How Can 2 Trillion People Survive on a Concrete Planet?

[@GenerationTech]

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[@fidgeysrii4888]

Honestly I'm disappointed by you Allan for showing solidarity with the state of Israel (Instead of all Jewish and Palestinian people affected by this horrific Crisis) after everything that has unfolded. I do not question the right of Israel to go after Hamas in !surgical! strikes akin to Operation Neptune Spear, but what we see is something completly different. Something that many historians and Genocide experts like Raz Segal say is a Genocide of the Palestinian people. I am against all forms of antisemitism, I spoke up when Charlotsville happend and Neo-N*zis chanted "The J*ws will not replace us", I spoke up when Kanye West said his BS and people in the US started putting up antisemitic banners on highways. Just like those cases I will call out when there is a clear case of Islamophobia and the STATE OF ISREAL (not Jewish people overall) is full of Islamophobia, I could quote Yoav Gallant or many other members of the Likud party here to show this point, but I ultimately wanted to asked why you felt compelled to show the Israeli flag instead of just the star of david if you wanted to show solidarity with the jewish people. I know big KZbinrs will never respond to comments like these but I wish I could have a friendly disscusion with you about a topic like this.

[@edmundprice5276]

What if each level of the planet is individually pressurised? But, 1 trillion people, assuming that they are all warm blooded like humans must produce a lot of body heat, 97,692,000kw of heat For reference, according to the national grid the current electrical consumption of the United Kingdom as of the 23/11/2023 at 7:12PM is 40000000kw In other words, the body heat of 1 trillion humans alone could power the United Kingdom 2.4 times over Im not sure my concern would be heating, i would think my concern would be for cooling

[@sellotape06]

How does coruscant cope with earthquakes

[@Novusod]

They probably did something like the plot to Spaceballs where they stole the entire atmosphere of another planet.

[@spikedpsycho2383]

First Coruscant population is one trillion, not 2 Second, using Brooklyn's population density and average building size, A population of 1 trillion can live on an area the size of russia And Africa, with of space for parks, gardens and oceans. Using Manhattan as example 1 trillion can fit on Russia alone.

[@Scottington666]

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.

[@ion_force]

the whole planet is one big cope.

[@davidmartensson273]

Similar to William Gibsons Neuromances. He describes it that he wrote it as a dysfunctional future society and the collective technology sector reacted with "what a visionary" and set about to make it a reality :D

[@Jiub_SN]

The fans overcompkicate it. Breathable air? Scrubbers. Food? Hydroponics and imports. Water? Waste recycling. Structural integrity? Automated droids. It isn't that crazy lmao

[@Jiub_SN]

@@ion_forceyou sound like a guy who wears sandals and doesn't shave properly

[@davidmartensson273]

@@Jiub_SN Sure we overcomplicate things, and are having a blast doing it :D

[@Swonestone]

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.

[@shadowfox009x]

And most planets have only one continent and one climate zone. But how planets without plants (looking at you Coruscant, Tatooine and Kamino) have a breathable atmosphere is fascinating.

[@TheAncientAstronomer]

​@@shadowfox009xWe shouldn't forget for a great part of earth's history, there was only one continent and more or less one climatic zone. So what's portrayed in Star Wars isn't so far fetched.

[@HSCrimson]

​@@shadowfox009xKamino almost certainly has microorganisms like plankton (specifically phytoplankton) or algae that creates oxygen. Most oxygen on earth comes from oceanic sources

[@HSCrimson]

​@@shadowfox009xAlso, tatooine has enough plants or photosynthetic organisms to support herds of bantha, so there must be enough plants or plant-like organisms to create oxygen as well

[@mr.boomguy]

​@shadowfox009x I can kindof forgive the lack of diversity on these planets to overwhelming world building. Like at this point, it's no longer about being lazy, it's about being effecient. How can you write a world as diverse as ours and ever release 1, little lone 2 planets within a reasonable time frame

[@ItsAVolcano]

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.

[@MrJol420]

Theres levels though theres a jungle at the bottom level

[@mr.boomguy]

The only thing keeping Corosant in power and as rhe repuplics capital is the illion of control. If or when that illution is broken, they're on their own, and they will struggle

[@demonic_myst4503]

A jungle under a city ukm nothing will grow only logical answer its artificial not a real jungle

[@carthienesdevilsadvocatenr2806]

...And Sewage. Which is often mistaken for the Government Legislation.

[@canisblack]

@@carthienesdevilsadvocatenr2806 No it isn't. Nobody could mistake sewage for legislation. The sewage could never be that bad.

[@QuantumAscension1]

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.

[@davidmartensson273]

On the other hand, pressure in the depths would still build unless you have some solution. But also, divers handle high pressure regularly so the body can obviously handle it, just don't take a fast elevator from the bottom to the top or you get diving sickness ;)

[@sciencecompliance235]

The spaces on the lower levels would still be mostly air. Unlike a ship, which (ideally) is not permeable to water, the levels of Coruscant would be permeable to air. For the spaces to function as spaces, the vast majority of the volume would still be air. Displacement of air would be fairly small.

