So I've been thinking about several things lately. Here's a comment on HN I made not too long ago:
...what (all) people need is
not money, but rather a comfortable place to live, healthy food to eat,
clean water to drink, and medical attention as needed (Level 0.5 of
Maslow's hierarchy of needs).
Another fact that I've been pondering is the trend for more and more people to be moving to urban areas (more than half are now in urban areas, as of sometime last year or two).What if multi-tenant buildings were built so that they provided a comfortable shelter, healthy food, and clean water? This building model was the result:
The gray part is the living area, and the green part is a high-tech
greenhouse that grows (hopefully) enough food to sustain the building
population (at least the plant-based part, anyway.) It also acts as a
sewage treatment plant, doing what nature does in a tighter loop:
filter out the water till it's as clean or cleaner than we're used to,
and use the "waste" as fertilizer. I'm still thinking through this, but
I think it's possible to "funnel" the light of through (or around) each
living unit, and into the greenhouse. Basically, the walls, floors and ceilings will act as fiber optical pipes and take advantage of TIR (total internal reflection) to get the light to each plant, or re-route it to a solar cell. The greenhouse could be mostly autonomous
using swarms of robots and sensors. The rest of
the energy could perhaps come from geothermal sources (see
this article for more explanation).
The shape of the gray part mimics the sun path diagrams for a given
altitude (in this case, Boston); the almost flat side on the right side
of the building as in the picture above faces due south. As far as can
tell, this would be the ideal shape for the best exposure to the sun,
assuming no shadows fall on the building. To make this assumption true,
just extrude the bottom as needed to clear anything that can cast a shadow on the part shown.
Note:
Click here to download:
idea.skp (169 KB)
