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"Human beings hardly ever learn from the experience of others. They learn; when they do, which isn't often, on their own, the hard way."
- Robert Heinlein
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| Terrafoam Dorm Building | ||
| Maximum people in minimum space. |
| Because no one had a window, they could really pack people into these buildings. Each terrafoam dorm building had a four-acre foot print. It was a perfect 417 foot by 417 foot by 417 foot solid brown cube. Each cube originally held exactly 76,800 people. Doubling this to 153,600 people in each building was unthinkable, but they were doing it anyway. On the other hand, you had to marvel at the efficiency. At that density, they could house every welfare recipient in the entire country in less than 1,500 of these buildings. By spacing the buildings 100 feet apart, they could house 200,000,000 people in a space of less than 20 square miles if they had wanted to. At that density, they could put everyone in the country without a job into a space less than five miles square in size, put a fence around it and forget about us...
They clustered the buildings on trash land well away from urban centers so no one had to look at them. It was a lot like an old-style college dorm. Each person got a 5 foot by 10 foot room with a bed and a TV — the world’s best pacifier... There were no windows anywhere in the building. It was a cost-cutting measure, but it also helped to make every room identical. The ceiling height was 7 feet throughout, so it felt very small all the time. LED lights everywhere — our room was absolutely identical to every other room in the building and had a single, bare two-foot LED panel bolted to the ceiling. There was the same panel every ten feet in the hallways... |
| From Manna,
by Marshall Brain. Published by Self in 2002 Additional resources -
|
Compare to the cubic city from The Cubic City (1929) by Rev. Louis Tucker and the Todos Santos arcology from Oath of Fealty (1981) by Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven.
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'The wings were at full spread-rest, their delicate metal interleavings extended.'
'A record that wouldn't get lost and couldn't be destroyed.'
'LET ME TELL YOU HOW MUCH I'VE COME TO HATE YOU SINCE I BEGAN TO LIVE.'
'What he got was indeed a kiss. It was disconcerting. No kissing lips were visible.'
'I shall introduce myself. I am R. Daneel Olivaw... I am a robot. Were you not told?'
