Magnisanti and the World that Wasn't

Before Reading

Have you read Ocaslan Planning?

What about The Daily Discourse?

Universe 26 is also important.

Gassner Industrial architecture is also useful.

On to the Meat and Potatoes

In Ocaslan planning, a socio-economic computer model designed to create a nigh permanent human civilization with stability in population and a single continuous government had three stages. These stages were Arcosanti, Magnisanti, and Ultrasanti. In the mid to late Petroleum Era Oscalan models were produced and the first steps were taken towards realizing Arcosanti, and these were the Gassner model megacities. This was as far as things progressed because of the combination of rampant waste, government corruption, resource mismanagement, and environmental collapse. This would kick off the Resource Wars, the global population contraction, and the second dark age. This would pretty much end Arcosanti, which ultimately accomplished building the first generation of arcologies. Magnisanti could not be realized, since the global population collapsed from twelve billion to a little over one billion.

Had the Resource Wars turned out differently, had the population not collapsed, and had the planet's biosphere teetered to the edge of collapsing itself, things would have progressed forward.

The Magnisanti Megacities

The future of Earth and humanity would be the creation of Alpha tier megacities. These cities would be built around a small number of important goals. The most important would be to house a massive population and control it in a manner that would seem like a gulag or western prison system. The people are there to support the government, support military efforts in recruiting, and to engage in economic activity. In doing these things they are to consume, consume, consume. After living out their productive lifespan, die quietly and efficiently. Retirement is an illusory goal because the ideal worker/prole lives to their mid to late fifties and then dies. Hospitals are reserved for the rich and the young. Medical treatments are efficient, and anything chronic should be treated early, maintained if it is expensive to cure, and after a certain point, assisted death is a highly viable option. Retirees are a drag on the economic engine, even if they do vote favorably towards the party.

The thing missing from the Magnisanti Alpha cities is industrial zones. Alpha cities are not for making things, or operating in part of the logistics system, they are the terminus of the supply chain, not the central hub. This is deliberate because it keeps an Alpha city dependent on the national/federal distribution city, and if there are uprisings and revolts in said Alpha City, there is no threat to the supply chain. Alpha Cities are for data industries, communications, media, and financial activities.

Structurally the Alpha City would have an incredibly dense core of Gassner tenements, linked together through mass transit systems, and stacked so that there might be three or four layers to the actual city. Life on the bottom layer would be hell, a breeding ground for dissent, crime, drug abuse, rampant gangs, and lawlessness. This is deliberate because then that justifies the presence of the large and heavily armed police forces. The middle tiers would be poor people and slightly less poor people, and the top level would still be poor people, but these would be the poor people in the best standing with the powers behind the system. This is where the ranking corporate managers would live, neighbors with police officers, loyal party members, and the rest of the menial apparatchik. 

The arcologies would rise from the Gassner blocks, using them as pilings and footing to soar kilometers into the sky. Here the wealthy and the powerful would live isolated from the masses. Where people in the city are intended to breed, wage, and die before sixty, the residents of the towers would flirt with immortality. The staggering wealth and economic output of the population would allow the tax takers to live like Olympians among mortals. These beings would decide who would win elections, or be appointed, or whatever face they would present to the masses for their autocratic regime.

The Beta Cities

Beneath the Alpha Cities, the Beta Cities are geared towards very specific purposes. These are the heavy manufacturing centers or the logistic centers. Alpha cities have tens of millions of residents, or more, Beta cities would be constrained to fewer than nine million. The structure would be the industrial core, the thing the city was planned to produce, bracketed by Gassners and megastructures that are specifically not arcologies. Humans would live in the kilometer-tall ziggurats and pyramids while laboring in gigafactories. In some instances, these facilities could be automated, but requiring human labor provides a means to control more of the population as well as keeping these cities economically profitable.

China has the idea of Beta Cities. In their government-controlled economy, specific industries are clustered together into specific cities. All the Chinese denim factories and blue jean factories and denim dye factories are all in one city. Beta Cities consolidate around a specific industry or product, and they take export it in great amounts for massive profits. The US is not quite there yet, but there are already industries where the vast majority is dominated by a few processing plants in a handful of cities. It is the most obvious in food production, where we find that more than 80% of beef, pork, and chicken are all processed and packaged in six centers.

The only difference between the current models and the Magnisanti model is that if a resource is vital, it is not isolated to a single beta city so if there is an insurrection or rebellion, the vital resource isn't threatened. Non-vital goods are very specifically restricted to single cities so that if there is a rebellion and Toilet Paper City is placed under martial law, everyone knows that the reason they have to reduce their tp usage is that a bunch of assholes in Toilet Paper Town are terrorists and the Federal Guard should just go take care of things.

The Gamma Cities

A Gamma City is superficially a megacity, with Gassner architecture, and a population in the millions, but it has a more normal distribution of residential, commercial, and industrial zones. Like Beta Cities, a Gamma City is based around a specific output, but this is a supporting material. If Beta Cities are final assembly, Gamma Cities are subcontractors are each specifically slaves to either a Beta or Alpha City. Those attached to Alpha Cities produce niche goods, typically food, consumables, perishables goods, or similar. They also proxy as a place to go for people who want to leave the Alpha City for a vacation. For Gammas tied to Beta Cities, they provide secondary housing for industrial labor, with some commuting from Gamma to Beta. This is also how complicated things like military goods, finished durable goods, and the like are built.

A Beta City would house a tank assembly line, and likely have some components made on site. Three Gamma Cities attached to the Beta would individually be tasked with each producing a specific component and shipping it, such as one producing transmissions, wheels, and other road gear, the second casting and forging armor plates, mantlets, track skirts, and body panels, and third being highly policed while producing the autocannons.

