X-Seed 4000 | Hacker News Reader

X-Seed 4000

en.wikipedia.org

150 pointsbane64 comments

> 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)

Your only need 34 of these to house all of Afghanistan.

I imagine they'd be less suitable for growing opium poppies though.

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!

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.

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

You have to keep the thing painted, though, and wash the windows. So there would be plenty of forever jobs.

Yeah, but the defense industry can't charge the firm that does the maintenance $1500/gallon for regular paint.

I think the right way to do it would be to make it modular and profitable, so that the rent/agriculture/solar/wind from the first floor could pay for the construction of the second floor, etc. Either that or set up a kind of franchise system where new settlers could purchase a customized home pod that gets bolted on to the existing structure, consuming some utilities but providing a mounting point for the next one.

"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.

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.

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 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.

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.

> 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...

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.

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

http://www.buildtheenterprise.org/cost-mass/

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

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

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.

Regular old fission power and ion engines.

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.

This reminds me or the ARCOs from Sim City 2000.

Seems like you watched Real Life Lore today as well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToKKtcRg6YU

Some light similarity to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Babel

I would say the precedent is more to 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.

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.

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

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

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

Hence the mention in the article that the building is required to protect inhabitants from pressure gradients.

It's perfectly possible to live at 4000m. For example

* El Alto (Bolivia, near La Paz) 4,150m (13,615ft) population of 974,754 in 2011.

* Potosí (Bolivia) 4,090m (13,420ft) population of 240,966 in 2012

I've never been so high. Once I went from my city Buenos Aires (25m, 82ft) to Abra Pampa (3507m, 11505ft). I had to be quiet (walk instead of running) and even talk slowly, but I was fine. (Some people get worse symptoms.) I stayed for a day, but after some weeks you get use to the height an can live quite normally.

8000' is high enough for people to have problems (I live near the mountains in Colorado, and whenever I'm at a vacation destination that's at 8000' or more, they always have oxygen canisters for sale).

But people hike/climb to the top of 14ers (14k+ feet) here in Colorado all the time without additional gear/oxygen. 4000 meters is only 13k' and change.

Ears would pop going up or down if they didn't pressurize it, but it would be livable -- especially if you pumped in extra oxygen on the higher floors.

But if you're building it that big anyway, you could certainly pressurize it too, though that would make the HVAC tricky, though you'd probably need to have zones of no more than 100 floors that were sealed from each other, or the weight of the air on the higher floors would raise the pressure on the lower floors.

If you're spending a trillion dollars to build a building, might as well make it comfortable, right? :)

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

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

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

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.

Yeah the only "use case" I find is a post-apocalyptic scenario in which we're trapped in much smaller areas for our cities. So practically each building becomes a self-sustaining city.

But in that scenario I doubt we would be able to pull off such project.

Seems like good sci-fi material though.

there's also a crazy amount of practical considerations if it were actually built.

Imagine all the logistics to send food around. The cabin fever from living on floor 500 and basically never touching the ground.

It would be better just to build smaller buildings.

> The cabin fever from living on floor 500 and basically never touching the ground.

Your comment reminds me of a fascinating book I have, Cities Without Ground: A Hong Kong Guidebook. It is full of cutaway diagrams of different areas of Hong Kong showing how you can get around from one place to another without ever touching the ground.

Like Sai Kung: "...Even at the water's edge, ground is elusive..."

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1935935321

Also reminds me of Kowloon: http://www.spoon-tamago.com/2014/10/28/detailed-cross-sectio...

these sorts of "mega-cities" are often a staple in futuristic dystopian scifi, and they've always struck me as completely impractical. There are circumstances where bigger is better, where you get increased efficiency due to scale, but mega-city-tower-dome-things don't really provide many benefits, while they come with a lot of complication.

Yeah I think Blade Runner is close to the most accurate depiction of what we'll end up with. Superstructures are interesting to me, but in terms of practicality I always thought building them in orbit makes a lot more sense than on Earth.

Monolith "megacities" may become practical, and even necessary, in interplanetary colonization:

We may not be able to simply build anywhere we wish on a given planet, and the horizontal sprawl of "traditional" cities in unexplored and potentially hostile environments would be risky.

Having a single place for spaceships/landers to dock at/orbit over, right next to the facilities for refueling, cargo transfer, storage, processing, distribution etc. would be desirable, so more-or-less vertical megastructures may be more practical there.

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?

If you were to do that, I still don't think it would end up looking anything like the X-Seed. You'd probably build "out, not up" and end up with something like the Raft from Snow Crash.

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.

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.

https://www.seasteading.org/

That's the goal of the Seasteading institute.

It kinda sorta works?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principality_of_Sealand

> 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?

Because major cities are located near natural supplies of fresh water, navigable waterways, etc., for a reason. The good places for cities tend to have cities in them.

You can get fresh water from any salt water supply, which is plentiful. Countries like Dubai, Singapore do just fine pulling large amounts of their potable water from the ocean.

Yes, you can compromise on some of the things that make a good city location if you have surpluses in other aspects... And the places where that is true already have major cities.

The places that don't have major cities have good geographic reasons for not having major cities. Pouring money into building a major city in the middle of Nebraska,or a similar location, would be silly.

Locals usually strongly resist big projects like this. Building in the water is politically a lot easier.

Where would one find the full technical documents for this?

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).

Better yet, announce we're building 2. That way we he can plan on building 3.

That has already happened: 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.

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

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

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

Needs to be very wide as the base needs to support a 4km (2.5 mi) structure above it. It could be more narrow if you had no living space inside, but then it's even less useful.

For comparison the Burj Khalifa and Shanghai Tower also taper which dramatically reduce amount of weight the base needs to support. Further, if you somehow stacked them on top of each other that's still less than 1/2 as tall as this structure.

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.

The most inefficient use of space ever conceived

How? Building in 3-dimensions is less efficient than 2D? What else would you rather do with all that vacant airspace above our sprawling cities?

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.

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