way, Earth's total population could be 14.537 billions people (510.072.000 km2 x 28.500).

Now, since technology would have progressed, one can assume that skyscrappers like the Shanghai Tower would be seen as very low-rise appartment blocks.
Therefor, the population density could rise even more.

Kowloon Walled City, in Hong Kong, had by 1987 a population density of 1.255.000 inhabitants / km2.
Of course it was a slum. But one can assume that the same density is achievable in confortable or even luxurious condition if we simply increase the number of floors of the buildings :
It was up to 14 floors in Kowloon.
Let's make it 1400 floors so that we can say there's plenty of space for residences of various standing, offices, shops, workshops... even whole industrial districts and what not.

With 625 billions people (510.072.000 km2 x 1.225.000), Earth is now a true ecumenopolis.
It needs around 1.25 quadrillions of kcal just to keep the population alive and active.

It has been estimated that, at current technology, we are producing with potatoes around 17000 kcal per cultivated acre.

Feeding Earth for a single day would need about 300 millions km2 of cultivated land with nothing but potatoes.

To feed Earth a whole year, we would need about 109,5 billions km2.
Something like having the surface of 214 Earths used for nothing but growing potatoes...

Now, to bring an idea of scale of the transport needed...
(cont)

(cont)

Potatoes have a density of about 634 kg / m3
On average, with irrigated soil, we can grow an absolute maximum of 5000 tons of potatoes per km2 in the UK.

So we know we'll need 2.366 billions m3 of convoy space to bring its daily supply of food to Earth.
(300.000.000 km2 x 5.000.000 kg / 634 kg/m3 )

To give an idea, the current biggest bulk carrier has a length of 362 m and can carry 220.000 m3
Earth would need to build close to 11 millions space ships with similar transport capacities AND interstellar travel capabilities just to feed itself a single day.

If there's a crew of 30 on each of these ships, we can say there would be basically the equivalent of the USA population docking in orbit of Earth at any given moment.

A sign of absolute power. When your capital world produces nothing but commands and consumes everything from its subject worlds as tribute, then your civilization has reached its apex government type.

Because space marines eat brains to gain memories.

You underestimate the technology of the Great Works, purple tangent.

(cont)

So, with all these big numbers and the logistical nightmare of feeding "Earth City", why bother ?

Because Earth City isn't about sustainability.
It's about centralization of power and ressources.
It's about Humanity's leadership having the industrial capacity and workforce to do any project it wants.

Sure, interstellar colonization is being conducted agressively, with dozen of millions of colonists leaving Earth each day to seed new worlds.

These new worlds will be dependant of Earth for the first few decades or even for centuries.
The way they repay Earth is by using ALL the land they can to grow food.

It's about trade :
The vast industrial output of Earth is centralized, its state-of-the-art continent-sized industrial complexes producing so much and with such efficiency that the economy of scale makes moot any attempt by the colonies to compete with their own crude equipment.

It's about power :
No colony can be trully independant, as Earth could just wipe the population of said colonies and replace it with eager volunteers.
By the time a colony could build a single space battleship, Earth could field (and crew) entire fleets of them.
It even already does.

And sure, a galaxy-wide revolt of the colonies might means Earth would starve.
But Earth is producing its own food too :

- vast underground hangars are filled to the brim with tanks where artifical food of high nutritive density is being distilled, its bitter taste and unattractive structure unimportant as they are meant as survival rations rather than as daily bread like what is imported.

- orbital domes are producing vegetables and other delicacies for the wealthy and well-connected, insuring fresh products on a daily basis for those that can afford it.

None except author's fiat.
Planetary population is ultimately restricted by the ability to radiate away waste heat. And it turns out we'd run out of radiating ability long before we'd run out of living space.

A good video on topic: youtube.com/watch?v=XAJeYe-abUA

>philipsibbering.com/wh40k/03-ecopolis.shtml
Thank you, user

>Such a mastery supposes that it is possible to make food on a vast scale without needing a whole planet to do so.
Why does it presuppose that?

>Seriously, why cross half a galaxy to grow vegetable when you can build orbital glasshouses ?
Seriously, why build colossal pyramids out of stone instead of using steel structures if you want something really fucking tall? I guess the Egyptians never existed!

There are people alive today who will see vertical farming become commercially viable, and indoor farming in general is already common. There are no experts who seriously think vertical farming might be physically impossible.
We can estimate a higher probability of advancements in vertical farming as the size of skyscrapers continues to increase, because it's merely an engineering challenge, it doesn't require discovering new laws of physics like FTL would.

And not every society will be up for the challenge of said engineering challenges, especially if a cheaper alternative is available. Vertical indoor farming doesn't need to merely be physically possible, it needs to be better than the alternatives; and when you're running a gamut of a zillion different sci-fi settings and tropes, you can't point to one and say "THIS IS THE WAY IT'LL BE!"

Take these books, for example; of the 13 known sapient species, one and only one has actual capability to FTL travel, everyone else just uses the first group's systems. While you don't get any indication of city-worlds, it is very conceivably possible that anyone but the Chahwyn, who haven't figured out FTL, can't figure out how to make food grow on an inhospitable planet, especially since they can always import it from elsewhere, courtesy of someone else's FTL. Even if the engineering capacity to do so exists, why would it ever be developed?

A defecting hive world would have the manpower to occupy or even repopulate them (though they might have a problem with some skills initially).
Using insects would be smart as they're high protein & you could raise them in high oxygen envirinmements to make them bigger. Fungi would be an option too

Sure, and we can imagine a futuristic society that sends digital communication via swarms of precisely trained butterflies rather than radio waves, not because they don't know about radio waves or because anything on their planet prevents radio waves, but because they just happened to invent the butterfly method first and no one feels like working on an alternative to a system that's good enough. You can't point to one setting and say "THIS IS THE WAY IT'LL BE!"

I'm not the one arguing that it is necessarily implausible to believe that any society that has access to FTL also has access to essentially unlimited food production on any site.

To make a simple example to illustrate the difference
>All cars are red!
>That's not true, I saw a green car yesterday.
>You haven't proved that all cars are green!

If they have cheap FTL, why should they invest factory space and resources to making habitable zone for farming, when they can just ship goods from farming colonies? Ever notice how people in cities are not sustained by their own farming, but instead import food from farms further away? Who wants to spend a few square miles for a field when you can build office buildings there?