Originally published at: Running on Italics: The Universe of Tomorrow [Corp] - StimHack
Discuss the latest article here.
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Great! Looking forward to the future. Really nice thoughts, guys. Really makes me think about this world in a different way. Keep it up! 
Yeah, it’s exciting to hear about what else you have in store.
This pack really is kind of all over the place, so I’ll just focus on one minor point: I don’t share y’all’s skepticism about the size of the Worlds Plaza. I seem to recall Worlds of Android saying what the total population was, but I can’t seem to find it. I don’t think it was too many, though, so we can safely suppose that 70 million people counts as “almost 1%.” Worlds Plaza doesn’t promise to hold them comfortably or even safely, so let’s give each person two square feet of space. That’s only five square miles.
Which yes, is still pretty big. But looking at the map, the plaza is served by two different light rail lines. And the preview for The Universe of Tomorrow said “Though it began as a temporary system, the expo has become a massive, important fixture in the southern California landscape…The expo grounds, themselves, are vast.” So given the scale that these facts suggest, I don’t think a plaza two-and-a-quarter miles on a side is too implausible.
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Even if you give a more generous 1/2 a square metre per person and 10 billion between the worlds you’re still only looking at roughly the area of lower Manhattan or 20 Xinghai Squares. A huge but manageable space.
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You’re also assuming there’s only one story. A ten-story plaza reduces the footprint ten-fold.
Also, it’s Weyland. There’s nothing in the text stipulating this theoretical 1% needs to be standing… or breathing.
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But these kinds of statistical claims made my marketing are generally using the most favorable possible interpretation. In fact it could be factually false and I still think the fact that wayland is using that claim in their advertising to be very flavorful.
But by a generous method of calculation it is a technically true claim: 7.3 Billion People, One Building — Wait But Why
How Many People Can Fit in a Square Meter Comfortably-ish?
The quest for this answer brought me to the most obscure corners of the internet, where I came across two key groups of bored people. The first one shows nine Canadian journalists choosing to spend time positioning themselves together into one square meter.
…
The second case brings us across the world to a random New Zealand elementary school, where a teacher has decided to get cute and cram as many kids as she can into a square meter. She maxes out at a shocking 22 kids.
…
At 10 people per square meter … A full square kilometer could fit 10 million people
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What do you mean you won’t cover every card anymore! George is getting angry! 
I was going to argue that a plaza is single-story by definition, but wikipedia disagrees
But yeah, Weyland brags about being able to fit 1% of the worlds’ population in their plaza, but it’s really Jinteki’s protein grinders that deserve the credit. 
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“Huge but manageable” is still really really huge you folks 
A plaza “only” the size of lower Manhattan—that’s on the same scale as the rest of the expo—is still kinda nuts in terms of all the logistics and management and services required; it still feels to us like a certain level of implausibility more than what we’re used to!
What’s more interesting to me here is that we never even considered the idea that it might be ad copy, actually! The text is in the standard flavour text register—dry, encyclopedic, from an inworld perspective but sort of existing outside the world—and the natural read on that is that it’s just a factual claim. Which is neat, because we’ve seen flavour text do the job of ad copy before, it’s just always been obvious before that it’s ad copy, not factual!
Huh, I’ve never read any flavor text as an objective fact about the game world. Always as a tidbit of information said or recorded somewhere in world for some reason.
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Same.
Lower Manhattan for the very generous 1/2 square meter per person and 10 billion as population. 6 persons comfortably fit into a m². That brings it down to ~16666667m² or 16.6km². The Xinghai Square in Dalian, China is 1.76km². So ~9-10 Xinghai Squares or about 1/5 of Manhattan. While still impressive, it is meant to be impressive. And this would imply that the whole faire woud be about the size of Manhattan, which doesn’t sound too outlandish.
Of course there are very many unknowns. The population could be much more than 10 billion. Or much less. We don’t know.
Most models show the population as being 10-12 billion around the time of 2160. But with the severe unemployment that must occur in this world, probably less. But then you have to count clones and bioroids, right? At least clones?
Depends who you ask…
http://netrunnerdb.com/bundles/netrunnerdbcards/images/cards/en/10052.png
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