Universe 25, 1968–1973 (2022)

https://www.the-scientist.com/foundations/universe-25-1968-1973-69941

by firstSpeaker • 4 years ago

71 29 4 years ago

There are 2 kinds of people. Those who have discovered universe 25 and those who have not. Once you do however, there’s no going back.

082349872349872• 4 years ago

TIL why Carousel happens at 30 in the world of Logan's Run.

firstSpeaker• 4 years ago

Are there any more recent, more deeply analysed studies like this?

dmix2• 4 years ago

I checked Wikipedia and there doesn't seem to be any recent IRL studies on crowding. There was one study [1] in the 1970s that tried to see if over-crowding affected humans similarly. The study found that humans social ability allowed them to cope and organize, avoiding the negative effects. So people probably didn't really see a strong need to continue studying it since it didn't translate well to human social issues.

I'd imagine if you wanted to study crowding and the effects of excessive unwanted social interaction (minus the moral issues of killing mice or recruiting humans), you could study some over crowded prisons.

[1] https://nihrecord.nih.gov/sites/recordNIH/files/pdf/2008/NIH...

Aperocky2• 4 years ago

Others turned to the laboratory. The psychologist Jonathan Freedman recruited high school and university students to carry out a series of experiments that measured the effects of density on behavior. He measured their stress, discomfort, aggression, competitiveness and general unpleasantness. When he declared to have found no appreciative negative effects in 1975, the tide began to turn on Calhoun’s utopia.

This is the only paragraph I was found in reference, and I find the reasoning extremely weak.

Calhouns mice are a generational study, the human study obviously did not involve nearly as much time, and it's doubtful whether the space are as crowded as the mice study was.

Submariners have well documented health issues and recuperation after spending long period of time on cramped spaces, and a submarine is arguably more spacious than what the mice have been subjected to. Not to mention the simple fact that nobody (hopefully) had to start a family on a submarine, or a prison per replied comment.

Conducting similar study in humans is impossible given the obvious cruelty and ethic concerns, but if I have to guess the outcome are going to be no better than the mice study.

carapace7• 4 years ago

I saw a documentary about Kowloon Walled City. It was nightmarish.

Kowloon Walled City was an ungoverned and densely populated de jure Imperial Chinese enclave within the boundaries of Kowloon City, British Hong Kong. Originally a Chinese military fort, the walled city became an enclave after the New Territories were leased to the United Kingdom by China in 1898. Its population increased dramatically following the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong during World War II. By 1990, the walled city contained 50,000 residents[1] within its 2.6-hectare (6.4-acre) borders.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowloon_Walled_City

Fortunately, it was razed. There's a nice park there now. I sure am glad we're not mice!

Between Kowloon and the Yukon there's a sweet spot of population density. (Yukon is one of the least populated but still nice places on Earth. Fewer than ~45,000 people in ~450,000km².)

We have plenty of room on Earth. We could construct an artificial continent in the Pacific Ocean with a nice crinkly coastline and everyone could live at the beach.

jacquesm3• 4 years ago

We could construct an artificial continent in the Pacific Ocean with a nice crinkly coastline and everyone could live at the beach.

I'm from that crappy little country that makes islands for other countries: outside of the continental shelves I highly doubt that you could reclaim land unless you feel like living at the bottom of a very, very deep hole in the ocean and somehow I don't think that's the proposition that will get people enthusiastic. Plenty of visitors already freak out when they learn that NL is in many places more than 10 meters below sea level, and that's with relatively mild coastal weather. If you were to create a dike 100's of meters high (and where would you get the material without making the hole even deeper?) it will end up as something that would qualify as the biggest man made structure without the slightest competition, including the Great Wall.

This is engineering on a scale that is currently as far as I know impossible.

aliqot• 4 years ago

Curious how large a floating structure must be to defeat wave motion that threatens to pull it apart.

hungryforcodes2• 4 years ago

It looked really interesting actually. I'm sorry I never had the chance to go there.

carapace7• 4 years ago

It was nightmarish.

The scene that stayed with me the longest was a person working. She was in a space the size of a small closet. There was a small pot of soupy dough and three hot plates. She scooped dough and poured it on the plates. When they were cooked she removed them and put them on a stack. Then she did it again. The narrator said she worked like that for fourteen hours every day, making mu shu pancakes for the restaurants in the city (Hong Kong.) That was it. That was her whole life. Slaving like a robot.

It's good that they destroyed it.

optimalsolver• 4 years ago

*in mice.

plibither8• 4 years ago

Fredrik Knudsen did an amazing video on the "Mouse Utopia Experiments": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgGLFozNM2o

dang• 4 years ago

Related. Others?

1960s Mouse Utopias Led to Grim Predictions for Future of Humanity (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28572253 - Sept 2021 (49 comments)

What Was the Mouse Utopia? (2017) [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21366270 - Oct 2019 (6 comments)

The Doomed Mouse Utopia That Inspired the 'Rats of NIMH' - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12504271 - Sept 2016 (103 comments)

machina_ex_deus• 4 years ago

Any modern replication? With all the replication crisis everywhere, and this research being extremely narrativistic, are there any modern experiments affirming these conclusions?

It literally ran once and in the same environment, and only the last findings were taken? How do we know it's not just some specific genetic defect that propagated? Did they reintroduce new genes into the gene pool? Some other failure of the experiment? There wasn't even a control group in this entire thing, it's closer to a bedtime story than science.

I'm extremely cautious about making broad assumptions with so little data.

_dain_• 4 years ago

Nope, and the "Universe 25" label should make you immediately suspicious about what happened in Universes 1-24. Those never got published.

Gwern did some investigation into it:

https://www.gwern.net/Mouse-Utopia

As far as I'm concerned the whole thing amounts to fraud.

chris_st• 4 years ago

The interesting experiment to compare this to is the Rat Park[0].

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park

Universe 25, 1968–1973 (2022)

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