This Episode is brought to you by Brilliant. We often picture vast mega-cities in the future
and wonder if they will be utopian gardenscape arcologies or horrid hives of filth populated
by gangs of mutants and cannibals. Personally I don’t see why you’d have
to pick either-or. So today we’ll be looking at the concept
of mega-cities, both from the science fiction perspective – which is often dystopian hives
of crime and despair – and the potential future of giant cities and how they might
be anything but such dystopias and how they might do that. In truth we rarely see large cities as very
nice places in science fiction. Negative examples like Mega-City One from
the Judge Dredd Comic book series or the various Hive Cities like Necromunda from Warhammer
40,000 show extremes examples of crime and decay, and the entire Cyberpunk Genre is basically
built on crowded dark metropolises, but even the more positive examples are fairly dark. This may not be surprising. A lot of the Cyberpunk genre for instance
is strongly influenced by mid-20th century Film Noir, literally black film or dark film,
frequently featuring hard-boiled detectives investigating crimes in dark and crime ridden
cities. Those works tend to be heavy on pessimism
and fatalism. Indeed maybe the nicest example I know of
is Isaac Asimov’s classic novel “The Caves of Steel”, set in a future New York City
that has sprawled out over much of New Jersey and is under a steel dome. In that novel Earth is horribly over-populated
with 8 billion people and everyone lives inside a relative handful of giant mega-cities under
such domes and suffers from Agoraphobia, a fear of open spaces. Incidentally the current population of Earth
is 7.8 billion and we expect to hit 8 billion by 2023, and Asimov’s other classic super-urbanized
area, the Galactic Capital Planet City – or Ecumenopolis – of Trantor was said to be
super-crowded with 40 billion people. There is a long history of authors seriously
messing up scale where population and urbanization is concerned, and I’m not picking on my
namesake, the Grandmaster of Science Fiction generally wrote very accurate sci fi compared
to almost everyone else, he just has the best known examples. He also wrote them way back in the middle
of the 20th century, the same time Film Noir was in its peak, and I suspect this notion
of crowded, dark, filthy, crime-ridden giant cities dates from then as all around the world
we were seeing a big rise in urbanization twinned with industrialization. Just for a little context, most of our biggest
metropolises these days have somewhere around 10,000 people per square kilometer. So if you’re maintaining that density over
something the size of a state or medium-sized nation, which are generally on an order of
100,000 square kilometers, you’d have a population of around a billion in one, and
as Earth has about 500 million square kilometers of land and sea, that density would equate
to a population of 5 trillion people, not 40 billion. Problem is that even that huge number is misleading
because cities are more than their dense downtown regions. New York City has more skyscrapers than most
cities per citizen, but it’s only about 300 skyscrapers, and also only about 6000
high-rise buildings. The world’s tallest residential buildings
currently are north of 400 meters tall and have a density of a bit over 1 person per
square meter since they have around a hundred floors. A hypothetical mega-city where most folks
lived in very cramped apartments inside skyscrapers that tall – or taller, a kilometer or more
– ought to be around a hundred times denser than your typical metropolis, with around
a million people per square kilometer, meaning some mega-city built all like that and state-sized
ought to be hosting a hundred billion people all on its own and if the whole planet was
like that, we’d be talking about a population of around a quadrillion, not a trillion, let
alone 40 billion. Even if it were mostly just high-rises we’d
still be talking mega-cities of billions, not tens of millions, and most folks living
in modern New York City don’t live in a skyscraper or a high-rise, there are more
than a million buildings in NYC for its 8 million folks living inside city limits. In the metropolitan region, which is home
to around half again as many folks, things are even less dense. Interestingly while the definition of a high-rise
building varies, in the US a ‘mid-rise’ building is one as tall as the street is wide,
allowing 5 hours of sunlight on the street, and high-rises are taller allowing less sunlight
and making streetlight or reflective glass building a lot more necessary to keep those
streets lit even before nightfall. This probably helps feed into the science
fiction trope of mega-cities as being rather dark and one I always note when in downtown
areas. Fictional mega-cities often have domes or
air pollution adding to the darkness but the sheer height of the buildings alone can have
that effect, so large dense ones will need supplemental lighting on the lower levels,
even ignoring that much of the city might be actually underground. Data also supports that cities have higher
crime rates per capita than rural areas and while the reasons for this are hotly debated
and probably myriad, this appears to genuinely be the case and also is a global phenomena,
true of cities worldwide in general, and regardless of its truth it is the general perception
