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I love that George Lucas simply said 'This whole planet is one big city' and the collective fandom set about thinking of ways that's possible and the problems with it.

Unexplainable things in Star Wars. -most atmosphere have breathable air for most sapient species. -gravity is almost the same in all planets no matter the size(Think Mandalore and it’s moon) -coruscant somehow hasn’t fallen apart and it’s foundation hasn’t been damaged.

Videos like this remind me of a longstanding description in Legends about modern Coruscant on how the planet imports everything and at this point only exports laws and people (in the form of bureaucrats and soldiers). Coruscant basically can only exist as the head of a galactic government, as its infrastructure needs are so ludicrous.

Just a note on the air pressure thing, while the "surface" of Coruscant might be 7,300+ meters above it's original sea level, even with planetary characteristics identical to Earth, the pressure would be considerably higher at that altitude. On Earth, almost everything between sea-level and Mount-Everest altitude is open-space for air to disperse evenly, but on Coruscant you have to factor in all of the artificial materials that take up volume between the original surface and artificial one we see in the movies/shows. Just like a ship displaces a certain amount of water when it floats, all of that accumulated building material displaces the air upwards.

Durasteel must be one heck of a metal to last for thausands of years. I've long been wondering how the lowest levels that Corosant's buildings where build on hasn't collapsed yet, from either rust or corrosion

Coruscant probably has a thicker atmosphere than Earth. With planetary shields in place, it wouldn't be surprising if they could boost the planet's magnetic field to help it retain more atmosphere. Also, they could use a technology similar to what they use in those open hangar doors to maintain uniform pressure at all levels.

I recently heard a theory that Coruscant was not only built up, but also built down. Because of the canonical number of levels, the people living in the upper levels would necessarily be living in drastically different (almost uninhabitable) pressures and oxygen levels.

This issue is actually covered extensively in Asimov's Foundation, which had the same problem for Trantor, and to an extense Warhammer 40k's Holy Terra. Many agro planets provide for them, I guess.

That level of development is insane given the stated population. 2 trillion inhabitants squeezed down to just the _land area_ of Earth would still be less dense than Macau or Monaco (13,428 people/km^2, vs, ~21,000 or ~18,000 respectively)! So yes, you could fit the entire population of Coruscant on just 64% of Earth's land area, only using terrestrial building methods. You also have to contend with the waste heat issue.

This engineer has mixed feelings regarding Coruscant. I can't help but be impressed by the infrastructure that allows this planetwide city to support far more life than any naturel world could. There's also the realization that this world is always on the edge. It just takes a few things to go wrong before it falls apart. An extended failure of the electrical grid could shut down the life support systems that allows over a trillion people to breathe. A failure of the planet's plumbing could lead to water shortages and sewage backups. The city would have to have redundant systems, emergency protocols and an army of maintenance droids to handle malfunctions quickly. Otherwise, there is no way that it could have remained habitable for as long as canon claims that it has.

A ecumenopolis, like Coruscant, is an interesting thought experiment. The story Rogue Planet starts with an interesting look at the Garbage disposal process on the planet works, specifically the Wiko district garbage pit. That alone showed what an elaborate system was required for one of the most basic services.

Honestly, the sheer scope of Coruscant, the engineering and logistical mastery it would take to build and maintain such a planetary city, inspires a bit of existential terror in me.

11:39 I can confirm this statement about those who grow up at high altitudes. My grandfather was born in Tibet and lived there until the age of 11. When his family moved to the US, he could hold his breath for about 3 times as long as any of the other kids in his school, as he was used to much lower levels of oxygen than they were.

Actually I think for a fully built-up planet, overheating rather than cold temperature would be the greatest challenge, even if the planet itself is "naturally" cold. All the energies used to power the entire civilisation would end up being heat on the surface, far more than natural heat radiation can get rid of. Every other problem you have can pretty much be solved with "use more energy", but this energy must go somewhere. I'd imagine a planet like Coruscant would need numerous heat dissipation towers sticking out of the atmosphere to prevent the surface from becoming a furnace.

Whenever I see Coruscant i wonder how Jedi can live in a planet so out of balance with Nature. ^ ^ great movie as always.

I would consider how a revolving door works in a skyscraper. Regulate the warm air to pressurize the upper atmosphere on a huge scale.

I'm a produce manager at a grocery store and how little people think of me makes me sad everyday. The amount of strings I have to pull to get people there fresh food every single day is staggering. And all I would like is a little appreciation. Thank you Alan for mentioning it.