[@Walkdplankfrank]

What you call magic is just what you call science just way better

[@declan7797]

Also what's to say they didn't dig down as well? The crust is like 30-70km thick in places on earth, so maybe they strip mined for resources so actually they are not as high up more low down?

[@ryantolliver1643]

Sorry to burst your bubble, but the pressure at a given altitude is not dependent on the available space. The formula is as follows: Pressure at a given altitude = surface pressure * [1 - (6.87535*10^-6 * altitude)]^5.2561 As you can clearly see, the altitude at a given altitude only depends on the surface pressure and the given altitude.

[@mr.boomguy]

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

[@ItsAVolcano]

Massive construction droids, about the size of real life modern skyscrapers, are constantly wandering the city planet rebuilding blocks at a time.

[@AreUmygrandson]

In one of the book series, I believe “the new Jedi academy” Han and leia’s twins end up down in the sub levels and it’s describing pretty well. Han and Kip Durran go skiing at the poles with jet skies too

[@Tinynuggins-je9ji]

Forget about corrosion or rust. I wanna know how it hasn't collapsed from the compressive stress of buildings that size.

[@michaelwanamaker9829]

@@Tinynuggins-je9ji You're making the assumption that it hasn't, and that they didn't just build atop the ruins after gluing it together with more duracrere....

[@Tinynuggins-je9ji]

@@michaelwanamaker9829 Fair enough.

[@thesatiratician7903]

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.

[@RealBadGaming52]

U should look up 40K Adeptes mechanicus faction , they mention and worship and prey to all the technology like Ships and comouters and atuff, look it up

[@DamonNomad82]

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.

[@BrotherCaptain36]

Common misconception, the problem with holding your breath is CO2 buildup. He must have had a more resistance to CO2 poisoning.

[@Cecilia-ky3uw]

@@BrotherCaptain36 There is CO2 buildup that affects your mental reaction, but low oxygen levels are still a major factor as otherwise you'd faint(I cite the suicide bag and how you've already fainted by the second breath in it.

[@BrotherCaptain36]

@@Cecilia-ky3uw The trick with the Sewer-Slide bag is the helium, it reacts with the lungs in the same way as oxygen but not in an aerobic way. That way you pass out from low O2 without dealing with the effects of CO2 poisoning, you effectively remove carbon dioxide from the equation. I'm surprised YT even let you bring up that example, usually you get the banhammer.

[@vision-of-dog]

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.

[@smartass0124]

What about tattooween or mostifar

[@Blueee51]

​@smartass0124 what about them?

[@tamorcetold]

​@@smartass0124We're talking about overall air pressure, not oxygen content. It's possible that Tatooine evolved a species of microorganisms living in the sand that constantly absorb carbon and produce oxygen, sort of like algae. It's not Earth, meaning life could have evolved completely differently on Tatooine for this to be the case. The same theory could also explain Mustafar, with microorganisms adapted to heat and dehydration that constantly keep oxygen levels livable. This is just my head canon though. Please don't take it as gospel.

[@MonkeyJedi99]

The air pressure at the lowest under-levels must be deadly to humans (and many of the races we see in the various media).

[@Armageist]

Yeah if they are indeed at that Altitude at Surface level, there's no way they DON'T have a thicker atmosphere. The amount of mass added to the planet is staggering. Now granted, they probably built a lot of it out of the planet itself, which is a zero sum total. But let's say they built completely on top of the existing crust. The Planet is supposedly 12,240 km in Diameter, with the cityscape evidently. That's less than Earth's 12,742 km. If there are 5217 levels (not including the skyscrapers built with their bases on lvl 5217, and say each level is 14ft high (avg "room" height for buildings). That means lvl 5217 is 73,038 ft high, or 22.3 km. Now, let's say all of that is concrete. Granted they'll be huge chasms and porus allies and what not. But for now, all of that 5217 is concrete (or duracrete). Concrete weighs 150 lbs per ft³. If we were to cover the entire surface area of the Earth (549,000,000,000,000,000 ft²) in 73,038 ft high of Concrete, the weight of the concrete a lone would be ~1,515,699,183,599,999,800,000 tons. Earth itself weighs: 6,584,999,999,999,999,740,000 tons That's roughly 1/4 the weight of Earth, and ~30 times the weight of the Moon: (49,999,999,999,999,991,808 tons) Of course, it's not solid concrete, so maybe a quarter of that weight? That's still 7 times the weight of the Moon... That would definitely add Mass/Gravity to the Planet to increase the density of the atmosphere.

[@dianabarnett6886]

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.

[@jamesgravil9162]

At this point, you wonder why they haven't built a planetary ring for people to live on, like in Arthur C. Clarke's "3001." You could easily fit the population of two or three Coruscants on a planetary ring, and as a completely artificial environment it would probably be easier to manage. Also, it's not like other worlds in the Star Wars galaxy don't have artificial rings - Kuat for example.

