Mobile Cities
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 29 ก.ย. 2024
- Humanity has often preferred to move its communities, and in the future we might do that by moving our entire cities, by air, sea, or land.
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Mobile Cities
Science & Futurism with Isaac Arthur
Episode 403, July 13, 2023
Produced & Narrated by Isaac Arthur
Written by:
Briana Brownell
Isaac Arthur
Editors:
Briana Brownell
David McFarlane
Graphics by:
Fishy Tree
Jeremy Jozwik
Ken York (YD Visual)
Sergio Botero
Udo Schroeter
Music Courtesy of:
Epidemic Sound epidemicsound.c...
Markus Junnikkala, "Plotting a Course", "We Roam the Stars"
Stellardrone, "Red Giant", "Between the Rings"
Miguel Johsnon, "Far From Home", "So Many Stars"
Aerium, "Fifth Star of Aldebaran"
Here's the link for the July 13 NSS Space Forum on Instabase I mentioned in the episode :) It is free, hope to see you there.
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Hello, could you make a video of what the military could look like from the smallest to the largest level? What would squads look like?
Would humans even be needed in the future of war? Would there be only machines, AI, and robots as infantry, drones, vehicles, commanders, etc, while humans have no involvement?
Ergo Proxy🥷🏿
I always find it impressive how you’ve managed to come out with new videos for so long and still you have something new to cover. The amount of material on this channel already is incredible!
Yea. I'm not intrested in all of his videos, some topics just don't really intrest me, but thers still MANY MANY videos i can pick and enjoy
@@komiks42 I tihnk that's probably true for most of the audience, some are here mostly for FP vids, other AI or spacecol, etc :)
I'm in admiration of the depth of consideration in video and how consistent they are.
@@isaacarthurSFIAI've been following your channel for a bit. One day I plan on binge watching most of it
@@isaacarthurSFIA- I watch whatever you put up, do like some more than others, but have *never* seen one that wasn't interesting to me.
BTW, my voting on subject matter for future episodes is usually out of sync with the majority, but I figure you'll get around to everything eventually. ;-)
oh yes Mortal Engines, the book ... i remember the first time reading it, that awe feeling, amazing concepts
I'm happy to hear someone else felt that too.
The only ones that would be practical would be either a large cluster of ocean vehicles on a constant move or a space station on the move.
Carpenter here, just wanted to make an observation about when you were mentioning the "mobile homes" that you can untether from their original place and be moved somewhere else. This actually might present a big problem in practice even if it works in principle.
When you build a home, you are building what is called an "envelope" which is the outer most layer of walls, the roof, the floors and so on, are all tied together so as to encompass any interior and partition walls and spaces, which may or may not be tied/connected directly to the envelope of the building but modern building practices actually do a good job at tying most pieces of a home to one another.
The envelope of the building is often anchored to a concrete foundation rather than the floor, and foundation actually being part of that envelope. This means that technically all that is holding down most people's houses is the numerous anchor bolts that are placed all around the bottom plates of the envelope (so the outer walls plates, also including and interior structural walls but doesnt include partition walls necessarily) so you rarely have a house that has the foundation a continous part of the envelope isntead of simlpy being a structure that sits on top of the foundation and is anchored to its to prevent the sheer forces from moving the house horizontally but also from the wind and other potential forces that may want to bring the house off its foundation vertically in an upwards direction. This is most important during windstorms.
The biggest issue it seems to me is how we would build a house that could have its foundation also attatched to the envelope and have it be safe to move from site to site, or you have the same foundation at multiple of your properties or destinations in mind for the home and then you can move it between them and just re anchor the bolts but there is a reason we always replace anchor bolts when we put on something new to the foundation. So if we were to fly a house from one place to another and re anchor the foundation the anchor bolts wouldnt hold as well as once you take the anchor bolts out from the spot they were in the bottom plate, the hole used to thread the bolt through on the bottom plate is made wider and wider unless you could manage to perfectly vertically lift the house each and everytime which still would risk damaging the holes use for the anchoring because of the shrinking of wood when it dries so once you remove the anchor bolts, often the bolts were stretching some boards forcing them to remain straight when all the grain is stressing them to bend. So once off the concrete the bottom plates might bend and you might not be able to restraighten it.
