
X-Seed 4000 - bane
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-Seed_4000
======
jopsen
> Some estimate that in 1995 the cost of constructing the X-Seed 4000 may be
> ... between $479 billion and $1.4 trillion US 2017 dollars.

So instead of invading Afghanistan the money could have been spent building
two giant replacement towers :)

If designed to withstand earthquakes and tsunamis I'm guessing it would be
hard to bring them down.

(I know it's not the same... but nice to know that we could find the money to
build such a thing)

~~~
btown
Well, the jobs created for building a single structure are only temporary.
With a Forever War, though, we have sustainable employment with a constant
need for new hires! Think of the children!

/s

~~~
ben_jones
The trickle down economics affect is really quite amazing. All the PTSD
counselors, student loan officers, and lobbying positions, that this generates
really makes it a no brainer.

~~~
ekianjo
And don't forget Hollywood which makes an insane amount of money just to make
you feel like you were there.

------
gerdesj
"The X-Seed 4000 "is never meant to be built," says Georges Binder"

.. and this is because it will probably fail - badly - if it were to be built.
Bear with me 8)

Civil Engineering is capable of creating things of wonder and also of complete
disaster. For example the Millennium Bridge in London: standard materials, not
a particularly fancy loading (people) but it was a bit flat and when I saw it
I instantly thought about transverse loading caused by people walking. When I
was a grad in Civ Eng we were drilled about the Tacoma Narrows bridge failure
due to wind and about people walking in lock step (not just soldiers) on
bridges. That bridge ended up with some hydraulic dampers pretty quickly.

So, this beast. Hmmm. Resonance of some sort might destroy it in some way.
When you do Civ Eng our materials and knowledge generally proceed in small
incremental steps to be successful.

"Buildings & Data" might as well be smoking crack with their design. They do
admit as much. You should see what I've got on the drawing board.

~~~
ChuckMcM
I think you are overly pessimistic. I haven't looked at the actual drawings
but if they reflect the picture the sides appear to be built as inverse
parabolas. This would transfer all of the vertical weight into a horizontal
force at the foundation. If the base of the building was deep enough, you
could counter balance an arbitrary height. Essentially creating an unnatural
cinder cone equivalent. Internally the sides would be pressing inward and
distribute lateral forces around the circle. It should be at least as stable
as an equivalent volcano which typically has a much more variable material
structure.

Construction would be very interesting and challenging to pull off, each
'floor' at the bottom would have a tremendous amount of overhang.

~~~
gerdesj
Day old thread but I can't resist 8)

The basic ideas are sound as you say but there is a huge difference between
basic ideas and practical reality. I doubt anyone has looked into the
localized stability of say 240m^3 chunks of a volcano's structure. That's the
size of a flat of 10x10x2.4m.

This thing is a termite mound scaled up to human size and is absolutely
terrifying to me. How would it deal with say an earthquake? I mentioned
resonance as the curse of Civ Eng earlier and this thing is absolutely huge -
who can predict what weird oscillations might occur due to wind loadings and
counter them? Do you engineer it for a 1 in 100 year or 1 in 10000 year event?
Given climate change, do we even know what a 1 in 10000 year event even _is_
any more?

You may have heard about a fire in a tower block in London recently. The
Grenfell tower disaster (amongst many others) show that whilst we are capable
of building huge structures, economics and base stupidity will strike. That
was a few 100 people of which 80 odd died. This beast would house up to
1,000,000 people.

I am pessimistic because we have plenty of history to look at and this thing
is too big to fail, yet we are unable to do the basics yet. Grenfell should
not have happened and neither should many other tower block disasters.

The floor plan of this thing is 36km^2 who knows what weird effects might
happen in a building that covers that area. It would be a right bugger to
discover that you really should have put say huge rubber washers into each
joint to damp vibrations afterwards. Heck, 6km is enough to have to worry
about the earth's curvature. This is God, (sorry, $DEITY) sized engineering.
Try and hold an image in your mind of a 36km^2, 4km high space frame with
cells of say 20x10x2.4, pin joint all elements. Reduce the structure to lines.
Now bend and twist it. My mental model wobbles like a
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blancmange](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blancmange)
but some of the loads will be absolutely huge and I can't be arsed to quantify
them: I know. Try perturbing say one corner and watch it propagate.

Capability is not the same as responsibility.

------
nashashmi
I actually remember seeing this on some future predicting TV episode back in
1996. I remember seeing 20-story orb network connected by rail transport in a
triangle pyramid formation. Each orb was like a city zone e.g. commerce,
industry, residential, etc. By 1996 standards, this thing seemed ridiculous
and large. I mocked it at the age of 11. And my father yelled at me for being
so ... pessimistic. Back then, the show said it would be built by 2005 in the
middle of the waters. Always wondered what happened to this building and this
plan.

------
anonu
> Though it has not actually been built, it is the tallest design to have been
> completely specced out.

specced? feels weird to see that word in what should be an authoritative
source. Always makes me a bit cautious about Wikipedia when I see that choice
of wording...

~~~
vosper
When you get to the edges / infrequently-traficked parts of Wikipedia you see
a lot of writing like that. I'd take it for what it seems to be: non-
authoritative, opinionated, or incomplete. Maybe just plain made up.