If the SWTOR game is cannon, there is a quest line for the republic characters that states that the basic living systems on the planet of Coruscant was originally created by the Gree species.

As someone who works in retail, the amount of people who don't understand how logistics works and just think we have crates of stuff in the back or just have the stuff to make whatever they want back there is just... mind boggling. Can't imagine what it would be like on Coruscant.

If a culture had as much control over gravity as has been demonstrated in the Star Wars universe, then it would be trivial to create an ecumenopolis. You not only stabilize the gravity between each floor, but also control air pressure in order to maintain whatever atmospheric pressure you would like at any specific height. The lack of heat from their star wouldn't be a problem. For that matter, their biggest problem would be controlling waste heat to make sure they didn't accidentally cook themselves alive. Pretending Coruscant was populated with only Earth-like humans, then each one of them would be producing about 100 watts of heat. So about 200 terajoules of energy each second, given a population of 2 trillion. Then you can add in the waste heat from all their machinery. Space is a poor conductor of heat, so they would need a way to radiate their excess heat away from their planet before it becomes an oven. They are full of Clarktech, so maybe they have a way to bottle and recycle radiant heat?

2 trillion would still be wildly underpopulated for all those thousands of levels over the whole planet. It could quite easily house a thousand times that

What’s really funny to me about channels like this is I’m not even really a huge Star Wars nerd but this guy because of how passionate he is about Star Wars it actually makes me interested in learning about Star Wars

Wonder how Coruscant deals with what should be a thinner atmosphere if only the tip of a mountain is now the surface level.

Hay you and EckhartsLadder should team up and do one of those cross section break downs of Coruscant, from the very top to the very bottom and if you really get into it you might just get a few videos out of it.

Theres alot of lore explaining this. It isnt just a city. Thats just the top layer.. theres acrually a jungle underneath

It may make your average hive city look tiny in comparison but I'd be willing to bet that Holy Terra in Warhammer 40k still dwarves it in population and scale of infrastructure. In 40k Terra is the most over industrialized and densely populated planet in the setting and from my understanding is pretty similar to Coruscant in how it has levels built up from the surface. (Keep in mind the Emperor's palace IS the Himalayan mountain range... Like... The whole mountain range)

Cities and Industrialization have their own beauty to them. An unpopular opinion, but coruscant’s sunset is lovely.

Generation Tech is THE #1 Star Wars content creator. By miles... and miles. It's so refreshing to get this top teir channel after watching Star Wars Theory or the other popular channels. It's not even a contest. This takes a high intelligence, enormous love for Star Wars, and dedication to the channel. to constantly deliver such thought-provoking content.

Oxygen can easily be produced with machines, primarily from naturally forming CO², and the rest can come from Water(Ice Comet) import. Those machines would have to be everywhere, but that's not a problem. 2 atm of pressure is still fine to live with, the lowest levels are uninhabitable for some reasons but you should at least be able to go down 7km of structures without worrying about pressure at all.

There are two technologies that we know they have in the Star Wars universe that could be combined to make the atmosphere possible. 1. Artificial gravity. They have this on ships. If you have control of gravity you have control of air pressure. 2. Atmosphere retention fields. We see these on ship hangers - fields that can be flown through without the need to cycle an airlock. The planet could be composed of concentric shells made up of these 2 technologies. That would allow them to maintain livable local pressure gradients within each shell, then the final outer layer where you can stand directly under the planetary atmosphere has the final shell and pressure gradient.

The amount of engineering and maintenence that goes into ecumenopoli are so intense, like most likely gravity assisted building, artificial atmospheres, air scrubbers, foundation maintenance, mitigation of tectonic disturbances. All of that would make exploring a ruined one pretty cool. Needing oxygen supplies for high levels, those levels being insanely unstable, fissures opening up on top or midlevel areas from centemeters of tectonic movement several thousand feet below. That would be neat

I've always wondered that too on how can the whole city planet survive by being just a city

Those support structures must be pretty strong to hold miles of levels. All that extra mass must have done something to the planet's orbit. That's assuming it was Earth-sized without the levels. (IMHO it was smaller than Earth originally and grew to Earth size with all the growing.) And why did the growing stop? If the Jedi Temple is that old, why isn't it buried under more levels as the planet grew?