[@papapalps2415]

​@@jamesgravil9162Likely the reason almost every civilization in popular fiction doesn't do so, even if it's within their abilities. There's likely a unsurprising cultural bias for planets over artificial structures.

[@Mintis-bh4rr]

do not look up Blame! megastructure

[@michaeledwards2251]

Justified : if a human being from 100,000 years ago was suddenly transported across time to today, they feel shocked at the scale of modern cities, their engineering and logistics. Growing up within it, it is barely noticed.

[@mikiroony]

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.

[@samuelchallis3420]

And Trantor isn’t nearly as densely populated, in the books at least. Though the show pretty much just made it look like Coruscant

[@JohnGeorgeBauerBuis]

Yes, many agriworlds like Lothal and Dantooine produce food for export, and planets such as Sarapin provide energy. Sarapin alone exported up to 80% of the energy for the Core worlds.

[@davidmartensson273]

@@samuelchallis3420 yes, they actually state that the surface is only one of a few hundred meters above normal ground level, but that the city has dug deep down for heat and resources and more. But it never says its that deep all over. Couroscant hints at having the surface much higher. But its also possible that not all coruscants surface is that high, but rather that important districts congregated around the mountains to rise above the heavier atmosphere and pollution and that the industrial areas could be a lot lower. I know the planet looks flat from orbit BUT that is true for earth also from that height. I think I have heard that if you shrunk the earth down to the size of a snooker ball, earth would be orders of magnitudes more smooth than the snooker ball :P So even if the industrial areas are thousands of meters lower than city centers, the planet would still look like a flat city surface from orbit.

[@michaelsolomon3496]

​@@davidmartensson273 That's honestly fascinating

[@mikeg5025]

First thought when I saw the title, Foundation has already covered this

[@Brazbit]

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.

[@kadenstimpson3167]

I've always wondered how a planet-wide city could maintain constant density across all of its surface. There have to be at least a few areas that are less populated, and i would really love to see if there are any major parks or green spaces on Coruscant

[@Wi-Fi-El]

The only big issue is that 2-3 trillion people would barely fill one level of Coruscant. You'd need 2-3 quadrillion people just to reach the low end of population density for a city

[@MonkeyJedi99]

Coruscant is space Rome (during the height of the Roman Empire). Neither could survive without continuous import of wealth, labor, and resources like food & water.

[@DeathBYDesign666]

​@@Wi-Fi-ElThat is true! The couple trillion mark is so low that each person could have a potential entire cubic kilometer to themselves in the actual amount of livable space available. Terra in 40k for instance does have quadrillions of people and they are only half as old and not nearly as deep down into the crust of the planet. In fact the entire crust and mantle have become part of the structure at this point. This is hive city on top of hive city on top of hive city hundreds of times over. There are questions of gravitational stability, let alone structural stability in this mega structure as well so lots of things don't make sense.

[@GoranXII]

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.

[@eggos5074]

also earth has a less land mass vice coruscant which most oceans are gone so density is effected.

[@pinecactus9672]

When you out it that way it feels like coruscant is actually pretty empty.

[@Alexander_Kale]

Considering how Star Wars Engineers have found a way to create a glowing immaterial blade that can both cut through tank steel AND not melt the wielder's face off, I do not think waste heat is ever going to be a problem for these people....

[@STS232323]

their parking lots are probably way bigger than ours, so thats a little bit of extra space they need lol. Imagine if earth had 2 trillion people, but half of them needed somewhere to park their intergalactic spaceship. you also have to account for the fact that its the galactic capitol. paris has a population of 12m, but gets 38m visitors every year. at any given moment there will be probably be hundreds of billions or so offworlders just visiting coruscant for work or leisure.

[@GoranXII]

@@STS232323 Parking happens on top of buildings. As for tourism, Macau got 39.4M visitors in 2019, and has a native population of less than 700K. So yeah, neither of those are factors. Oh, and speaking of transport, Macau and Monaco need roads, which take up space (most are open to the sky, rather than buried, so that land is _only_ used for roads), while Coruscant doesn't. Macau _also_ manages to squeeze in some parks, which are another place buildings don't exist, and which Coruscant doesn't seem to have in any real quantity. So again, the issue is not that Coruscant is overcrowded, but that it's not really crowded _enough_ to justify the level of development it has.

[@wipplewopple1876]

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.

[@ckl9390]

Sort of like the catacombs below Paris. As the city was built up the quarries below it also became another living level. The double Everest depth sub-levels could also be explained by oceans being drained away, more like consumed, down to that depth and the remaining abyssal trench depths act more like aquifers now. That also presents the question of if there are still hydrothermal vents in the deepest parts of the remaining covered oceans with tube worms who haven't been impacted significantly by what happened to the rest of the planet.

[@onlypeaceindeath]

That's not a theory. It's based on the canceled game 1313 and the promoting Clone Wars episode, which introduces the existence of thousands of indivudual city-levels, each heavily populated and covered in different types of structures. Coruscant is basically city all the way to the core of the planet. We're most likely talking about a population in the hundreds of quadrillions or even a bit more, even if we assume that half the planet is uninhabitable.