------
pitaj
For the price of the largest building in the world, you could possibly build
the Enterprise [1].

[http://www.buildtheenterprise.org/cost-
mass/](http://www.buildtheenterprise.org/cost-mass/)

~~~
adrianN
Does that include R&D for Warp drive, transporters, etc?

~~~
girvo
Not in their plan, they're talking pure constant acceleration for solar system
wide exploring :)

~~~
dogma1138
With what fuel/engines exactly? we can build the enterprise right now if we
wanted too, but we have no way to fuel or power it.

~~~
pitaj
Regular old fission power and ion engines.

~~~
dogma1138
Ion thrusters will not produce enough thrust to move something that big within
a single lifetime. Fission will in essence be a steam power plant on that ship
since RTGs do not provide sufficient power.

Ion thrusters still need fuel, so you need to store gas, to move something
that big it would be one heck of a gas tank, and which point thermal nuclear
propulsion might be a better choice if you are mad enough to have a full
nuclear reactor in space.

------
koolba
This reminds me or the ARCOs from Sim City 2000.

------
dawnerd
Seems like you watched Real Life Lore today as well.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToKKtcRg6YU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToKKtcRg6YU)

------
chi17
Some light similarity to:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Babel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Babel)

~~~
gwern
I would say the precedent is more to
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Night_Land](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Night_Land)
\- nothing about the Tower of Babel was meant to house anyone or be self-
contained, it was merely a ladder to the heavens.

~~~
spookyuser
It's not canon, but in Ted Chiang's short story about the tower of Babel. The
tower was perpetually in construction, so a whole society eventually
flourished in the tower.

Some people never even left the tower because it took too long to get down
from the place they were born.

------
frankus
4000m is pretty well within the range of altitude-induced hypoxia.

~~~
chii
you'd assume the insides of the building is pressurized!

~~~
vortico
Unless the floors are airtight from each other, pressurizing the top floors
would make the bottom floors be more than ground level pressure.

------
pavement
Figure a space elevator might originate from a structure like this?

I mean, it doesn't look _completely_ retarded. Just kind of absurd.

------
bhhaskin
It would be really neat to see one of these mega city designs built in my
lifetime.

~~~
Analemma_
It's hard to see how it could ever be worth building - not just in terms of
positive ROI (though of course that's a factor), but in terms of why you're
doing it at all. If you want to build a city from scratch, why would you build
this thing instead of just starting it in e.g. the plains of Nebraska or
something?

Even in land-scarce Japan, if they wanted to start a city from scratch it
would be easier by orders of magnitude to just clear-cut a forest somewhere
first.

This thing is cool, but there's just no reason why it has to exist. There's
plenty of land left on Earth to use first.

~~~
robotresearcher
There might be one reason: all the land on Earth is owned by a nation or
protected by treaty.

Perhaps a city in international waters could be built without anyone's
permission, and outside any nation's jurisdiction.

Does anyone with expertise know if this is true or not?

~~~
simplicio
How many non-nations have 1.4 trillion dollars hanging around to build such a
thing? Even if Apple and Exxon convinced their shareholders to liquidate their
companies and put all the resulting money into building this thing, they'd
still be half a trillion short.

~~~
robotresearcher
I didn't say it was practical or likely. I wondered why would anyone build
away from land, and this was the only thing I could think of.

------
pirocks
Where would one find the full technical documents for this?

------
0xbear
That's a good way to get rid of Kim Jong Un: show him this thing, say he can't
build it, and pretend you're building it. That's what Reagan did to the USSR
with the Strategic Defense Initiative (AKA satellites with friggin' lasers
attached to their heads).

~~~
jzwinck
That has already happened:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryugyong_Hotel](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryugyong_Hotel)

The North Koreans have been trying to build this hotel for 30 years. It was a
response to the Singapore Swissotel which was the tallest hotel in the world
and built by a South Korean company.

~~~
0xbear
Hence my comment. North Koreans seem to have a thing for the grandiose.

------
rocky1138
I love that 1-bit image at the bottom. Reminds me of the Atari logo.

------
mrfusion
Does it need to be that wide or is that just a design decision?

~~~
hughes
I'm not 100% sure, but it sure looks like the shape is designed to result in
equal strain/deformation throughout the structure.

Imagine the structure is sliced into horizontal layers. Each layer needs to
support its own weight as well as the the weight of all the layers above it.
Similar to the exponential effects of the rocket equation, this results in a
rapidly growing mass requirement as the structure increases in height.

Some other towers actually have a similar shape, but with different constants
at work due to their smaller height. Look at the profile of the CN tower: it
also grows exponentially along its height.

------
basicplus2
The most inefficient use of space ever conceived

~~~
dsr_
That's a very odd statement. This sort of thing is very efficient in terms of
land use, energy use, and transportation costs. If anything, one might
consider it too efficient in terms of required control -- having a sanitation
worker strike would be absolutely disastrous for a million people at once. It
needs much more attention paid to means of governance and politics than a
regular city of a million people, because everyone is living in the same
building.

It's not very good at growing food or producing energy, but those are not
things that we expect cities to do today.