Thats just my two cents though from building houses. Im sure you guys could think of some scientific solutions to the issues i outlined,
It was a dark, blustery afternoon in spring, and the city of London was chasing a small mining town across the dried-out bed of the old North Sea.
Hey bud, I've enjoyed your content for a couple of years now. You do great work and your videos are always interesting and entertaining. Thank you for all the hard work and I look forward to your future projects.
FASCINATING SUBJECT MAN!!! AS WELL, IT IS WONDERFUL TO HEAR A REAL HUMAN BEING, NARRATING VIDEOS, Thank YOU Brother human.😢 ❤
for NOT being or using A.I.
There can be a nomadic community fleet in the outer solar system which can count as a mobile city.
I love that the base unit for this video is "order of magnitude".
I'm one of those people who seem to be able to sleep "anywhere." Personally, it's not the noise or movement from the environment that wake me up, it's a change in the environment. If I fall asleep in a loud environment and it's suddenly quiet, a moving vehicle that comes to a stop, or a drastic temperature change will usually wake me enough to reevaluate my surroundings.
Someone might have mentioned this, but the thumbnail and the title (while assuredly not a lie!) reminded me of a memorable Clive Barker short story called "In the Hills, the Cities". Read it to find out why. Just keep in mind it's from the guy who wrote Helraiser, so be forewarned.
Personally, my favorite example of this would be the Nomadic Cities from Arknights. Due to catastrophes and the oceans being haunted by an aquatic hive mind, nations had to resort to giant moving cities on threads. A feature I like about it is that each one can separate into different sections to better maneuver certain areas, and can even link up with other cities & settlements.
I never thought Id see Issac reference Netheril. Whoa. XD
Rocket ships, telescopes and satellites is all we ever see getting launched because it's exiting, and yields fast results, but to really become an off world civilization, there has to be tremendous investment in just the fundamental infrastructure to do planetary mining and future launches. The problem is that it's not glamorous and takes years , and many administrations to come and go.
A community atop an orbital ring could migrate from tower to tower over time.
This entire channel click baited my curiosity since the beginning! 😂😂😂👍🏼❤️
Loving the shorts Isaac 👍
No no no! The first question in fact IS 'Why?'! Now the proposition in very cool indeed. But still. Continuously hauling around an entire city gotta be massively expensive and inefficient.
Politics. A city could separate from a larger political union by just moving.
Environment.
Resources
Religion
Does the train in snowpeircer fit the category. I’m still on the beginning of the video
Cities are moved because the land sinks below sea level far more often than sea level rises above land.
All i want is a flying city and some airships. Is that so much to ask?
danny the street anyone? thats a dc hero that is a street.
Awesome, as usual.
Hello, could you make a video of what the military could look like from the smallest to the largest level? What would squads look like?
Would humans even be needed in the future of war? Would there be only machines, AI, and robots as infantry, drones, vehicles, commanders, etc, while humans have no involvement?
I'll never be not disappointed with what a fiasco the Mortal Engines film was - fortunately the books are amazing.
So...a Emperator class Titan?
Have you ever done a video about mechs, a la Mechwarrior?
yep, the Giant Robots episode :) Also the one right after this episode, Robots & Warfare
It always seemed impossible to me. It's difficult to do for a two-story house. A whole city would be straight-up impossible.
Mobile cities is a thing in the fiction of the Arknights mobile game; in this world they have a powerful abundant energy source. Even with that I think it's impossible, though.
The Dark Moon strategy game (upcoming) is a city builder featuring a mobile city that moves to try and stay on the dark side of the moon.
What about them being on rails?
A single joint out of an entire city's supports would be a monumental feat of technology that's beyond our current understanding, honestly... it's actually more feasible to have colonies on Venus or Rapture cities under Europa's ice (if you ignore radiation).
I used to think that only children believe in the “impossible”…
But, as I get older…. I realize, there really isn’t that much that is truly impossible.
As Isaac mentions…. It’s really more of a question of practicality, and motivation.
The main reason for NOT doing many things (which are “possible”)…. Is simply because there are more practical ways of achieving your overall goals.
Easily possible. On water we already have that, a large cruise ship or an aircraft carrier are practically cities. In air, airships have no practical size limits, in fact, the larger the better.
