From: Adrian Tymes (wingcat@pacbell.net)
Date: Sat Dec 30 2000 - 12:59:23 MST
Andy Toth wrote:
>
> are the Arcos of Simcity actual? i can't find any information on
> them. do they have an intername?
To my knowledge, they're mainly theoretical and proposals, but there
are no laws-of-physics barriers to their completion. The main problem
is money (and its subset, politics): unlike $1, one must come up with a
compelling business case to get people to spend $1 billion. So far, no
one has done so and followed it through to the point of actual
construction, though there are, of course, merely large buildings in
many densely populated areas (and off-shore, if one counts oil rigs and
the like). This may be due to the fact that buildings have
historically not been high-return ventures, so anyone who is in general
Aware Of Future Tech can easily get more money for their time - short
and long term - in other fields.
(I know that I, for one, am affected by this. Silicon Valley, where I
live, could use a just-offshore arco to ease its residential pressures,
and it has plenty of engineering talent for cool projects like this,
and it has plenty of VCs to fund something as provably long-term
profitable as this, yet getting it built is not currently worth the
large amount of my time I'd have to spend.)
A quick Metacrawler search on "arcology" turns up many hits, for
instance http://www.arcology.com/ (though that's far from the best hit
in the results; it's just a page of mostly-dead links).
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 15:32:36 MST