Legion World Forums LEGION CLUBHOUSE The Legion of Super-Heroes 31st Century Metropolis

I have some questions about the Metropolis of the Legion's time. I assume the city doesn't cover the whole planet (like some cities in Star Wars) because there are still references to regions such as Japan and the Ivory Coast. But I have also heard it covers a good chunk of the the US east coast. To me that seems impractical, because it would eliminate a good deal of arable land and natural resources. It would make Earth really susceptible to bribery and blackmail by planets that are primarily rural, such as Winath and Mardru.

So how big is Metropolis per any Who's Who/Encyclopedias/etc? Was a map ever produced of it?

Do you personally think having planets as primarily urban is a good or bad idea? I think it is really bad because it creates siege warfare in space. All invading forces would have to do is cut supply lines and the nation would eventually collapse. The video game Stellaris paints a bleak picture of rapid depopulation after an empire falls apart and the capital city-planet has no food (It's listed in the Precursor events on the official wiki if you care to read).

I think in Levitz Era, it was stated that Metropolis took up much of the Eastern seaboard of the U.S., while much of the interior of the U.S. had been depopulated, and reclaimed by nature.

Here is the Metropolis map from #6 of the 7 issue Who's Who in the Legion circa 1988.
[img]https://imgur.com/a/gx5H1e4[/img]

(uh oh. How do I get the image to display instead of just the link?)

The same map but with additional notes was published LSH v2 #313.

Based on that map Wikipedia says:

Entirely urban planets never made sense to me. Colu's the worst offender for this - some versions show the planet entirely urbanized. (They had natural sectors in the reboot.) It just seems like an awful way to live, not to mention the dependency, as Emily points out, on other planets for resources. In Klar Ken's Young Legion, there's Coluan nutritive paste, so maybe these heavily urbanized planets just manufacture food. We've seen parks in 30th/31st century Metropolis, but I don't recall if Central Park has ever been shown to have survived intact.

The idea of having a de-urbanized middle America is interesting. Curated as a national park or just left to rewild?

I'm not sure the food problem is necessarily that bad for urban planets, between synthetic meat and urban gardens, plus if it's just the land that's urbanized, oceans can provide vast amounts of food. I agree that's it's not particularly appealing to me as a place to live, however.

Also, even if they are dependent on more fertile planets for food, that's not necessarily a bad thing. That's just economic specialization and trade. If they had to depend on hostile planets, that might be a bad thing, and it does create a danger of the planet being somehow cut off from the food supply, but that's just true of cities generally, whether they are planet-wide or not.

I used to find the idea of de-urbanized middle America intriguing, but these days it just strikes me as a bit of coastal elitism. "Hey, let's just turn all the 'flyover' states into nature reserves! There's nothing important there anyway!"

On the subject of super-urbanized planets:

In 4O’s and ‘5O’s science fiction, the planetwide-city was often the ideal, the apex of Galactic Civilization. (See Planet Terminus in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series)

It meant 1OO% control of the environment, weather, plants, animals, etc. etc. And human control of everything was considered good.

In more 6O’s and 7O’s sci-fi, the ultracity is seen as evidence of dystopia: the oppressed masses crowded into nasty, filthy living conditions. (see Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?)

There is a modern movement in sci-fi (can’t think of an example, really) to imagine a pastoral paradise, where through ‘green’ technology, humans live “at one” with nature-- kind of a return to the ancient Greek pastoral ideal. De-urbanization, as you say.

The problem with de-urbanization is the required low level of population density. We would be talking only a few hundred million inhabitants at most, for a Pastoral Planet to work, whereas somewhere in the Legion canon the Earth’s population is said to be around 100 billion-- and Metropolis alone would have a population at least as great as all of present-day Earth.

The problem with both of these models is that they assume as an axiom that Humans (or other sentients) are the only inhabitants of the Earth that matter. Although to an extent, this actually is pretty much the case today:

XKCD1338

No answers. Only questions. -- The Alan Parsons Project

On Colu, the technology is only on the crust. The hollow inside of the planet is lit by an artificial sun. There, the Coluan party people play.

I was trying to remember the name of the planet from the Foundation series earlier!

By 'synthetic meat', do you mean stuff similar to tofu or food created via cloning?



I assume Colu has a low birth rate because they seem to follow the Space-Elf formula, in which long life spans lead to low reproduction. It would make sense for them to automate a lot of their production to compensate for their smaller workforce.

Meat grown independently of an organism. As Winston Churchill once said: "We shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium." He was predicting we'd do this by the 1980s.

