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"We are coming to a point in our history in which we need to start looking for more space," Han Admiraal, a civil engineer with over two decades of experience in underground space, told AFP on the sidelines of this year's World Tunnel Congress.
...
"Underground spaces could easily be used for growing crops," he said, as he toured the cavernous Bourbon Tunnel, dug deep under the Italian city of Naples as a potential escape route for King Ferdinand II of Bourbon after the 1848 riots.Scientific developments in areas like aquaponics—where vegetables and fish are farmed together—could help relieve the pressure on the food supply chain, and dramatically cut transport costs if such new farms were situated under cities.
Isn't excavation expensive?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by J053 on Friday May 10 2019, @01:32AM (21 children)
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday May 10 2019, @01:44AM (19 children)
Burrowing underground preserves more of the surface. Of course, you are still affecting a biosphere, but we don't care about it as much.
We should also be building up (arcologies) and maybe try seasteading, although the engineering challenges related to saltwater may be too much of a pain.
That said, it is probably wrong to say that the Earth can't support many more billions of people, when it can be done simply by expanding into some of those sparsely populated places you mentioned. There is more than enough food production to feed the entire planet and then some, agriculture will become more efficient, and there are steps we could take to cut food waste.
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(Score: 1) by optotronic on Friday May 10 2019, @02:14AM (7 children)
For some definition of "support". Maybe if you're willing to live with a dwindling number of non-human species and accept the health consequences of consuming microplastics. And if you're willing to live through possibly nasty food and water shortages as the climate shifts.
(Score: 3, Funny) by JNCF on Friday May 10 2019, @02:29AM
Dwindling number of species, yes. Nasty food/water/air, probably not. If we're still living in meat-bodies we'll just filter it all and live inside. That's kind of dystopian from our current point of view, but I think it's where we're headed, and when the future people look back at videos of The Old Nature they'll consider it ugly by comparison to their new surrounding which have been generated by genetic algorithms using human standards of beauty measured from EEG headsets as their fitness functions. Yes, I know I could well be wrong in this prediction.
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Friday May 10 2019, @03:00AM (5 children)
That's why I would prefer to see cities become extremely dense, to include towering arcologies or maybe TFA's underground structures that could allow 50 million people to fit into where 10 million people used to be, with stuff optimized for walking distance so that cars aren't needed, and possibly vertical farming, aquaponics, etc. within the city. Basically, you can make things more efficient and curb the outward spread.
If that doesn't happen, you'll just naturally see people bulldozing forests to build more homes, living in formerly sparsely populated areas, widening cities and suburbs, etc. You'll naturally see it, because I don't hear any great ideas that are going to stop unwanted population growth, although birth rates are naturally declining all over the world. But even if population levels off at 10-12 billion, we will see U.S. population hit 400 million, and maybe 500-600 million. Meaning a lot of environmental destruction to support that inevitable growth.
I'm not sure why I would be worried about this when people are voluntarily consuming microplastics by choosing to use stuff like sea salt. I did submit the infinitely recyclable plastic story [soylentnews.org] earlier.
Do we have a choice in the matter? Unlikely at this rate. But we could see places like Canada and Russia, which have large amounts of cold, unpopulated land, becoming agricultural powerhouses.
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(Score: 2, Insightful) by qzm on Friday May 10 2019, @04:25AM (4 children)
That would be because you are a moron sucking the teat of socialists populism.
Perhaps have a look at how high density housing works out.
Have a look at the psychological research on it.
It is a complete disaster.
The fact is there is huge free space.. most of the crowding is caused by artificial scarcity of where we are allowed to build.
City dwellers on the whole are the cause of pollution and environmental problems.. Not the solution.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 10 2019, @05:07AM
Most of the crowding is caused because populations keep growing, and people like to go where the action is, not out to the boonies.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday May 10 2019, @05:25AM (2 children)
Here, get yourself a cheap education:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projections_of_population_growth#Population_projections_of_the_101_largest_cities_in_the_21st_century [wikipedia.org]
People are already congregating into metropolitan areas en masse and will continue to do so. City planning will influence the quality of the outcome.