The Delta Cities

Delta Cities look more like modern cities and have populations typically around one million or so.

A Delta City is a supporting construct for Gamma and Beta Cities, providing them with immigrants who want to move into the big city for better opportunities and a chance at the glamorous shiny life. The difference between a Delta City and a Gamma City is that Delta Cities are cookie cutter, they are numerous, all look the same, and are mass exporters. The sundry factories, distribution centers, and other logistic works that keep everyone up and into Alpha Cities in toothpaste, toilet paper, prepackaged food, and replacement sleeves for their fuckbots come from Delta Cities.

Military Delta Cities make rifles, ammunition (never for the weapons they make, those two commodities aren't produced in the same place) medical supplies, and host barracks and training centers to produce grunts, infantry, low level technicians, ammo handlers, and the like.

The Epsilon Cities

The Epsilon Cities have the startings of Gassner construction and range in population from 100k to 500k people. Like Delta Cities they are supporting, but they are as often tied to a specific natural resource, such as being the location of a hard rock mine, a lumber production zone, heavy industrialized agriculture, ranching, or aquaculture. They can also be more niche, supporting things like megaprisons, megauniversities, or Federal special projects divisions.

The Zeta Cities

Zeta cities are between 50k and less than 100k people, and most are either remnants of old population clusters that haven't been assimilated, or are left in place to act as Human Reservations. These reservations serve as places for people to be exiled to, rather than anything approaching gulags or the like. Being sent to a Zeta City is a forced retirement, or a relocation.

Some Zetas are growing and will eventually become Epsilons. There is a general plan for some cities to grow and rank up. It is a regimented process that is planned so that eventually everything is organized into the Magnisanti plan.

Sub-Zeta Cities

Technically designations exist below Zeta, and almost all of these would be legacy communities, and would be planned to expand into Zetas, or be relocated to more efficient locations, as the goal of Magnisanti isn't dispersal, its high sustained population with an incredibly long and stable timeline, where billions live short, efficient, productive lives, and one out of each million finds a path to technologic immortality and godhood.

Eta - 20-49k people

Theta - 11k-19k people

Iota - 1k-9k people

Kappa - less than 1,000 people

Author's Note: As a point of reference, the city I like in would be classified as a Theta, and if you rolled the entire county population together, it's Eta. The town where my place of employment is, at 800 people, is a Kappa 'settlement'. My home state, Tennessee, Nashville and Memphis are both low-level Deltas, and Knoxville and Chattanooga are Epsilon cities. The Largest city in the South is Houston, and it is only a small Gamma level city. Mexico City and New York City are both Beta Cities, and the third largest city, Los Angeles, is a large Gamma. The world population of the current United States at the end of the Petroleum Era would have been close to a billion and I am imagining the US of say ... 2100 ... probably has more than 50 states, likely has annexed Canada, Mexico, a score of islands, and might have satellite states around the world (Israel, Ukraine, the Phillipines, etc) and had a population closer to 1.6 billion.

A note on survival. The population contraction has something like eleven out of twelve late Petroleum Era people vanishing in the course of about a century. In current terms, its a survival rate of one in eight.

But Scras, would I make it?

Good question.

How many siblings do you have?

How many kids do you have?

Do you live in an area of strategic value?

Are you pro-urban, or pro-rural?

If you dont have any kids, then no. Do you have more than two kids? If not, then no. Do you live in an area that could be contested in a military action, or do you live near something that is a strategic target in thermonuclear war?

Me personally, no. I don't survive. I have one sibling, they have no kids. I have no kids, and I live near Oak Ridge National Labs aka the Department of Energy and Department of Defense lovechild that manufactures, services, certifies, refurbishes, and otherwise manages the nuclear weapon stockpile of the US. In my favor, I live in a semi-rural area not likely to be fought over.

Post-Magnisanti?

Post-Magnisanti is an unpleasant place, or a nice one, depending on what your specific world view is. The population would continue to increase, regimented use of land would continue, and increasingly large cities would become increasingly dense and resource efficient. The differing point is do you consider the human population as a resource in the co-efficiency equation or not. The Alpha Cities would grow and become Super-Alpha, or a new tier would be devised. The Alphas and Betas would merge together into megacities the size of modern states. Eventually these megacities would start overlapping with each other, slowly eliminating everything that wasn't themselves. The wilderness would be reduced to parks, not like Yellowstone, but Central. Mountains would be populated and the peaks might remain as tourist attractions, rivers are tunneled out to become mile wide sewers feeding into processing cities the size of a modern megacity, and these would be of middling importance.

The Eperopolis would appear, the Continental Cities. North America would become a single population center. Europe and China would follow quickly.

The Ecumenopolis would come sometime later as oceans would be surmounted by transoceanic hyperstructures so that a person could ride a hypersonic bullet train from what is modern Los Angeles to Singapore without ever changing cars. By this point, the entire planet has grown into a single monstrous city. It is also worth noting that at this point of development, the world population is likely closer to 100 billion or more. Space elevators ring the equator, and the planet has a Niven Ring around it where a billion people live on the edge of space. The Moon would be rigorously colonized and the other planets would host tens of millions or hundreds of millions, with the pressure of a slowly growing, highly repressed, heavily organized society just pushing for something that will let it tell the laws of physics to get wrecked and start launching ships to distant stars because surely, there has to be a way out.

Examples of the Ultrasanti Ecumenopolis can be seen in Star War's Coruscant, Ouros from Jupiter Ascending, Borg-Earth from Star Trek: First Contact, the forge and hive worlds of Warhammer 40k, Cybertron from Transformers and the DC lair of Darkseid, Apokolops.