Luke Campbell <lwcamp@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> On Apr 8, 8:36 am, Michael Ash <m...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>> Charles Talleyrand <kitplan...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>>
>> I mentioned a roof because it should scale horizontally to a basically
>> infinite degree, and as a roof it doesn't have to be particularly tall.
>> You'll need sup****ts at frequent intervals, of course, but that's
entirely
>> doable. You may be able to piggyback on buildings and utility poles to
>> some extent if you want to make it cheaper, but with enough money,
roofing
>> a city with glass ought to be entirely feasible with current
technology.
>
> There are some practical issues that come to mind. If the city wants
> to raise the temperature, presumably this is because it is cold. Cold
> often is associated with snow in the winter. Heavy snow loads can
> cave in roofs. The usual method of getting around this - sloping the
> roof - is impractical on the scale of a city. You will need to make
> the roof strong enough to withstand the extra load of overlying snow,
> which will require more than your usual greenhouse roof.
This will be self regulating to some extent. Depending on the climate, the
extra temperature will hopefully put you over the freezing point, so the
snow will eventually melt off. What's more, the snow will insulate, so as
more snow ac***ulates, the more heat becomes available to remove it.
Whether this will be fast enough to stop the collapse will depend on the
temperatures and the maximum rate and duration of snowfall, and of course
the strength of the roof.
> There is also issues of how you deal with rainfall - the city will
> intercept a fair amount of water, where does it all go? Of course,
> this can also be a benefit, as the runoff drains for rainwater could
> go into the municipal water supply assuming the roof were kept fairly
> clean.
Pipes at regular intervals would solve this. Or even just holes; the roof
doesn't need to be airtight.
> Which also leads to dealing with detritus and debris, such as wind
> blown leaves, dust, bird droppings, and the like. You will need
> someone to go up there periodically and clean out the gutters or
> equivalent.
Leaves and bird droppings hopefully wouldn't be a problem except at the
very edges, since there's no mechanism to get leaves or birds above the
roof at the inner ****tion. (The local hawk population may start to
congregate over the thing to take advantage of the rising air, but they
would presumably give it up once they realized there was nothing to eat.)
If you get enough rain it may be possible to make the system
self-cleaning. Gutters fill up because they're relatively narrow, and
using wider channels might fix that problem. If you just have holes at
intervals then I imagine it may be possible to have the rain just wash
things off the glass and into the holes.
--
Michael Ash
Rogue Amoeba Software
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