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.