[@darwinskeeper421]

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.

[@nerysghemor5781]

Yep. Warhammer 40K goes into this as well with Forge Worlds, Holy Terra, and other roads, though in the grim darkness of the 41st Millennium, they outright state that if the supply from Agriworlds and other support worlds stops, these worlds are potentially screwed, and whole worlds DO get lost in that universe due to things like that. Pretty much if a consequence CAN occur in 40K, it will somewhere.

[@johnt3606]

I also assume the planet would rely a lot on imports, and any space blockade would be absolutely disastrous

[@gamer1X12]

It's a miracle a severe earthquake hasn't collapsed the lower levels and ruined life on Coruscant. seriously unless they've got some Star Wars Technology™️ that neutralizes volcanoes and tectonic plates (which itself would cause problems) it is a stroke of divine luck that in thousands of years, a sudden eruption or earthquake hasn't caused the instant collapse of a lower level.

[@tylersoto7465]

Exactly having too many eggs in one basket lol

[@papapalps2415]

But this is...literally the case with real life, as well? Surely you, as an engineer, realize this, right? Literally every modern city in existence is cripplingly dependant on outside factors to survive, namely food. All of our current civilization is shockingly fragile and vulnerable. All of the aforementioned factors you brought up just as easily apply to, say, New York, or Tokyo, or whatever. It doesn't take very much going very wrong for very long for things to go very badly.

[@followerofthemantle3489]

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.

[@nicoleg2544]

When you ask the average New Yorker where food comes from, they say “The store, duh,” and when you ask them where the store gets it they just look at you with that blue-screen-of-death, short-circuit, press-and-hold-to-restart look in their eyes. The average city dweller has absolutely zero understanding of what a supply chain even IS, never mind how it operates.

[@mithrillis]

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.

[@tbotalpha8133]

Yeah, at the scale of an entire planet, you have to start treating Coruscant like a spherical space-ship. And just like a spaceship, it would need some kind of heat radiator system to dump the VAST quantities of waste heat it's producing out into space. Either that, or some kind of sci-fi technobabble handwave, like dumping heat into some kind heat-sink that just... erases the energy, somehow. Star Wars already defies our laws of physics in many ways - a heat management system that breaks the laws of thermodynamics would hardly be that weird.

[@SofaMuncher]

You're spot on. There have been many theories about how many people earth could support. Pretty much all systems could be scaled up to support literally quadrillions of people, but waste heat is the ultimate limiting factor. Capping out at most in the hundred trillion range.

[@carlosdgutierrez6570]

Move the planet to a higher orbit, further from the sun to reduce the incoming solar heat and allow for natural cooling to do the job. If you move the planet far away from the sun the natural cooling can do most of the job and given Star wars technology they certainly have the tech to slowly move the planet.

[@7177YT]

I was going to make this comment. Spot on they need a humongous heat sink to make this remotely possible. (:

[@michaeledwards2251]

@@carlosdgutierrez6570 Given a population of only 1 trillion would demand each m2, of the 100 m2 per person, would have to lose an Kw, moving further away from the sun would only reduce, not solve the problem.

[@chrisbonner3368]

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

[@smartass0124]

What about tattooween or mostifar . Maybe species including the humans breathe co2

[@hirotashi]

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 their fresh food every single day is staggering. And all I would like is a little appreciation. Thank you Alan for mentioning it.

[@garyoak9649]

Everybody wants thanks for there job get over yourself

[@michaeledwards2251]

@@garyoak9649 Not every job is essential to every day survival

[@zacharythomas8617]

As a Gas Station CSR, management is so hard to come by. Thank you.

[@Thrashman-ye4cf]

Some people do appreciate you guys, I do

[@Thrashman-ye4cf]

@@garyoak9649cool guy alert

[@raymondalexander1662]

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.

[@seanryan9403]

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

[@osasunaitor]

Same!

[@Ptaaruonn]

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

[@AskMia411]

I had the same thought at the beginning of the video, but i think I might have the answer? Despite there not being a lot of plant life, the sheer amount of people on the planet, along with whatever pets they have, means courasant is still full of life. I’d imagine that a lot of people would have plants in their homes, either as a hobby or as decoration. I also imagine that the unused lower levels and actual planet surface have plant and animal species that adapted to live in those conditions. The Hawk bats were mentioned in the video, so it’s not too far fetched to think other species figured out how to survive down there. Still not an ideal world for the Jedi, but perhaps not as bad as it seems on first glance.

[@Ptaaruonn]

@@AskMia411 Well, yes, life finds a way and all, but damn, I personally would hate to live in Coruscant.

