Considering that such sci-fi cities are often said to have multiple levels as well, either fair portions of this "global city" must be largely empty or the planet must have a population density equivalent to that of a rural town. Assuming a city literally covered the surface of a planet the size of the Earth, with no large bodies of water or other uninhabited areas, a population of 1 trillion would have a density of around 5000 people per square mile, or five times smaller than that of New York City (and fourteen times smaller than Manhattan).
Not as scenic as acres of farmland, but it works.īecause Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale, City Planets tend to have implausibly low populations, even if the number quoted seems high. Massive greenhouses for crops and battery farms for livestock.Food and other supplies have to be imported from elsewhere at great expense (or not-so-great expense, if they've got some form of Teleportation - be it cool gates or.The local Starfish Aliens don't need food as we might understand it.Taken to an extreme, it may be implied the locals even paved over volcanoes and oceans in the process of creating the City Planet. Generally, this trope implies that the only biome of importance on the planet is urban jungle. To be sure, many City Planets are divided into "administrative sectors" or other such local government institutions to keep order manageable, but effectively it's all the same city. This trope occurs as the apparent result of a civilization, presumably over centuries or millennia of expansion, converting the entire surface of a world into one vast city. While most examples are recent, the concept dates as far back as the nineteenth century work of Thomas Lake Harris, and the term "City Planet" dates at least as far back as the first draft of the script for Star Wars: A New Hope.
Sometimes referred to as a planet city, world city (though "world city" has also been used to mean other things), completely urbanized world, omniopolis / omnopolis, or ecumenopolis. In other words, this is what happens when someone takes Planetville a little too literally: there is only one "city" on the planet, and it covers the entire planet. A city planet is a subtrope of Absurdly Cool City, Mega City, and Single-Biome Planet, because you just took an entire planet and made the entire planetary biome a single city.
0 kommentar(er)
