Agoraphobia is defined as the fear of open spaces public transit, shopping malls or simply being outside of your home.
But is the fear really realistic, and is it actually possible to live an entire life completely indoors? And weirdly, if the entire human species suffer from this phobia that could we all theoretically live inside of one gigantic building and not ever have to leave our homes or at least never have to leave the comfort of the building?
The answer is yes but let's first take a look at some real-world concepts before venturing into the detailed insanity of all living, eating, sleeping and breathing in the same building.
Perhaps the most realistic proposal of fitting an entire city's worth of people inside of the same building is the Shimizu Mega-City Pyramid, which is planned to be built in the bay of Tokyo in Japan. When finished the pyramid is expected to be 14 times taller than the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt at just
over two kilometers tall, and will be capable of supporting a population of 1 million people who will live inside of it that means that the building could support the entire population of the US state of Montana, or house the population of entire large cities like San Jose California or Cologne, Germany.
The building would have eight square kilometers of floor space when finished which is four times larger than the actual country of Monaco and even larger than the UK territory of Gibraltar. However, a building this massive cannot actually be built with current construction technology. Construction is
anticipated to begin in the year 2030 and the building is projected to be completed by the year 2110 which is ludicrous if you think about it. That is 93 years from now if you're reading this post in 2017 which means that most of us will probably not be alive by the time of this building is finished being built.
Think of all the history that could possibly happen within ninety-three years and this building still may not even be
finished after all of that.
It's not completely unprecedented however, this cathedral in the city of York first started being built in a year 1220
imagine being the first person who lay down the first brick to begin building this cathedral. He would have spent his
entire lifetime working on the project and so would have his son, and his son, and his son, and his son (Lucky he didn't have a daughter) and so on until 252 years later the cathedral was finally finished being built. Nine generations would have
passed from the time that the first person began working on it. It would have been like if your relative from 1765 had
begun building something and you today right now just finished it you probably can't even think of any relatives that you may have even had back then and that probably would have been even more severe in the Middle Ages.
A distant relative would have begun building a building and their name would have been long forgotten but you centuries later would be still working on and completing what they had
originally started anyway.
It's very strange to think about, but let's move back to the mega pyramid building in the distant future of 2110. Power is
generated by solar panels on the building's trusses. Transportation is provided by massive accelerating walkways, elevators and personal rapid transit tubes with automated shuttlepods that zip from one part of the building to another.
The building is full of homes, offices, restaurants, stores and is a fully functioning city of 1 million people who live entirely indoors.
Nobody would have to really ever leave, but 1 million people isn't all of us, so let's envision something like this but on a much larger scale.
First off, let's envision where would be the most strategic location on Earth to place a building that could house all 7.478 billion of us.
My answer is probably Brazil and specifically right here. The reasoning for this is largely because of water since twelve percent of all the Earth's surface freshwater is located in Brazil and the second largest dam in the world is located nearby.
I'll get more into the reasoning later so let's assume that we've moved everybody's houses and homes as they are
together into one place.
Everybody on earth gets to keep their current size living space, so what would this look like all together?
For reference the average U.S. house built in 2013 was 241 square meters in size. According to the UN however thirteen percent of the world's population lives in five square meters or less of living space. 28 percent have between five and nine square meters of space, 24 percent have between 10 and 14
square meters, 18 percent have between 15 and 19 square meters and only eighteen percent of the world's population within 20 meters or greater size houses.
So American houses are certainly not the global norms and averaging out all of these numbers gives us a building living with 90,000,860 square kilometers of living space in a two-dimensional view about the size of Jordan in the Middle East that was all just one floor but if we constructed the building to be as high as the current tallest residential building in the world at 414 meters or 101 stories high, then the living space of everybody on Earth would take up an area of around 900
square kilometers on the surface, a little less than the size of the Faroe Islands in Denmark.
As for food, after a lot of research it appears that sweet
potatoes are the most calorie intensive crop that you can grow. If we utilized efficient farming techniques and made
use of vertical farms with artificial sunlight, we can construct a 1 cubic kilometer building that would be dedicated solely to producing sweet potatoes for our population.
Each cubic kilometer mega-farm could produce enough sweet potatoes to feed over 27 million people of 1500 calorie per day diet.
So, if we also built 275 of the buildings connected to the main living space then we could feed the entire human race inside a steady diet of pure sweet potatoes.
Since humans need to drink 2 liters of water to survive each day and the nearby dam has a reservoir of 29 cubic kilometers, we could have enough drinking water nearby to last us for over 4,000 years. Of course some of the water would be used for other purposes like agriculture but it would still be enough to last for centuries using all of our needs inside the mega building if we kept maximum efficiency and assume that nothing goes wrong.
Finally; we need space for other things besides just living. In New York City about 75% of the zoning ordinances are for residential property while the remaining twenty-five percent is for commercial, manufacturing, transportation or park space. If we kept that same ratio in our mega building, then we would add an additional 225 square kilometers worth of
the building space on the Earth's surface that will stand as high as the residential portion.
Altogether our mega building that could house all of humanity in the same living space that they live in today complete with all water needs, a diet of pure sweet potatoes, stores, parks and transportation would take up an area of 1339 square kilometers on the Earth's surface, still just a little smaller than the Faroe Islands in Denmark.
The parts devoted to water storage and agriculture would be one kilometer high and the rest of the building would be 414 meters high.
In terms of power, the nearby dam would provide a lot of it, but probably wouldn't be enough to power the entire building. It is estimated that a solar panel array the size of Spain could provide enough power for the entire world's energy needs. So a grouping of solar panels of this size nearby the building would provide way more than enough since humanity would be using much less energy all concentrated together.
Transportation will be just like in the Shimizu Mega-City Pyramid, handled by thousands of elevators, walkways and
automated shuttlepods moving in tunnels inside the building.
Life wouldn't exactly be very nice on a diet of sweet potatoes and never being able to leave the building, but in a
catastrophic event like a nuclear war, global warming or a meteorite impact that could cause living conditions on
the outside to become lethal, then something similar to this may become necessary.
The political situation inside would certainly be messy to say the least. There would probably be a wealthier section with more living space and a poorer section with less living space.
It may take centuries and generations to build it and most people would certainly not want to live this lifestyle, but
still... It is technically possible that we could all live in the same amount of space that we do now in an area no
larger than these islands in the Atlantic Ocean.
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