Comment on Well done, all of you!
Grail@multiverse.soulism.net 9 hours agoOne thick water pipe going to one farmer’s irrigation system, alongside one gas line, one power line and one internet line, costs a whole lot less than hundreds of long water, gas, power, and internet lines going out to an entire rural neighbourhood. And I think we can do even better than that. I think you’d be able to get by just fine with a Starlink internet connection, and by cooking with induction. So that’s just one water and one power line, and they only have to be thick enough to fit your farm’s needs, not an entire community of people getting up to shower at 7am. Plus if the roads out to your farm were only being used by your truck, and the occasional post van or visitor, they’d take way less wear, and could be engineered to a much more basic standard. We wouldn’t need to build a 6 lane elevated highway, we could just make a simple two lane asphalt road with reflector posts.
So why don’t you go live alone on your square mile farm, feeding 320 people, and ship the food over to our nice walkable medium density neighbourhood? Overall, the whole lot of us would be using less carbon, spending less time fixing roads, and we’d all be happier. We all get the freedom to choose how to live and how to travel. Because right now America’s zoning boards are only approving single family homes in suburban and rural areas, and I don’t call that freedom.
Rivalarrival@lemmy.today 8 hours ago
You’ve still got that centralization mindset…
Electrical power. In your head, electrical power is in the city, and we need to take a little bit out to a farm house. We don’t want to take a big-ass cable out to a big rural community, because that would be wasteful.
The electrical power produced in the city is a coal-fired plant in the heavy industrial sector. That is not the kind of power we need.
The kind of power we need is produced by big-ass solar generators out near the farmland. It’s produced by big-ass wind turbines out near the farmland. It’s supported by big-ass pumped-storage facilities out near the farmland. This kind of power needs big-ass cables out to the rural areas. You don’t want to build big-ass cables out toward the farmland; big-ass cables are exactly what we need to bring power from the farmland to the cities.
Gas. Gas isn’t produced in the cities. Gas comes from wells scattered throughout rural areas, and flows toward the cities. The gas lines you don’t want to build are the ones that supply the city.
I’ve already addressed internet, but I’ll hit it again: Wireless works better out of town. In town, it is subject to all sorts of interference from everyone trying to use it at once. You need the cables in the city because the available EM spectrum is not nearly enough to meet the needs of that dense populace. Out in the rural areas, where interfering signals are physically separated, there is much more bandwidth available per person.
Those simple, two-lane asphalt roads can handle much more than 320 people per square mile. Those simple roads would be much better utilized by increasing rural densities to the human average, rather than leaving them grossly underutilized. 6-lane elevated highways are features of the medium and high density urban areas, not rural.
Grail@multiverse.soulism.net 8 hours ago
If the roads have more cars on them, they’ll break faster and cost more effort to fix. Ideally, we’d build rails out to your farm and send a train to pick up the food you make.
Now the problem with your gas and electricity logic is you’re talking like the countryside is one place. Like the power and gas are made right next to your farm and you can just plug into it with a 100m cable. And since you mention it, I think an off-grid solar setup would be a great idea for your farm. That’s one less line needed. Now you just need to get water for your crops from elsewhere. I figure you’re not gonna want to use well water, because if there were enough water under your farm to feed the crops, you wouldn’t need irrigation.
But if we’re talking about 300 people’s houses, we can do better than a 300 off-grid solar setups. We can build an economy of scale. We can diversify between solar and wind turbines to reduce the battery requirement. We can build a nuclear plant. We can build row houses that share some nice thick walls, to prevent air conditioning energy loss to the environment. We can run trams instead of electric cars and waste far less energy moving metal vehicles around. We can take up less land than 300 times your farmhouse and amenities do.
Rivalarrival@lemmy.today 6 hours ago
Well, you’re in the right community.