[@shanenolan5625]

The jedi temple is a force nexus . ( built on top )

[@AskMia411]

@@Ptaaruonn Oh I absolutely agree I hate being in a big city. Courasant would be a hard place for me to live. It’d be cool to go see live performances there, I bet the tourist are areas were amazing, but I wouldn’t want to stay there for long. I imagine it’s like New York in that way? But yeah, I’d much prefer a less crowded, more vibrant world if I lived in the SW Galaxy. I was going to say the “life finds a way” line in my previous post but I didn’t have a good place for it 😅 Given how much detail most worlds have in SW, I think an exploration of the species that live in the lowest levels would be a fascinating addition to the lore!

[@CHRF-55457]

Thats kinda part of the reason why order 66 happened. Jedi being too unbalanced with the nature/light side of the force

[@fredmacvenn8525]

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

[@aprotosis]

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?

[@MrJol420]

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

[@qurterx7]

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.

[@MadnessQuotient]

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.

[@michaeledwards2251]

High tech solutions simply wouldn't be reliable over millennia. All solutions have to (a) simple (b) maintenance driven by self interest.

[@tylerreed610]

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

[@Tamamo-no-Bae]

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.

[@thegreenmanofnorwich]

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

[@michaeledwards2251]

Not given the way it would be constructed. Purchase of airspace. Initially just the surface. A new surface built 200 levels up to make a new surface. 5000 human levels, 25 superlevel to house Skyscrapers.

[@sitfish1113]

The bottom levels are super dangerous and sparsely populated really

[@SharksSJ408]

A thousand times 2 trillion? Lol no. Do you have any idea how big that number is?

[@TDjerf]

​@SharksSJ408 asuming an earthlike planet 2 trillion would be about 255m2 per person per level. I think that i would be fair to assume that their architecture and relevant engineering are are roughly at the same relative level as every other tech. As such taking burj khalifas 200+ floors with 160 habitable levels should be low balling the average number of floors. 255*160/1000 would give about 40m2 of living area per person on average. Yeah, a thousand times 2 trillion does not seem as an absurd number for a galactic capital know as a super dense city wide planet.

[@michaeledwards2251]

@@TDjerf Heat is the barrier : Coruscant as described is a relatively low tech structure which evolved, not designed, into existence, driven by commercial pressure. Abandoned commercial plants, etc. Most of the structure is commercially extinct. (How the Jedi Temple had much of its lower levels covered up by random building, allowing hidden tunnels to other streets. ) Surface area equivalent to earth, radius 6400 km, Surface 4 pi radius squared. Surface area of 4 x pi x 4096 x 10^4 x 10^6 roughly 5 x 10^14 m2, a trillion is 10^12 giving 250 m2 per person for 2 trillion. Only by maintaining a constant air flow from the lower levels and from the equator poleward, can the planet stay within habitable limits.

[@Alverant]

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?

[@davidmartensson273]

Not necessarily. If its the same size as earth, the distance from the center to the surface if around 7000 km, and the distance from the surface to the highest mountain peek is 9 km. Now, I am unsure about how much of those structures that are just empty space but a lot of it is, just look at when big buildings are brought down with explosives, they take up only a few percent of the original size. So if we count high and say that 10 % is structure and 90 % is air (my guess is that air would be much more) then the extra material would only add 0.04 % to the total mass of the planet. Still a lot but not enough to significantly fling it out of orbit. It might very well have adjusted the orbit a bit, but with weather control that is most likely not a big problem :)

[@alaeriia01]

1:14 hey, it's the McLaren Technology Centre!

[@brianmoyachiuz905]

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

[@alkatron768]

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.

[@smartass0124]

What about tattooween or mostifar

[@alkatron768]

@@smartass0124 Tatooine used to be a lush forest planet before something happened. Anyway, there should be enough oxygen remaining in the atmosphere for a couple thousands of years, especially with that sparce of a population. Mustafar, I got no clue. But since we only get to see space wizards without protective suits there maybe there just isn't a breathable atmosphere?

[@smartass0124]

@@alkatron768 but how does still have oxygen when we see it it should have ran out

[@alkatron768]

@@smartass0124 Because oxygen doesn't just randomly disappear?

[@stephenwillis2751]

Didn't Padme have to have atmosphere to breathe though?@@alkatron768

[@richarddeese1087]

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.

[@papapalps2415]

I mean, Coruscant is also extremely dug into the ground in terms of urbanization. We know, per the old canon at least, that the planet is actually closer to a absolutely huge space station than anything else, because the cityscape supposedly extends all the way to close to the planets core.

[@Jackal19x]

Coruscant is, in some ways, more lore-rich than entire galaxies and fandoms' worth of fantasy and sci-fi combined; always been one of my favorite talking points. Glad you decided to dedicate this video on it.

[@justinweber4977]

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.

[@xGOKOPx]

"tribe of people who used to be Imperial Bureaucrats" sounds wild

[@captiannemo1587]

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

[@mr.boomguy]

I've been thinking, maybe the metal of the structures displaces enough air. But who knows really

[@ckl9390]

It's likely that more air simply has been imported from off world and the lower levels have Venus levels of crushing air pressure and pressure induced heat (like what happens in a diesel engine), that is except anywhere important which would be pressurised against that. Remember that a planet's mass is only one factor in air pressure. Venus is comparable in mass and size to Earth and yet it has ten's of times the atmospheric pressure because it simply has more mass of atmosphere. It is actually in Venus' stratosphere where there is a comparable heat and atmospheric pressure to Earth's, and except for the sulphuric acid clouds one could quite comfortably breathe and live there in open air cloud cities. Quite literally everything has been imported to Coruscant, including the atmosphere.

