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As a hypothetical, tell me how to build a completely self sustaining society of at least 10,000 people - self sustaining both in the present, and in the future - with the following assumptions: 1. You have unlimited money. Imagine you are the richest person on Earth. 2. You have unlimited energy. Whether it's nuclear, fusion, or some sci-fi futuristic power source, you have all the power you could ever need at your fingertips. 3. You have a large, tropical island measuring roughly 10 miles wide by 30 miles long. Volcanic in origin, it has a large mountain in the North with wide flat plains to the South and a steeper side to the North. The soil is rich and the forest is thick. 4. You have a construction period of 25 years in which to bring in anything you need - construction material, machines, tools, computers, crops, livestock, people, etc. Anything and everything, and once the 25 years is up, you have to then live 100% self sustainably with no outside materials. Tell me if this could work, and how. How much farmland would you need? Could you support a beef diet? Would skyscraper greenhouses produce enough fruit for 10,000 people, daily? How would you organize your society? What crops would you grow? How would people eat? Live? Work? What recreation would you offer?
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Jul 17, 2014 04:31
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| # ? May 4, 2024 16:19 |
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no minorities
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Jul 17, 2014 05:47
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The island is called "Rapture".
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Jul 17, 2014 06:23
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slap me silly posted:The island is called "Rapture". I don't get the reference - please enlighten. Anyone have any clue how much wheat you'd have to grow to make enough bread products for 10,000 people, every day? How would you store it? Would you have to rotate land?
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Jul 17, 2014 07:34
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redshirt posted:I don't get the reference - please enlighten. probs not
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Jul 17, 2014 07:43
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All of the people would be locked in steel boxes buried miles underground. Their only contact with the outside world would be robots that arrive daily to deliver fish gruel and extract genetic material. The robots would look exactly like Noam Chomsky.
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Jul 17, 2014 07:53
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First you'll need some empty cereal boxes, a milk carton, glue, and some sticky-back plastic 
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Jul 17, 2014 08:25
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You need the Juche idea, with a hefty helping of Songun.
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Jul 17, 2014 08:44
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In this scenario the Polynesians beat you to the punch and they did it without your fancy rear end unlimited energy and money. Otherwise unlimited money and energy? Spend stupendous amounts of money on inventing the replicator.
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Jul 17, 2014 08:55
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I get the feeling this is a homework project but it looks like fun. I enjoyed doing something similar for my Economics class in High School. The problem with all this is very simple, the more complex you go the harder it becomes to replace. If you want to go with LED lights for your skyscraper farms than you'll need Silicon, Germanium, Phosphorus, Arsenic, Boron and Aluminium. That doesn't go into what you need for any of the more complex computer components like Integrated Circuits and everything that goes together to make a computer. After that, you've got to have factories that can build all that crap and replace themselves plus whatever materials are needed to make them. So you either have to find a way to mine deep underground, filter sea water for whatever trace materials are in it or just stockpile a crazy amount of raw minerals. This has to be solved first.
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Jul 17, 2014 09:29
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You should look up "Jonestown" for ideas.
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Jul 17, 2014 09:37
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Destroy the unlimited power generator and release the captives onto the island to live as they will. At night, you hunt.
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Jul 17, 2014 09:39
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Use minorities to build the society for 24 years and then 'free' them in year 25 and live off what they have created
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Jul 17, 2014 10:23
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For starters you're going to need around a desalination plant that that can handle 10,000 liters of water per day, even with low flow toilets flushed once a day. Everybody always ignores the basic logistics of taking over the planet.
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Jul 17, 2014 10:29
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World Order Operation 50
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Jul 17, 2014 15:04
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I am serious about hunting people: if you took a bunch of average people from the developed world and plopped them down on an island then the only way to organize and motivate them enough to actually do poo poo would be to provide an external threat. Unless your group of people are all highly motivated self selecting types. This avoids the dumbass criteria: that you have unlimited power - that ruins the scenario. Why dig a hole when you could spend some of your unlimited cash on a plastic tube seventy miles long and pump your feces into the deep ocean using your unlimited power. Seriously, this unlimited everything poo poo is wank. A community in a survival situation is shaped by response to need. - Col. Santiago, Sparta Command GuestBob fucked around with this message at 15:36 on Jul 17, 2014 |
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Jul 17, 2014 15:31
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Lord Windy posted:I get the feeling this is a homework project but it looks like fun. I enjoyed doing something similar for my Economics class in High School. These are the kinds of logistic issues I'm interested in discussing. How much of a stockpile, and is there any special handling? Mining seems unlikely, so any metals/minerals have to be stockpiled. What about buying a ton of used ocean liners and then keeping them for scrap/recycling purposes? Could enough material be salvaged from say 1000 oil tankers to keep everyone happy? One of the key's to this scenario is the emphasis on "modern" society. If it was simply survival, it would be an entirely different matter. Think of a 10000 person science colony, with all the best of modern tech.