On land, take NASA's crawler transporter, it's plenty big enough for a decent size apartment complex, and the rockets it carried were just as heavy. A mobile city doesn't have to be a single entity. And I'm pretty sure we can build them bigger, much bigger than ships. A ship has to deal with large waves, a land crawler doesn't, so it can be less rigid, and therefore bigger. And with more advanced materials size can be increased further. And if you build the houses from steel and aluminium (or wood), they would be far lighter too.
I want the capital of Arizona to become mobile. We could rename it...
_Walking Phoenix_ 😏
ati vazut prea multe filme science fiction de genul stargate atlantis
Just want to confirm this was not clickbait.
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Cat fact one:
Your cat is planning to off you and claim the life insurance.
Isaac is always grounded. Unless it's Clark tech but that's in the name 😂
It is not
Thought it was a let's play
Homie dont play that🤣🤣
Modern cruise ships aren't far off this, some even have permanent residents. If you've never seen one up close they are beyond gigantic. The Titanic looks like a dinghy next to a modern cruise ship. The currently under-construction Icon of the Seas is 1,200ft long, weights over 250,000 GT, and between passengers and crew can carry nearly 10,000 people. The smallest state capital is Montpelier, Vermont, and has only about 7,500 people.
@@Stevie-Jaircraft carriers are fucking crazy.
That honestly sounds insane. I routinely see car transport ships, which look like an elongated skyscraper suddenly appeared nextdoor. But apparently, the ship you mention is even larger.
No cruise ship or aircraft carrier I've ever seen in port here came close to these car transporters and I can't imagine anything that size
@@Stevie-J i totally understand, im from italy and we as a populace are a bit spoiled by the peace having allies in border provides, when we were financing our latest aircraft carrier the only reason it was done is because it can function as an hospital ship doing crisis, which is a good thing but it shouldnt be the reason we make our navy more sufficent. I dont agree with alot of things the us does but their military spending isnt one of them.
I seen a video of one the other day had like 6 restaurants 8 bars 10 pools basketball courts tennis courts water slides i think it had 2 movie theaters it had a place for plays literally everything you could think of it was crazy
Mobile sea cities would be a good idea, one could simply move it to the optimum location for the time of year. This already happens to some extent in the sailing community.
One concern I'd have about large floating cities is different stress on different parts of the structure. It will need some sturdiness, but also a small ability to flex. The various videos of ships breaking in storms come to mind.
So it can move under the Captain or committee's control, but it can also be moved by strong currents/waves
How about a mobile sea city made of many smaller vessels that can connect to one another via gangways and rope ladders and such.
@alphaclean3364 exactly and they could be together most of the time then separate if there was a storm predicted.
@@alphaclean3364There's a game called P.A.M.E.L.A which does basically exactly this with its floating cities. It was kinda abandoned, but it's really cool conceptually, and you can play to the end.
@@alphaclean3364 This is the correct answer, every single seastead is some family home, they all operate autonomously, and can diffuse or come together at will.
We had a town that was moved once, a little south of Lubbock Tx. The town was built about a mile east of the planned site. They put all the buildings on skids, and dragged the whole town to where it belonged. This is how Slide Tx got its name.
Slidell?
@OriginalDonutposse no, it is Slide, Texas.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slide,_Texas
So residents would be 'Sliders'?
Lansing, Michigan.
Wheeling, West Virginia.
American gets Mobile (, Alabama).
This is the kind of messed up stuff that can only happen in flat areas.
For those that go: "Wait, why is the Swedish town of Kiruna moving?"
It is due to the mining operations that have spread underneath the city, making the ground unstable. There have been instances of local earthquakes occurring due to the unstable ground. Their solution was to move the city because the mining operations are MASSIVELY profitable, and they keep finding new veins and materials, the last one was the beginning of 2023 where they found what is labelled "Europe's biggest rare earth minerals deposits". They have the funding to move the entire town of 22k people and their houses which is wack.
So the company running the mine is paying for the move?
That's... actually nice.
@@Arrynek01one of those weird cases where a corporation does the right thing. Must be some weird european thing
Thank you for explaining that.😊❤
@@Arrynek01 Well, mining law requires them to handle any fallout from their mining operations. So if you pollute a lake, it is the mining company's fault, and they have to fund the solution to it.
@@ManBearPigCreativeMeanwhile in the United States::
Small city caves in due to mining that was kept secret, 60% of the town is dead, but the shareholders were willing to take the risk.