so shows up in fiction. So even ignoring all the infamous gangs and
mobsters of the Film Noir era, it’s not surprising that fictional mega-cities get
seen as full of criminals. Needless to say it’s pretty hard to keep
cities clean, though we do it way better than in the mid-20th century, let alone pre-modern
times where garbage pickup and plumbing were not in play. So I thought today we’d examine both those
fictional dystopian mega-cities and apply some science and realism to them to see how
they might be, and how our own future mega-cities might be. Assuming we have them. Ultimately the drive to cities had to do with
jobs and services being more readily available there while at the same time we were no longer
subsistence farmers, folks who grow their own food and a little bit more for trade,
as opposed to now where a single farm that’s full time is typically cranking out more like
a hundred times what it’s employees personally eat. Indeed that could shift to cities too, as
we might adopt more vertical farming or greenhouses and hydroponics and that might end up being
done inside cities… see the Arcologies episode for more discussion of self-sufficient architecture
and growing food inside super-tall buildings. Anyway, the cities grew and sometimes overlapped
and merged, or absorbed their nominal suburbs, and folks tended to assume this was an eternal
thing that would stop only when we ran out of growing space. Though as Asimov noted in his novel “Caves
of Steel”, that wasn’t an unbeatable hurdle as they could grow algae and similar in artificially
lit tanks stacked on top of each other, if they had a power supply. We had a huge boom in open-air farming productivity
so can move that maximum figure up from his suggested 8 billion, and could easily crank
that up even more with various approaches like greenhouses instead of open-air farming,
vertical farming, and hydroponics – not to mention space farms. So there really isn’t an upper limit to
people on the supply side. However, we do have limits based on getting
rid of the heat, and also the sheer issues with transport in and out, of supplies and
people. Air quality inside a city is always a worry,
even leaving out examples like the Great Smog of London, but doming one over to help with
this is rather dubious since the city itself is a far bigger and denser producer of pollutants
than things outside in general. So you generally would not be doming a place
over with only a few exceptions, like if you were on an airless world like Mars or the
Moon and began under domes and just expanded. You still have to supply and clean that air
though. As an example, if we made a big hemispherical
dome over a mega-city with a population of a billion people, than they need to be getting
rid of and bringing in about a billion pounds of carbon dioxide and oxygen a day just for
people’s breathing and not including any other lifeforms or machinery. Or around half a cubic meter each. That is about half a billion cubic meters
coming in and about the same going out, daily. For scale, while you’d probably pipe it
in, or if freighting it in do so with the gas under compression, but the typical railroad
car has around a hundred meters of volume so a billion people would need a train 5 million
cars long coming in each day. And presumably going out too, as you need
to purge that air. Even ignoring the whole greenhouse gas and
heat island issues, concentrations of carbon dioxide can be lethal if high enough and cause
lethargy and mental issues even as low as thrice the atmospheric normal concentration. This is already a major problem in the venting
of modern buildings which tend to have higher concentrations of carbon dioxide especially
in the winter. CO2 is also heavier than normal air so you
can’t rely on it just going away on its own. Indeed, we have had some mountain lakes that
were deep enough to have pressures where the carbon dioxide in them could liquify it and
store large amounts and it ended up outgassing and killing people. You could have similar things happen in giant
mega-cities and hives where you’d potentially have high pressure locations where the carbon
dioxide accumulated, especially without proper venting. New York City uses a billion gallons or a
few billion liters of water a day, some mega-city of a billion needs a hundred times that and
presumably needs to have reservoirs, cisterns and septic tanks able to hold many days worth
of water and waste. If you’ve got some super-water tower or
septic tank a kilometer tall, or deep, that thing has 100 atmosphere of pressure at its
bottom, more than enough to liquify carbon dioxide at room temperature if CO2 is getting
into those tanks. Air is light compared to food and water though,
and in terms of volume, we use about the same amount of water per day, at between a quarter
to half a cubic meter. We excrete similar. Even ignoring the pressure issues of pumping
fluids – water or air – up into kilometer tall buildings or kilometer deep subterranean
regions – modern New York City has over 10,000 kilometers of water mains, and you’d
need more than proportionally as a city grew. Ditto sewer pipes. All those and their storage and recycling
tanks are going to need to be somewhere and while many likely would be subterranean - and
create quite the impressive undercity - much will probably need to be higher up in the