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Jul 17, 2014 17:51
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redshirt posted:These are the kinds of logistic issues I'm interested in discussing. How much of a stockpile, and is there any special handling? I'd move as far from modern as possible. A primitive society with few material needs seems more appropriate. Keep residences underground, using maybe something like a termite colony as a model. gently caress a dependency on livestock. Instead harvest the ocean, and also get people hooked on eating insects since they're far more sustainable. I'm no expect on plants but I really imagine it wouldn't be tough with that square mileage to grow enough to sustain just 10k people. Spend your money initially just training people in primitive ways. You'd need farmers, fishers, people who can go into that jungle and determine which plants will cure you and which will kill you. Ever watch that really loving lovely movie 'Reign of Fire'? In it they're basically entertaining themselves by acting out Star Wars like a play. Well there you go, Hollywood has given you an endless supply of retarded entertainment. Someday in a thousand years the people will think we worshiped Batman or something. Either that or spend your infinite wealth buying up nukes and developing orbital death lasers. Is it considered self-sufficient if you're killing everybody else and taking their poo poo?
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Jul 17, 2014 18:18
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Liar posted:I'd move as far from modern as possible. A primitive society with few material needs seems more appropriate. Keep residences underground, using maybe something like a termite colony as a model. gently caress a dependency on livestock. Instead harvest the ocean, and also get people hooked on eating insects since they're far more sustainable. I'm no expect on plants but I really imagine it wouldn't be tough with that square mileage to grow enough to sustain just 10k people. An island of 10000 "primitives" is easy. People have already done this in fact! I want the best tech the world has to offer. For instance, where are we at with industrial sized 3d printers? Is it feasible in 30 years to imagine a 3d printer factory printing out steel beams, sheets of metal, train bodies, etc?
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Jul 17, 2014 18:22
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redshirt posted:An island of 10000 "primitives" is easy. People have already done this in fact! We're not far off from 3D printed houses now seemingly. The question is where the hell do you get the resources from? You can only store so much metal, and keep in mind that there's like a hundred different metals in a computer. I suppose if you literally have infinite money and you just want to be retarded about this then you could dig storage silos that go miles into the ground and then just fill them up, but at that point you're seriously deviating from what's logical to "WHEE IT'S MAGIC". The other big issue then would be what the hell are your people doing? In a primitive society everyone has a role. As we progress further into the future people are becoming less necessary. If you have a factory printing out buildings then that eliminates a LOT of jobs. Also I'd say it wouldn't be inconceivable to say that people might not even be necessary for farm work in another twenty-five years thanks to automation. You won't need livestock because we're on the verge of growing meat too (seriously). You'd have a society where maybe 1 in fifty people actually needs to do a job. How pissed is that guy gonna be that forty-nine others get to sit on their asses, leaching off from the system? It's an actual problem that we're facing now. Employers are basically making jobs up because if people don't have a job and money then they can't buy the poo poo the employers sell. I suppose your only retort would be to create a slave population straight off the bat. Put all of your factories in one spot, build a massive wall around it, and all of the working people are confined there. From their perspective where they are is the entire world and life is good. They'll never know that they're working their asses off so 98% of the island's population can sit around and fathom the meaning the existence.
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Jul 17, 2014 18:47
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Liar posted:We're not far off from 3D printed houses now seemingly. The question is where the hell do you get the resources from? You can only store so much metal, and keep in mind that there's like a hundred different metals in a computer. I suppose if you literally have infinite money and you just want to be retarded about this then you could dig storage silos that go miles into the ground and then just fill them up, but at that point you're seriously deviating from what's logical to "WHEE IT'S MAGIC". Good question. Half the issue here is truly "what do you do with the people"? Farming would still be fairly labor intensive. You'd need a large fishing fleet. Then there's the infrastructure of running the island itself - who works in the cafeteria? Who fixes the plumbing? Etc. Who bakes the bread? Who makes the cheese? Who processes the lobster? I'd guess you could easily employ 3-5 thousand people via farming, fishing, infrastructure, and management. Management would be a big deal since, as a closed society, poo poo needs to be planned to the Nth degree - 5 year forecasts and the like. As for livestock, I'd think cows/pigs would be out, or only present as tissue donors, in order to grow meat, as you say. Chickens and dairy cows seems like a must.