The thing I contemplate most about cities is what is their purpose, every city on earth at first had a purpose. Natural resources nearby, strategic locations for defense/offense and in that regard there are many reasons for a mobile city. It should be important to note though there's also reasons to have smaller mobile structures like Labs, refineries or factories.
Currently we have a rover on Mars doing tons of research. It's not too much of a stretch to have a rover lab filled with people there too. These could be rovers, subs, tanks or walkers easily depending on the environment as well. So if your sci fi needs a little extra cool one of those would be a neat thing to throw in without being too much of a stretch for your readers.
A game called Arknights have mobile Cities (Called nomadic cities in the game)
Because of catastrophes, basically natural disasters but ten times worse (imagine hurricanes combined with meteor showers that drop skyscraper size rock, and said rocks can cause a incurable disease), they have to keep moving to avoid this cause a catastrophe could level an entire city
I like the idea that if the Americas were never discovered by anyone in the East and the Native Americans somehow “modernized”, they’d have a bunch of mobile cities due to how large the continents are and their very different concept of land ownership
Why seasonal weather extremes.
As far as i recall there is indeed a big Mobile tracked vehicle which serves as a Mobile laboratory
Crossroads?
Some other examples are the "Ship Country" and the "Bothersome Country" from Kino's Journey, with Bothersome Country being a strangely close plot to Mortal Engines (I think the light novel story of it predates ME, even). What a shame what happened to the Mortal Engines movie though. Lots of other fun examples in games, like the Wandering Village, too. Thanks for covering this topic Isaac!
The mortal engines books are some of my favourite but damn that movie was bad, and they ended it in a way that contradicts the storyline of the other books
@@Rullstolsboken Shrike's story was saved by Stephen Lang actually reading the book imo. When they stuck to the plot the movie was great, but the mix ups and mischaracterizations was really to the detriment of it. 😔
Laputa: Castle In The Sky?
I liked this one and I feel compelled to add a notable example of The the moving cities of Arknights. Where they need to move so as to avoid calamities which in setting very from devastating blizzards to explosive fireballs raining from the sky. They have gained the ability to forecast these calamities like the weather and move the cities out of the way in a few hours time. I felt that this would have been a nice addition to your video, but even then great video as usual.
//Edit:And now I realize it was already mentioned.
I always liked the idea of walking buildings or cities using "strandbeest" legs to move around, particularly because they would be able to utilize fairly complicated motion without requiring a great deal of computational oversight, as a building walking around on something like spider legs might require. In theory they also wouldn't require a particularly complicated drive train for that motion, or could be driven by external forces like wind.
The anime Chrome Shelled Regios, is all about mobile cities called Regios, that travel around on a ruined Earth looking for resources, fighting giant mutated insects, and competing with other mobile cities for said resources.
One really cool concept is the tame megafauna that drags the city or even carries it on its back. One of the factions in Warhammer is composed of nomads that set their tents on giant beetles. (I mistook them for another nomadic faction in Endless Legend who uses more conventional beasts of burden.)
40k is always such a werid mix of neat and weird ideas :)
Xenoblade 2 is built upon the entire concept - after all, "megafauna" describes most Titans perfectly (though not all - some of them are small enough to be outright enemies to fight after they were weaponised, while simultaneously being on other, much larger Titans that *are* the landmasses of that game's world)
Play The Wandering Village. It's a city-building game where you build your settlement on top of a gigantic dinosaur-like creature.
The city of Terminator in Kim Stanley Robinson's various books was always a neat mobile city. Always rolling around the horizon line of Mercury, keeping out of direct sunlight.
Me: *click on the vid to see if it have any clickbait
Issac: “There are no clickbait titles on this show.”
Me: *Understood, have a nice day 😎
Nice, I've been working on a setting on an oceanic planet where the capital is a floating city, partly for political reasons as none of the various island nations that made up the planet could agree on who should house the capital and partly as a means to avoid the regular large storms that sweep the planets surface.
Wow that’s really cool
The first mobile city I always think of is Terminator on Mercury in the novel 2312. On rails going around the planet, such a cool idea.
Seriously. That's a gem right there.
The rails offer some interesting possibilities…
I never read that novel, so I don’t know if it included this concept, but…
The rails could be made from a temperature reactive material, so that the heating/cooling of the day/night cycles, could be the mechanism that propels the city around the planet.
