Guest essay by Eric Worrall
The Guardian has opened a new front in the green effort to bypass parental controls on what their kids experience, with the launch of “Climate Hope City” – a virtual city sited in the Minecraft virtual reality universe.
According to The Guardian;
On the rooftops, there are endless luscious gardens, so that the skyline of the city looks almost like the tree tops of a vast rain forest. Beneath them, lining the roads, are multi-storey farms, producing fruit and vegetables for the local populace. There are strange sail-shaped constructions that suck CO2 out of the air, and along the canals, hydrogen powered boats glide silently through crystal clear waters. This is Climate Hope City – and for now, it exists only in Minecraft.
When the Guardian launched its Keep it in the Ground campaign in March, editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger, and other senior staff, spoke about the challenge of finding new ways to discuss and report on climate change – to break out of traditional journalism and explore fresh ideas.
“We carry on flogging a load of dead horses, in exactly the same way, with exactly the same whip,” wrote columnist and environmentalist George Monbiot. “We have to constantly be reinventing our storytelling capacity.”
One answer to that challenge is to envisage a future zero carbon city in Minecraft. The hugely successful block-building game allows players to construct complex and fascinating models of everything from medieval castles to giant space cruisers. Climate Hope City is not a fantasy world but a vision of a green urban environment which uses technologies that either already exist around the world or are at the prototype stage.
The first thing which struck me is the technical inconsistencies of their vision. The city boasts large wind turbines, adjacent to tall buildings. Wind shadow anyone? One of the main reasons wind turbines are located in lonely places or offshore is that wind turbines in cities are usually an utter embarrassment – the poor airflow in the bumpy urban environment usually causes the turbines to stand idle even more frequently than optimally sited turbines.
Then there are the large vertical farms. OK, vertical farms are a way of growing a lot of food in a compact area. But the one thing you can’t increase is the available sunlight footprint – you don’t get something for nothing, unless you pump in artificial light. If you plan to use artificial light, you need a lot of energy, somewhere around a 30 watts per square metre per tier of growing surface. Given a floor size of 50m x 50m = 2500m, thats 75 kilowatts per “floor” – not counting any additional energy which might be required for climate control and irrigation. You’re not going to get that kind of energy from a handful of mostly idle urban wind turbines.
The alternative, relying on sunlight alone – vertical farms powered by sunlight cast huge shadows, they can surely only work if they are not sited next to other vertical farms, or are not sited next to tall buildings, which prevent them from receiving sunlight.
Finally there is the guided tour around the virtual city (see below) – a very sunny virtual city. But how could such a city possibly be so sunny, when every scrap of available sunlight is being utilised by the vertical farms, solar panels, or being blocked by the shadows of the towering wind turbines? The street level of such a city, even if it was physically possible, would surely be more like the gloomy, shadowy dystopian visions of movies like Blade Runner or Johnny Mnemonic, rather than the sunny urban paradise portrayed by The Guardian.
The Minecraft virtual world is a fantastic place to explore your creative skills, it is very popular with children and many adults. As a technical geek, I’m a fan of virtual reality. But like all virtual realities, the Minecraft implementation of real world physics is somewhat incomplete. The Minecraft constructions are fantasies, nothing more.
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Keep the Watermelons out of minecraft 🙂
“Climate Ho Pecity is not a fantasy world…”
No, indeed; it’s far crazier than that.
“…but a vision of a green urban environment…”
A delusion, in other words.
“…which…”
You mean that.”
“…uses technologies that either already exist around the world…”
Because of huge subsidies and wasteful governments.
“…or are at the prototype stage.”
Having skipped the proof-of-concept investigation, along with any cost-benefit analysis.
They tried it in the 60s. Everyone to live in tower blocks. This time with no co2 in the atmosphere, replaced with hydrogen. That will go down like the Hindenburg?
Hmmm… A modeled world that’s about as accurate as a modeled climate…
Fortunately no one reads the
Guardian
it is interesting to note that the civilization series of games –
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization_%28series%29
global warming was there from the 1996 game and made a variety of changes to tiles on the board (land) which continued in civ 2,3 and 4 until 2010 with civ 5 they removed the feature.
