StarDestroyer.Net BBS

Darth Kalgarath wrote:my very first post.


My question is this : considering that Corscuant is a city that covers the entire planet, and the novels and printed material I've read all talk about it as being entirely urbanized or industrialized, how do the local officals deal with the logistics of providing food, waste management, etc for what is appearntly tens of billions of beings? And what could the cultural ramifications be as a result?

Solauren wrote:It's also possible that the lower levels of coruscant are massive greenhouses.

Count Dooku wrote:I assume that they have massive undergound systems to handle the waste-management system, and they would need to constantly import huge amounts of food. There could even be entire planets that are completely dedicated to food production for Corscuant and a few other heavily populated worlds. If you owned enough land, it would be a BIG buisness. I also think a trillion is a more realistic number.

SWTC wrote:All evidence indicates that the [pre-Dark Empire] surface of Coruscant was entirely covered with city, except for small polar caps and tiny isolated seas. The orbital views in The Phantom Menace show consistent and well-lit urban terrain at essentially all latitudes. Supposing that the cityscape amounts to 90% of the global surface, and assuming that the planet is about the same size as Earth, this means an area of about 460,000,000 km². (This is a miserly, worst-case estimate, since the physical characteristics of Coruscant derived from other sources make it larger than Earth.) The typical population density for suburban areas of modern cities on Earth are of an order of magnitude about 10,000 or 20,000 persons per square kilometre (taking the comfortable Australian city of Perth as an example). (Readers who would prefer a USA example could consider New York county, with a 1999 population of 1,551,844 persons, an area of 28 square miles = 72.5km², and a population density of 21,107 persons/km² after metric conversion. Reputedly the densest urban population centre on Earth, Hong Kong, had 98,000 persons/km² in 1999 and remains less built-up than Coruscant by some orders of magnitude.) If Imperial City were only as heavily populated as the suburbs of Perth then the population would be of the order of nine trillion persons. Of course Imperial city is not inhabited in the same way as Perth. These suburbs consist almost entirely of single-level buildings and generous gardens around each family dwelling; Imperial City is composed of spires averaging two miles tall, with hundreds of floors, and very few residents ever set eyes on the soil of their planet. The population density of Imperial City is certainly at least several hundred times that of Perth. The total population of Coruscant must be at least of the order of several thousand trillion (1,000,000,000,000,000), and certainly no less than several hundred trillion.

Wyrm wrote:There's also a problem with heat.

At 3,500 kcal/person/day * 4.185 kJ/kcal * 1e15 people, you get 14.6475e21 J/day of heat. Therefore, in order to maintain even temperature, Coruscant would have to radiate 14.6475e21 J/day. This equals Coruscant needing to radiate 169.531250e15 W in total (86,400 s/day) to space, or (assuming an Earth-sized Coruscant--close enough for government work) a radiation rate of 1,326.516 W/m^2.

So what temperature does a body have to be to radiate that much? Well, Stefan-Boltzman says that a blackbody (the most efficient radiator) needs to be at least 391 K in order to do the job, or 117 degrees C. That's quite toasty, and I'm not even including all that nifty technology Coruscant has! (It may be efficent, but if the energy isn't leaving Coruscant, all the energy used eventually ends up as heat.)

Obviously, Coruscantians simply can't let the planet heat up to equilibrium temperature; some heavy duty heat sinks are in order. Also, the heat problem can be mitigated if you export your waste from the planet rather than just dumping the sewage down to the lower levels (where it can ferment and add to the problem). Exporting matter means exporting heat, too.

Spanky The Dolphin wrote:I thought the heat issue had been long decided, that they can convert it into neutrinos...

loomer wrote:That's true... Though what's stopping them from using the heat itself for power? Channel it into chambers, heat it up a little bit more, and let it spark a reaction with a chemical or even boil water... Or you could decide to turn Hoth into a nice, warm place to visist. Either way works.

Darth Wong wrote:The skyscrapers are probably largely self-contained, with hydroponics, waste recycling/filtering, water/air treatment, and other facilities built into their structures somewhere. When you have gigantic multi-kilometer tall buildings, this is not infeasible.

Wyrm wrote:At 3,500 kcal/person/day * 4.185 kJ/kcal * 1e15 people, you get 14.6475e21 J/day of heat. Therefore, in order to maintain even temperature, Coruscant would have to radiate 14.6475e21 J/day. This equals Coruscant needing to radiate 169.531250e15 W in total (86,400 s/day) to space, or (assuming an Earth-sized Coruscant--close enough for government work) a radiation rate of 1,326.516 W/m^2.

Connor MacLeod wrote:I vaguely recall from the novel "Rogue Planet" that there are underground mass drivers utilized to propel certain forms of waste material off-planet (I don't remember if the y were either collected by other ships or just allowed to shoot off into space though.)