[@Zatarra69]

Assuming no space below ground is hollowed out and containing air, the pressure at the surface, despite its height above the core, would be normal. Keep in mind the Earth would be about as smooth as a cue ball if you shrank it down. Mt Everest is only high relative to the surface. Relative to the core, it’s basically the same as sea level. The only reason the air is thin is there’s so much space to fill below.

[@wakjagner]

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.

[@michaelsolomon3496]

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)

[@Vin.1904]

He said that the "ground level" is at level 5000+ which is 70k ft above the planet's ground level. And 70k ft = 20k m which is more than twice the height of the mount everest, highest point of the himalayan

[@merafirewing6591]

​@@Vin.1904 that means Mount Everest is buried underneath all that cityscape.

[@Vin.1904]

@@merafirewing6591 most likely

[@onlypeaceindeath]

Curscant is basically city all the way to the core if we go by the the cancelled game 1313 and the Clone Wars episode that promoted the game slightly. Coruscant is made up of 5000+ city levels, with the lowest being situated right above the core of the planet. The population would be astronomically higher than a few trillions of people.

[@papapalps2415]

Terra 'dwarfing' Coruscant is absurd; there's no real particular reason to believe that. I will also note that the Imperial 'Palace' in 40k, as neat as it is and as much as people drool over its scale, is something of a misnomer; the Palace as such isn't actually a palace, as in, a single, continuous building like 99% of people think. It's instead basically a hive city, for all intents and purposes, with countless different structures and such. The actual 'palace' structure would be the Sanctum Imperalis, which, while massive, is nowhere near that size.

[@rckoala8838]

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.

[@Xo-3130]

Skyscraper sized Droids.

[@davidmartensson273]

@@Xo-3130 And fusion furnaces that break down any garbage to loose atoms that are then separated and purified for reuse.

[@CalebHurely-bo6ff]

Humans can survive in massive air pressure differences. So living under miles of air isn’t so much of a problem as long as you come up slowly. The lower levels would be very dense air but that really isn’t a problem for most humans.

[@Ozzy08018]

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.

[@Player-pj9kt]

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

[@marvincool3744]

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

[@Gyj-s1l9479]

I love how your curiosity turns into videos like this.

[@thalmoragent9344]

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.

[@AaravYatgiri]

The Star Wars galaxy is roughly type 3 on the Kardashev scale. This means that they have almost full control over their galaxy and its recourses. I would imagine that having full control over a planet would be light work for them.

[@samr.england613]

I would say that everything you imagine is total fiction and fantasy. There's no science in, 'Star Wars'. For example, when Han Solo tells Chewbaca to, "Check the power couplings on the hyperdrive", it means ABSOLUTELY NOTHING! And if we could travel at, "lightspeed" from point A to point B, time dilation would rule out ever seeing again anyone we left behind, or would meet at the end of our relativistic journey. Get real.

[@johnnyanderson2-roblox185]

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.

[@jiffypoo5029]

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.

[@christophercripps7639]

I think the number was 73,000 feet. This is 13.8 miles or approximately 0.35% of Earth’s radius. With volume increasing at the cube of the radius Earth’s surface would enclose 1% more volume with 13.8 miles of stuff enclosing the natural surface. However, the weight of all that duracrete would crush the crust some the way glaciers did during the ice age. In fact parts of the crust in the Great Lakes region are still “rebounding.”

[@israelignaciomirelesmaria3009]

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

[@SgtJohnRemairez]

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?

[@krisstopher8259]

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)

[@Ak5h1t]

Freakin awesome buddy ❤

[@krisstopher8259]

@@Ak5h1t i would need a team of 25 ppl to build all the CGI models lol

[@caspernilsson706]

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!

[@C.D.G.1]

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

[@Mc.Knight]

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 👍🏽

[@smartass0124]

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

[@LarryPhischman]

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.

[@byronthomas4733]

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

[@sgchoe4806]

I always love multi-level planetary cities. Coruscant from Star Wars, Trantor from Foundation, Neo Tokyo from Akira, Las Vegas in Blade Runner 2049.

[@jaysimpson1689]

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.

[@davidmartensson273]

Or space is not just vacuum in the Star wars universe, which would also explain why ships need to run the engines constantly to move forward instead of like in the Expance series only use small directional thrusters during combat.

[@sciencecompliance235]

Star Wars is a fantasy IP, despite having space and planets. It does not follow logic, but the thought experiment of a city planet is interesting, nonetheless.

[@_zokenyepu6831]

@@davidmartensson273I agree it would also explain why we hear ships in space because without air there’s no sound

[@Brinelious]

I really love the Coruscant lore, they could make a really great series in the mold of Andor that follows more "ordinary" citizens in the underworld with a very unique vibe and aethstetic.

