Here's the link for the July 13 NSS Space Forum on Instabase I mentioned in the episode :) It is free, hope to see you there. Blog link - us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/8716415258643/WN_ovcIpIO7SIahG-B5yaDoVg General Registration Link - us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_ovcIpIO7SIahG-B5yaDoVg

Just want to confirm this was not clickbait.

Modern cruise ships aren't far off this, some even have permanent residents. If you've never seen one up close they are beyond gigantic. The Titanic looks like a dinghy next to a modern cruise ship. The currently under-construction Icon of the Seas is 1,200ft long, weights over 250,000 GT, and between passengers and crew can carry nearly 10,000 people. The smallest state capital is Montpelier, Vermont, and has only about 7,500 people.

I always find it impressive how you’ve managed to come out with new videos for so long and still you have something new to cover. The amount of material on this channel already is incredible!

Mobile sea cities would be a good idea, one could simply move it to the optimum location for the time of year. This already happens to some extent in the sailing community.

For those that go: "Wait, why is the Swedish town of Kiruna moving?" It is due to the mining operations that have spread underneath the city, making the ground unstable. There have been instances of local earthquakes occurring due to the unstable ground. Their solution was to move the city because the mining operations are MASSIVELY profitable, and they keep finding new veins and materials, the last one was the beginning of 2023 where they found what is labelled "Europe's biggest rare earth minerals deposits". They have the funding to move the entire town of 22k people and their houses which is wack.

We had a town that was moved once, a little south of Lubbock Tx. The town was built about a mile east of the planned site. They put all the buildings on skids, and dragged the whole town to where it belonged. This is how Slide Tx got its name.

The thing I contemplate most about cities is what is their purpose, every city on earth at first had a purpose. Natural resources nearby, strategic locations for defense/offense and in that regard there are many reasons for a mobile city. It should be important to note though there's also reasons to have smaller mobile structures like Labs, refineries or factories. Currently we have a rover on Mars doing tons of research. It's not too much of a stretch to have a rover lab filled with people there too. These could be rovers, subs, tanks or walkers easily depending on the environment as well. So if your sci fi needs a little extra cool one of those would be a neat thing to throw in without being too much of a stretch for your readers.

I always liked the idea of walking buildings or cities using "strandbeest" legs to move around, particularly because they would be able to utilize fairly complicated motion without requiring a great deal of computational oversight, as a building walking around on something like spider legs might require. In theory they also wouldn't require a particularly complicated drive train for that motion, or could be driven by external forces like wind.

The anime Chrome Shelled Regios, is all about mobile cities called Regios, that travel around on a ruined Earth looking for resources, fighting giant mutated insects, and competing with other mobile cities for said resources.

Some other examples are the "Ship Country" and the "Bothersome Country" from Kino's Journey, with Bothersome Country being a strangely close plot to Mortal Engines (I think the light novel story of it predates ME, even). What a shame what happened to the Mortal Engines movie though. Lots of other fun examples in games, like the Wandering Village, too. Thanks for covering this topic Isaac!

One really cool concept is the tame megafauna that drags the city or even carries it on its back. One of the factions in Warhammer is composed of nomads that set their tents on giant beetles. (I mistook them for another nomadic faction in Endless Legend who uses more conventional beasts of burden.)

I liked this one and I feel compelled to add a notable example of The the moving cities of Arknights. Where they need to move so as to avoid calamities which in setting very from devastating blizzards to explosive fireballs raining from the sky. They have gained the ability to forecast these calamities like the weather and move the cities out of the way in a few hours time. I felt that this would have been a nice addition to your video, but even then great video as usual. //Edit:And now I realize it was already mentioned.

The city of Terminator in Kim Stanley Robinson's various books was always a neat mobile city. Always rolling around the horizon line of Mercury, keeping out of direct sunlight.

The first mobile city I always think of is Terminator on Mercury in the novel 2312. On rails going around the planet, such a cool idea.

My favorites are great big spinning toroids, mile wide 10 miles in diameter I saw early renderings done in the 70's and I was like wow, this is how you build a city! Central waterway through the middle, with terraced homes, buildings, gardens, forests, built up embankments on both sides. It would be so unbelievably huge, you wouldn't even feel like you were in space, just in a normal city. If you could stick a fusion drive on them, do 1/2 speed of light, make into a generational ship to populate exoplanets within a couple hundred light years.

