Welcome to the Science Mondays segment! Each week here on Geek Alabama, Science Mondays will feature stuff from the world of science and science related content. Our goal here at Geek Alabama is to hopefully have you learn something useful and fulfilling. Science is a geek’s best friend, and we love featuring science content here at Geek Alabama.
What happens when a city never ends? No farmland. No oceans. Just a planet-wide urban machine — towers stacked 5,000 levels deep. This video explores the ecumenopolis, a concept from the 1960s by Constantinos Doxiadis, who believed humanity might urbanize the entire Earth.
Through Coruscant (Star Wars) and Trantor (Asimov’s Foundation) — fully urban planets with over a trillion inhabitants — we ask: is a planet-city truly possible, or destined to collapse?
We break down Coruscant’s layers — from the political Emergent Level, to the criminal Underworld, to heat-choked machine tiers — exposing the brutal logistics of feeding, cooling, powering, and moving a civilization with zero nature.
Doxiadis imagined a fractal, human-scaled ecumenopolis, grown through Ekistics, with walking-distance cores and protected green lungs.
So — could a planet-city work through flexibility over control?
Or would it, like Rome, collapse the moment the grain stops flowing?
Categories: Science Talk Stuff