[@billbassett887]

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.

[@llalaleina]

Yay I was hoping someone had already commented about independently sealed layers!

[@huoshewu]

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.

[@appo9357]

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

[@mygolfballsannoy]

And more Dredd police.. honest ones

[@WyFoster]

Or the Megabuildings from Cyberpunk

[@appo9357]

@@WyFoster I only know of Cyberpunk. Are those basically the same thing?

[@WyFoster]

@@appo9357 yes

[@ApocEllie]

Fun 40k fact. Mars in the 40st millennium is actually alot like Coruscant. Except the reason everyone lives on the surface is because they've nuked the entire surface several times and the "lower levels" (tbt it's most levels) are infested with insane murder robots! But there are archaeotech archeologists that still go down there to find old STCs and such.

[@benotar358]

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

[@paulmatts2015]

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.

[@alexcheetah79]

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

[@Paul-D-Hoff]

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

[@Amadeus8484]

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.

[@BigBass63]

As far i can remember in WarHammer 40K, Holy Terra is in the hundred of trillions to several quadrillions of souls living in and under her surface, from the deeps of the mantle to the highs off the Everest. "I am alone again now. Strange to say that, surrounded as I am by the quadrillions of the Throneworld, and yet it is truer now than it has ever been." The Emperor's Legion, Chapter 1, Tieron

[@stcredzero]

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.

[@davidmartensson273]

Agreed BUT the lore clearly states that the whole planet surface is a single city.

[@stcredzero]

@@davidmartensson273 Cities have parks which are large green spaces. Also, given that this is an interstellar spacefaring culture, with casual access to orbit, numerous "parks" hundreds of miles in diameter wouldn't pose any proportionally greater detours in transportation than Central Park posed to 20th century New Yorkers. So a Coruscant with lots of green space, composed of interconnected city clusters hundreds of miles in diameter, interspersed with "green spaces" hundreds of miles in diameter, could still qualify as a planet-wide city.

[@papapalps2415]

​@@stcredzeroI mean, we know parks and artifical natural areas do exist, to some extent, including a single small ocean kept for tourism and such, but nothing like what you are saying. Certainly nothing large enough to be visible from orbit, obviously.

[@snowstorm9310]

When the entire Galaxy is your playground, I don't need to ask questions about how an entire planet can be a city. The fact that you can travel from one system to another in a matter of hours, and transport seemingly infinite resources as long as you've got the space to maneuver Anything can work if they try hard enough.

[@theoriginalfloatingrumshack]

Brilliant! Loved this episode. Very cool.

[@jon6309]

It’s amazing how wealthy and important an entire planet could be where it was more efficient to utilize every inch of the planet for buildings and skyscrapers and just import food, water and other products from other planets that didn’t have such significance in comparison.

[@SolarinDay]

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

[@papapalps2415]

It would have to be a different kind of shield than a 'conventional' used against sieges and such, because we know that shield isn't kept on 24/7, or even close to it.

[@loyc12]

Fun fact: 2 trillion people spread evenly on earth’s 510 million square km gives you about 4000 people per square km (~ 1500 people per square mile), which is a normal density for a european city according to google. And this is if it were all on 1 single layer, which ut definitely is not in that case. We should be looking at rural-level population density, not a world sprawling city center… It’s funny how writer always extremely underestimate the measurements of a space empire (population, planet count, army size, etc). Coruscant should have in the quadrillions of people at the very least for it to look like it does. My headcannon is that astronomical measurements in star wars are much smaller (planets and distances). Would also explain all the one biome planets lol.

[@20th_century_Ghost]

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

[@ForestRaptor]

Good thought, but think about advancements we have had for quake prone areas.

[@Xo-3130]

In Legends there were things like this. Actually happened because the building foundations near the lower levels break down.

[@justinhart-nishikawa3105]

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

[@DeathBYDesign666]

I doubt the official nubers actually reflect the reality of this planet. You see the skylanes absolutely jam-packed at all times and those are mostly the rich people. You think about that, then you consider that there are thousands of levels below the surface and you can probably expect at oeast 100 times the official number. In Warhammer 40k their earth ecuminopolis has only been around half as long and has a population of quadrillions of people and doesn't have nearly as many sublevels. I think the 2 trillion mark is a very sparse population according to square footage per person.

[@papapalps2415]

Exactly. Thankfully, the 2 trillion can either be dismissed, due to said contradictions with the movies, or rationalized away (my preference is that the 2 trillion is simply referring to Imperial/Galactic City, which is specifically the part of Coruscant with most of the screen time, with places like the Senate and Temple districts, as well as the Imperial Palace and the like), which will naturally be less populated due to being Rich People Center TM.

[@1973Washu]

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.

