Any modern replication? With all the replication crisis everywhere, and this research being extremely narrativistic, are there any modern experiments affirming these conclusions?
It literally ran once and in the same environment, and only the last findings were taken? How do we know it's not just some specific genetic defect that propagated? Did they reintroduce new genes into the gene pool? Some other failure of the experiment? There wasn't even a control group in this entire thing, it's closer to a bedtime story than science.
I'm extremely cautious about making broad assumptions with so little data.
I saw a documentary about Kowloon Walled City. It was nightmarish.
> Kowloon Walled City was an ungoverned and densely populated de jure Imperial Chinese enclave within the boundaries of Kowloon City, British Hong Kong. Originally a Chinese military fort, the walled city became an enclave after the New Territories were leased to the United Kingdom by China in 1898. Its population increased dramatically following the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong during World War II. By 1990, the walled city contained 50,000 residents[1] within its 2.6-hectare (6.4-acre) borders.
Fortunately, it was razed. There's a nice park there now. I sure am glad we're not mice!
Between Kowloon and the Yukon there's a sweet spot of population density.
(Yukon is one of the least populated but still nice places on Earth. Fewer than ~45,000 people in ~450,000km².)
We have plenty of room on Earth. We could construct an artificial continent in the Pacific Ocean with a nice crinkly coastline and everyone could live at the beach.
> We could construct an artificial continent in the Pacific Ocean with a nice crinkly coastline and everyone could live at the beach.
I'm from that crappy little country that makes islands for other countries: outside of the continental shelves I highly doubt that you could reclaim land unless you feel like living at the bottom of a very, very deep hole in the ocean and somehow I don't think that's the proposition that will get people enthusiastic. Plenty of visitors already freak out when they learn that NL is in many places more than 10 meters below sea level, and that's with relatively mild coastal weather. If you were to create a dike 100's of meters high (and where would you get the material without making the hole even deeper?) it will end up as something that would qualify as the biggest man made structure without the slightest competition, including the Great Wall.
This is engineering on a scale that is currently as far as I know impossible.
It would have to be stupendously large if you ever want to build inside it using ordinary building materials, otherwise it will be like living on a permanent earthquake.
Yeah, I wouldn't try to hold back the ocean, I mean more like a floating island the size of Texas or so. But really fractal/crinkly, so there's lots and lots of coastline on the "interior" of the island. The outer edge would buffer storms and high seas.
I have no actual idea if this is possible or not. (IANAEngineer or anything like that, just a weirdo on the Internet.)
You start with the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. That's a lot of carbon floating on hydrogen and oxygen and salt. You collect the salt, melt it, use that to oxidize the GPGP trash. (Molten Salt Oxidation[1]). Plastic is converted to synthesis gas ("a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide"[2]). Exothermic reaction.
Now you need a way to convert the syngas to struts and glue. (I have some ideas on that but they're even nuttier... In any event, syngas is pretty useful stuff.)
Use the struts and glue to make large structures out of "octet" truss (space-filling tessellation of octahedrons and tetrahedrons) and just float on top of the water. Imagine an upside-down Frisbee shape with walls roughly 100m tall and a diameter of two or three kilometers. That would be a small prototype.
Really the main motive would be to perform a kind of stunt just to get people to realize that we can build very large structures now.
I think you'd be better off building something like that above the ocean with the whole thing supported by piers anchored very deep. Otherwise sooner or later your structure will meet that one wave that it can't deal with and then it's game over. But even something supported by piers would be an amazing feat of engineering by our current standards, even a typical drilling platform that is embedded in the continental shelf is - up close - something to behold. What you are talking about is many, many orders of magnitude more complex, both from a materials science perspective as well as the engineering itself. The sea is a formidable enemy for anything that you intended to float on top of it, in the longer term if you don't sidestep the problem you'll end up with your structure as a submersible. One of the problems is that moving water is incredibly destructive, I've seen 8 cubic meter concrete blocks thrown about like confetti during a bad storm at the coast, and that's nothing compared to what you have to deal with on the open ocean.
That's what left after the impact of a 2x2x2 meter concrete block. These are used to reinforce the piers near IJmuiden, where I used to live and the force of the impact of the water will dislodge those blocks from the asphalt in which they are embedded and throw them over or onto the pier itself. That's approximately 15 tonnes and I have no idea how much force it would require to break them free from their surroundings.
