[beaconstudios]

This is one of the reasons we need to be expanding the space for collective resources - it's not likely we can sustain a world where everyone on earth lives in a single family detached home in the suburbs with a car, private heated pool, private air conditioning etc that the author advocates for. However, if we're a little more clever with how we allocate and share our resources, we can scale up standards of living in a sustainable way - urban transit and a fleet of automated electric taxis, community pools, zero energy building techniques and mixed developments, and so on. This just requires that we head back in the direction of sharing things (social democracy) and away from economic individualism (neoliberalism).

[rmah]

4 bil households (8 bil people) with each household living on a detached 500 sq m lot (20m x 25m or apx 1/8th acre) => 4,000,000,000 hh * 500 sq m => 2mil sq km.

The earth has 149mil sq km of land area so those suburbs would take up about 1.7% of the land. If you subtract out antarctica (14 mil sq km), siberia (13 mil sq km) and 3/4 of canada (7 mil sq km), the sahara desert (9mil sq km)... you're still left with about 106 mil sq km so we're using about 1.8% of the land.

Density isn't evenly distributed you say? Well, let's look at only china then... Some 1.4 bil people in 9.6mil sq km. Everyone living on in 500 sq m lots means 350,000 sq km, or about 5% of the land. Lots of western china is too inhospitable you say? Fine, subtract out Xinjiang, Tibet, Inner Mongolia and Xining (forget the fact that 60mil+ people live there). That's half of china's land area! You're still left with around 4.860 mil sq km. So everyone's suburban lots would fit in about 7% of the land.

My point here is that the earth is not really as crowded as many people seem to believe. It only seems crowded if you spend the majority of your life in or near dense urban areas. Which most people do these days. So most see it that way. There are still vast tracts of nearly uninhabited land and even vaster expanses of sparsely inhabited land. Sure, these are typically not the really nice bits of the earth (from a human perspective), but we do have central heating and A/C now, right? :-)

[beaconstudios]

I didn't mean to imply that land area was the constraint - the constraint is energy/fuel use, traffic, and other symptoms of inefficient resource use.

We should be aiming to design houses so that minimal HVAC is necessary to maintain comfortable conditions, not building ramshackle houses in the desert and patching the inefficiencies with massively energy-consuming devices.

The broader point I'm trying to make is that we should be aiming for effective improvements in living standards - and there are two components in effectiveness, correct orientation and efficiency. American suburbs are pretty backwards in terms of cost/benefit: they're expensive to maintain infrastructure-wise, they isolate people from each other, and you have to drive for an hour to get to anything leading to even more expensive car-centric infrastructure. We should be aiming to fulfil human needs on a planetary scale, which means efficient use of resources.

[rmah]

Sorry, that post was my attempt at a bit of data humor :-) I actually agree with everything you're saying.

[beaconstudios]

ah sorry, the medium doesn't always lend itself to tone-based jokes! I see it now, haha

[marcosdumay]

> it's not likely we can sustain a world where everyone on earth lives in a single family detached home in the suburbs with a car, private heated pool, private air conditioning etc

Car traffic and road maintenance are limiting factors here, but I don't see any reason why the private air conditioning and even heating a pool (the space for a private pool, on the other hand is a traffic generator) would be limited by energy availability.

[beaconstudios]

It's not that HVAC limited by energy availability - it's that what people want is to regulate the temperature of their environment, and you can get most of the way there with good architectural design. This means people can get what they want in a more energy efficient way.

[marcosdumay]

I personally hate HVACs, but I live in a very comfortable climate.

Way too many people live in places where the environment temperatures are outside of the survivable range, or in places that get so hot, it's hard to do anything (often even at night). You just can't fight those by designing you building differently. You can improve the situation a little bit, but not enough.

[beaconstudios]

You'd be surprised. Ancient Iran (a literal desert) kept buildings cool with windcatchers [1] and qanats [2]. I do agree that we have a tendency to set up shop in really extreme places, but that's not necessarily a limiting factor in sustainable design.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windcatcher

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qanat#Cooling

[marcosdumay]

Just keep in mind that deserts are the easiest places for artificial temperature control. Anything you try in a desert works, there are no clouds obstructing the Sun, or humidity stopping a passive cooler; every night is cold, every day is hot; there's nothing blocking winds or passive heat emission.

Basically, everything that makes them so damn inhospitable also makes it easy to manage the temperature of a building.

You will have a much harder time on any other place.

[ZeroGravitas]

There should be some standard measure for how amazing a feat of historical civil engineering is and also how much we know how they actually did it, so 10/0 is 'aliens did it' through to 1/10 for basic mud huts.

Qanats seem like 'aliens did it' level of technological sophistication from my limited understanding of when and how they were built, but I guess that's more due to my lack of understanding than genuine alien influence.

But are there experts out there that know how they actually built them, and how would they rank qanats vs pyramids or great cathedrals? Like how many lifetimes were needed to plan and execute them?

