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Very clever idea. How much energy to rotate everything?
Wow, imagine what it’d be like when you’re drunk
ÂżCould be the noise a very severe problem?
Stop the world, er, city, I want to get off!
Pedestrians only – no cars? 2 problems – what about goods and what about lardbuts who cannot even conceive of the idea of walking a mile?
Was not too impressed with the user friendliness of his measures of rotation speed either. Everyone uses degrees. I understand about radians, but I still find degrees easier to visualise.
And for those with OCD that want everything to remain in place so they know where it is?
How about the stuck in the mud types who hate change of any kind?
And what happens when the system breaks down and stops moving. Now you have to walk more than 8 minutes to go to work.
Not to mention wildlife would have no end of trouble.
Cursor_
This is the wackiest thing I’ve ever heard of.
I can just imagine the sales pitch to the Sheik with this demo!
The energy required to construct and operate the machines that would “move” or “transport” the city instead the people it would be thousands of times larger, that constructing a proper massive transport system … not to talk about the annoying additional “centrifugal” forces and the “artificial” winds of 3000m X 4 PI rad/h = 37km/h.
Not to mention that you have to supply water and electricity to a moving city …
Copied from the Road City in “The Roads Must Roll” by Robert Heinlein.
In a later book, one of Heinlein’s characters looks down from space at the ruins of the failed experimental city.
I don’t know what you guys are all so negative about.
I see this fitting perfectly into the recovery plan. Lots of jobs building it all, lots of jobs planned to maintain it, and then lots of jobs cleaning up the wreckage after demotition.
I bet you this guy has one of thos highly sought-after college degrees, or he owns a bearing manufacturing plant.
Bet you adam likes it….
What idiocy.
I hate to say it, but the current course of civilization is unsustainable. The paradigm of having people expend vast amounts of energy to transport themselves back and forth to and from work, shopping, and entertainment cannot be justified in the face of dwindling resources. Besides being unbuildable, a rotating city solves no problem except in the minds of people who think automobiles are the problem. The problem is people traveling on a daily basis at a cost of hundreds of kilowatts of power.
Civilization will likely continue to survive, but it will be more on the level of 17th and 18th century agrarian communities after the fossil fuels and rare earth elements that fuel the technological society have been squandered.
The real future looks more like sub-Saharan Africa than like Star Trek.
yeah just wait till the first power surge this thing has… everyone flung off in all directions!
hhmmm look a lot like apple’s new campus.. soo how does one manage the all the utilities and services?
Not to mention the logistics behind Fire & EMS and PD services.
Sware to gawd it looks like something from a video game, or a mothership from any alien invasion movie.
It’s going to need a huge infrastructure underneath for utilities, and cargo transport. It would also need an airport next door, and would need to be placed near the coast or a big river for cargo transport.
Also why bother with an outer ring that doesn’t rotate for farmland, why not just use REAL LAND instead and make the “city” part smaller?
Let’s play Frogger !
http://classicgamesarcade.com/game/21607/Frogger.html
“Oh, the humanity.”
There won’t be any lardbutts. The powers that control the city will have them hustling to carry goods into the city. it takes a lot of calories to hand carry enough building materials to build those sky scrapers.
— Why is the agricultural area on a band if it doesn’t rotate?
— When you cross a walkway and you miscalculate your trajectory, do you wait for a full revolution of your destination band?
— What if you are old and walk too slow? See that 80 year old over there? He’s been going round and round the bridge for 3 years now.
— when people fall between the bands. Throw that guy a rope… oh never mind.
— What happens if you are susceptible to vertigo or motion sickness?
Scale it down and it might be interesting inside a hamster cage.
Only thing needed to rotate is the crops
This is crackpot. But there is a kernel of a good idea.
Rather than build the city that spins. Build an elevated public transport system as a series of loops. Each loop going the opposite direction from the loops adjacent.
You would get the same benefits of this crazy idea, without the stupid parts.
The cost of constructing the rotating disks would dwarf the cost of all of the buildings combined. Building the disks, drive mechanism, and support structure would be on par with building 10,000 Golden Gate bridges. Kinda makes the economics look a little ridiculous.
Just move the space between the land masses instead.
Oh wait, that would be just like mass transit! Duh!!
The perfect location for our national government! Since all it does is go around in circles anyway! 🙂
In #24 spsffan said: The perfect location for our national government! Since all it does is go around in circles anyway!
Nah. It’s the ideal layout for a prison.
If some old elected repres…, uh, ignurnt prisoner, falls between the disks and gets ground into paste, well, it just saves on the next meal… twice. (once ’cause its one less mouth to feed and once ’cause its more meat to feed the other elected repres… uh, igurnt prisoners.)
But it doesn’t need to move around for that. Waste of energy…
Just build it on a large “shake table” earthquake simulator.
Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We’re still waiting for our flying cars and robot maids.
Magical
I want the Dramamine franchise!
Neat but impractical. As many here have noted this would need some crazy machinery. Easier to build layers of height. Underground, ground level and upper level to reduce travel distances.
Actually I guess each band could be floating to make contruction cheaper and make it cheaper and smoother to move.
But:
The whole city is only 2 miles across which would be an easy 25-30 minute walk without any crazy moving parts! That would be the max distance! So really pointless design.
The one thing I keep noticing about all these urban utopias that are pedestrian centric is that they have zero allowance for people who have difficulty walking or climbing stairs. You’ll never see an elevator or walking ramp.
In a wheel chair? Broke your leg and are now on crutches? Have severe arthritis in the hips, knees, and/or ankles? Have little physical energy due to a severe flu or ongoing chemotherapy? You’re f*cked in those “utopias”. The designers watched “Logan’s Run” too often and presume everybody will be in the peak of health and fitness. It shows in every single “utopian city” design. All that’s ever missing are the “carousels” where the disabled go to be “renewed”.
BTW, the 100x speed of the animation gives in a “Matrix” vibe as in the scene in the white emptiness where the miles of weapons racks zoom up to and past you.