@@bobinthewest8559if memory serves - and I might have the wrong story - that was the case in this story except no special materials required. The metal rails expanded in the heat and shrank when cold, like all metals, and the city was driven along by having a suitably massive wedge that was constantly being squeezed "out" of the heated daylight section.
@@bobinthewest8559 Exactly how it is in the story. That book is absolutely off the rails 😏
Terminator was in KSR's _Mars_ trilogy before it was in _2312_ .
The first rule of warfare: If your city is about to be attacked, get out of the way.
The Mortal Engines book series by Phillip Reeve is a great exploration of this concept. The movie is a bit rubbish but books are well worth reading
So good! I'm reading the fever crumb trilogy next
You need Originium tech if you want to make it practical.
Welcome back… dokter-lynx
My favorites are great big spinning toroids, mile wide 10 miles in diameter I saw early renderings done in the 70's and I was like wow, this is how you build a city! Central waterway through the middle, with terraced homes, buildings, gardens, forests, built up embankments on both sides. It would be so unbelievably huge, you wouldn't even feel like you were in space, just in a normal city. If you could stick a fusion drive on them, do 1/2 speed of light, make into a generational ship to populate exoplanets within a couple hundred light years.
I always imagined massive pyramid colonies that just land and start doing what's necessary. Massive green houses as the outer layer if you're near star (mostly looked cool in my head as a kid)
That's a good imagination😊
@@rwm1980 Well Stargate was a movie I rented back then. I just added an eternal expanding humanity and straight forward mass colonization. You drop hundreds of thousands down in good locations across a planet and within generations you're entrenched.
The MOVIE Mortal Engines!?
This is book erasure
PREACH
There's a book?
@@spicetea4060there's a series of books
The idea of a massive mining crawler on a low grav moon or large-scale floating refining platform in the atmosphere of a venus or gas-giant planet are likely viable concepts. A true *city* in the sense we really think of them, with a population of 100k or more is vastly larger than these however, and I think problems like torsion on such an enormous structure would become very severe, with deformations in the terrain surface, swells in the ocean, or winds in the atmosphere twisting and warping your city like a pretzel until it comes apart. Even large modern bridges need to be very carefully engineered to avoid being annihilated by torsion and vibration.
The one case where I see 'moving cities' eventually becoming a reality is with structures like Oneal colonies with thrusters that can reposition themselves in orbit, move between planets, or even embark on millennia long journeys between stars - quite possibly the only viable way for humans to travel between stars.
Another mobile city varient would be the main city of a nomadic group.
I bet the Mongols had something like this, and the Indians have something for religious reasons during Kumbha Mela, where a city is built ground up every year to accommodate pilgrims.
I could see space ships modified to fit together like puzzle pieces. Like a fleet of pirates or merchants who, in their long travels between points of interest, join their ships together to form a ring and generate artificial gravity. And each ship has its own facilities, but Mikey’s ship might have a restaurant and John makes up for Mikey’s space sacrifice by storing his produce, so on and so fourth. Pop up vendors almost, for the merchants.
And some ships might be built specifically to form giant ring habitats, as a safety feature but also for as stated long voyages or community events, or periods of static living in a resource rich etc environment.
Buckminster Fuller had ideas for a floating city on the ocean that looked like a tetrahedron and another for one that floated in the sky that looked like a gigantic spherical balloon.
As a big time fan both of the channel and of Mortal Engines, I've been waiting on this one for a long, long time...
happy Arthursday!
Doesn’t Lando have some giant centipede like city powered by a crap ton of AT-AT Walker legs on some mining planet in Dark Empire comics where it’s constantly moving along to stay out of the nearby sunlight? It’s a mining venture if I recall correctly since Thrawn steals a bunch of his drills, but it was just creeping along staying in the shade and running another impossible city like he does, but now maybe it’s not SO impossible ;)
This definitely makes sense for lunar cities, excluding polar ones. Or at least the farming communities, with farmer's markets coming around every 4 weeks.
In the mobile game Arknights, the world has many cataclysmic natural disasters that necessitates the worlds inhabitants to created "mobile cities", which allow them to pack up and move the entire city within 2 weeks if they predict one coming their way. I always wondered how practical they are in reality, albeit they are powered by the fictional resource of that universe. The bigger concern is of course, probably it sinking into the ground from it's sheer weight.
