[HN Gopher] Universe 25, 1968-1973 (2022)
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Universe 25, 1968-1973 (2022)
Author : firstSpeaker
Score : 59 points
Date : 2023-01-08 15:20 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.the-scientist.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.the-scientist.com)
| dang wrote:
| Related. Others?
|
| _1960s Mouse Utopias Led to Grim Predictions for Future of
| Humanity (2015)_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28572253
| - Sept 2021 (49 comments)
|
| _What Was the Mouse Utopia? (2017) [video]_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21366270 - Oct 2019 (6
| comments)
|
| _The Doomed Mouse Utopia That Inspired the 'Rats of NIMH'_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12504271 - Sept 2016 (103
| comments)
| carapace wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowloon_Walled_City
|
| 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.
| jacquesm wrote:
| > 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.
| aliqot wrote:
| Curious how large a floating structure must be to defeat wave
| motion that threatens to pull it apart.
| jacquesm wrote:
| 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.
| carapace wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_oxidation
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syngas
| jacquesm wrote:
| 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.
|
| Have a look at that first image:
|
| https://www.alipobiolog.nl/wplog/natuur/na-de-storm-2/
|
| 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).
| hungryforcodes wrote:
| It looked really interesting actually. I'm sorry I never had
| the chance to go there.
| carapace wrote:
| It was nightmarish.
|
| 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.
|
| It's good that they destroyed it.
| twic wrote:
| 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.
| firstSpeaker wrote:
| Are there any more recent, more deeply analysed studies like
| this?
| dmix wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1]
| https://nihrecord.nih.gov/sites/recordNIH/files/pdf/2008/NIH...
| Aperocky wrote:
| > 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.
| dmix wrote:
| Here is the relevant text from the source:
|
| > 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."
| Aperocky wrote:
| 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.
| 867-5309 wrote:
| >Continuing to study this in humans are impossible given
| the ethical concerns and obvious cruelty
|
| many non-Westernised cultures survive in cramped living
| conditions. they submariners were not accustomed to it and
| so suffered more
| optimalsolver wrote:
| *in mice.
| [deleted]
| plibither8 wrote:
| Fredrik Knudsen did an amazing video on the "Mouse Utopia
| Experiments": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgGLFozNM2o
| nickdothutton wrote:
| There are 2 kinds of people. Those who have discovered universe
| 25 and those who have not. Once you do however, there's no going
| back.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| TIL why Carousel happens at 30 in the world of Logan's Run.
| [deleted]
| machina_ex_deus wrote:
| 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.
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