Pardon my general ignorance in this topic, but it’s those energy, water and food demand would still be applicable no matter where people live, no? The denser the population, easier to deliver said things (something alike economy of scale). Unless i’m missing something?
Yes, but is the power grid capable of such demand? Sewer and water pipes?
Thinking with the perspective of, how do we service this land for growth/people changes one's perspective.
People often think...look at all this empty land, it can hold so many people... but, where will they get their power (which can relatively easily be transmitted long distances). Water and sewage are another challenge. Water of a sufficient quality and quantity needs to come from somewhere and be treated, sewage needs to be conveyed to a treatment plant, treated, and discharged to, generally, a river or lake. So much infrastructure is needed for modern society, especially density, that is often not thought about by most.
For example, I was at a gas station on a highway where there are no cities nearby and another customer asked if there were any car washes. I thought about it for a minute and realized that there's no sewage treatment around so there's nowhere to send car wash water. They could store it and truck it but that would be quite expensive.
Thanks for coming to my shower thoughts TEDx talk.
> Water and sewage are another challenge. Water of a sufficient quality and quantity needs to come from somewhere and be treated, sewage needs to be conveyed to a treatment plant, treated, and discharged to, generally, a river or lake. So much infrastructure is needed for modern society, especially density, that is often not thought about by most.
All of these problems are easier with higher density, not harder. Would you rather run and maintain a few giant sewer lines for a million people, or thousands of small sewer lines over hundreds of miles? Sewage treatment plants benefit enormously from economies of scale. Economies of scale and lower transportation costs make higher-density living more economical in nearly every way.
>All of these problems are easier with higher density, not harder. Would you rather run and maintain a few giant sewer lines for a million people, or thousands of small sewer lines over hundreds of miles?
But that's not really the problem faced with construction, except when building on previously undeveloped land. Significant increase in density imposes commentate additional demand on existing infrastructure, which is much harder to expand than to operate and quite probably vastly harder to expand than it would've been to build initially to that expanded state before there was a dense city on top of it.
Well, the two extremes would be an even distribution of small homes over the entire agricultural footprint space for the human population, vs. all the humans living in a giant skyscraper surrounded by the agricultural (and energy, and water) production zone. Each setup has certain advantages and disadvantages (transport from field -> skyscraper has a cost, vs. local availability of basic resources, but on the other hand, if you have to run fiber optic to every household, that gets expensive). In terms of delivery, it depends on lot on the mass of what's being delivered.
If we want to go larger, then imagine multiple installations like this, perhaps specializing in different production capabilities, and trading among one another. Sort of a Factorio gameplay scenario.
Basically, would skyscrapers (or underground versions) be the best way to colonize Mars (you'd still need the large agricultural zones)? See also Mad Max: Fury Road for the dystopian version (BulletFarm, GasTown, and Hydroponics/Milk IIRC).
Back on Earth, the issue would be that if you doubled the population density of a city by building a lot of skyscrapers without also doubling the regional agricultural zone size, you'd end up dependent on import of foodstuffs from remote regions, which could become a problem.
I don't think we exist somewhere on the line directly between your two extremes; I think there are more dimensions than that. It's true that for most of human history, the local availability of basic resources meant not having to transport lots of goods around. But that's just not modern society: even in resource-rich rural areas, the vast majority of goods on store shelves are from far, far away. If you want local stores to stock oranges all year, and smartphones, and plastic toys, resources are going to be moving thousands of miles no matter where humans live. Density ultimately just means fewer destinations for those goods, which can allow for optimization. High-density living is just more optimal in almost every way.