Then there is the problem of anchoring your structure. All of the air on the Western side of a floating structure would impinge on the height that the whole thing extends above the sea, turning it into a gigantic sail. Before long your structure would start to move and the mass may work against moving in the beginning, but once it picks up speed the whole thing turns into a giant moving obstacle, eventually crashing into the shore somewhere.
If you don't want that you'll have to expend a fair bit of power or anchor it to the seabed somehow, and to withstand such force will require a lot of engineering. This will need to be maintained as well to offset it coming loose in places.
On the whole I think the easiest way would be to take an ocean liner and stick it somewhere at an anchor but even that isn't going to be very pleasant without forward motion to counteract a storm (you want to be heading into a storm under power, not float around in it).
> I think you'd be better off building something like that above the ocean with the whole thing supported by piers anchored very deep.
That's the idea, but instead of piers you have a grid of floats or buoys. The octet truss structure is light enough and strong enough to float on just the tops of the waves.
> Otherwise sooner or later your structure will meet that one wave that it can't deal with and then it's game over.
The largest wave so far recorded (not counting tsunami) was an 84-foot (25.6m) rogue wave off Norway.
I figure you would need some sort of dissipative structure rather than a flat wall. Something akin to Tesla's valvular conduit with flexible baffles and fins to turn the water's kinetic energy back onto itself. Probably 300m thick or more so you have plenty of room/time in which to work.
> What you are talking about is many, many orders of magnitude more complex, both from a materials science perspective as well as the engineering itself.
Oh, I hope not! The structure is conceptually simple, at least, and the materials should be mostly off-the-shelf. I have no real idea, of course.
> The sea is a formidable enemy for anything that you intended to float on top of it
Oh, yes. I've lived next to the ocean for the vast bulk of my life so far. Although I'm not nautical, I can't imagine living far from it for long. Our Pacific ocean here is much sweeter and kinder than your stern North Sea, of course ("pacific" eh?) But it is still a god. I don not worship the ocean but my respect for it falls not far short.
When I watch video footage of big storms out on the deep water I think I'm crazy, but then I think about just how big of a structure I could make, and I'm enthused again.
> Then there is the problem of anchoring your structure. All of the air on the Western side of a floating structure would impinge on the height that the whole thing extends above the sea, turning it into a gigantic sail.
That is easy, in theory: windmills instead of sails, driving propellers to keep on station.
- - - -
I'm more or less going to actually try this. The initial prototype will be very small, probably around 200m in diameter, and it will look more like a spider or water-strider bug than a platform.
The scene that stayed with me the longest was a person working. She was in a space the size of a small closet. There was a small pot of soupy dough and three hot plates. She scooped dough and poured it on the plates. When they were cooked she removed them and put them on a stack. Then she did it again. The narrator said she worked like that for fourteen hours every day, making mu shu pancakes for the restaurants in the city (Hong Kong.) That was it. That was her whole life. Slaving like a robot.
After they destroyed it, she presumably did the same job somewhere else, with better electrical safety but higher rent. Her job wasn't created by the walled city, it was created by the economic order of Hong Kong.
That's almost the point: China is a larger version of Kowloon. The Earth is a larger version of Kowloon. The Solar System is a larger version of Kowloon. The Milky Way Galaxy is a larger version of Kowloon...
We are not mice. We have to decide what population density (and economic order) we will live with.
> We have to decide what population density (and economic order) we will live with.
What does that mean in this case, though? I don't want to put words in your mouth, but if you're saying we have to pick the density we're ok with, does that mean she just shouldn't exist?
> if you're saying we have to pick the density we're ok with, does that mean she just shouldn't exist?
What? No. How does that follow?
I believe she (and everybody else) should have at least the basic needs met automatically: food, shelter, clothing, most medicine, electricity and telecomms, etc. We have the technology and resources to do this now, it's just a matter of logistics. A single modern server could compute utopia in a few minutes.
>> We have to decide what population density (and economic order) we will live with.
> What does that mean in this case, though?
Well, in this case they tore the place down. I have no idea what happened to the residents.
