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Comment by Analemma_ | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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

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...

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

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.

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