Once you dive into the physics and logistics of a planet like Coruscant, you start to realize how impossible it is. Mountains have limits to how high they can get on a planet, dictated by the planet's size, mass, density, tectonic plate composition, wind speeds, atmospheric composition, etc. If Coruscant has the same rough stats as Earth (size, mass, density, etc), then it's tallest mountain at most isn't going to be much taller than either Mt Everest or K2. Also, "air scrubbers" wouldn't be enough to increase the density of the atmosphere that high up. They would have to pump in and generate entire additional atmospheres worth of gas. They would need the following ramped up to a planetary scale: Atmospheric recyclers Atmospheric generators Heat exchanger systems Heat capture systems Gravity manipulation devices The biggest problem the planet would face isn't actually air. It's heat. The amount of heat of even just that much metal stacked on top of each other is... Kind of insane. Like, not as in slightly toasty. As in "temperatures normally only reached by stars" kind of hot. Once you add in electronic devices, organics residual body heat, cooking, etc... They're going to need some serious sci-fi wizardry to stop the metal itself in the lower levels from spontaneously combusting. ... By the way, if they didn't have the last 3 in that list, even if no people were there, the sheer mass of pure metal in the lower levels with all the metal of the layers on top weighing down on them would at the very least cause the lower levels to collapse into a ball of molten metal that fused to the planet and turned into it's new planetary core. At worst? Probably exceed the Schwarzschild Radius and collapse into a black hole and then take the entire rest of the planet with it. Either way, the planet would have some... Absolutely whack gravity in it's levels. And from space? Planet's gravity well would be way, WAY higher than a planet of that size should have. So no jumping into or out of hyperspace anywhere near it.

Its worth noting that Coruscant is Earth Sized AFTER becoming built out. It has our gravity and air pressure at its surface Now. But, when it started it would have been a much smaller planet. That also likely means the majority of Coruscant's moons are added to its orbits, not part of the original formation of the solar system.

In "The Old Republic", the MMO, I remember a few quests on the deep levels on Coruscant, there was an old engineer who treated "The Great Machines" underneath almost like gods, because they where responsible for keeping everyone on the planet alive, there are huge, ancient, very elaborate machines constantly producing oxygen and power.

Honestly, I'm more worried about how the lower levels hold up the weight above it. Unless, all the new stuff on the surface actually has a solid foundation that goes all the way down to the crust/mantle, which would be pretty cool and make sense for such a massive carpet of industry.

Coruscant is in a position indeed. It's deemed important because it's the center of the single most powerful and influential galactic entity but also 1 shipment away from Anarchy.

I have always thought about this and have tried to look it up multiple times and have found close to nothing on it! I think i even asked this question in another of your video! 🤘🏽 Thanks for covering it!

The first time I saw Coruscant in the Prequels my initial thought was, how do they deal with their garbage? Some serious recycling going on, I expect. Nice video. Also, thanks for the wallpaper.

I remember a Legenda era book where one of the plots involved Jacen and Jaina getting lost as, like, 5 year olds on lower levels of Corusant and after running into a bunch of obstructions (including an old maintenance droid stuck in a cycle of replacing the burned out bulbs in some lights with its existing, and also burned out, bulbs. They're eventually saved by a tribe of people who used to be Imperial Bureaucrats that hid further down, and returned the twins to Leia.

Brilliant! Loved this episode. Very cool.

I love how your curiosity turns into videos like this.

“Looks at Holy Terra” 2 Trillion are rookie numbers.

About the oxigen and high altitude. If you can make oxigen for trillions, you also must be able to increase the percentage of O2 to cancel the effects of lower pressures

I've been obsessed by coruscant since the early 2000's. I've made thousands of concepts about possible megastructures but also alternative worlds kinda based on it. like dys-utopian forest cities (massive podiums with rows of skyscrapers like in hong kong basically and connected by subway and highways with internal exits and sometimes droneports). Unfortunately they are just colorized sketches but they evolve all the time, lol. I've done tons of AI tho and they are very high quality and photorealistic environments. The next step is full scale VR CGI but that's gonna take decades to finish, lol (maybe faster when i can use AI to create models)

I've always thought myself that they were simply using an artificial at atmosphere on the "surface" because as you pointed out, that is WAY too high to naturally sustain any kind of normal life in any way.

maybe a significant amount of the aliens breathe by turning co2 into o2. That might help with the atmosphere composition issue

I loved playing Star Wars the Old Republic because it was a F2P game, and I enjoyed the Aesthetic or feeling when walking down some alleys that were just lit up with neon and some sort of cantina. It seems like one of those Cities where walked down one level is like a whole entire neighborhood, and then you go down another level and its another street level. And you just never know where the surface is?

