Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[MetalSlimeHunt]

On the rooftops things:
Mostly irrelevant but studies have shown that in warm areas(like Texas and stuff) painting the roof white and upgrading the isolation can decrease power use (in the summer) with 60%. Painting most of the house white(or some kind of superreflective paint) can reduce temperatures with 1 to 2.5 Kelvin.

Of course, there is the slight issue of making said buildings shine like stars during the day.

Farmers are being payed not to grow food in a world where starvation is still a major issue.
...Yet there are legitimate economic reasons as to why you can't just do the seemingly obvious thing.

Things like that are why I loathe economic systems.

One can never forget that the world is anything but uniform. We have enough food to feed everyone on the planet. We may even have enough to do so multiple times over. The issue is that all the food in the world won't help if there are underlying political and societal causes for starvation, which is what causes modern famines. If you live in a place where families earn a dollar a day in wages, even the cheapest food still will be a financial burden, and buying anything else will be short of impossible. If you live in a place where warlords and their armed bands take anything that is given to people outside of said armed bands, then international aid won't help unless said aid comes with lots and lots of armed and trained soldiers. In theory, that's what the Peacekeepers are supposed to be for. In practice, it never ever works out like that.

[EveryZig]

Political turmoil and uneven development cause most of it, but there are also things like this:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/05/07/health/main4998190.shtml

An estimated 3.5 million children under the age of 5 are at risk of hunger in the United States, according to a look at government numbers by an anti-hunger group.

Note that this came from census numbers in 2005-2007, before the recession.

In the exact same country that pays farmers to produce less food.

[10ebbor10]

On the rooftops things:
Mostly irrelevant but studies have shown that in warm areas(like Texas and stuff) painting the roof white and upgrading the isolation can decrease power use (in the summer) with 60%. Painting most of the house white(or some kind of superreflective paint) can reduce temperatures with 1 to 2.5 Kelvin.

Of course, there is the slight issue of making said buildings shine like stars during the day.

Green roofs have a similar effect but it not as strong. Also, on the fish thing, I think it's called aquaponics(Aquaria+ hydroponics).

[Eagleon]

Green roofs have a similar effect but it not as strong. Also, on the fish thing, I think it's called aquaponics(Aquaria+ hydroponics).

Nitpick, though I can see someone coining and using aquaponics for their business, hydro- is the greek root for water (with -ponics meaning work or labor), aqua- is latin. Mixing the two makes me cringe. I've heard it called aquaculture, or just fish farming.

What I'd love to see is more subterranean apartments and other buildings (earthscrapers) so that we can use existing skyscrapers for more sensible things like wind/solar platforms, epic gondola landing-pads, and the farming thing maybe. In an extensive underground city, you could tear up most roads on the surface and rely on tunnels and lifts, and use the huge amounts of space you gain for parks, farms, whatever you like. I doubt the engineering challenges are worse, just different - ventilation, combating shallow water tables and poor soil support, etc., fires (possibly), earthquakes (probably), and bioterrorism (what else is new?) are its biggest problems, but it'll get easier and cheaper as more people do it, as with everything. Maybe a pipe-dream, maybe optimistic in that people would still want to be surface-dwellers and would probably stay just as crowded on the surface, but I guess DF rubbed off on me for wanting this.
Edit: This is what I get for posting to nitpick, everything I just said has been said here by others. Durp. Sorry gaise.

[Montague]

I dunno how practical such a vertical farm would be. Buildings like that would be tremendously expensive and produce is a commodity with extremely thin profit margins. Such a farm would probably have to be run at a profit for years and years to recover the inital capital investment.

How about something simplier like improving the yeild of food crops? They are creating perennial (meaning they don't need to be re-planted every season) versions of current food crops, which would vastly increase the productivity and lower the cost of production. It'd even sequester an absurd about of carbon if all traditional crops were replaced with perennials, eg, returning atmospheric carbon levels back to pre-industrial levels.