The city is separated into district sized plates which each has its own engines
I once calculated the speed of moon rotation at some latitudes and realized a pretty slow rover could always be under the sun (and thus powered)
Dunno bout legged cities, but aerostat cities in Venus' atmo are (technically) within our reach, so i'm down for those.
edit: on a second thought, a possible moving city would be a roller city. Two cylinders one inside the other with a gap. The gap would be filled with water to the point where the inner cylinder is buoyant. The inner cylinder has the living spaces, stacked on decks with either a central (fusion?) powered core that lights them all up in a stacked fashion or individual artificial suns for light (crops and mental health). It would be locked on a carrier bearing support that's also the outer cylinder's structure against collapse. The outer skin would have to have some sort of ablative surface to resist the damage as it rolls. Motion would be achieved by shifting the weight of the inner cylinder. Dunno about turning, perhaps the outer cylinder is in two halves, allowing for differential steering.
It's ... doable, i see no structural issues, but the sheer cost of making it once more cuts it out of reach. Floating cities or Europa submarine cities that travel under the ice, always putting the moon between them and the planet... those seem more within our means.
ain't nobody going there bro we all saw Europa Report
If you're gonna do that, why not just go the whole hog and make it a sphere instead of a wheel? Then it can turn in any direction.
Barotrauma™ (Submarines are cool.)
Reminded me of Arknights' nomadic cities. That world is so ravaged by natural insanity that the idea of moving cities and people are much too ingrained in the culture itself to the point where hardly any cities with major Terran populations that needs to dodge Calamities (the name of these gigantic disasters, including falling meteors, extreme storms, etc) isn't nomadic by default. That world, while having "magic", is still dedicatedly realistic and elaborate, you do need to check it out!
As someone who are on-and-off the game since its release, i would also recommend it, but at a distance. The setting is intriguing and unique, and the stories it have is fun at the very least, but its way of monetizing itself can be quite the turnoff.
@@sponge1234ify well it's a gacha game, and that's a fair critique though still have to applaud the setting, writing and the aesthetic that mostly carried its reputation. anecdotal experiences won't matter too much tho, it's better to let everyone experience the magic of *ohshiteveryonedying&fading* by themselves.
Was looking for arknights comments. The amount of detail about how mobile citys operate is great. In terra if you want to make a expand you have no choice but be mobile or a catastrophy will destroy everything. There is also taking a city and raming it full speed at another city making for a great set piece.
Spekaing of gacha games, Punishing Gray Raven has the "Eternal Engine" - basically a giant train with carriages 25 metres tall and wide and like 100+ long. The train has dozens, or even hundreds of those and it goes on big train tracks across Eurasia to avoid the virus hotspots. There is also the Nona Ouroborosa, which is a giant ship a few kilometres long that sails around the Pacific ocean.
Fnally, there's "Atlantis", a big floating city, kind of like the Atlantis in the Star Gate franchise. It's situated somewhere in the Atlantic ocean and it can also dive to a dept of a few kilometres. It was used as a floating reserch base for some secret technologies.
Arknights is why i clicked on this video lol
I have a setting for my tabletop games that's centered on a mobile city at sea- it runs on diesel and I thought it was bananas- good to know it's more realistic and plausible than I immagined! I'll give it sails as well
I’ve been creating mobile cities since 1990. I just love this! I never thought I’d see the day when this would even become a topic. Thanks!
Love the idea of a residence that you can un-tether, call for "the movers", and have in place in another state/country in a few hours!
If a planet is light on one side for months at a time, then dark for months at the time it will be bad to live in total darkness for months so if they can move a city they can move it to the day side
I can imagine this becoming something of a trend at a smaller scale. You could have a village or town sized community living in a jointly owned ship-habitat, with everything they needed to keep a town happy and fed aboard the vessel.
The advantage of this would be that the town could periodically uproot itself to visit other locations in the solar system.
Perhaps a few seasons on Mars, a year on the moon, then an extended trip to Enceladus or the mining hubs of the asteroid belt.
I doubt these townships could return directly to earth, because they might not be capable of rentry and earth based launches.
Though the inhabitants should be able to find a service to shuttle them to earth with the town docked in orbit.
