3 ms·

"The X-Seed 4000 "is never meant to be built," says Georges Binder" .. and this is because it will probably fail - badly - if it were to be built. Bear with m

"The X-Seed 4000 "is never meant to be built," says Georges Binder" .. and this is because it will probably fail - badly - if it were to be built. Bear with me 8) Civil Engineering is capable of creating things of wonder and also of complete disaster. For example the Millennium Bridge in London: standard materials, not a particularly fancy loading (people) but it was a bit flat and when I saw it I instantly thought about transverse loading caused by people walking. When I was a grad in Civ Eng we were drilled about the Tacoma Narrows bridge failure due to wind and about people walking in lock step (not just soldiers) on bridges. That bridge ended up with some hydraulic dampers pretty quickly. So, this beast. Hmmm. Resonance of some sort might destroy it in some way. When you do Civ Eng our materials and knowledge generally proceed in small incremental steps to be successful. "Buildings & Data" might as well be smoking crack with their design. They do admit as much. You should see what I've got on the drawing board.

ChuckMcM 9y ago
I think you are overly pessimistic. I haven't looked at the actual drawings but if they reflect the picture the sides appear to be built as inverse parabolas. This would transfer all of the vertical weight into a horizontal force at the foundation. If the base of the building was deep enough, you could counter balance an arbitrary height. Essentially creating an unnatural cinder cone equivalent. Internally the sides would be pressing inward and distribute lateral forces around the circle. It should be at least as stable as an equivalent volcano which typically has a much more variable material structure. Construction would be very interesting and challenging to pull off, each 'floor' at the bottom would have a tremendous amount of overhang.
- gerdesj 9y ago
  Day old thread but I can't resist 8) The basic ideas are sound as you say but there is a huge difference between basic ideas and practical reality. I doubt anyone has looked into the localized stability of say 240m^3 chunks of a volcano's structure. That's the size of a flat of 10x10x2.4m. This thing is a termite mound scaled up to human size and is absolutely terrifying to me. How would it deal with say an earthquake? I mentioned resonance as the curse of Civ Eng earlier and this thing is absolutely huge - who can predict what weird oscillations might occur due to wind loadings and counter them? Do you engineer it for a 1 in 100 year or 1 in 10000 year event? Given climate change, do we even know what a 1 in 10000 year event even is any more? You may have heard about a fire in a tower block in London recently. The Grenfell tower disaster (amongst many others) show that whilst we are capable of building huge structures, economics and base stupidity will strike. That was a few 100 people of which 80 odd died. This beast would house up to 1,000,000 people. I am pessimistic because we have plenty of history to look at and this thing is too big to fail, yet we are unable to do the basics yet. Grenfell should not have happened and neither should many other tower block disasters. The floor plan of this thing is 36km^2 who knows what weird effects might happen in a building that covers that area. It would be a right bugger to discover that you really should have put say huge rubber washers into each joint to damp vibrations afterwards. Heck, 6km is enough to have to worry about the earth's curvature. This is God, (sorry, $DEITY) sized engineering. Try and hold an image in your mind of a 36km^2, 4km high space frame with cells of say 20x10x2.4, pin joint all elements. Reduce the structure to lines. Now bend and twist it. My mental model wobbles like a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blancmange https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blancmange but some of the loads will be absolutely huge and I can't be arsed to quantify them: I know. Try perturbing say one corner and watch it propagate. Capability is not the same as responsibility.

ChuckMcM 9y ago

I think you are overly pessimistic. I haven't looked at the actual drawings but if they reflect the picture the sides appear to be built as inverse parabolas. This would transfer all of the vertical weight into a horizontal force at the foundation. If the base of the building was deep enough, you could counter balance an arbitrary height. Essentially creating an unnatural cinder cone equivalent. Internally the sides would be pressing inward and distribute lateral forces around the circle. It should be at least as stable as an equivalent volcano which typically has a much more variable material structure. Construction would be very interesting and challenging to pull off, each 'floor' at the bottom would have a tremendous amount of overhang.

gerdesj 9y ago
Day old thread but I can't resist 8) The basic ideas are sound as you say but there is a huge difference between basic ideas and practical reality. I doubt anyone has looked into the localized stability of say 240m^3 chunks of a volcano's structure. That's the size of a flat of 10x10x2.4m. This thing is a termite mound scaled up to human size and is absolutely terrifying to me. How would it deal with say an earthquake? I mentioned resonance as the curse of Civ Eng earlier and this thing is absolutely huge - who can predict what weird oscillations might occur due to wind loadings and counter them? Do you engineer it for a 1 in 100 year or 1 in 10000 year event? Given climate change, do we even know what a 1 in 10000 year event even is any more? You may have heard about a fire in a tower block in London recently. The Grenfell tower disaster (amongst many others) show that whilst we are capable of building huge structures, economics and base stupidity will strike. That was a few 100 people of which 80 odd died. This beast would house up to 1,000,000 people. I am pessimistic because we have plenty of history to look at and this thing is too big to fail, yet we are unable to do the basics yet. Grenfell should not have happened and neither should many other tower block disasters. The floor plan of this thing is 36km^2 who knows what weird effects might happen in a building that covers that area. It would be a right bugger to discover that you really should have put say huge rubber washers into each joint to damp vibrations afterwards. Heck, 6km is enough to have to worry about the earth's curvature. This is God, (sorry, $DEITY) sized engineering. Try and hold an image in your mind of a 36km^2, 4km high space frame with cells of say 20x10x2.4, pin joint all elements. Reduce the structure to lines. Now bend and twist it. My mental model wobbles like a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blancmange https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blancmange but some of the loads will be absolutely huge and I can't be arsed to quantify them: I know. Try perturbing say one corner and watch it propagate. Capability is not the same as responsibility.