I always imagined massive pyramid colonies that just land and start doing what's necessary. Massive green houses as the outer layer if you're near star (mostly looked cool in my head as a kid)

oh yes Mortal Engines, the book ... i remember the first time reading it, that awe feeling, amazing concepts

Nice, I've been working on a setting on an oceanic planet where the capital is a floating city, partly for political reasons as none of the various island nations that made up the planet could agree on who should house the capital and partly as a means to avoid the regular large storms that sweep the planets surface.

Me: *click on the vid to see if it have any clickbait Issac: “There are no clickbait titles on this show.” Me: *Understood, have a nice day 😎

I’ve been creating mobile cities since 1990. I just love this! I never thought I’d see the day when this would even become a topic. Thanks!

Love the idea of a residence that you can un-tether, call for "the movers", and have in place in another state/country in a few hours!

In a creative writing work of mine, I had a city upon a gigantic ship that functioned as the trade hub for most of the world since it was one of the few places where goods from nearly every civilization would accumulate. Super cool to see a vid on the topic from a completely different perspective, but still one of my more favorite genres. I always like to try and place science into it

This definitely makes sense for lunar cities, excluding polar ones. Or at least the farming communities, with farmer's markets coming around every 4 weeks.

Buckminster Fuller had ideas for a floating city on the ocean that looked like a tetrahedron and another for one that floated in the sky that looked like a gigantic spherical balloon.

If homes are ever constructed robust enough to be routinely moved and if they were constructed airtight, they could be used in many different environments. Like your basement would be a ships hull that you bury when you're on land, but you could move to water, and also you could dock it in a rotating space marina, and possibly suspend it from a tether into the atmosphere all while maintaining an "up" direction

The only ones that would be practical would be either a large cluster of ocean vehicles on a constant move or a space station on the move.

The best and greatest example of mobile cities is James Blish's novel "A Life For The Stars". In that book entire Earth cities use Clarke tech to lift themselves bodily and fly among the stars as migrant workers so to speak. NYC and Scranton, PA are prominently featured. A great read!

For land crawlers noise and vibration can be solved easily by going electric. And bumps can be solved by a Bose suspension. That's an active suspension that keeps the vehicle perfectly flat on any terrain at any speed, as long as the suspension travel is enough. It's even capable of jumping over small obstacles.

In the mobile game Arknights, the world has many cataclysmic natural disasters that necessitates the worlds inhabitants to created "mobile cities", which allow them to pack up and move the entire city within 2 weeks if they predict one coming their way. I always wondered how practical they are in reality, albeit they are powered by the fictional resource of that universe. The bigger concern is of course, probably it sinking into the ground from it's sheer weight.

As a big time fan both of the channel and of Mortal Engines, I've been waiting on this one for a long, long time... happy Arthursday!

I have a setting for my tabletop games that's centered on a mobile city at sea- it runs on diesel and I thought it was bananas- good to know it's more realistic and plausible than I immagined! I'll give it sails as well

I have come back to your channel and wow you've come a long way with your speech Mr. Arthur. As someone who has struggled with a lisp my whole life its really quite inspiring! Im honestly very impressed. Nice work.

I once calculated the speed of moon rotation at some latitudes and realized a pretty slow rover could always be under the sun (and thus powered)

You need Originium tech if you want to make it practical.

Just finished a series featuring a series of mobile cathedrals slowly walking - just fast enough to keep the sun in the center of the sky... Less than 30 sec in and this will certainly be fun

You never disappoint, keep up the good work.

Hey bud, I've enjoyed your content for a couple of years now. You do great work and your videos are always interesting and entertaining. Thank you for all the hard work and I look forward to your future projects.

I can imagine this becoming something of a trend at a smaller scale. You could have a village or town sized community living in a jointly owned ship-habitat, with everything they needed to keep a town happy and fed aboard the vessel. The advantage of this would be that the town could periodically uproot itself to visit other locations in the solar system. Perhaps a few seasons on Mars, a year on the moon, then an extended trip to Enceladus or the mining hubs of the asteroid belt. I doubt these townships could return directly to earth, because they might not be capable of rentry and earth based launches. Though the inhabitants should be able to find a service to shuttle them to earth with the town docked in orbit.