20:13 this reminds me of the nomadic fleet city in a anime called Gargantia. where it has a main ship but has multiple smaller ships that could change to different parts of the fleet.
If homes are ever constructed robust enough to be routinely moved and if they were constructed airtight, they could be used in many different environments. Like your basement would be a ships hull that you bury when you're on land, but you could move to water, and also you could dock it in a rotating space marina, and possibly suspend it from a tether into the atmosphere all while maintaining an "up" direction
Why does everyone with a lisp decide to talk to people for a living. do literally anything else
In a creative writing work of mine, I had a city upon a gigantic ship that functioned as the trade hub for most of the world since it was one of the few places where goods from nearly every civilization would accumulate. Super cool to see a vid on the topic from a completely different perspective, but still one of my more favorite genres. I always like to try and place science into it
Just finished a series featuring a series of mobile cathedrals slowly walking - just fast enough to keep the sun in the center of the sky...
Less than 30 sec in and this will certainly be fun
to keep the sun in a certain place on equator you need to move at 1667.924 km at hour. those cathedrals are NOT slow at all
I did the math considering that ''slow'' cathedrals are on equator they are ''walking'' at 463 meters a second which is more than mach one
Mobile cities would be great for an alt-history sci-fi series where a nomadic empire like the Mongols became the dominant political powers on Earth, and then slowly expanded across the universe
*cough* Mortal Engines *cough*
They have moved smallish buildings before but it's difficult - they're usually moved by taking apart and re-assembling at the new site.
It has never existed IRL before so I think it has to be a sci-fi setting or a sci-fi element added to make the alternate history.
@@SuperFlamethrower…
You’re talking about moving structures that were built as permanent.
If mobility is part of the plan from the outset, you build your structures in a completely different way.
This series made me remember the flying city of Panda La depicted in the old Tailspin cartoon, which took to the skies via giant hot air balloons to invade and conquer those that oppose them.
I'm a fan of places built on naturally buoyant terrain - like Sanctaphrax in Edge Chronicles
Something about using propellers or rockets to keep something afloat has always seemed scary to me, what if there was a major malfunction?
I love when someone thinks about this and writes about safety measures.
It's probably why the Magnetrine disc from Simon Stalenhags's art is one of my favourite fictional propulsion method. They are basically spinning magnetic gyroscopes that are only usable in the upper Northern Hemisphere - and allowed huge vehicles to magnetically levitate. The art book "Tales from the Loop" explains that if there's ever a malfunction - the disks would naturally spin as the vehicle sinks through earths magnetic field and keep the descent to a few centimetres a week.
I always wanted to see a settlement that floats on Magnetrine discs, but I don't think he ever drew something like that unfortunately.
I'm gonna chime in and mention Arknights for a bit because a low-key major part of the worldbuilding involves the video's topic (and also becuase they were the first thing that came to mind when I saw the video). Ahem
Long story short, the world of Terra has many of its civilizations live in mobile "Nomadic Cities" this is primarily due to avoid Catastrophes, that is to say crazy meteorological phenomena that is at least on par with natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina, the Tohoku quake/tsunami or the recent wildfire epidemics in California and Canada.
I also think it overlaps with the mining aspect the video discusses as these disasters leave behind as a byproduct Originium, which served as a fossil fuel analogue of sorts and powers most engendered things in Terra, including the aforementioned engineering behemoths. It also has a side effect in Oripathy, but that is prolly more relevant in a video covering sci-fi diseases.
These cities seem to be able to break apart and combine if need be, separating or joining modules to become bigger (the latter evidenced in the Near Light event where not-Polish cities had joined together for their annual sporting competition). Not everyone lives in these cities, as some pockets of civilizations live in the barrenlands betwixt or in parts of Terra that were hereto untouched by Catastrophies (Kjerag and initially Siesta IIRC)
A smaller but seemingly denser case within the same setting is the landship used as the headquarters of Arknights' protagonist faction, Rhodes Island. A phama corp (among other things) specializing in treated the aforementioned disease. The vessel is significantly smaller but can still hold a lot of personnel and patients. the Mansfield Break event also established the technology is used for a prison in not-'Murica
You build a mobile city to get away from big government.
I call it the firefly principle.
No matter how long the arm of tyrannical government gets, you need need to travel a little bit further away.
