Good times, bad times

Designing 100% Sustainability for the Inheritors of our Genes, because we must!

With our noses into this millennium, we would do well to look ahead at the chopper that may just take them all off! Chopper? Noses? In case you hadn’t noticed, we have already badly overstretched this planet’s ability to sustain the 6.85 billion of us who live here, and no one has yet come up with a credible plan to resolve the increasingly apocalyptic situation!
In 1900, before we began to use petroleum to feed ourselves, there were 1.6 billion people alive on Earth. Now, in 2009 with the world heavily dependent on petroleum, we are 6.85 billion, and there is now only 2.04% of the ratio of horses to people that there was in 1915. Does that not suggest that there might be a major calamity if we were to find ourselves without oil? Can any of you see yourself commuting from the depths of the megacities of today to the hopefully fertile fields that used to surround them to grow your own food?
Commercial food production is oil powered. Most pesticides are oil based, and all commercial fertilizers are ammonia-based. Ammonia is produced from natural gas – where does that leave us without oil and gas, for the next 10,000 years?
I come from an odd background, having had my heart stop for 10 minutes when I was 28 following a car accident in Kenya. In the 18 months that it took to recover by staggering, walking and jogging more than 330 miles, I was able to contemplate and clearly see most of the foundations for life that have yet to emerge from our animal backgrounds. What are those foundations?
We already possess an eternal life, that is the components of our genes do, in having been present in a variety of combinations ever since life first began. Consider that it has been a multiple of only 20 of the 5 generations, grandparents to grandchildren, that we know in our own families, if a generation is 20 years (5 x 20 = 100 x 20 = 2000) back to the year zero. It is astonishing to know that only 20 times the people that we have known well in our own families can bring us back to the beginning of the history of Western Civilization!
And, the history of civilization itself is generally reckoned to be the invention of agriculture in about 10,000 BC. So, we can almost certainly say that the beginnings of civilization were only 120 times the 5 generations that we know in our own families. Where does that leave us in the next 120 multiples, especially if we run out of petroleum in the next 50 years?
Most of you will gasp and scratch your heads when I suggest Linear Cities as an answer!
Why live in a long ribbon, linear city when you can live in something as exciting as the Burj Dubai, for example? The answer comes down to simple, 7th grade mathematics: lines have a far greater perimeter than circles, which have the minimum for a given surface area that is mathematically possible.
These differences are compounded when you stack the circles on top of each other to create any skyscraper, which is superb in the views and sense of power that it creates, but poor when all its inhabitants must walk into fields to grow their own crops because there is no more petroleum to produce the food and bring it to where people can eat it! Please consider too that all of our cities are circular, not linear, forms that restrict people’s access to fields to grow crops!
Why should this make a difference? After all, technology has been directing us toward the heights for at least a century, the same century that has been driven largely by petroleum, and the mobility that it gives us.
What happens when we no longer have that mobility, and we have to walk into the fields, much as our ancestors did before we had cars, trains, ships and aircraft, almost all driven by petroleum, except on the wiser continents? Can we still grow food if we cannot get to fields to plant the crops by hand? Can we still harvest food if we cannot grow it, organically using the latest methods, because at least 50% of us are stuck in cities, 40% more in towns, and only about 1% within walking distance of fields?
I therefore propose linear cities, where everyone can walk from where they live into open fields, both to grow their own food, and to supply those who are still stuck in existing cities, and towers like that above!
Linear Cities that are bordered by high speed rail lines, along with medium and low speed lines, which are the only form of transportation outside of bicycles and electric cars that can be driven by electricity.
Everyone lives within a 10 minute walk of their own field, chickens and fruit trees, and all can very rapidly reach the existing cities using the high-speed rail link, which uses only about 1/3 of the energy/passenger mile that cars and aircraft use.
The wind turbines along the top edge of the north to south linear city capture the energy of the prevailing westerly wind that has been accelerated as it passes over its 3 – 5 stories. Expressways can be used deliver building materials to build linear cities just alongside, and we can start by installing wind turbines first, followed by both high-speed rail and “high temperature” superconducting induction tracks in the roadway to drive electric vehicles, giving them unlimited range, followed by the construction of the linear cities themselves.

The Linear Cities can follow the expressways or go more directly between the existing cities. They should first run north and south, and then run east and west to link the north to south cities.

This article is dedicated to the components of the genes that we all carry, and that we have all shared throughout our history. Long may they live, 100% sustainably!

Please see many more details on my website at: www.greenmillennium.eu.