xpostah's Shortform
post by samuelshadrach (xpostah) · 2025-01-01T13:34:25.484Z · LW · GW · 12 commentsContents
12 comments
12 comments
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comment by samuelshadrach (xpostah) · 2025-02-20T16:36:15.614Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Project idea for you
Figure out why don't we build one city with one billion population
- Bigger cities will probably accelerate tech progress, and other types of progress, as people are not forced to choose between their existing relationships and the place best for their career
- Assume end-to-end travel time must be below 2 hours for people to get benefits of living in the same city. Seems achievable via intra-city (not inter-city) bullet-train network. Max population = (200 km/h * 2h)^2 * (10000 people/km^2) = 1.6 billion people
- Is there any engineering challenge such as water supply that prevents this from happening? Or is it just lack of any political elites with willingness + engg knowledge + governing sufficient funds?
- If a govt builds the bullet train network, can market incentives be sufficient to drive everyone else (real estate developers, corporate leaders, etc) to build the city or will some elites within govt need to necessarily hand-hold other parts of this process?
↑ comment by Purplehermann · 2025-02-20T16:56:04.825Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Vr might be cheaper
Replies from: xpostah↑ comment by samuelshadrach (xpostah) · 2025-02-20T17:26:26.724Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I agree VR might be one-day be able to do this (make online meetings as good as in-person ones). As of 2025, bullet trains are more proven tech than VR. I'd be happy if both were investigated in more depth.
Replies from: Purplehermann↑ comment by Purplehermann · 2025-02-20T20:05:12.808Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
A few notes on massive cities:
Cities of 10Ms exist, there is always some difficulty in scaling, but scaling 1.5-2 OOMs doesn't seem like it would be impossible to figure out if particularly motivated.
China and other countries have built large cities and then failed to populate them
The max population you wrote (1.6B) is bigger than china, bigger than Africa, similar to both American Continents plus Europe .
Which is part of why no one really wants to build something so big, especially not at once.
Everything is opportunity cost, and the question of alternate routes matters alot in deciding to pursue something. Throwing everything and the kitchen sink at something costs a lot of resources.
Given that VR development is currently underway regardless, starting this resource intense project which may be made obsolete by the time it's done is an expected waste of resources. If VR hit a real wall that might change things (though see above).
If this giga-city would be expected to 1000x tech progress or something crazy then sure, waste some resources to make extra sure it happens sooner rather than later.
Tl;dr:
Probably wouldn't work, there's no demand, very expensive, VR is being developed and would actually be able to say what you're hoping but even better
Replies from: xpostah↑ comment by samuelshadrach (xpostah) · 2025-02-21T16:25:27.185Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
especially not at once.
It could be built in stages. Like, build a certain number of bullet train stations at a time and wait to see if immigrants + real estate developers + corporations start building the city further, or do the stations end up unused?
I agree there is opportunity cost. It will help if I figure out the approx costs of train networks, water and sewage plumbing etc.
I agree there are higher risk higher reward opportunities out there, including VR. In my mind this proposal seemed relatively low risk so I figured it’s worth thinking through anyway.
no demand
This is demonstrably false. Honestly the very fact that city rents in many 1st world countries are much higher than rural rents proves that if you reduced the rents more people would migrate to the cities.
↑ comment by ProgramCrafter (programcrafter) · 2025-02-20T18:12:59.658Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Is there any engineering challenge such as water supply that prevents this from happening? Or is it just lack of any political elites with willingness + engg knowledge + governing sufficient funds?
That dichotomy is not exhaustive, and I believe going through with the proposal will necesarily make the city inhabitants worse off.
- Humans' social machinery is not suited to live in such large cities, as of the current generations. Who to get acquainted with, in the first place? Isn't there lots of opportunity cost to any event?
- Humans' biomachinery is not suited to live in such large cities. Being around lots and lots of people might be regulating hormones and behaviour to settings we have not totally explored (I remember reading something that claims this a large factor to lower fertility).
- Centralization is dangerous because of possibly-handmade mass weapons.
- Assuming random housing and examining some quirk/polar position, we'll get a noisy texture. It will almost certainly have a large group of people supporting one position right next to group thinking otherwise. Depending on sizes and civil law enforcement, that may not end well.
After a couple hundred years, 1) and 2) will most probably get solved by natural selection so the proposal will be much more feasible.
Replies from: xpostah↑ comment by samuelshadrach (xpostah) · 2025-02-21T16:21:10.521Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Sorry I didn’t understand your comment at all. Why are 1, 2 and 4 bigger problems in 1 billion population city versus say a 20 million population city?
comment by samuelshadrach (xpostah) · 2025-01-13T04:36:47.987Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
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comment by samuelshadrach (xpostah) · 2025-01-01T13:34:25.575Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
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comment by samuelshadrach (xpostah) · 2025-01-12T11:29:23.055Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
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Replies from: Richard_Kennaway↑ comment by Richard_Kennaway · 2025-01-12T20:51:28.537Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
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Replies from: xpostah↑ comment by samuelshadrach (xpostah) · 2025-01-13T04:38:33.446Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
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