I checked Wikipedia and there doesn't seem to be any recent IRL studies on crowding. There was one study [1] in the 1970s that tried to see if over-crowding affected humans similarly. The study found that humans social ability allowed them to cope and organize, avoiding the negative effects. So people probably didn't really see a strong need to continue studying it since it didn't translate well to human social issues.
I'd imagine if you wanted to study crowding and the effects of excessive unwanted social interaction (minus the moral issues of killing mice or recruiting humans), you could study some over crowded prisons.
> Others turned to the laboratory. The psychologist Jonathan Freedman recruited high school and university students to carry out a series of experiments that measured the effects of density on behavior. He measured their stress, discomfort, aggression, competitiveness and general unpleasantness. When he declared to have found no appreciative negative effects in 1975,
the tide began to turn on Calhoun’s utopia.
This is the only paragraph I was found in reference, and I find the reasoning extremely weak.
Calhouns mice are a generational study, the human study obviously did not involve nearly as much time, and it's doubtful whether the space are as crowded as the mice study was.
Submariners have well documented health issues and recuperation after spending long period of time on cramped spaces, and a submarine is arguably more spacious than what the mice have been subjected to. Not to mention the simple fact that nobody (hopefully) had to start a family on a submarine, or a prison per replied comment.
Conducting similar study in humans is impossible given the obvious cruelty and ethic concerns, but if I have to guess the outcome are going to be no better than the mice study.
> Making the leap from mouse to man, however, was not so simple. “This is where it gets controversial,” Ramsden said, describing how other scientists tried to replicate Calhoun’s results in human populations.
> “How do you map Calhoun’s pathologies onto human society? How do you measure sexual deviancy? [Researchers] chose venereal disease, illegitimacy and divorce. That stirred up some controversy. How do you measure breakdown
in maternal behavior? They chose public welfare and child assistance rates.”
Others turned to the laboratory. The psychologist Jonathan Freedman recruited high school and university students to carry out a series of experiments that measured the effects of density on behavior. He measured their stress, discomfort, aggression, competitiveness and general unpleasantness. When he declared to have found no appreciative negative effects in 1975, the tide began to turn on Calhoun’s utopia.
> Freedman’s work, Ramsden noted, suggested that density was no longer a primary explanatory variable for society’s ruin. A distinction was drawn between animals and humans.
> “Rats may suffer from crowding; human beings can cope...Calhoun’s research was seen not only as questionable, but also as dangerous.”
> Freedman suggested a different conclusion, though. Moral decay resulted “not from density, but from excessive social interaction,” Ramsden explained. “Not all of Calhoun’s rats had gone berserk. Those who managed to control space led relatively normal lives.” Striking the right balance between privacy and community, Freedman argued, would reduce social pathol- ogy. It was the unwanted unavoidable social interaction that drove even fairly social crea- tures mad, he believed. Culture and upbringing also play key roles in adapting to environment, others suggested.
> Further studies of space design seemed to prove this. One such study compared students living in two different styles of college dormitory—corridor versus a suite style. Those in the corridor perceived the environment as crowded and exhibited increased stress levels. Those in the suite style, where the dormitory was partitioned into a series of separate communal areas, fared better, even though the level of density was similar, Ramsden said. “By comparing the two, [researchers] were able to provide evidence both of pathology and its amelioration through more effective design.
> “Calhoun’s studies remained influential in places,” Ramsden concluded, “but for the social sci- ences more generally, it seemed that simply associating Calhoun’s rodent universes with pathology instead of its amelioration was an opportunity considered too attractive or per- haps too convenient to miss.”
Right, this is a very opinionated interpretation of the result and I'm not sure if I can agree with it.
This manual distinction are performed without a equivalent study and are just assuming people will cope fine when it happen.
In fact in the Calhoun's study mice did continue to live, they just chose not to start families - effect that are already seen in lesser degree in much of the world.
It literally ran once and in the same environment, and only the last findings were taken? How do we know it's not just some specific genetic defect that propagated? Did they reintroduce new genes into the gene pool? Some other failure of the experiment? There wasn't even a control group in this entire thing, it's closer to a bedtime story than science.
I'm extremely cautious about making broad assumptions with so little data.