Thanks. Of course, more people know about Coruscant, but before Star Wars there was the Foundation. Its imperial capital Trantor is an ecumenopolis entirely covered in a metal skin, like a ball bearing. But unlike Coruscant, it's mostly dug underground, with the metal skin only about 500 ft above ground level. People are born, live, & die there - most without ever seeing the surface. Most would find it uncomfortable not to be fully enclosed. And it is also fatally dependent on constant imports. A fascinating world. tavi.

I love Coruscant, great video! Happy Thanks Giving alan

Good video, also the room setup in the background looks great!

Alan, every single video is always 🔥. Thanks for your commitment to some of the highest quality content on YT.

There's a problem with your math because the planet's mass has been increased due to 7600 feet of concrete and steel added to the planet Coruscant from external sources. Coruscant has significantly higher mass in 10 ABY than it did in 90,000 BBY. That increases the planetary gravity which affects the stratosphere. Coruscant is weird, Earth is not a valid analog.

Tranton from The Foundation series (both books and TV Show) has always been a good comparison with Coruscant in terms of scope, economy and political significance. Thanks for the awesome content 👍🏽

Alan, I love the plug to 40k there. Great content as always! Thank you

I keep saying we need to build Mega Blocks like in Dredd.

In every alien invader movie where they steal the water and air of the planet, then they import it to this planet

great video by a great channel

The vast majority of the city's volume is filled with duracrete and steel. They didn't climb up 73,000 feet, they added 73,000 feet of filler to the bottom of the container, effectively lifting the atmosphere up 73,000 feet. Lower levels would experience higher air pressure.

Great work Allen. A lot of fictional technology often gives birth to real break throughs in real technologies.

Maybe there are air-sealing levels every 5,000 feet that separate the space vertically into discrete levels which can be maintained at whatever pressure is desired. People will pass between levels in a functional air lock. Then just above the highest sealing level will be like the new ground level of the remaining open vertical space, with pressure decreasing upwards from there, as on Earth.

This is exactly why I subscribed to you!

On weather predictions. One bases predictions on passed weather conditions, and if weather is changing one can't predict with any accuracy.

Why does it only need to be air scrubbers? Han, Leia, and Chewbacca went outside with only a mask on for air. Yes, they were in a giant space slug. However, I don’t think that the slug’s stomach would have a conducive atmosphere. Maybe the characters in Star Wars are not “human” as we perceive humans.

Honestly, the more I think about Coruscant, the more of a hellscape it becomes. You have BILLIONS of civilians in the lower, poorer, levels who've never breathed FRESH air, seen the sky, experienced real weather, ANYTHING natural! You go deeper and you have those who've never seen sunlight! I also headcanon various respiratory illnesses and cancer to be quite common in the low levels due to the air being less clean the further down you go. Also, I was always confused as a kid why WHOLE ASS PLANETS in SW can suffer famines and lack of resources... IT"S BECAUSE CORUSCANT IS ESSENTIALLY A PARASITIC PLANET to them! Coruscant can ONLY get its resources from other planets, or recycling what it already has/had. Take EVERYTHING horrible about large crowded cities, and multiply that by like...a million, that's Coruscant. And I HATE IT. No wonder the Jedi's senses were so clouded, there's nothing natural on the planet! Just because a planet has trillions of individual lives on it, does NOT mean it's rich in the Living Force. Coruscant is a metal and concrete hell, a lifeless husk of a dead planet. Like a person in a permanent vegetative state. Are they REALLY alive anymore? Is the planet REALLY fully of life anymore? Or is it just the life support machines?

Great video

This is exactly the video I needed after rewatching the Star Wars prequels the other night. Thank you!

A planet like corasant should be like Zootopia of different environments from snow to Savannah to ocean. Yet all seems for same environment

Am I the only one who wants a 40k video now that Allen has mentioned it?

Best Star Wars channel on KZfaq I feel like most of the other are just filled with complaining and negativity. keep up the good work my man

I remember in one of the novels that in the lower levels. Luke ran into a mobile skyscraper. That was just a demolition unit for taking down old skyscrapers

If only 25% of the Corusant were paved over, with all cities 200 miles in diameter or larger,all of the scenes in the movies would still work.

I'd be curious what the interest rates are in Banks in the Star Wars universe and what it would cost to live on the more expensive planets. It would be interesting to know that.

Thank you so much for making this video! I finally got my little brother to like star wars and he has so many questions about this.

