Corscuant and supply logistics

[Darth Kalgarath]

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?

[apocolypse]

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?

Actually, you're lowballing the number quite a bit. It's at least a trillion in the books, but many agree that even that number is too low. If it was only a trillion, the majority of the planet would be unoccupied (and wouldn't be much of a city planet then )

[Count Dooku]

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.

[Solauren]

How do they handle it?

The same way we do on earth, just in space stations and planets. They send it off to be cleaned, or grow the food elsewhere and bring it in.

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

Imagine how much food you could generate in an area 500 hecatrees wide, 600 stores tall, and that's the bottom of a building complex

[Master of Ossus]

Several books have discussed massive recycling centers under the inhabited portions of Coruscant that provide water and oxygen to the populace above. They use super-virulent bacteria to accomplish the effect. Also, the climate is maintained by huge weather stations that are designed to maintain livable environments, and even alter day/night cycles if necessary.

[Darth Wong]

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.

[Crossroads Inc.]

Indeed, echoing Wong, there are actually several skyscrappers today that are being designed to go "Green" Recycling ater and making its own energy through a viraty of methods.

When buildings become as big as the ones on Courscon, you can imagine easily each building a self contained 'town' that could grow food, recycle air and water, and produce energy.

[Winston Blake]

Even modern designs for comparatively tiny manned Mars ships have a Closed Ecological Life Support System, sustaining several people without needing any food/waste/air to be removed or supplied, and that's without genetically engineered food/oxygen plants or super-bacteria. It's possible that all buildings simply have a few million cubic metres on the lower levels reserved for life support.

[loomer]

Well, according to logic, they have three options.

One- Devote large spaces in buildings or dedicate the buildings themselves to growing food, which in turn filters the air. However, then you need water, which can be recycled from human wastes and even dead people. Or synthesized using some oxygen and some hydrogen.

Two-Recycle everything and still grow food or rely on imports, but with Soylent Green being the base of most meals. However, using this system would likely be a midpoint between theory one and three, where, while the plants are still being planted and growing to edible size, they cut down on imports but after a few months begin recycling the bodies for water.

Three- Import anything and everything they could desire to eat for the wealthy, and staples like the SW equivalent of rice for the commoners and the poor, though no doubt quite a few would starve, leading into option two.

All three options tie together rather nicely.

On a side note, first post. Yay.

[Darth Cronos the Proud]

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

I think that serveral EU sources (like the one that details the Solo children geting lost in the Coruscant underground) state that the lower levels of the city-planet aren't inhabited by "mainstream" citizens (and I use that word to mean even the poverty level inhabitants of the city-planet, exculding the totally undersirables like the ones the Solo kids encountered) and have been abandoned a long time ago. That would mean that any hydroponic or CO2 recyling plants would be in the mid or upper levels (unless by lower levels you mean lowest levels still inhabited by "mainstream" citizens.) Most of my EU books are packed away, and I couldn't find any quotes to confirm the above in the books I have out, so if anyone knows in which book(s) quotes to back these points up (if any) can be found, I'd appriciate it.

[apocolypse]

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.

No, it isn't. Several hundred trillion maybe.

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.

Saxton broke it down nicely. Even assuming a "Perth style" setting, your still several times lower.

[Wyrm]

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.

[loomer]

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.

[Omega-185]

The problem with using the heat as a source of power is that it doesn't actualy get rid of the heat, just move it around. I supose that it might be possible to take the heat and use it as an energy source to create anti-matter (do I have my physics right?) or possibly hypermatter (is hypermatter like an uber-anti-matter?)

[Spanky The Dolphin]

I thought the heat issue had been long decided, that they can convert it into neutrinos...

[Connor MacLeod]

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.

Not neccesarily. Given the apparent proliferation of waste-heat removal technologies available, they probably have any number of ways to safely absorb and dispose of waste heat (neutrino radiators used on shields come to mind.)

You also have to remember that radiating waste heat into space would not be feasible when under planetary bombardment, and they can go many hours or days without lowering those shields (The Last Command is an example that immediately comes to mind.) Which means, naturally, they would need other means of disposing of waste heat. Such as the neutrino radiators.

[Connor MacLeod]

I thought the heat issue had been long decided, that they can convert it into neutrinos...

For some systems like shielding they did, yes, but there's never been any evidence they use it on planets for that purpose (there is no reason they couldn't of course.)

[Connor MacLeod]

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.

There will be inherent inefficiencies in the process that will limit the effectiveness of such a tactic. Invariably some (more likely most) of the energy derived from such a process will simply be re-radiated back into the enviroment as waste heat in some form.

[Connor MacLeod]

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.

Considering the usage of massive construction droids on Corsucant to constantly demolish and rebuild entire sections of the planet, they probably produce alot of things they need without much effort (didn't the Han Solo novels mention duplicators and the like?)

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 sips or just allowed to shoot off into space though.)

[Winston Blake]

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.

Well, 14.6e21 J per day is only equivalent to 18 Acclamator 200 gigaton TL shots per day. As the Hoth ion cannon showed, planetary installations have much greater power resources than ship-based weaponry, so it's plausible that a single installation periodically sends enough energy into space (say, into the sun) to make Coruscant a significantly open system.

[Cykeisme]

It's possible that they fire pulses of the excess energy (in a more conventional form) into the system's sun, but that would generate a big hazardous column above the planet.
It's still more likely that they'd use neutrino radiators like shield systems.


There was a discussion some months back about a similar topic (air and environment control), where there was some mention about large vats of microscopic organisms that did most of the work maintaining the composition of the atmosphere. It was on the same thread that most people agreed that heat was dissipated as neutrinos.

Considering what was said here, I guess it's likely that every building has some environment-regulating machinery, but that there's also large centralized plants that do part of the work.


Btw, why are there so many misspellings of "Coruscant"?

[Spanky The Dolphin]

Because people are either lazy or dumb. Or both.

[Darth Kalgarath]

Ok. Well that answers most of the technical questions I had.
The other part of my question was what socio-cultural impacts this would have on Coruscant's denziens? I ask this because, seeing as Coruscant's the capital planet of the Old/New Republic/Empire and I haven't been able to find any info on whether or not they can vote/particpate in the selection of the officials and administrators that run the local government on Coruscant. Does anybody know if the utilities are privatized, or provided by the government, or contracted to private companies?

[RThurmont]

Coruscant logistics is probably the most fascinating area of EU detail, in my opinion. Obviously you would never make a three hour action movie on the subject, but just imagining the incredible infrastructure required to sustain life in such an environment is electrifying (to me, anyway). Imagine the complexities of power generation, wastewater management, zoning, population distribution, transportation grids (public transit, freight transit, private transit), security, and so forth...I mean imagine if you could build on that scale in SimCity...

Regarding the subject of waste heat, if I recall correctly Coruscant was described as a cold planet in the EU, so if we accept that as canon (not neccessarily something we have to do-remember, they drive convertible cloud cars and ride around in open top air taxis), then we must assume they're doing a darn good job at it.[/quote]

[Srynerson]

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.)

This was also the subject of an "article" on HoloNet News: +http://www.holonetnews.com/50/news/1344_2.html (I'm not sure of the HNN website's canonicity, but given that the print-version of HNN that appears in SW Insider is supposedly C-level canon, I'd imagine it has some claim to canon status.)