[silicon2401]

> This is one of the reasons we need to be expanding the space for collective resources - it's not likely we can sustain a world where everyone on earth lives in a single family detached home in the suburbs with a car, private heated pool, private air conditioning etc that the author advocates for.

I'd rather push for population control. I don't want to live in a world where humans have to live like insects, crammed into giant hive cities.

> However, if we're a little more clever with how we allocate and share our resources, we can scale up standards of living in a sustainable way - urban transit and a fleet of automated electric taxis, community pools, zero energy building techniques and mixed developments, and so on. This just requires that we head back in the direction of sharing things (social democracy) and away from economic individualism (neoliberalism).

I'd rather use cleverness to sustain our quality of life with smaller populations. If we had your sci fi utopia, we could have a population of 1 million total humans, each living like a king. I don't understand why you want to use sci fi magic just to have everyone live like an ant in a box

[beaconstudios]

wow, an unironic Malthusian in the wild. Nobody wants you to eat the bugs and live in the pod, friend - the point is to give everybody the best possible standard of living with the resources we have at our disposal. We can attain a pretty great standard for everybody.

Not only is population control completely unnecessary, but it requires either mass murder or forced sterilisation. I would prefer that we not do either of those things.

As standards of living increase, population growth also naturally shrinks to even or below-even maintenance rates; so if you're worried about a future with 100 billion humans crammed into Hong Kong style bed cages, your best bet is to try to improve living standards around the world.

[silicon2401]

> We can attain a pretty great standard for everybody.

By whose definition? Living in a city is not a great quality of life for me. I've done it and hated it compared to living in a suburb.

> Not only is population control completely unnecessary, but it requires either mass murder or forced sterilisation. I would prefer that we not do either of those things.

Educated people have way fewer children than poor and uneducated people. Not to mention placing a cap on immigration, etc. Your argument is reductivist and leaves out a lot of valid ways to reduce populations.

[beaconstudios]

I don't live in a city either, but American suburbs are terrible. I can't imagine living somewhere where I can't nip to the shops 2 minutes down the road (walkable or drivable), where I have to drive long distances to get to the nearest economic hub because it was plonked down in the middle of nowhere, where the main road is basically a small highway. I want walkable human-friendly environments with a mix of high- and low-density accomodation to suit people's preferences.

Number of children is tied to economic status, not education - "poor and uneducated" should just be "poor". That's exactly what I said. A cap on immigration doesn't change the population - but with all your arguments put together, it certainly gives me a vibe of what you actually want.

[silicon2401]

> I can't imagine living somewhere where I can't nip to the shops 2 minutes down the road (walkable or drivable)

have you lived in the US? there are lots of different kinds of suburbs. my suburbs have shops

> I have to drive long distances to get to the nearest economic hub because it was plonked down in the middle of nowhere

long distances is relative so I can't comment here.

> I want walkable human-friendly environments with a mix of high- and low-density accomodation to suit people's preferences.

I want low-density accommodations. I want everybody to have acres of land and I want to go days without seeing other people.

> A cap on immigration doesn't change the population

Take Japan, or any other country with negative rate of change in population. Without immigrants, how do you imagine their population will change?

> it certainly gives me a vibe of what you actually want.

Why so cryptic? I'll tell you what I want so you don't make some weird assumptions. I want to live in a world where people have the option to live with acres and acres of land. I want to be a hermit so I never have to see other human beings unless I have to go into town to buy groceries. People who enjoy cities should go ahead and live there if they want, but in your hive world, there are no countrysides or suburbs left, just sprawling concrete scars on the landscape where people go to rooftop mini-parks and think they're experiencing nature

[beaconstudios]

> have you lived in the US? there are lots of different kinds of suburbs. my suburbs have shops

Well, good - that's not the type of suburb I was taking issue with, as I would hope was apparent.

> I want low-density accommodations. I want everybody to have acres of land and I want to go days without seeing other people.

That's not possible. If everybody were to live in that kind of isolation, nothing would get done.

> Take Japan, or any other country with negative rate of change in population. Without immigrants, how do you imagine their population will change?

That doesn't change the population level globally. It's just shifting people between borders.

> Why so cryptic?

Because its just an impression and people tend to take suggestions that they have eco-fascist inclinations pretty badly. Talking about population control and low-education immigrants isn't definitive but it certainly smells bad.

> I want to be a hermit so I never have to see other human beings unless I have to go into town to buy groceries

I'm not against that, if it can be done in such a way where everybody gets what they want. I'm only really against hording of resources to the detriment of others.

> but in your hive world, there are no countrysides or suburbs left, just sprawling concrete scars on the landscape where people go to rooftop mini-parks and think they're experiencing nature

Nice 40k reference, but you have a strange impression of what I've said. I want a world where people's personal preferences are maximised, which includes living arrangements; we just have to do it sustainably so the biosphere doesn't collapse. I love nature too, see - I live just on the edge of the countryside myself.