The Mortal Engines book series by Phillip Reeve is a great exploration of this concept. The movie is a bit rubbish but books are well worth reading

I'm a fan of places built on naturally buoyant terrain - like Sanctaphrax in Edge Chronicles Something about using propellers or rockets to keep something afloat has always seemed scary to me, what if there was a major malfunction? I love when someone thinks about this and writes about safety measures. It's probably why the Magnetrine disc from Simon Stalenhags's art is one of my favourite fictional propulsion method. They are basically spinning magnetic gyroscopes that are only usable in the upper Northern Hemisphere - and allowed huge vehicles to magnetically levitate. The art book "Tales from the Loop" explains that if there's ever a malfunction - the disks would naturally spin as the vehicle sinks through earths magnetic field and keep the descent to a few centimetres a week. I always wanted to see a settlement that floats on Magnetrine discs, but I don't think he ever drew something like that unfortunately.

The end of the railroad track town supporting the men building the tracks, Hell on Wheels moved by railroad and spawned a few permanent towns such as Cheyenne Wyoming.

Another mobile city varient would be the main city of a nomadic group. I bet the Mongols had something like this, and the Indians have something for religious reasons during Kumbha Mela, where a city is built ground up every year to accommodate pilgrims. I could see space ships modified to fit together like puzzle pieces. Like a fleet of pirates or merchants who, in their long travels between points of interest, join their ships together to form a ring and generate artificial gravity. And each ship has its own facilities, but Mikey’s ship might have a restaurant and John makes up for Mikey’s space sacrifice by storing his produce, so on and so fourth. Pop up vendors almost, for the merchants. And some ships might be built specifically to form giant ring habitats, as a safety feature but also for as stated long voyages or community events, or periods of static living in a resource rich etc environment.

i remember your first videos, now you have improved a lot on the sound and speech, keep going 💪

Great episode, like always.. thought provoking as well

I think the first example of a good reason to move a city I read was in Dave Duncan's "West of January" Always a pleasure to watch these!

If a planet is light on one side for months at a time, then dark for months at the time it will be bad to live in total darkness for months so if they can move a city they can move it to the day side

Your video popped in my recommended. I love your voice.

Thanks Isaac !!! This has always been a super big interest of mine. McMurdo station says hey! 😁🖐

In either " Saturn's Brood" or " Neptune's Children", a mobile city on Mercury rode on rails....

I love this channel so much!

Loving the shorts Isaac 👍

20:13 this reminds me of the nomadic fleet city in a anime called Gargantia. where it has a main ship but has multiple smaller ships that could change to different parts of the fleet.

Right on. Thanks for sharing.

Issac, you have one of the most incredible brains I've encountered, and I've known some real smart people. Thank you for sharing.

great episode, bonus new book to note down on my read later list

The first rule of warfare: If your city is about to be attacked, get out of the way.

This series made me remember the flying city of Panda La depicted in the old Tailspin cartoon, which took to the skies via giant hot air balloons to invade and conquer those that oppose them.

The idea of a massive mining crawler on a low grav moon or large-scale floating refining platform in the atmosphere of a venus or gas-giant planet are likely viable concepts. A true *city* in the sense we really think of them, with a population of 100k or more is vastly larger than these however, and I think problems like torsion on such an enormous structure would become very severe, with deformations in the terrain surface, swells in the ocean, or winds in the atmosphere twisting and warping your city like a pretzel until it comes apart. Even large modern bridges need to be very carefully engineered to avoid being annihilated by torsion and vibration. The one case where I see 'moving cities' eventually becoming a reality is with structures like Oneal colonies with thrusters that can reposition themselves in orbit, move between planets, or even embark on millennia long journeys between stars - quite possibly the only viable way for humans to travel between stars.

Dunno bout legged cities, but aerostat cities in Venus' atmo are (technically) within our reach, so i'm down for those. edit: on a second thought, a possible moving city would be a roller city. Two cylinders one inside the other with a gap. The gap would be filled with water to the point where the inner cylinder is buoyant. The inner cylinder has the living spaces, stacked on decks with either a central (fusion?) powered core that lights them all up in a stacked fashion or individual artificial suns for light (crops and mental health). It would be locked on a carrier bearing support that's also the outer cylinder's structure against collapse. The outer skin would have to have some sort of ablative surface to resist the damage as it rolls. Motion would be achieved by shifting the weight of the inner cylinder. Dunno about turning, perhaps the outer cylinder is in two halves, allowing for differential steering. It's ... doable, i see no structural issues, but the sheer cost of making it once more cuts it out of reach. Floating cities or Europa submarine cities that travel under the ice, always putting the moon between them and the planet... those seem more within our means.

