4 ms·

Good luck getting enough AC units in that structure to keep everyone from dying of heat stroke within a few minutes.

logfromblammo 9y ago
Give everyone 8 feet between floors, with one mechanical floor for every 10 occupied floors, that is 24 feet high, and make the lobby level 16 feet. And round up to 260 occupied floors to account for babies born in the building. So that's 260 * 8 + 26 * 24 + 16 = 2720 feet. But at ~50W thermal output per person, that's 380 GW of heat that has to be removed from the building. The perimeter of Manhattan is about 32 miles, or 168960 feet, so that's about 1 billion sq.ft. of surface area, about 1/3 outer wall and 2/3 roof. The building would need to reject 380W of waste heat from every single square foot. You would need AC capable of moving 1.3 trillion BTU/hr, or 108 million "tons". I think regular air conditioners might not cut it. You'd probably have to use all collected urine to transport waste heat to a gigantic radiator out in the ocean.
- 24gttghh 9y ago
  Bravo. Now you need to factor in toilet facilities, and presumably potable water access so everyone can piss enough to cool the building hahahaha...
  - logfromblammo 9y ago
    You can use the waste heat to flash-distill the urine back into drinkable water. You're already running some heavy-duty nuclear reactors just to circulate fresh air into the building and waste products out, so the real problem, I think, is getting food calories in, and the solid waste out. Even if you can fix the structural problem, and the waste heat problem, and the CO2 problem, you can't get food into the building fast enough to feed everyone. A 2000 kcal/day diet for 7.6 billion people is 18 million tons of sweet potato running up the elevators all day, every day. New York is a freight transit hub, but I don't think it could currently handle 6.5 billion tons of freight annually. The entire US transports 20 million tons of freight annually. There's just no way. You would have to reduce the food to a liquid nutrient slurry off-site, and bring it in via pipeline. And your sewer... we're talking a literal river of poop, here, at 7300 cu.ft./s .

Give everyone 8 feet between floors, with one mechanical floor for every 10 occupied floors, that is 24 feet high, and make the lobby level 16 feet. And round up to 260 occupied floors to account for babies born in the building. So that's 260 * 8 + 26 * 24 + 16 = 2720 feet. But at ~50W thermal output per person, that's 380 GW of heat that has to be removed from the building. The perimeter of Manhattan is about 32 miles, or 168960 feet, so that's about 1 billion sq.ft. of surface area, about 1/3 outer wall and 2/3 roof. The building would need to reject 380W of waste heat from every single square foot. You would need AC capable of moving 1.3 trillion BTU/hr, or 108 million "tons". I think regular air conditioners might not cut it. You'd probably have to use all collected urine to transport waste heat to a gigantic radiator out in the ocean.

24gttghh 9y ago
Bravo. Now you need to factor in toilet facilities, and presumably potable water access so everyone can piss enough to cool the building hahahaha...
- logfromblammo 9y ago
  You can use the waste heat to flash-distill the urine back into drinkable water. You're already running some heavy-duty nuclear reactors just to circulate fresh air into the building and waste products out, so the real problem, I think, is getting food calories in, and the solid waste out. Even if you can fix the structural problem, and the waste heat problem, and the CO2 problem, you can't get food into the building fast enough to feed everyone. A 2000 kcal/day diet for 7.6 billion people is 18 million tons of sweet potato running up the elevators all day, every day. New York is a freight transit hub, but I don't think it could currently handle 6.5 billion tons of freight annually. The entire US transports 20 million tons of freight annually. There's just no way. You would have to reduce the food to a liquid nutrient slurry off-site, and bring it in via pipeline. And your sewer... we're talking a literal river of poop, here, at 7300 cu.ft./s .