air with the residential buildings. Moving stuff in dense places is tricky, as
best discussed with the “Elevator Conundrum”. Elevators permit tall buildings but paradoxically
also limit their height, because the more people and floors inside one, the more elevators
you need, and each shaft has to pass through every floor and you need more than double
if you double the height because the average ride time in an elevator is longer if you
are taller. In a simple approximation, if I double a buildings
height I’ve doubled how many people need to use elevators, but also doubled the average
time each elevator needs to service a person, quadrupling it, and thus quadrupling the number
of shafts, but each one still takes up the same space per floor. Eventually you reach a point where half your
floor space is elevator shafts and if you build any taller you can’t get anymore people
inside. Similar problems occur for transporting other
things, be it roads or water, and you mostly get around it by smart traffic control and
higher speeds. We normally pump water through pipes at about
a meter per second, we can move it faster especially in wider pipes, which not only
have a higher flow from their wider cross-section but also allow a faster speed of water. You also don’t necessarily have as much
demand in the tallest buildings as they might be fairly self-contained with shops and jobs
in them, and crosswalks to neighboring buildings out at higher floors, rather than everyone
going to their apartment and the ground floor and just that. This could result in stratification all by
itself, as while we have neighborhoods in cities now, those exist two-dimensionally,
if the buildings are tall enough and linked together at higher floors, you’d start seeing
neighborhoods occupy certain altitudes, not just north, east, south, and west. Uptown and downtown take on very different
meanings. Don’t assume transit up and down is all
elevators either, it is not that hard to make vehicles and roads that can run vertically
even ignoring options like air travel. When you start making buildings kilometers
tall even freight elevators aren’t really ideal anymore and you might be considering
vertical passenger & freight vehicles and the roads or rails for them. One key concept here, you have a lot of wide
veins and arteries in such a city and they take up a lot of space, probably far more
than actual living quarters. But let’s contemplate scale for the moment
and we’ll make up a hypothetical example for that. We’ll call it Mega-City 42 or MC42, because
42 is the channel’s lucky number, and say it is a big giant square brick built of superstrong
materials 50 kilometers a side, rising 4 kilometers up and 2 down, nearly half buried, and with
a population of a person per square meter or a million per square kilometer. So there’s 2.5 billion people in there,
nearly a third of our current planetary population and equal to what it was when Asimov wrote
Caves of Steel in 1954. That sounds very crowded, if you had everyone
on the same floor they would literally be packed shoulder to shoulder. We will assume essentially modern biology
in terms of needs, consumption, lifespan, etc. Now on one floor they’d be shoulder to shoulder
but this thing is 6 kilometers in total height and if we assumed 3 meters or 10 feet per
story that means it’s got 2000 levels, which means each level has 2.5 billion square meters
to it but the whole thing has 5 trillion, or 5 million square kilometers, the equivalent
of 1% of Earth’s surface area or bigger than all but the top five or six largest modern
nations. Suddenly it’s a lot more roomy. We shouldn’t assume those 2000 floors were
everywhere as you’d presumably have a lot of places with much higher ceilings or none,
but if you did there would be 2000 square meters per person, 21,500 square feet or half
an acre. Which would be palatial if we’re talking
apartments but we can probably throw around 90% of that area to all the stores, factories,
roads, elevator, pipes, storage facilities, hydroponics, and places that aren’t just
one normal floor high. Which would still be roomy, at about 200 square
meters per person versus the modern norm of more like a tenth of that, per resident, and
even fairly roomy houses rarely more than triple it. Given that folks tend to concentrate till
they’re comfortable and that most of the space isn’t residential, you are likely
to have vast areas that are pretty sparse in people there. Even assuming you don’t have abandoned areas,
some hydroponics facilities feeding the population, is probably most automated and regardless
would have huge chunks empty of people for long stretches or even just shut down while
awaiting use for some other crop or a change in demand. And it would be big, hydroponics can be very
dense and multi-leveled, but we would still be talking tens of square meters per person
so we’re talking hundreds of giant skyscrapers or subterranean caverns devoted just to individual
crops, mostly empty of people most of the time. Let’s talk numbers. With 2.5 trillion people, one person is born
and one person dies every single second. If we assumed they stored folks in crypts
of a few cubic meters per person that’s a 100 million cubic meters of tombs every
year, probably mostly abandoned, fully a cubic kilometer of new tombs every decade. There are 160,000 funeral homes servicing
