Talk:Forine (world)

There's a big problem with the portrayal of Forine as covered with buildings. I'll leave aside the fact that I've put a lot of the population in orbital habitats and in the asteroids, precisely because Forine is such a miserable world, since that is non-canonical. But even if everyone did live on Forine, you still wouldn't get that effect. A 3,000 miles diameter world has a lot of surface, especially when it doesn't waste any of it on oceans, agricultural areas, and wildernesses. Try working out how much acreage each Forininan would have if the entire surface was single-storied buildings. Add the extreme unlikelihood that buildings would be single-storied, and the picture simply doesn't make sense.

I'm very tempted to rewrite the description wholesale, but I don't want to do that without giving others the chance to show me that I'm wrong. Are my calculations incorrect? (I can't give you my exact figures, because I made them a long time ago and I don't have them here, but I think it worked out at several thousand square meters per inhabitant).

Rancke 12:52, 17 August 2007 (UTC)

I agree that with a population of 6 billion, there would be loads of space per inhabitant; so a world wide arcology would most likely not be in use.

Given the inhospitable climate (Minus140+; doesn’t really matter what scale you use Celsius or Fahrenheit) the need for protection from just the temperature would be enormous; not even taking the atmospherics into account; a regional arcology might make more sense. Sstefan 13:24, 17 August 2007 (UTC)

Oh sure. Arcologies or environmental domes are a must. Come to think about it, you might be able to do something with environmental domes (assuming for purposes of argument that TL 10 is sufficient to make Really Big environmental domes). If the domes cover not only residential areas, but also agricultural fields and artificial lakes and wildernesses, you may be able to cover a lot of Forine with them. Of course, this would give Forine the ability to grow its own crops, but I've never believed in the notion that a high-population world would import most of its foodstuff instead of using hydroponics and carniculture to grow it. The logistics are simply prohibitive - the number of ships you need to import food for 6 billion people is huge. (Note that I'm not saying that Forine can't import a lot of naturally grown food as luxuries, just that most of what its hoi polloi eats must be home-grown).

One problem is that I've no idea how big environmental domes that are reasonable for what tech levels, nor do I really have any feel for how much space domes for X people would take up.

Rancke 13:53, 17 August 2007 (UTC)