Ok…Here’s one for you. If burning hydrogen in fantasyland cars creates water vapor, isn’t water vapor a stronger greenhouse gas than co2? I suppose it depends on what amount and at what altitude, but just curious.
I am, of course, referring to real world conditions. Carbon makes the world go around. Lack of 02 doesn’t trigger breathing mechanism. Build up of co2 does. Just, when a person thinks real deeply, uh, we wouldn’t be here without it in all it’s various mechanisms to support life.
Do they burn hydrogen, or use it in PEM fuel cells? The chatter I hear is using “waste” renewable energy to create and compress hydrogen. Then when needed, a fuel cell is used o recover the electrons. If you ignore the capital costs and the horrific round trip efficiencies of the double conversion, it’s a decent strategy.
Paul
June 14, 2015 at 4:15 am
“Do they burn hydrogen, or use it in PEM fuel cells? The chatter I hear is using “waste” renewable energy to create and compress hydrogen. Then when needed, a fuel cell is used o recover the electrons.”
Fuel cells create H20 as well, the world’s worst heat-trapping climate gas.
Can a 19 yo and a 55 yo join in? (I was mildly appalled at my son when he started – Genghis Khan had nothing on him for slaughtering peasants…)
Oh yes, my son knocked a villager off of a cliff once. Then, he took his books. After some discussion, I determined it probably was an accident.
Sky Rim (of Fus Ro Dah fame) has some very very dubious ways of making money. So no raiding witches in caves and selling their wands. I don’t care how much a horse costs.
They make the green city in a game thats entire premise is MINING to collect natural resources (coal, iron, gold, diamonds, red rock) to power and sustain yourself. I don’t know how well they thought that through.
Sounds like Monbiot wants to be an author, not a fact finding journalist
“But like all virtual realities, the Minecraft implementation of real world physics is somewhat incomplete. The Minecraft constructions are fantasies, nothing more.”
=======================================
“Suppose evil scientists removed your brain from your body while you slept, and set it up in a life-support system in a vat. Suppose they then set out to trick you into believing that you were not just a brain in a vat, but still up and about, engaging in a normally embodied round of activities in the real world. This old saw, the brain in the vat, is a favorite thought experiment in the toolkit of many philosophers. It is a modern day version of Descartes’s (1641) evil demon, and imagined illusionist bent on tricking Descartes about absolutely everything, including his own existence. But as Descartes observed, even an infinitely tricky demon couldn’t trick him into thinking he himself existed if he didn’t exist: cogito ergo sum, “I think, therefore I am.” Philosophers today are less concerned with proving one’s existence as a thinking thing (perhaps because they have decided that Descartes settled that matter quite satisfactorily) and more concerned about what, in principle, we can conclude about nature, and about the nature of the world in which we (apparently) live. Might you be nothing but a brain in a vat? Might you have always been just a brain in a vat? If so, could you even conceive of your predicament (let alone confirm it)?
[…] In the standard thought experiment, it is obvious that the scientists would have their hands full providing the nerve stumps from all your senses with just the right stimulations to carry off the trickery, but philosophers have assumed for the sake of argument that however technically difficult the task might be, it is “possible in principle.” One should be leery of these possibilities in principle. It is also possible in principle to build a ladder to the moon, and to write out, in alphabetical order, all intelligible English conversations consisting of less than a thousand words. But neither of these are remotely possible in fact, and sometimes an impossibility in fact is theoretically more interesting than a possibility in principle, as we shall see.
Let’s take a moment to consider, then, just how daunting the task facing the evil scientists would be. We can imagine them building up to the hard tasks from easy beginnings. They begin with a conveniently comatose brain, kept alive but lacking all input from the optic nerves, the auditory nerves, the somatosensory nerves, and all the other afferent, or input, paths to the brain. It is sometimes assumed that such a “deafferented” brain would naturally stay in a comatose state forever, needing no morphine to keep it dormant, but there is some empirical evidence to suggest that spontaneous awakening might still occur in these dire circumstances. I think we can suppose that were you to awake in such a state, you would find yourself in horrible straits: blind, deaf, completely numb, with no sense of your body’s orientation.
