Image via Wikipedia
Q. What do the following items have in common?
- Flying cars
- 300-story buildings
- Shiny jumpsuits
- Domed Cities
A: Each is a long-predicted feature of the future which has not shown up yet because it is not possible (or at least highly impractical) and because its implied benefits, if any, hardly seem worth the costs and/or risks.
Granted, the risks associated with shiny jumpsuits are more social than existential.
Anyhow, not so fast there on the domed cities says our good friend Brian Wang:
Previously the case
was made for improved feasibility [of creating domed cities] with existing covered areas and domes
in the 30-40 acre ranges and with costs of $400 million to 1 billion.
There is also new strong teflon material (EFTE) which is 100 times
lighter than glass and which can lower costs by 4 times. It was also
shown that Domed Cities can reduce heating and cooling costs and energy
usage by over 90%.Domed cities will enable every day to have moderate temperature and no
rain or snow and no ice formation. Current trends show the elderly
population will rise dramatically, obesity will rise unless there are
changes and about 3 billion people will be added to city populations in
existing or new cities over the next 30 years. Domed Cities will be
made far more walkable than current cities and enable citizens to be
more active which will reduce obesity and eliminate traffic deaths and
accidents. Ice and rain are a factor in about half of all of the more
severe falls. Falls on ice and snow are 5 times more likely to result
in a fracture. Falls still occur indoors now so falls will still occur
but increased risks factors from more slippery surfaces can be removed.
Also, many new cities will be in places like China and a well designed
domed city can be used to reduce air pollution, which kills 1 person
out of every thousand in China.
So let’s see if I’ve got this right — cleaner, safer cities where you never get rained or snowed on and where heating and cooling costs have been cut by 90% or more. An added benefit, it seems to me, would be that putting domes over cities greatly reduces the heat sink effect. If modern cities are contributing to global warming, domed cities would slow down or eliminate the problem.
The closest I’ve ever come to experiencing life in a domed city was staying at the Gaylord Opryland Hotel in Nashville. The Gaylord is essentially a small city — with hotel, convention center, restaurants, shops, and a large park (including a small artificial “river”) a
Image via Wikipedia
ll under one enormous transparent roof. Wikipedia tells us that the atrium covers about 4.5 acres.
There is very little sense that you’re somehow “indoors” when you’re sitting in sunlight with blue sky above, birds singing, and a light breeze blowing. The only real giveaway was that it was August and one could walk around quite comfortably in business attire. The temperature in the atrium was mid 70s — outside it was high 80s — and I’m guessing there was a 20-point or greater gap in humidity levels.
Here’s another item I could have added to the list at the top — weather control. Someday we’ll have highly advanced technology that will enable us to truly control the weather, presumably for the whole planet. In the mean time, weather control is pretty easy to accomplish in smaller spaces — all you have to do is enclose them. Of course, it’s a limited kind of weather control. The fact that you don’t get rained on in the Gaylord atrium didn’t prevent the entire complex from being partially submerged during the recent flooding.
The domes Brian is describing will be much higher, much lighter, and probably much closer to being completely transparent than the roof of the Gaylord atrium. Those cities will eventually offer all the benefits of being outdoors with none of the drawbacks.And of course, we’ll still have the whole rest of the planet undomed so nobody needs to worry about losing the outdoor experience.
Brian has done a whole series on domed cities over at Next Big Future. Read the whole thing:
http://nextbigfuture.com/2010/
http://nextbigfuture.com/2010/
http://nextbigfuture.com/2010/
http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/