the city and filling that necropolis, and a quarter of a million obstetricians delivering
the replacement population. Alternatively if the place is dystopian and
the final resting place of most folks in down the sewer or garbage shafts, with the average
human body containing about 125,000 calories, there are 5 million mutant cannibals living
in the under-hive on a diet of humans. I’m not sure if its more disturbing that
someone carefully calculated that out or that I googled it and calculated how many folks
could live on it, but either way, welcome to SFIA, where we contemplate how plausible
a cannibal sub-civilization might be… and for show regulars, note that I did not suggest
a drink and snack at the start of the episode. Dystopian sci-fi loves to imply cannibalism
as a civilization wide thing, like with Soylent Green, but you can't do that, there’s only
a couple months of food for one person in a person and it takes a lot more than a couple
months to grow one, still you can have a very large niche for detritivores simply from the
sheer hugeness of the overall population, again in this case 5 million. That’s a lot of folks who could survive
on a diet of human alone, and they could probably supplement that heavily with mushrooms grown
from all the human waste flushed down the tubes too, over a billion kilograms of solid
waste and about thrice that of liquid waste per day, and an order of magnitude more of
that in the water carrying it away. It reminds me a bit of the concept of marine
snow, detritus falling from higher levels of the oceans to feed the lower levels where
there is no light. Key notion in that grim little aside, unless
you’re taking active steps to prevent a place being dystopian, with sufficient time
and size you’re creating ecological niches and rather big ones. MC42 is supporting a mutant cannibal population
in its bowels quite capable of filling out a modest sized modern nation or one of our
largest metropolises all on its own. And again if they’re raiding the mushroom
farms near the waste dumps they can do way better, you can grow an awful lot of mushrooms
off a million tons of crap, not too mention all the wasted food. We estimate about 30-40% of food in the modern
US is wasted, and even if we assume they do way better, only tossing 1% of their food
not 40%, MC42 could support 25 million people on that alone, and fully a billion if it was
40% wasted or tossed out. Scale is always so important for future concepts,
because it's where you notice that 2.5 billion people each throwing out a crust of bread
a day are throwing out a combined several billion loaves a year. It’s where you note that MC42 either has
a million garbage collectors on the payroll, at modern levels, or its equivalent in robot
manpower. It’s where you note that if its got a few
million giant factories and warehouses, and each one only is shutdown and abandoned for
one year once a century for sale, renovation, or abandonment, that means you’ve got tens
of thousands of them abandoned at any one time where squatters and gangs of mutant cannibals
can dwell. It produces a couple billions tons of trash
a year and millions are employed either disposing and recycling it or scavenging from it. And if you are using superstrong materials,
keeping in mind that even a thick steel girder might need centuries to rust down, you could
easily get a city built on a city, of layer after layer of things built on top of the
ruins of those deemed too much of a hassle to repair or no longer in an area with enough
traffic to make it worth using. In all likelihood you don’t even get civilizations
and cities like this emerging unless they’re big on long-term building, sustainability,
and efficiency, but you only need that to be true during its initial building and growth
phase. If the city starts dwindling in population
for some reason, that often gets into a feedback loop with bad management, strained resources,
higher crime & corruption, and general pessimism about the civilization, so it could turn into
a ramshackle half-abandoned mega-city in a few generations. Indeed left to itself, those buildings meant
to house a billion in comfort and luxury might be home to scattered tribes of mere millions
a few centuries later, just because the effort to repair it is considered more than building
a new one elsewhere is. I also keep mentioning mutants, as their popular
in scifi dystopias, but keeping in mind that cybernetic and genetic tinkering is likely
to be common in the future, that might be real enough, especially with animals. As we looked at in our Environments of Space
Habitats episode, those being closed and artificial ecosystems, you might tend to modify a lot
of critters to fit that ecosystem like tinkering with your squirrels or birds to pick up litter
and turn it in at waste collections points for food. A mega-city is arguably little different than
a space habitat, especially if you’re aiming for the Arcology approach of self-contained
and self-sufficient production of everything including food. You might have some very weird critters wandering
around such a place if they went feral from neglect or simply being rendered redundant
or out of fashion. Someone designs a mechanical bird and produces
a few thousand as some neat new fad in urban cleanup and a century later they’ve been
replaced but most are still in service and wandering around having adapted to raiding