Never clickbait. Isaac is the absolute best and we would all be so lucky if he ruled the world!! Trust this man, and he needs to be protected at all costs. Thank you for all you do, Isaac. You are a companion; your videos are comforting, informative, and so insightful. Cheers.

Awesome, as usual.

In a way we already have predecessors for this with for instance sesonal and construction workers living in trailers. There are also so called "boat people" that can just move elsewhere when needed. I also want to point at the human faction in the game Starcraft for whom most of their structures are mobile.

I love the idea of giant train cities like Snowpiercer. The idea of upscaling it feels like it'd create a logistical and habitational nightmare, but a cool one. It could also solve some of the fuel issues, if it's run on superconductive rails kept superconductive by being on a super cold planet. FIY, superconductors can lock onto permanent magnets, levitating an object above them without needing any energy. Then you just need some ion or rocket engines to accelerate or decelerate, IF you ever need to.

Mobile cities would be great for an alt-history sci-fi series where a nomadic empire like the Mongols became the dominant political powers on Earth, and then slowly expanded across the universe

Doesn’t Lando have some giant centipede like city powered by a crap ton of AT-AT Walker legs on some mining planet in Dark Empire comics where it’s constantly moving along to stay out of the nearby sunlight? It’s a mining venture if I recall correctly since Thrawn steals a bunch of his drills, but it was just creeping along staying in the shade and running another impossible city like he does, but now maybe it’s not SO impossible ;)

It was a dark, blustery afternoon in spring, and the city of London was chasing a small mining town across the dried-out bed of the old North Sea.

wow great video keep it up!

another awesome video

Makes me think of Cannon in Eclipse Phase -- a Mercury settlement that is essentially a big mass driver on rails, circling the planet daily to stay out of the sun and link up with a variety of mining operations, with a swarm of vehicles heading out from it to collect the rich minerals of Mercury, bringing them back to the mass driver for delivery to customers.

Always impressed by the depth and breadth of knowledge in Isaacs videos, then be thrown with a casual cultural reference that I have to go look up right now!

FASCINATING SUBJECT MAN!!! AS WELL, IT IS WONDERFUL TO HEAR A REAL HUMAN BEING, NARRATING VIDEOS, Thank YOU Brother human.😢 ❤ for NOT being or using A.I.

The Shimizu Corp has been planning an submersible city for years. It will be interesting to see if they pull it off.

I LOVE your dialect! :3

"Cities on the go. Because there are no clickbait titles on this show" kind of rhymes😎

Been a while since I viewed your channel. Mobile cities are interesting. They're majestic from an aesthetic point of view, and a kind of interesting concept, but there needs to be a practicality or a need for such a thing. And I think that's all I have to say.

my favorite is the bubble city of Terminator on the surface of Mercury in the hard sci-fi novel 2313. Gigantic rails push the city within a habitable "terminator line" at the horizon of Mercury through the expansion and contraction of the tracks coming from the heat of the sun.

The first thing I thought about was James Blishs "Cities in Flight". Now I'll have to re-read it of course.

I think "slug propulsion" would make most sense for giant cities. It gives you maximum contact area, doesn't produce any vibrations and presumably is relatively maintenance free. I could also imagine them producing some sort of expaning foam that allows them to fill out the worst holes in the ground. As for the scenario a planet with a very skewed rotational axis might be realistic. There is massive climate change, so moving the city is worthwhile and it is slow enough so you can move them in time.