Imagine building a village sized "kill doser" and driving around the country, ignoring the tyrannical government outside.
You find a good spot to park, and then when it looks like the outside government is trying to pull some shenanigans, you just drive away.
I think this works better as a boat. The problem is that "the powers that be" would likely just sink the boat rather than allow people to seastead.
Arknights has moving Cities because of the Catastrophe (a sudden storm that drops giand crystals) heck even onepiece has done it really good (spoilers of course so watch out) with the kingdom sanji is from the Germa Kingdom where they are all mercenarys moving around the world selling their fighting force and then come together (rarely) to form the kingdom with their ships all puzzling together into one and then there also was the thriller bark ps. from the one piece wiki "comprised of platforms surrounded by railings, that are build on the shells of large snails resembling Den Den Mushi. Those snails are seemingly unaffected by the salty sea, and are strong enough to climb the Red Line."
For land crawlers noise and vibration can be solved easily by going electric. And bumps can be solved by a Bose suspension. That's an active suspension that keeps the vehicle perfectly flat on any terrain at any speed, as long as the suspension travel is enough. It's even capable of jumping over small obstacles.
"Cities on the go.
Because there are
no clickbait titles on this show"
kind of rhymes😎
In either " Saturn's Brood" or " Neptune's Children", a mobile city on Mercury rode on rails....
Issac, you have one of the most incredible brains I've encountered, and I've known some real smart people. Thank you for sharing.
The best and greatest example of mobile cities is James Blish's novel "A Life For The Stars". In that book entire Earth cities use Clarke tech to lift themselves bodily and fly among the stars as migrant workers so to speak. NYC and Scranton, PA are prominently featured. A great read!
Im partial to the massive tree-ships in Hyperion, who's drive plumes looked like a huge root system. But then pretyy much every space vessel is a mobile city.
@@stevenhetzel6483 Those where cool. Great book. I'm partial to the alien mothership from Close Encounters.
Great timing, I'm starting to draft a story about mobile (living) cities.
And in regards to floating cities--couldn't you just have giant vaccuum chambers for floatation cells, so you don't have to worry about lifting gas escaping?
In a way we already have predecessors for this with for instance sesonal and construction workers living in trailers. There are also so called "boat people" that can just move elsewhere when needed. I also want to point at the human faction in the game Starcraft for whom most of their structures are mobile.
Let's see if there's a Arknights meantion lol
The Shimizu Corp has been planning an submersible city for years. It will be interesting to see if they pull it off.
What is the sound of your city slowly breaking through a cloud layer on its way to higher altitude so it can bask in the sun? It sounds exactly like “Red Giant” by Stellardrone ❤️👍🏽👍🏽
Notification squad
The end of the railroad track town supporting the men building the tracks, Hell on Wheels moved by railroad and spawned a few permanent towns such as Cheyenne Wyoming.
Why don't we just take bakiny bottom and push it somewhere else?
Really loved Alastair Reynolds' version of this in Absolution Gap
Mobile cites are a good concept but isn't a O'Neil cylinder a mobile city 😂
Edit: not long after I said this he made the distingusing line😅
They are mobile only when you need to avoid something hitting it. Otherwise they don't move under their own power.
@@mrbuttocks6772 ...Or if you want to drop them on something. *Someone* had to bring up Gundam in response, might as well be me.
First
Awwwww
Fun fact: for the giant platform idea, this is basically what they did in Darling in the Franxx. In that world, earth had been destroyed by aliens, so the remnants of society had isolated themselves in domed cities on platforms, which now roam the landscape looking for resources. To keep things efficient, the majority of the populace is locked into a virtual reality, basically sleeping. It's neat, because I've heard both of those concepts mentioned in videos on the channel!
We already have cruise ships and oil rigs. Also the shifting base in Antarctica.
The first thing I thought about was James Blishs "Cities in Flight". Now I'll have to re-read it of course.
Try not to get too spindizzy when reading it! :D
@@cf453 I'll make sure I'm already spinning in the other direction by way of administering Trappist as needed ;-)
Walking cities, controlled by AI !
I think walking cities probably bad idea, however cities on wheels, flying or on water might be better. I always thought about this, if global warming is happening and water levels are rising, wouldn't it be better to have cities on large barges that attach together to make a big city?🤔🤔🤔
The military would love movable military bases