scrap heaps for replacement parts. Someone genetically engineers alligators to
swim around the sewers clearing blockages and eating the beavers who keep damming up
the pipes and now the old yarn about alligators in the sewers becomes real and maybe even
a tourist feature. Delve the depths of the undercity and hunt
the cyber-gators. One might worry about the whole thing collapsing
literally, not just culturally, but keep in mind most older cities are already built on
top of old layers of themselves. For that matter, while we’re contemplating
the lower levels of MC42 filling up with garbage and corpses, and being a literally crappy
place to live, that is actually the planet we live on. When you walk out in a forest you are stepping
on ground composed of fallen trees and decayed plants, animals, and their waste. Many millions of years of it, and we don’t
hesitate to build on that either. Whereas some 20 meter thick tether of graphene
or shaft of ultra-strong unobtainium might be quite capable of sitting there for millenia
holding up everything above it even while entire wars were being fought in those lower
levels between various gangs and whatever passed for law enforcement. Upward mobility might be very literal in a
megacity as it might just be easier to keep building upwards regardless of if lower levels
were being left vacant or even collapsing occasionally. Also keep in mind if you are preserving your
dead in a necropolis, the one for MC42 was growing by a cubic kilometer a decade, a millenia
later it is a literal mountain of corpses and probably very empty of the living, but
if you’ve got strong and durable materials, such things might become routine. They’d also be a natural haven for criminals
or undesired elements to hide or be banished to. This doesn’t even necessarily imply the
powers that be are particularly cruel or callous either, it’s just a matter of scale. The Attorney General’s office estimates
there are 20,000 gangs in the US with about a million total members, we’d expect MC42
with 8 times the population to at least match that proportionally with 160,000 gangs and
8 million members – the entire populace of modern New York City, and 6 times the number
of people on active duty in the US military. Here it would all be packed together though,
and again that’s assuming modern US averages. The cities with the highest murder rates in
the world average between 50 to 130 murders per 100,000 people per year so if MC42 matched
that, full on dystopian, that would be as much as three million murders a year or one
about every ten seconds, as the cause of death for 10% of the population. So MC42 could be having regular battalion
or regimental scale clashes between mega-gangs without being any more homicidal than some
of our more dangerous cities on modern Earth. To combat that MC42 probably has somewhere
between .1% to 1% of its populace as law enforcement, or 2.5 to 25 million. All right, that is dystopia and we are assuming
it for a case where pessimism reigns and a somewhat Darwinian natural order exists. Let’s talk now about why that wouldn’t
be, probably, and how future mega-cities might actually look. A lot comes down to the character of the civilization
and the competence and intent of those running the show, but much comes down to technology. If you’ve got a virtually unlimited power
supply and super-strong materials, then your megacity is probably composed of many giant
towers that people live on the outer ring of, with hydroponics and industry in the interior
regions along with enclosed, lit, and manicured parks. You have no shortage of freshwater as you
can easily pump your used water or saltwater through filtration systems and also use that
as a giant coolant and radiator to keep the city cool from all the heat people and their
activities generate. You can recycle everything through sheer brute
force application of energy if you need to and because heat removal is your true bottleneck,
there is no space limitation, just limits on how much activity you can have and how
much lighting you can have. Just the natural daylight hitting any given
square meter of Earth during the daytime is enough to comfortably light a thousand times
as much area to what we’d think of as slightly dim interior lighting. Your real control on space is the price of
building it and maintaining it, and so for instance a megacity whose structures were
built of a self-repairing material is likely to be gigantic in terms of internal space
per person because you can build cheap and do not need to maintain it beyond feeding
some raw materials and energy to any given house. Organic buildings might have something akin
to their own plumbing system as nutrients were sent through them and waste removed. The same would tend to apply if you had something
that was just very strong, cheap, and durable as your main building materials, much as steel
and concrete altered our cities when they got cheap enough to build with. A lot can be done with traffic control too. I suspect it won’t be more than another
generation before traffic jams become oddities reported on the news as such rather than the
typical traffic report for rush hour. If you use modern navigating software you’re
probably already used to seeing stretches of road on your map turn orange or red to
indicate real-time slow downs and it would be very easy, with enough computing and tracking,