Not wanting to horrify you, then, the scientists arrange to wake you up by piping stereo music (suitably encoded as nerve pulses) into your auditory nerves. They also arrange for the signals that would normally come from your vestibular system or inner ear to indicate that you are lying on your back, but otherwise paralyzed, numb, blind. This much should be within the limits of technical virtuosity in the near future–perhaps even today. They might then go on to stimulate the tracts that used to innervate your epidermis, providing it with the input that would normally have been produced by a gentle, even warmth over the ventral (belly) surface of your body, and (getting fancier) they might stimulate the dorsal (belly) epidermal nerves in a way that simulated the tingly texture of grains of sand pressing into your back. “Great!” you say to yourself: “Here I am lying on my back on the beach, paralyzed and blind, listening to rather nice music, but probably in danger of sunburn. How did I get here, and how can I call for help?” Starting with little steps, they decide to lift part of the “paralysis” of your phantom body and let you wiggle your right index finger in the sand. They permit the sensory experience of moving your finger to occur, which is achieved by giving you the kinesthetic feedback associated with the relevant volitional or motor signals in the output or efferent part of your nervous system, but they must also arrange to remove the numbness from your phantom finger, and provide the stimulation for the feeling that the motion would provoke.
Suddenly, they are faced with a problem that will quickly get out of hand, for just how the sand will feel depends on just how you decide to move your finger. The problem of calculating the proper feedback, generating or composing it, and then presenting it to you in real time is going to be computationally intractable on even the fastest computer, and if the evil scientists decide to solve the problem by pre-calculating and “canning” all the possible responses, they will just trade one insoluble problem for another: there are too many possibilities to store. In short, our evil scientists will be swamped by combinatorial explosion as soon as they give you any genuinely exploratory powers in this imaginary world.
It is a familiar wall these scientists have hit; we see its shadow in all the boring stereotypes in every video game. The alternatives open for action have to be strictly–and unrealistically–limited to keep the task of the real-world representers within feasible grounds. If the scientists can do no better than convince you that you are doomed to a lifetime of playing Donkey Kong, they are evil scientists indeed.
[…]
“Throw a skeptic a dubious coin, and in a second or two of hefting, scratching, ringing, tasting, and just plain looking at how the sun glints on its surface, the skeptic will consume more bits of information than a Cray supercomputer can organize in a year.”
– Dan Dennett, Consciousness Explained, 1991
==========
“There is an answer?” said Fook with breathless excitement.
“Yes,” said Deep Thought. “Life, the Universe, and Everything. There is an answer. But, I’ll have to think about it.”
…
Fook glanced impatiently at his watch.
“How long?” he said.
“Seven and a half million years,” said Deep Thought.
Lunkwill and Fook blinked at each other.
“Seven and a half million years…!” they cried in chorus.
“Yes,” declaimed Deep Thought, “I said I’d have to think about it, didn’t I?”
-Douglas Adams
thanks for reminding:
virtual reality, subsided by an early agro state socialism –
beginning utopic, ending as ponzi scheme:
from the ‘hanging gardens of Semiramis’ to an exhausted, exploited babylonian desert.
Part of Saddams late state socialism, subsided by oil exploration.
____
look at the factious reality of the region now and run for shelter.
Regards – Hans
from the ‘hanging gardens of Semiramis’ to an exhausted, exploited babylonian desert:
a salinated, decarbonized dead zone for contemporary life.
