How common should Ecumenopolis be within the UFP?

[Oddish]

I wasn't saying we were headed toward ecuminopolis status. We're not. Our global population is projected to level out soon, and as more countries teach developed status, it will probably drop slightly.

And yes, my power estimate for the ecuminopolis we aren't going to create was low. But if most people's journeys are taken by high-efficiency electric trains with hundreds of people in them rather than cars with only one, and people consume efficient plant-based protein rather than meat, the per capita power burn will drop. We might still be in the exawatt range instead of the petawatt, but the sun, planetary core, and Jovian H Reserves will provide more than adequate juice.

 

[Timo]

Trantor wasn't a planet that chose to expand to a single city. It was the administrative center of a galactic empire, the little slum of inhuman skyscraper offices created when all those bureaucrats had to be crammed in somewhere.

One doesn't aim to create hellholes like, oh, downtown Miami or Shanghai. Those emerge, due to reasons that have basically nothing to do with the physics or ecology of construction, or the ways people want to live and work. Construction obliges; an ever-deepening perversion of urbanism is the result.

Thanks to an authoritative body of writing, we know that population growth isn't what gave us Trantor; people from elsewhere, from a galaxy of untold quadrillions, crowded in there, in a deliberate and deliberately exaggerated analogy of things we witness in our reality. We do not know if the same is true of Coruscant, since its origins are lost in myth and, well, Legends. But there is plenty of room for a city-planet in the Trek universe. It just apparently doesn't happen to be within the borders of the UFP, which isn't suffering from an inflow of bureaucrats, but is currently exporting colonists to wilderness worlds instead, in another analogy to our history, and again in sharp contrast with what today's conventional wisdom would suggest might happen in real exploitation of outer space by us humans.

Creating the planetary city is trivial in Trek: thermal management on starships is a non-issue in defiance of our understanding of physics, and thus would be on a planetary scale as well, unless the writers deliberately decided otherwise. Energy truly is free, as are lunches. And everything can be built, including office towers 3,000 km high and apartment blocks spanning the seabed from ocean cost to ocean cost, with commuting from one to the other a matter of pressing the right button on your remote, or perhaps blinking the right way. The need to create this planet can be manufactured as best fits drama: if it's to accommodate population growth, then a population that thinks differently from today's humans can easily be postulated, but a dozen other reasons readily present themselves, too. Including "because we can".

Timo Saloniemi

 

[publiusr]

This has always been a false dichotomy -- "We need to solve our problems on Earth before looking to space." The two go hand in hand.

I'm sure there were those who thought all the powdered wig types playing with early microscopes should have been at work making something more "useful" like sick-beds. And so it goes....

 

[Oddish]

I'm sure there were those who thought all the powdered wig types playing with early microscopes should have been at work making something more "useful" like sick-beds. And so it goes....

The line about space refers to exploration for exploration's sake. Of course, we harness space by putting up comsats and GPS satellites, but the theory is that until, say, visiting the moon has some tangible benefit (like mining aluminum), we shouldn't bother.

Despite my disdain for NASA, I don't agree with this. While I don't think an ecuminopolis is in our future (our technologically savvy societies almost unfailingly limit population growth), it's a good thing to expand our horizons.

 

[publiusr]

I could see a "planet wide" city of left-over mining waste accumulated into one body. You make your own "planet"--your rules.

 

[Christopher]

The line about space refers to exploration for exploration's sake. Of course, we harness space by putting up comsats and GPS satellites, but the theory is that until, say, visiting the moon has some tangible benefit (like mining aluminum), we shouldn't bother.

Which is nonsense, because how do you know what benefits there can be until you actually look for them? The fact that we don't know what might be there to find is the exact reason we need to explore.