for that to improve to the point that most traffic is being coordinated down to the moment
to minimize everyone’s delays. Add to that I suspect most vehicles will have
an auto-pilot feature built in as a standard option within at most twenty years. So that would tend to help with city growth,
where your car, or a robot taxi, can just drop you off at your destination then go park
and get summoned to arrive at a precise moment when you need to leave. Indeed I suspect we wouldn’t see cities
grow too much more without a lot of that sort of smart control as a regular complaint by
those contemplating living there is always the traffic and parking issues. Little tiny changes like that can seriously
impact growth too, as an example if 10% of the population is contemplating moving into
a city or leaving it, and for only 10% of those is traffic a big enough factor to push
them one way or another, that’s a 1% growth rate just from that one single thing. It would amplify too as there is so much lost
time and money in traffic delays. Similarly, I mentioned food waste as running
between 30-40%, and that is everything from the farm to your table and is ripe for improvement
to prevent spoilage loss. Smarter farming, smarter harvesting and transport
and distribution, and even smart apps that monitored as you cooked, knew the typical
appetites of yourself and who you cooked for, and could do on the fly recipe alterations
to produce just the right amount, are probably not that far off. Warehouses, from an economic perspective,
are fundamentally a bad thing, it’s inventory sitting there burning money to maintain the
place while the goods decay, and if you’ve really got your supply and demand calculations
down and aren’t so weather and season dependent on production of things like food, you can
minimize warehouse costs. You could get reverse trends too, better automation
means fewer folks working in large centralized giant factories and also would tend to come
in a package with a lot more remote work, letting you commute at light speed and we
might see cities begin to unpack as folks just opted to live wherever seemed best with
no consideration for its proximity to workplaces or supply points. These exact same technologies tend to help
with issues of violent crime and property damage, intentional or accidental, as you
can track and respond so much more accurately and quickly and possibly predictively, and
we discussed some of that more in the Episode “New Technologies that Might be in the Cards”
So it is very speculative if the rise of cities will lead to the rise of mega-cities with
one big caveat. As long as we can keep feeding people it seems
likely the population would keep growing and Earth is likely to always be seen as the most
valuable real estate. As we’ve noted elsewhere, if your goal is
to have nature preserves you’re probably better off building those in space habitats
like an O’Neill Cylinder rather than trying to keep chunks of Earth preserved, since it
is so much easy to control things like invasive species or pollution or ecological shifts
in a big closed cylinder floating in the vacuum. Cost is the big factor there though. When we’re talking about building up, building
giants structures kilometers high or deep with many levels, or space habitats, I’d
guess that your price-point is going to be something like 10% of your civilization GDP
for construction and maintenance of these sorts of megastructures, be they mega-scrapers
or space habitats. It might be twice that or half that but I
would tend to think we couldn’t support much more than double that without folks feeling
like they could do with less space and at much less than half that they’d probably
feel comfortable having more. So if you’ve got robots who can spew out
the equivalent of a square kilometer per person and maintain that on that budget, either from
being good at maintenance or using ultra-durable materials, then that’s the kind of density
people would have, but if it all has to be done by hand and a hundred square meters per
person was that price point, than crammed little apartments is what you’d get. Either way though, if a place is attractive
to live in and of itself folks will tend to pack in there, and it is not hard to imagine
that in the more distant future if our solar system became a Dyson Swarm or the center
of an interstellar civilization, Earth might be so attractive as a destination that even
a square meter of Antarctica might cost more than most people earned in a year, just because
the whole planet had urbanized. As an example if in a dyson-swarm or galactic
empire of a hundred billion-billion people just one a million people decided to visit
Earth in a given year for just a few days each, that is a trillion tourists on-world
at any given time. Whether they’re visiting mega-cities sprawling
over every last inch of land and sea or packed into apartments the size of closets or Earth
has become some hundred-layered Matrioshka World or a near pristine wilderness dotted
with skinny-self contained kilometers high arcology super-towers is hard to say without
knowing not only the technology available but its specific economics. Of course cities also tend to move with time,
even ignoring population growth what was once a giant urbanized area can crawl over the
map over the centuries, a farm pasture one century is now a thriving downtown region,
and if your populace stops growing, even if just locally, be that a region of Earth or
