Maybe more interesting than the infrastructure needed for plumbing is the mass transit within the Rock City.
Visualize the Rock City with one hundred floors for our grand design. Now visualize Fort Worth sprawled for maybe fifty miles at the ground level. We should get the same amount of surface area in half a lateral mile in the Rock City because it will be spread over one hundred floors.
The biggest constraint on travel in the Rock City isn't horizontal since you should be able to walk from one side to the other in ten minutes. The elevators are where this gets interesting since we will need a lot of them. Keep in mind maybe there are a million people in the city and the Rock City won't leave their jobs behind. Some percentage of them will need to be physically present to do whatever they do so there will still be rush hours.
The easy cop for this one is to invent anti-grav but that's cheesy. With devices like that, we only need to provide vertical tubes and the commuter only needs to jump into one and then use the device to regulate where to stop. That would be cool but too impossible relative to current technology to use it.
We need our whizbang System Designers to compute the optimum number of floors relative to the number of elevators to support them since letting the Rock City go to fifty floors with twice the lateral spread might be a more optimal solution. The numbers theory types who compute such things are some major eggs with firecracker minds and they can do that sort of computation with great precision.
An additional piece to the optimization is the reducing number of people who need to be physically present in a workplace to do what they do. We will need a boatload of elevators but perhaps not so many as you may envision after seeing a Boston traffic jam.
For the horizontal traverse, how about we go with the moving walkway similar to airports. We can steal from an old sci fi story (Heinlein?) in which the rolling roads had 'lanes' with faster ones in the middle. We wouldn't need them to be all that clever since the horizontal distance to go isn't that far. At most we're between half a mile and a mile for the distance from one side of the Rock City to the other.
As to how you will bring your groceries back from the market on a rolling road, you won't. There will be 'bots to do such things. You can shop in-person or remotely, as you wish, but 'bots will do the delivery either way.
Yah, so the Rock City doesn't result in fewer cars, it doesn't result in any cars. In terms of national savings from eliminating the car economy, it's almost incalculable. A large part of the purpose behind the Rock City is eliminating compulsive consumerism. The world can't take it and mostly we can't afford it anyway. That production can continue without limit assumes the population will grow that way as well and that's one of the worst assumptions we can make.
Tremendous sociological changes are required in parallel with reduced consumerism and one of the biggest is the enormous number of people who will lose their jobs anyway through increasing robotization. The sociology comes into it with dealing with the fact the government will be supporting people who would work but there's no work available. That's inevitable regardless of a Rock City but eliminating consumerism will cause even more of it. This is only evolution in action so the question isn't ain't it a bitch but rather what will you do about it.
Note: if you're thinking the vision is of an abandoned wasteland at the ground level, lose that since we have no anticipation people in a Bavarian village will want to move anywhere and why should they. We will have another Part for the look of the ground level but don't expect cattle herders, shepherds, or any farmers like that to go underground. Don't expect Arabs to leave their beloved horses. The view isn't of a world which is mechanized but rather optimized.
Visualize the Rock City with one hundred floors for our grand design. Now visualize Fort Worth sprawled for maybe fifty miles at the ground level. We should get the same amount of surface area in half a lateral mile in the Rock City because it will be spread over one hundred floors.
The biggest constraint on travel in the Rock City isn't horizontal since you should be able to walk from one side to the other in ten minutes. The elevators are where this gets interesting since we will need a lot of them. Keep in mind maybe there are a million people in the city and the Rock City won't leave their jobs behind. Some percentage of them will need to be physically present to do whatever they do so there will still be rush hours.
The easy cop for this one is to invent anti-grav but that's cheesy. With devices like that, we only need to provide vertical tubes and the commuter only needs to jump into one and then use the device to regulate where to stop. That would be cool but too impossible relative to current technology to use it.
We need our whizbang System Designers to compute the optimum number of floors relative to the number of elevators to support them since letting the Rock City go to fifty floors with twice the lateral spread might be a more optimal solution. The numbers theory types who compute such things are some major eggs with firecracker minds and they can do that sort of computation with great precision.
An additional piece to the optimization is the reducing number of people who need to be physically present in a workplace to do what they do. We will need a boatload of elevators but perhaps not so many as you may envision after seeing a Boston traffic jam.
For the horizontal traverse, how about we go with the moving walkway similar to airports. We can steal from an old sci fi story (Heinlein?) in which the rolling roads had 'lanes' with faster ones in the middle. We wouldn't need them to be all that clever since the horizontal distance to go isn't that far. At most we're between half a mile and a mile for the distance from one side of the Rock City to the other.
As to how you will bring your groceries back from the market on a rolling road, you won't. There will be 'bots to do such things. You can shop in-person or remotely, as you wish, but 'bots will do the delivery either way.
Yah, so the Rock City doesn't result in fewer cars, it doesn't result in any cars. In terms of national savings from eliminating the car economy, it's almost incalculable. A large part of the purpose behind the Rock City is eliminating compulsive consumerism. The world can't take it and mostly we can't afford it anyway. That production can continue without limit assumes the population will grow that way as well and that's one of the worst assumptions we can make.
Tremendous sociological changes are required in parallel with reduced consumerism and one of the biggest is the enormous number of people who will lose their jobs anyway through increasing robotization. The sociology comes into it with dealing with the fact the government will be supporting people who would work but there's no work available. That's inevitable regardless of a Rock City but eliminating consumerism will cause even more of it. This is only evolution in action so the question isn't ain't it a bitch but rather what will you do about it.
Note: if you're thinking the vision is of an abandoned wasteland at the ground level, lose that since we have no anticipation people in a Bavarian village will want to move anywhere and why should they. We will have another Part for the look of the ground level but don't expect cattle herders, shepherds, or any farmers like that to go underground. Don't expect Arabs to leave their beloved horses. The view isn't of a world which is mechanized but rather optimized.
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