Rich and Strange Aeons

Some guy on rasfs has an approach I hadn't thought of before (my two posts are 16 through 18 in the thread) to heating a city: just heat it, not worrying about the dome or roof. Running some numbers, it seems... maybe doable. A lot depends on how quickly heat is lost to the air, and how little we can get away with to get halfway comfortable; adding 100 W/m2 gets too expensive. OTOH, that was assuming continuous year-round heating. Just doing the worst days would cut cost a lot (though raise the proportion of the infrastructure). For purposes of not dying, simple de-icing might be sufficient -- bursts of heat to clear the ground, and people can wear coats like normal.

The thing prompted me to try to actually estimate costs of the roofs I like to go on about. I don't know enough for a good estimate, but comparison to greenhouses ($7.50/square foot) or the raw costs of transparent materials ($3/foot2 plexiglass, $4 Lexan or glass, all 1/8 inch thick) suggests a minimum of $100/m2 for $100 million per square kilometer. That would seem feasible. I don't know how this scales -- big building costs can look a lot higher, and we'd have to be building a lot higher than a greenhouse, but then we don't actually need a normal building, just a roof or umbrella. Unless we want smart roofs, which we might, for summer... $1 billion/km2 would be a lot even for Manhattanites. There's also a question of how thick the panels have to be to survive -- 1/8 inch, or 1/2 inch?

Domed cities link! Notes possibility of floating a dome on air pressure.

Buckminster Fuller's little essay

Thank you, pompe! I get to re-use my 'hubris' tag (in a good way): biggest building plans, from an architect who's already built similar buildings. Article also links to a much bigger proposal for Japan, which is probably vaporware. This hyperbolic pyramid design is a new one to me, for arcologies, and my first reaction is "wow, that's really space inefficient", compared to a cube or dome, but I assume there are other benefits. Be nice to know what they are.

From James we get GOP candidates as Buffy villains.

From fallenrose, Michael Pollan (Omnivore's Dilemma, Botany of Desire) has a new book out (In Defense of Food). Don't eat too much, eat plants, don't eat things your grandma wouldn't recognize as food... I'd note that some of the animal engineering he mentions is arguably counteracting previous abuses; eggs aren't getting "fish oils", they're getting a flaxseed component which might be closer to natural eggs than the pure corn diet.

I wonder how this interacts with the John Hawks paper on rapid human evolution, which seems to support my intuition that various human populations could well have adapted to their specific agricultural diets. Perhaps we should think about not just traditional foods but food traditional for our individual genomes, where determinable. A related thought was that if there's any genetic component to correlations between 'race' and IQ, perhaps it's not from "X are dumb" but "X aren't adapted to Middle Eastern-derived agriculture, and IQ is nutrition sensitive", with certain middle-class populations suffering from the fact that while they can afford all the food they think they want, their genomes actually want foods not sold in their hemisphere.

Creationists take on plate tectonics and linguistics.

It's too hot. And going to get hotter. While Shiver linked to another "wear sunscreen or die" article.

When thinking about space colonies, one of my big reasons was not "destiny" or "spread our eggs" or "flee the brown folks", but "whee, controllable outdoors climate, including gravity". People worry about radiation in space but it sounded like if you piled up the outer shell -- 10m thick, maybe? -- you could even get better shielding than the atmosphere provides. And no UV worries.

These days I'm more likely to think of arcologies, or paraterraforming the Earth, though still, somehow a km-wide space cylinder doesn't upset the imagination as much as a 1-km high roof. Maybe because of gravity, even though the cylinder would be spinning.

I link again to http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/12/21/17846/757 in which long-thinking machines like unto Culture Minds choose against unshielded poorly maintainable nuclear reactors.