a region of the galaxy, then population shifts could see area abandoned or reduced to a fraction
of their former number. If those places are built to last you could
get huge tracts of giant structures nearly abandoned for decades only to be revitalized
decades or centuries later. As for the future of our own cities, I suspect
they will tend to keep growing in population and shifting and merging but also more so
in size, as we can build bigger, cheaper and more durably and overall standard of living
rises. Fundamentally the science fiction trope of
dark, violent, and decaying mega-cities is, as we noted near the beginning, fueled by
the inherent pessimism and fatalism we see in fiction, particularly the Film Noir inspired
Cyberpunk genre, it is a story very rooted in darker parts of human nature. On this show we don’t ignore that aspect
of things but tend to take the idea that the future is a far brighter and more optimistic
place, and I suspect our cities will trend toward that. So probably no roving gangs of albino mutant
cannibals living in the depths of the mega-cities in the future, or at least, not very many
of them. We were discussing the difficulty of moving
things in and out of mega-cities today, and I thought we’d close with a bit of brain
teaser on city-transport from our friends at Brilliant, though I’ve modified it a
bit for a sci-fi theme. You have 5 mega-cities, Pascal, Qurra, Rutherford,
Sagan, and Tesla, and 4 available modes of transport, airplane, spaceship, vacuum train,
and wormhole gateway, but most cities only have 1 or 2 of those options available to
reach another. Pascal and Qurra are connected by spaceship
and vacuum train. Sagan and Rutherford are connected by a wormhole
gateway and spaceship. Qurra and Tesla are connected by air travel
only. Pascal and Rutherford are connected only by
spaceship. And Tesla and Rutherford are connected by
both a vacuum train and a wormhole gateway. We have a traveller who starts in the mega-city
of Pascal, and wants to visit every place at least once before returning to Pascal,
but he will have to visit one of the cities twice. Based on these modes of travel between the
cities, which place must he visit twice? Qurra, Rutherford, Sagan, or Tesla? Go ahead and put your answer and reasoning
in the comments below. Brain teasers and problems are a great way
to get the brain going, I try to do one with my morning coffee every day, but they’re
also a great way to have fun with the family too while getting some education in. My wife Sarah and I tend to do a logic problem,
Sudoku puzzle, or crossword most days and it's a great way to learn and have fun. Having fun while you’re doing it is the
best way to learn, and something our friends over at Brilliant focus on. They have a huge collection of daily challenges
and quizzes, including the one we just covered, as well as detailed explanations of how to
solve them if you get stumped. If you are naturally curious, want to build
your problem-solving skills, or need to develop confidence in your analytical abilities, then
get Brilliant Premium to learn something new. Brilliant’s thought-provoking math, science,
and computer science content helps guide you to mastery by taking complex concepts and
breaking them up into bite-sized understandable chunks. You'll start by having fun with their interactive
explorations, over time you'll be amazed at what you can accomplish. If you’d like to learn more science, math,
and computer science, and want to do it at your own pace and from the comfort of your
own home, go to brilliant.org/IsaacArthur and try it out for free. Before we get to the upcoming schedule, I
wanted to give a quick shout out to the sci fi Film “2067” that came out last week,
the studio sent me an advance copy a couple weeks back and it combines a mix Blade Runner-esque
dark future in a grim metropolis with Time Travel paradoxes. It’s the first time travel film or show
that surprised me with its resolution of the various predestination paradoxes in a long
while, and combining it with scifi film noir cinematography makes it a nice accompaniment
to today’s episode on grim future megacities, and definitely worth a watch. So that will wrap us up for today, but we’ll
be back this weekend for our mid-month bonus episode, as we look at the recently released
Navy UFO footage and try to see what mundane explanations might fit them, and if they aren’t
mundane, what they might be and what it might indicate about our potential alien visitors
and their advanced technology. Then next Thursday we will turn things around
a bit, and ask how low-tech a civilization can be and still travel through space to distant
worlds, and in two weeks we’ll return to our new series, Becoming an Interplanetary
Species, to look at our first trip to a distant world, as we look at our first Base on Mars,
and how we go about getting there. If you want alerts when those and other episodes
come out, make sure to subscribe to the channel, and if you’d like to help support future
episodes, you can donate to us on Patreon, or our website, IsaacArthur.net, which are
linked in the episode description below, along with all of our various social media forums
where you can get updates and chat with others about the concepts in the episodes and many
other futuristic ideas. Until next time, thanks for watching, and
have a great week!
