06-15-2017, 10:54 AM
Again, this is a book (or set of books actually) rather than a movie, but...
In Niven's Ringword, much is made of the Puppeteer homeworld being home to one trillion Puppeteers and thus being essentially a single planet spanning city with buildings 'miles tall'.
However, a bit of simply math quickly shows that you could easily fit 1 trillion humans into a set of structures much less than 'miles tall' and still have plenty of planetary surface left over for other stuff.
For example, if you put 10,000 people each in structures the size of a World Trade Center tower, then it would only take 100 million such structures to house a trillion people. The land area of the Earth is 196.9 million square miles. If larger structures are used, the number can reduce. If smaller, but more, structures are used then more land area is used, but you could still likely have major areas of city with large parklands interspersed.
Point being that a planet covering city wouldn't really be necessary, even with structures we could build. With 'miles high' structures, the number goes down even more and much of the homeworld could be park or farm or whatever the Puppeteers wanted.
Trantor in Asimov's Foundation universe and Coruscant in the Star Wars universe also have this issue.
Todd
In Niven's Ringword, much is made of the Puppeteer homeworld being home to one trillion Puppeteers and thus being essentially a single planet spanning city with buildings 'miles tall'.
However, a bit of simply math quickly shows that you could easily fit 1 trillion humans into a set of structures much less than 'miles tall' and still have plenty of planetary surface left over for other stuff.
For example, if you put 10,000 people each in structures the size of a World Trade Center tower, then it would only take 100 million such structures to house a trillion people. The land area of the Earth is 196.9 million square miles. If larger structures are used, the number can reduce. If smaller, but more, structures are used then more land area is used, but you could still likely have major areas of city with large parklands interspersed.
Point being that a planet covering city wouldn't really be necessary, even with structures we could build. With 'miles high' structures, the number goes down even more and much of the homeworld could be park or farm or whatever the Puppeteers wanted.
Trantor in Asimov's Foundation universe and Coruscant in the Star Wars universe also have this issue.
Todd