Hans
The energy requirement neccessary for optimal plant growth in a totally closed system is much higher than stated here. For instance, in summer, 1000 W/m2 photosynthetically active light energy rains down on the fields. Assuming 20% efficiency, one would need 5 kW installed electrical power/m2, using super highly efficiency LEDS. Even then, the amount of heat generated would fry the plants, which is why most of these systems use elaborate cooling systems to get rid of the heat. Of course one can use less lightintensity, but then growing time will increase and the quality of your product will decrease. Have a look at commercial greenhouses for tomato production (which, by the way, simultaneously increase CO2 concentration to above 1000ppm for optimal growth, lower water use and better product quality). I have a problem envisioning how to replace global food production in this way. But please, dream on.
High-rise living: a failed experiment of the 1960’s. Failed mainly because there is nothing for the kids to do in them but get up to vandalism and crime, plus elderly people cannot get out at all. Most of the cities round here are dynamiting such blocks and replacing them with lower buildings. I can’t imagine anything more un-green than living in one of those,.
Except in Australia. We seem to be knocking down low/single level housing in favour of high-rise buildings, specifically, apartment blocks. Near where I live two single level dewllings were buldozed a year or so ago and now two blocks, containing 56 apartments, now stand. Several other single level houses have been razed in favour of high-rise living. Sad but true.
I remember living in a high-rise in Melbourne for a few months. Right in the middle of one of the most interesting parts of the inner city. Amazing restaurants, theatres, clubs, good transport links, all within a few minutes walk.
Every Friday night, the floor of the elevator was covered in blood. One of the residents of the high-rise was a maniac. They hadn’t caught the maniac – nobody wanted to talk, they were frightened of what the maniac would do to them when he got out of prison. The CCTV was defective, probably because some of the other residents of the high-rise were involved in business activities which they didn’t want recorded.
I don’t like high density living. Most of the people in that high rise were decent families. But when you pack people in like sardines, you’re never far from someone bad.
The high rise destruction of our Australian cities is for the benefit of the Chinese market.
Half of Melbourne is already owned by Chinese investors. Most real estate agents advertise in English and Chinese: some advertise only in Chinese.
In China you are only permitted to own two houses. But in Australia, foreigners can buy as many properties as they like because our anti-democratic politicians sold us out to the highest bidder a long time ago.
http://www.google.com/search?q=melbourne,+property,+chinese
That’s why my horizons are literally disappearing.
Eric Worral – citing you:
‘counting any additional energy which might be required for climate control and irrigation.’
Vast Irrigation led to salination. Salination’s the way to decarbonize whole regions.
____
everyone correct me if I’m wrong – nevertheless thanks for thought challenging.
Hans
reminds imperial soldiers salting the ground of burnt down Carthago – a legend, maybe.
On nowadays world maps theres no such city called ‘Carthago’.
Period. Hans
Actually this is brilliant! This is the solution to the climate problem. Right under our noses!
So what we do is we take the 97% consensus “scientists” like Mann, Hansen, Schmidt and such and we give them all elaborate Minecraft virtual reality gear. Complete with the Oculus Rift head mounted 3D screens and everything. Then we do the same for the AGW consensus politicians and the media like Monbiot himself and McKibbon.
And once they are all safely strapped in to their virtual world, then we crank up the virtual temp, the virtual H2O feedbacks in the even more virtual climate models (tee hee,) and produce all of the virtual apocalyptic scenarios the AGW cult has been ginning up everyone about.
They will have a field day! And if we can safely channel all of their cockamamie babble in to this Minecraft virtual reality, the rest of us out here in the real world can get on with our quite blissful lives free of their authoritarian meddling. Hurray.
Who’s with me?
It’s just a game, really. And kids know that, trust me, they can make the difference between real world and virtual reality. My kid plays Minecraft too, and believe me he doesn’t think about what’s fake and what’s true in any of the games’ worlds…….
As a player of Minecraft I can tell you conclusively:
It is impossible to build a city in minecraft in survival mode without either cutting down a vast forest of trees and burning the logs, or digging up large quantities of coal and burning it.
yes, and now you’re flogging a load dead horses with a new and improved whip.
Is this an admission that the Guardian is no longer convincing anyone over the age of six?
Can we start a fracking operation and cosl mine next to this?