RE: A Future Filled With Foodscrapers

[nomadics]

The vertical farm from the clip looked like 1 floor storage space.
There is a reason for the high rents of office space in skyscrapers. It is hard to build very high buildings, and it is expensive to maintain them. When we build more than 10 storey building there are only two materials - steel and reinforced concrete (not environmental friendly). There will be also high electricity consumption for water. We need pumps to push the water to reservoir on 15 floor then other pumps to deliver the water from 15 to 30 floor, etc. I am sure there also will be problems with air conditioning. I think it is just not sustainable to use high building for a farm. Low buildings with glass roofs or artificial lights will be better. Humans occupy less than 5% of the land mass of the planet we have space for hydroponics.
Cheers

Comments

[eric-boucher]

"We may be occupying less than 5%, but our impact far exceeds this number, especially on healthy natural lands: "Tobler et al. partitioned 217 countries into a total of 19,032 polygons with 295,000 persons per polygon. This amounted to an area of 25.4% of earth's surface. So that would be around 96% being considered as occupied at a population density of 42.45 people/sq.km (But the quadrangles would also include a lot of protected and unprotected wilderness and uninhabited deserts. So it would be far to smoothed to give a proper idea of how much land is inhabited)
_{by Tobler et al. (1995)The Global Demography Project (Natl. Center for Geographic Information and Analysis,Univ. California, Santa Barbara) , Tech. Rep. 95–6."*}

Furthermore...

"Another interesting perspective was given by a new global map of European Commission's Joint Research Center which was published in the World Bank's World Development report in 2009.[3] According to the report, 95% of world's population is concentrated on just 10% of world's land surface. While only 10% of the world's land is classified as remote or more than 48 hours from a large city. So we can either state that most humans now inhabit only 10% 0f world's land, but we have the rest 80% well connected with roads, highways, farmlands.etc. So depending on time taken to travel, we can say that humans now inhabit 90% of world's land leaving only 10% for wilderness."

For the moment, most of the material used to make high rise is in deed underlined in your note just above, but loads of new materials are arising and finding their way into structures of all sizes and 3-D designed printed. According to the researches made on the use of skyscrapers of all sort, we could use such building strictly for agricultural necessities and water could be either brought up and/or gathered as well. Many options of energy alternatives are offered and already running on the front. the buildings themselves wouldn't need to be containing any offices. the use of wind gathered within the buildings' structures allows for electricity generation and thus providing for all energy consumptions necessary for water/air pumping, when needed and where moisture, water and heat is needed as per arcology principles, see Arcosanti publications.

Great conversation, by the way, thanks a lot for this as it is such an important topic we need to tackle as a civilization.

Namaste :)

[nomadics]

Yes great conversation. It is true we impacting the whole planet. By 5% I mean concentrated urban population. There is a lot of space around the cities not occupied by wild life. We can use hydroponics and vertical farms in the suburban area. Skyscrapers for food is just not the way in my opinion. Nations build skyscrapers mostly for prestige not because they need them so badly... There are new materials. Nanotubes are promising but we can’t manufacture them in big industrial scale. No buildings from nanotubes any time soon...

Cheers :)