[@worldtraveler930]

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

[@jarkoer]

8:45 Thank you for that. I work with food, and during the pandemic I was considered an "essential worker" and allowed to keep on working. I work my butt off to get those shelves stocked in a timely manner, but every day you get disrespected by managers wanting you to do the work of 3 people and by customers who think you're an uneducated slacker and who want their "precious" RIGHT NOW without any concept that some things may be out of stock or simply not carried. The average person on the street don't realize that there's a high employee turn-over rate. It doesn't matter how much is in stock in the back if a store doesn't have enough employees to keep the shelves stocked. And it takes time to hire a new person and get them trained to put things in the right spot so that some entitled Karen (or Ken) doesn't complain that the price on the shelf label doesn't match the item's actual price. For what's essentially an entry-level dead-end job, there's a surprising amount of attention-to-detail and work ethic involved. Okay, sorry for the whiny rant. I'm done. lol

[@alexielshadowangel]

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?

[@anonymousrex5207]

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.

[@hermanni1989]

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

[@adlockhungry304]

It’s Star Wars. Every planet has a breathable atmosphere wherever you go. Even Lava World™️ (Mustafar).

[@jacobhuff3748]

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.

[@Sphendrana]

Coruscant really does make any old hive city from 40k look tiny by comparison.

[@johnshort5830]

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

[@alexritchie4586]

Isaac Asimov already solved many problems with ecumenopolises when he wrote about Trantor, the capital of the Galactic Empire in 'The Foundation Saga'. My favourite detail is that Trantor appears egg-shaped from space because as the planet rotates the night-side extrudes giant cooling fins into space to bleed off waste heat, then retracts them again as the planet turns towards day-side.

[@Versudan]

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.

[@АлексейМомот-щ7о]

Don't worry, Disney killed gravity well lore 🤣

[@TheLA384]

About the density of the air, I don't think you can compare it to earth. The density at high altitudes is low, because the molecules tend to "sink" to the bottom, on planet earth meaning ground level. On a planet where the entire surface is covered with thousands of levels of building, the top level (the one that is exposed to the air and has a clear view of the sky) basically becomes ground level and everything below that is technically "underground". So the air density at Coruscant's "ground level" (the parts visible from the sky), would roughly be the same as on earth at ground level. Only the levels above that (the visible towers) could experience lower air density.

[@NareshSinghOctagon]

Thing is,this was done slowly over the many thousands of years,layer by layer,the foundation has most certainly either eroded into the surface or become one with the surface,and is practically a solid chunk who know how deep. This is assuming they didn't use some kind of trick when building that actually allows for a more hollowed out lower section,and some are if they even have their own weather patterns.

[@Pnutbtrsprnkls]

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.

[@princeimrahil6557]

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

[@HF7-AD]

13:10 the only explanation I can come up with is that the holes that connect the levels have some sort of repulsor tech that makes the air within them not immediately rush to the bottom, and every level essentially has its own atmosphere

[@irystocrattakodachithatmooms]

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.

[@MatthewTheWanderer]

As with most things about the Star Wars universe, it falls apart once you think about it at all!

[@deepashtray5605]

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.

[@davidmartensson273]

Since most buildings are mostly air and the extra surface height is actually not so much more, only 0.38 % more volume, added over thousands of years, some by digging down, adding no more mass, and some along with all the other imports over the tens of thousands of years it likely took to build. Over that time the orbit might have changed a bit, but probably not enough to cause any problems the weather control machinery cannot over come.

[@deepashtray5605]

@@davidmartensson273 Melting glaciers caused by global warming here on Earth is moving enough mass to actually cause a slight but measurable wobble in our own rotation, which made me wonder about redistributing the original mass of the planet. I do have a hard time trying to figure out where the building material would have come from given that even with the construction we've already accomplished here building materials are starting to get scarce. Can't see adding another 4-5 miles of skyscrapers over the entire surface. I was also wondering if Coruscant had a moon to prevent it from becoming tidal locked and stuck with one side always facing their sun. Obviously I spend way too much time on this :) Thanks.

[@davidmartensson273]

@@deepashtray5605 Wobble yes and yes a slight shift is likely but I would assume it would not destroy the planet :) And since they are talking about 100 000 years, I guess they will have been able to mine out moons or asteroids all over the system. As for tidal locked, no moon is mentioned but it might also be just not mentioned. George Lucas probably did not dive so much into the science to think of everything and had de done so I would assume he would have mentioned a moon or multiple. :)

[@papapalps2415]

​@@deepashtray5605I would thinks it obvious that most of Coruscants building material was imported gradually over the course of hundreds/thousands of years as it was built up. Similarly, I don't really see a reason SW-grade technology couldn't compensate for any environmental issues, such as extra mass-related ones.

[@adamwolf9419]

2 trillion seems like a gross underestimate of Coruscant’s population. I’ve seen another estimate that placed it at 5 trillion, but even that seems way too low. Every wide camera shot on Coruscant, it looks like we can see hundreds of thousands of people in an area covering probably on average around a square mile. Since Coruscant is about the size of Earth, with that number of people per square mile it would put the total population on just surface alone to be around 20 trillion people. With 5000 total levels, the actual total population may be in the hundreds of trillions.