In the "second book" of the Foundation "Trilogy" (actually the sixth original short story) The Mule, it is noted the huge number of ships required continually to shuttle between the farm worlds and Trantor just to feed it daily. As the Empire collapsed, Emperor's focus shifted more and more to just keeping this lifeline going.

Later prelude books shifted this emphasis and to some extent contradicted the earlier books with huge fish farms in the remaining oceans and enormous yeast farms that provided the bulk of the planet's food requirements.

30th Century Earth, while much more urbanised and populated than our current planet is a long way from this imagined world.

Edit: Corrected Terminus to Trantor. Trantor is the capital of the empire with the world-globing city. Terminus is the newly colonised planet that becomes the centre of the Foundation.

I assume that the average citizens of mega-cities (and planets that are massive urban sprawls) are eating 90% some sort of CHON(P) synth-mush made from Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen and Nitrogen, with assorted flavors and nutrients and textures and colors added at the point of delivery (even if that 'point of delivery' is the food extruder in your kitchen). It's mostly free, although anything beyond a few basic textures and colors and flavors costs extra to A) buy the 'recipe' to teach your food-maker and B) provide the spices and materials to do anything beyond those basic flavor options. (There's a black market in hacked recipe programs, or used fooders that already know a bunch of recipes, with families handing them down, in a manner oddly reminiscent of people in the past handing down recipe books.) The technology should be mature enough by the 30th century that someone from the 20th century who was visiting would have no idea that the synthesized CHON 'mush' he was eating was not *actually* the 'beef stroganoff' it was called, because it would have all the proper tastes and textures and appearances. 'Foodies' would claim to be able to tell the difference, but, like wine tasters, would utterly fail to tell the difference in blind taste tests.

The other 10% of the time, you are buying vat-grown meat or mass-produced vegetables, perhaps even imported from somewhere like Winath, and paying a premium for such fancy foods.

The decadent (and able to afford it) would refuse to eat synth-food, and only eat the 'real stuff,' and even splurge and spent way, way extra for black market food, like *actual* meat from (no longer) living animals, shipped from planets where the hunting of such is still allowed. Many worlds would also have some local cultures that are allowed carefully regulated hunting, 'for cultural reasons,' and less-than-ethical folk would divert some of this 'culturally hunted' meat to the local black market... I could see someone like Leland McCauley taking a perverse glee in eating animal meat, not because it tastes any better than the vat-grown stuff (or even synthetic protein with the appropriate flavor and texture treatments), but just because it's so darned A) illegal, and B) expensive.

All the elements necessary for synthetic food are ridiculously common. The Carbon and the various trace elements (like Potassium) would be the 'hardest' to acquire, and even those can be gathered by plankton or yeast or some bacteria, in vast vats, or open drifts on the seas (or lakes given over to that purpose, in their entirety!). We could start doing this sort of thing today, but it wouldn't be cost-effective. In 1000 years? It will be a heck of a lot more so, and cheaper by far than trying to grow enough animals or plants to feed tens of billions of us. Eventually, we'll probably end up importing a lot of hydrogen from Jupiter, which will be kind of ironic, shipping raw elements *to make into food,* rather than actually shipping food itself (which would still be way more expensive, because raw hydrogen never 'spoils' and Jupiter is a hell of a lot closer than Winath.

The Tenzil Kem Archeology Foundation uncovered a World War VII bunker outside Metropolis. Inside he found the registration documents confirming CHON(P) was the new name for ... Soylent.

It's the reason why Tenzil hasn't been recent volumes.

^^ (This applies to both the posts above mine). On Stellaris sites there is a general hypothesis that the biological lifeforms being "pampered" by Rogue Servitor robot farms are being fed that.

Come to think of it, the DCU would be the perfect universe for AI Empires. There are so many living batteries they could actually make a Matrix scenario work (I play around with this in my Earth-S stories). Aside from Colu, I struggle to think of existing AI powers. Is there any I am forgetting?

Robotica.

Lisnar is kind of a reverse-AI empire, where the sentient machines are exploited by the biologicals.

Grenda (Home of the Green Lantern Stel

I think the Manhunters had some kind of hidden world, after they escaped the guardians.

Bismoll had a near miss, almost being taken over by the Computer Tyrants. (Legion of Substitute Heroes Special #1. Some may not consider this canon. On the other hand Renkil Kem, Tenzil's little brother, has some mad computer skills.)

I'm sure there are more.

31st century Metropolis is likely underestimated in scope. If you look at the night time photos of the US from space, it looks like it goes from Boston to Atlanta in our time, with a little patch of dark in West Virginia. You might even say it would cover the eastern third of the country.

Of course, there's always the unwritten disaster in the in-between years that could explain why Metropolis doesn't extend even further.

Evidence of the use of synthetic meat in the Legion's era.