Carpenter here, just wanted to make an observation about when you were mentioning the "mobile homes" that you can untether from their original place and be moved somewhere else. This actually might present a big problem in practice even if it works in principle. When you build a home, you are building what is called an "envelope" which is the outer most layer of walls, the roof, the floors and so on, are all tied together so as to encompass any interior and partition walls and spaces, which may or may not be tied/connected directly to the envelope of the building but modern building practices actually do a good job at tying most pieces of a home to one another. The envelope of the building is often anchored to a concrete foundation rather than the floor, and foundation actually being part of that envelope. This means that technically all that is holding down most people's houses is the numerous anchor bolts that are placed all around the bottom plates of the envelope (so the outer walls plates, also including and interior structural walls but doesnt include partition walls necessarily) so you rarely have a house that has the foundation a continous part of the envelope isntead of simlpy being a structure that sits on top of the foundation and is anchored to its to prevent the sheer forces from moving the house horizontally but also from the wind and other potential forces that may want to bring the house off its foundation vertically in an upwards direction. This is most important during windstorms. The biggest issue it seems to me is how we would build a house that could have its foundation also attatched to the envelope and have it be safe to move from site to site, or you have the same foundation at multiple of your properties or destinations in mind for the home and then you can move it between them and just re anchor the bolts but there is a reason we always replace anchor bolts when we put on something new to the foundation. So if we were to fly a house from one place to another and re anchor the foundation the anchor bolts wouldnt hold as well as once you take the anchor bolts out from the spot they were in the bottom plate, the hole used to thread the bolt through on the bottom plate is made wider and wider unless you could manage to perfectly vertically lift the house each and everytime which still would risk damaging the holes use for the anchoring because of the shrinking of wood when it dries so once you remove the anchor bolts, often the bolts were stretching some boards forcing them to remain straight when all the grain is stressing them to bend. So once off the concrete the bottom plates might bend and you might not be able to restraighten it. Thats just my two cents though from building houses. Im sure you guys could think of some scientific solutions to the issues i outlined,

Balamb garden, aka, a floating University, designed for tight manovering over tricky terrain, hover travel and equipped with weapon systems.

Train-cities or even train-states would be an interesting concept. Trade and transportation as a primary sector of economy. Will work especially great on "eyeball planets".

One of the stories in "Gulliver's Travels" has the floating city of Laputa, done by hand-waving 'magnetic levitation' . The size of the kingdom they governed was limited by where the necessary magnetic ore was found underground. The ruling class lives in Laputa, they discourage rebellion by the ground-dwellers by "gently squashing them flat."

In the Endless Story (Translation of "Die endlose geschichte" idk if it exists) there is a City on a lake, where everyone lives on boats and changes their neighbours periodically. This is not really a moving city, since the central structure, basically one large harbour, stays the same, but a shiftimg City. A City where places swap their positions.

In a story i wrote, there's a civilization that lives on Gaint rafts that are dragged around the ocean by a pod of giant whales, and in the same story there's another civilization that lives on top of Gaint creatures that walk on land and feed on the sun through their back for energy, they're called "colossus sunbacks" and the world is full a petrified dead colossus sun backs with abandoned cities in their backs.

13:36 during my time in the military i found sleeping in an unimogue troop transport going 80-100 pretty normal... that being said, it took some time getting used to

Never been this early, looking forward to this one! A mobile city also appeared in the book "The Quantum Thief" by Hannu Rajanemi

I run a D&D campaign, and recently sent the adventurers to a tent-town held aloft by giant kites

Really loved Alastair Reynolds' version of this in Absolution Gap

Everyone talks about walkable cities, but only Issac talks about cities that walk.

I never thought Id see Issac reference Netheril. Whoa. XD

The Anime / Manga / Light Novel series - Chrome Shelled Regios has a similar setup. In a Post Apocalyptic world, many people live in mobile cities that gradually move.

Reminded me of Arknights' nomadic cities. That world is so ravaged by natural insanity that the idea of moving cities and people are much too ingrained in the culture itself to the point where hardly any cities with major Terran populations that needs to dodge Calamities (the name of these gigantic disasters, including falling meteors, extreme storms, etc) isn't nomadic by default. That world, while having "magic", is still dedicatedly realistic and elaborate, you do need to check it out!

The MOVIE Mortal Engines!? This is book erasure

Fascinating. Watch this space.

And then there's the insanity that is the Great Spirit robot from the Bionicle franchise: a million foot tall robot that contains within it islands and cities populated by cybernetic species. It's both awesome and insane all at once.

I love that the base unit for this video is "order of magnitude".

I could see it being common on ring worlds were the terrain is usually flat. probably wouldn't be a city though but a collection of buildings each on their own platform.

Great! My topic suggestion materialized to a video

>Walking cities Barely begun to watch the video. The only close examples I cam remember are Macross series's ships, mainly the SDF-1 Macross with the city inside of the gigantic giant robot/ship.