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Jul 17, 2014 18:53
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redshirt posted:Good question. Half the issue here is truly "what do you do with the people"? Why would you need to fish if you're literally growing meat? Also I'm sticking with "eat bugs". That's literally the future. You'd need a 10,000 acre farm to feed 10,000 people (1 acre per person is the average). Right now with technology being what it is you could man that at about 10 people per hundred acres. So that'd be roughly a thousand people employed in farming. But you're dealing with technology twenty-five years from now, and you're throwing infinite money into developing what you need to get by. So reasonably speaking you could be looking at half that number needed to be employed. I suppose you could create a society with a bigger push on sustenance farming, where people basically grow for themselves. If you're putting all your people into massive sky-scrappers then this isn't too tough. Just have massive patios extending around the building where people on each level are encouraged to work together to feed that entire floor. Some vegetables grow better upside down, so they could be utilizing the next floor above them as well. In this case you could probably cut your major farm in half since you're basically just growing corn to use to grow meat. In this case you've also created your society of order. Each floor would need an elected official, and then each building a main official, and then a center of law where everyone reports to. Ummm... So it's Judge Dredd basically. You'd need strict population controls, although to be fair your island is actually big enough to house everyone on Earth. It'd just be a matter of resources. Also gently caress dairy. Chicken maybe, but honestly gently caress dairy. It's not needed.
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Jul 17, 2014 19:28
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Liar posted:Why would you need to fish if you're literally growing meat? Also I'm sticking with "eat bugs". That's literally the future. Do you have any source for the 1 acre per person figure? I've been looking for this information for a while. Seafood would be a huge part of the diet - why not? It's local and sustainable. It also produces a lot of jobs. I don't see how you could present a "modern" society without dairy. No cheese? No thank you. Food production would employ lots of people. How many chickens would be necessary to 1. produce enough eggs and 2. ensure future generations and 3. provide some meat? I'm assuming 5000.
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Jul 17, 2014 20:13
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thrakkorzog posted:For starters you're going to need around a desalination plant that that can handle 10,000 liters of water per day, even with low flow toilets flushed once a day. Everybody always ignores the basic logistics of taking over the planet. With unlimited energy, desalinization becomes an easy matter, yes?
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Jul 17, 2014 22:26
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You mention 3d printing. Have you considered 3d printing sex dolls to vent off social tension? With the advances in computing that will likely come about in the next quarter century, the sky really is the limit here. Perhaps oculus rift could be involved somehow? Just spitballing!
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Jul 17, 2014 23:35
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Sunshine Mix posted:You mention 3d printing. Have you considered 3d printing sex dolls to vent off social tension? With the advances in computing that will likely come about in the next quarter century, the sky really is the limit here. Perhaps oculus rift could be involved somehow? Just spitballing! Would a brothel be an outrage on the Island?
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Jul 18, 2014 04:14
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redshirt posted:Would a brothel be an outrage on the Island? To Jesus.
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Jul 18, 2014 05:34
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redshirt posted:Do you have any source for the 1 acre per person figure? I've been looking for this information for a while. Look up home gardening and small farms. We used about 1/3 acre for our veggies, but that was because we were just growing oddball items like purple carrots and heirloom tomatoes. If we'd needed to survive off of it, we'd have needed considerably more. A 200/lb pig (hanging weight @150 lbs) provides enough meat for a family for 1 year or so. An angus cow, hanging weight (post processing) of 800 lbs, can provide 2 families. However, beef cattle are inefficient, requiring several pounds of fodder to gain a pound of weight. Pigs are more efficient, requiring 2-4 pounds to gain. Turkeys are the most efficient of all. Pigs, chickens and goats will eat a wide variety of foods, including table scraps. But if you give them garbage, you will get garbage meat. A good laying hen starts producing at roughly 6 months old, giving one egg per day. She will do so until she is 5 or so, at which point she's going to drop off in production rapidly and is probably best used as chicken stock. You know where to find all this stuff and more? Your nearby 4-H office.
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Jul 18, 2014 05:47
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Hide it under a hologram and encourage adultery.
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Jul 18, 2014 06:01
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If you can fish off the island thats a huge deal, because that's sustinence your population didn't have to generate. But I understand if you say 'no fishing' so that this is a truly closed system. Always fish, if you can. I think your real problem will be the technology. You need a population far larger than 10,000 to manufacture all the different components for all of our technology. Think of gorilla glass or whatever its called for their cell phones. You're going to need a whole system to produce cellphone glass for when some idiots cell phone screen cracks. It's just not feasible.
