Gadgetory

by now you've probably heard a lot of the dire warnings about how the world population is growing at an unsustainable rate and we're consuming far too many resources discussed solutions range from the practical to be absolutely fantastical but unless you're an intractable nihilist that doesn't care about the survival of the human race you'll probably agree that we have to figure the problem out at some point and one of the most interesting ideas that has been proposed as the concept of the arcology large self-contained communities with minimal impact on the environment but is this just the stuff of science fiction or might millions of people be living in such a structure one day and just what the heck would that look like anyway well our colleges have been conceptualized many ways from tall skyscraper like structures to self-sufficient groups of buildings closer to the ground but they all have one thing in common some way to more densely pack living working and recreationists along with infrastructure to improve efficiency and cut down on pollution and waste whoa whoa hold the phone there Linus this sounds like some sort of nightmare where we're all living in little sleeping pods and eating meals in pill form well it's not in fact there are real-life arcology projects in the works right now the most prominent of these is probably Masdar City in Abu Dhabi this is an area of six square kilometers being developed with features like automated driverless pods for transportation a large solar plant water recycling and creative use of architecture to provide forced air cooling without the need to suck tons of power including a 150 foot tall wind tower that flushes air downward pretty cool but Masdar lacks the wow factor superstructure appearance that has been commonly depicted in video games like Sims city and Deus Ex for something like that you'll have to go to Russia where a project called crystal island is being planned and yes the name is quite apt at nearly half a kilometer tall with 27 million square feet of floor space it would be one of the largest man-made structures in the world with the outside covered by a special skin whose purpose would be to provide climate control depending on the season and with power provided by the Sun and the wind the interior would be a mix of residential commercial and educational spaces though there's no word yet on whether transportation will be provided by a fleet of horses of course as you might expect such massive undertakings tend to run into roadblocks there are indeed people already living and working in Masdar city but completion has been pushed back several times and we may not see the finished product for more than a decade and the developers have actually backed off their promise of complete carbon neutrality anyway as for Crystal Island they haven't even broken ground yet partly due to the late-2000s financial crisis so it's not surprising that it's more common to see places that use our ecology concepts instead of fully fledged self-sufficient highly integrated cities the Las Vegas Strip for example features pedestrian walkways and bridges connecting many of the casinos hotels and businesses so that you're often not walking down the street itself and in many cases don't even have to go outside to get from point A to point B and if we're only talking about the idea of containing things in a single building large new skyscrapers like the Shanghai Tower in China are increasingly borrowing ideas from arcologies not only does the Shanghai Tower feature a kind of insulating skin similar to what was imagined for Crystal Island it has a prominent twist in it which helps to repel wind that could otherwise cause the building to sway without having to use extra construction material and although it's connected to the main electrical grid wind turbines atop the building provide around 350,000 kilowatt hours of extra power per year for the offices and hotel rooms underneath but although projects like these might be giving us a glimpse at the future of urban living there's a debate swirling as to whether our ecology like structures that are ultimately built will actually help us solve our problems with resource consumption and overpopulation or if they'll just turn into enclaves for the wealthy but don't despair if it turns out you're not loaded enough to be on the cutting edge of sustainable living I hear that urban composting is actually trendy now speaking of transit is becoming more and more common to become a freelance worker or small business owner and freshbooks takes the hassle out of one of the worst parts of being a business owner accounting FreshBooks is a cloud-based platform that lets you manage all that numbers stuff if you're not a numbers person everything from creating invoices in just a few seconds to sending them to people to tracking whether they've seen them or not to put an end to those guessing games to getting paid through the platform to tracking your hours and tracking expenses FreshBooks lets you do all of that and it's simple but don't take my word for it check it out head to FreshBooks comm slash tech quickie and enter tech quickie in the how did you hear about us section they've got a free trial go try it out thanks for watching like dislike check out our other channels leave a comment with a video suggestion and don't forget to subscribe