I've always figured the first layers were built down from the natural surface then built up, then they just brought in what other things they needed, like air, and probably do a pretty solid trade in imported food/water/air just to keep everything working. The canon never talks about it, and the movies and shows just gloss over the science of it, but the Star Wars galaxy could just put blocks of molecules together for transport instead of trying to send gas or liquid around the galaxy. They have repulsor lifts and gravity plating, so controlling gravity is something that isn't an issue. Making and transporting blocks of specific molecules should be child's play, and there are going to be billions of planets that don't have life they can pull from, so even if level 5000 is miles up, they can just cart in air to fill up the sky so it's breathable, then use repulsor lifts to keep that from crushing the lower levels with the trillions of tons of mass. It's probably more then that, but whatever. You get it.

My question is ss the city grew did the continuous building and setting of new foundations slowly along with the development of articial atmospheric control push the atmosphere concentration upwards? All that construction and new mass also had to to change the rotational balance of the planet too.

I have always wondered what happens when massive earthquakes trigger on Coruscant. I picture the buildings all falling over like dominios.

Stellaris had a precursor race that was an alliance of races that used an ecumenopolis as the capital. This alliance broke down, and the food transports for the capital ended as all the member states began to withdraw to their own borders. The capital became a warzone overnight as people scrambled to secure what little food they could, eventually being forced to eat the dead, and finally, starving.

13:40 There's something like what you described on Coruscant: The big holes (canonically called Portals) that connect the levels that ships/flying cars go thru also admit sizable amounts of air which helps circulate air to the more toxic (in more ways than one) lower levels of the planet

So Alan would you elaborate on whether you were suffering from altitude sickness during your trip to Mount Everest?!? 🤔

1:11 Mclaren Technology Centre

Excellent ❤

An ecumenopolis would need to export its sewage and carbon from its atmospheric scrubbers to Agriworlds as fertilizer to balance out the food they extract from these worlds . Also metal and plastics recycling would be mandatory . And possibly even corpse recycling , reducing corpses down to base elements to be added to the fertilizer exports of the Ecumenopolis . And if foundation lore and 40k lore can serve as a guide an Ecumenopolis will need hundreds of agriworlds to feed it.

I came to watch a lore video but I actually got an introspective on our own society.

Not in the lore, but just supposition based off known lore. But it could be a planetary shield that is holding in the atmosphere.

Thanks for giving us farmers some credit, we may hate the city (and the city would probably hate us) but we do what we can to get you guys good and fresh food :)

Guys it's videos like this that give me hope for Star Wars. A thank you to the stewards during the dark times that keep the heart beating. Star Wars is not for everyone. Only those who truly care.

Surprised I dont see more people talking about Trantor from Isaac Asimov's *foundation*. He went into a lot of detail about how such a planet-city could exist

What does 40k lore say about their hive worlds and terra, for solving the same problems you talked about in this video

There should be a series on the development of early courascant. That would be so interesting

Just in case my apartment gets yeeted into space... of course! 🤣

I find myself wondering where all the building materials came from and how it was all processed or refined. At some point the orbit will begin to shift due to both the increase and distribution of mass.

They probably have oxygen generators that get increasingly large the higher you get. By the time you reach the top, their massive, probably having whole buildings dedicated to them and them alone. That seems like the only way the air would be breathable at that sort of altitude.

If I recall correctly, in the legends books they mention how the Republic senators had their local quarters (by the senate building) in a fancy condo complex that had a view of the last mountain range visible on Coruscant. I think it's way more interesting that they have the top of the tallest mountain in the middle of a plaza surrounded by more tall buildings for people to walk up to and look at. It really gives perspective on just how massively built up the planet has become. I would be really interested in seeing a show or some movies set in the very early days of the Republic and how it was founded, the founding of the Jedi order, or even further back at the beginnings of Coruscant when it was still a natural planet with jungles and (if they follow the legends material) would show the fight between the two local species of the planet for control.

This video is among the many that Allen comes up with that keep me up at night

Coruscant actually does have one ocean left that wasn’t covered by the city, the great western sea. Assuming that’s still cannon. Which I hope it is the idea of coruscant having one last area that’s still natural and where you can find non artificial plant and animal life is such a cool concept.

I didn't have that problem during the pandemic. I had self grown vegetables, and some fruit, I also hunted for my meat. There's also a creek not too far from my house, that I get fish out of. I also had a well stocked arsenal in case anyone thought about raiding my place, and taking my self sustainable food source. Although toilet paper did become an issue.

I think the sheer mass of everything they've built over the planet would extend the atmosphere by a lot.