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Jul 18, 2014 07:28
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Use the island as a jumping-off point for an Aquarius-like settlement from The Millennium Project. The serious answer would be to recontextualize "modernity" and do away with it as much as possible. Unless this Island would have extensive contact with the outside world for materials/metals not native to the area.
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Jul 18, 2014 07:38
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A serious question, are we even close to mining the sea floor?
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Jul 18, 2014 09:01
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Khazar-khum posted:Look up home gardening and small farms. We used about 1/3 acre for our veggies, but that was because we were just growing oddball items like purple carrots and heirloom tomatoes. If we'd needed to survive off of it, we'd have needed considerably more. Good info, thanks. Can you estimate the number of chickens the Island would need?
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Jul 18, 2014 09:04
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DavidAlltheTime posted:If you can fish off the island thats a huge deal, because that's sustinence your population didn't have to generate. But I understand if you say 'no fishing' so that this is a truly closed system. Always fish, if you can. Absolutely fishing would be a major part of the society. As for tech, since it is a closed society, the tech is closed as well. And so no "Gorilla Glass" but rather the locally sourced alternative. 3D printing for everything.
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Jul 18, 2014 09:06
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Oh, also, as a former community shared agriculture project manager, the figure we always used was 20 shares per person. Now, a share isn't keeping someone alive all year, it's providing them with 10-15lbs of vegetables once a week for 20-22 weeks in the summer (zone 5). There's still thirty weeks unaccounted for, so let's say a more true figure is 10 people fed with vegetables year round on each acre of land. I don't know how much nutrition they were getting from us, but I'd wager you'd need some sort of meat. I never dabbled in it, but I always heard from my meat-farmer friends that rabbits or turkeys were the most efficient. Good luck with your homework.
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Jul 18, 2014 09:41
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redshirt posted:An island of 10000 "primitives" is easy. People have already done this in fact! This would still fullfill your requirement for a closed society because you couldnt allow THOSE people on your magical island, now could you? Nektu fucked around with this message at 12:24 on Jul 18, 2014 |
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Jul 18, 2014 12:18
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OP I would recommend reading up a bit on Fourier's concept called a Phalanx. It was his self contained and dreadfully boring idea of a utopian community. I can't find any quick but complete outline about it, but when I read about it a few years ago it seemed to fit with the idea you're asking about
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Jul 18, 2014 12:44
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redshirt posted:Can you estimate the number of chickens the Island would need? Are we going with real chickens who are fed healthy food, given space, and raised right? In that case roughly 5-7 eggs per chicken per week. I believe a chicken is good for two or three years because their egg production gets too low and you're better off eating them. The chickens used to fill supermarkets produce far more eggs, but do so at a cost of basically living horribly and only laying eggs for sometimes half a year. So probably two or three chickens per person, assuming everyone on your island wants to eat two eggs for breakfast everyday. But honestly what's your obsession with eggs and dairy? They're not vital at all, especially dairy. You put more food into a cow than you get out of it. Meanwhile you have an ocean surrounding your island loaded with fish. And your island is already advanced enough that you're just growing meat in factories. It'd be like if there was a scene in Star Trek where Picard strangled Data's cat to death because "gently caress replicated meat".
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Jul 18, 2014 13:34
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All of this bullshit about 'food' and 'resources' isn't any good. People have known how not to die for a long time, you need to think about social aspects. For example, who's going to be doing all the manual labour? I suggest you take a meaningful percentage of the population, say 3,000 people, and make them the hard labour class. To ensure the stability of your class system it's important that there be some obvious "other" quality about your labour class to differentiate them from the normals. In the past rulers have used everything from religion to skin tone to do this, but be creative! And don't be afraid to force some sort of symbol on your labour class if the tricky bastards blend into your population. Oh, and don't forget to pick something out for yourself, get something that says, "Good Luck" to the future of your project.
Aggressive pricing fucked around with this message at 14:51 on Jul 18, 2014 |
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Jul 18, 2014 14:48
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| # ? May 4, 2024 16:19 |
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Liar posted:Are we going with real chickens who are fed healthy food, given space, and raised right? In that case roughly 5-7 eggs per chicken per week. I believe a chicken is good for two or three years because their egg production gets too low and you're better off eating them. The chickens used to fill supermarkets produce far more eggs, but do so at a cost of basically living horribly and only laying eggs for sometimes half a year. So probably two or three chickens per person, assuming everyone on your island wants to eat two eggs for breakfast everyday. Yeah but people like dairy, and it can't easily be replicated. And eggs are awesome too. The chickens stay.
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Jul 18, 2014 20:01
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