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(Score: 3, Insightful) by Bot on Friday May 10 2019, @08:41AM (1 child)
I dunno elsewhere but here many people would gladly return to a piece of land as they are tired of getting their brain and respiratory system fogged with the city air. But it's unfeasible economically because you need to turn product into money to pay taxes.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Friday May 10 2019, @11:17AM
J053 is not wrong. There are vast, vast swathes of the Earth that are empty. They could carry many more people, and probably will before most of us have passed from this life, actually.
The trouble is supplying the material needs of those unborn billions. Capitalism, as currently constituted, can't do it. The "pillage the earth, exploit huge masses of poor to do the work, give it all to a lazy entitled handful" is unsustainable. A model that watched the triple bottom line of profit-social-environmental might have a chance.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Friday May 10 2019, @02:51AM (3 children)
Shame alot of Australia can't support humans very well [quora.com]
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday May 10 2019, @03:09AM (2 children)
Consider massive engineering projects to channel seawater inland, then desalination. Or something along those lines:
Large Wind and Solar Farms in the Sahara Would Increase Heat, Rain, Vegetation [soylentnews.org]
Y Combinator Unveils Another Climate Change "Moonshot": Flood a Desert [soylentnews.org]
The coast is always going to be a better option because you have all the water you'll ever need right there. And instead of seasteading, you could pull a Dubai and build artificial islands.
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(Score: 2) by JNCF on Friday May 10 2019, @03:40AM (1 child)
The distinction between an oil platform and an artificial island is murky. Materials used? Density of base? Same for an island and a continent. To me, the thing that makes seasteading seasteading is that we are moving into a space which has been ocean in human history (and may still be, depending on the specific proposal). It's labels all the way down, of course.
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Friday May 10 2019, @09:10AM
Austrailia has a lot of uninhabitted coast and desert. That gives place for cities like Dubai (no need for artifical islands), and place for solar power to power it.
If Austrailia hadn't spent the last few decades selling it's resources at pennies on the dollar to China it would be very well placed.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday May 10 2019, @04:49AM (6 children)
I think you are overly optimistic. The resources required by the giant cities you are proposing are not trivial, and not known to be available. Food may be doable, but other components are less likely. Have you tracked the price of Copper recently? Indium? (Well, it's been a few years since I did. It was too depressing.)
The only way I can conceive your giant cities surviving is if sea-water mining for uranium (known to be slightly profitable) made, as a side effect, a rich ore for other needed materials. But most materials are too expensive to extract from sea water. Or possibly as a side effect of controlled fusion we could create a torch to vaporize rock and run the vapors through a mass spectrometer. Whee!! (I'm going to just skip over all the problems inherent in THAT scenario.)
Not to mention that we already seem to be killing off the plankton, which make about 2/3 of our atmosphere's oxygen. And the forests that make another large fraction. So expect the oxygen level of the planet to take a sharp dip fairly soon.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday May 10 2019, @05:20AM (3 children)
Energy wise: solar panels, thorium fission, and fusion. Use situational resources where applicable, like geothermal.
Maybe in a few decades we'll have a credible attempt to do asteroid mining, including getting resources to the Earth's surface [soylentnews.org].
We need to apply that to landfills.
That will probably balance out. Or we're just screwed.
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(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday May 10 2019, @04:32PM (2 children)
Asteroid mining will be, at best, marginal economically until we have permanent residence in space. I suppose it could be run by a good enough AI, though.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday May 10 2019, @06:36PM (1 child)
Asteroid mining would be best for making things in situ. But there are seemingly credible proposals for bringing asteroids down to the surface of Earth. I think it boils down to getting the asteroid to orbit Earth, wrapping the asteroid in a heat shield, and then sending it down to hit a desert. Most of the velocity will be lost without the mass being burned off, and it will be far too slow to cause a catastrophic megaton explosion.
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(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Friday May 10 2019, @09:29PM
So that is what happened 65 million years ago! :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Friday May 10 2019, @07:58AM (1 child)
So expect the oxygen level of the planet to take a sharp dip fairly soon.
That's OK, we'll just build megamaid
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 10 2019, @02:06PM
We first have to find Druidia.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by DannyB on Friday May 10 2019, @02:12PM
Yes, let's use the space we have above ground - - - for solar and wind.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.