The Hanging Gardens of Babylon
Andre Willers
12 Dec 2014
Synopsis :
The Hanging Gardens Of Babylon was why the city was built . A huge ,
fortified , vertical farm . The whole city was the garden . And that was the
wonder of it . They actually were in advance of anything existing today .
Discussion :
The closest image I can find on the web . A far cry from
today .
1.A quick calculation :
Size of Babylon : 900 hectares . http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylon
This is 3000 m x 3000 m.
2.The walls at every 10 m and 20 m high .
This gives surface area of walls of
A=(3000/10)^2 x2x2x20 sq m
= 540 000 000
sqm
=133 437 acres
.
3.One person requires
1. 0.07 ha / 0.17 acre
The minimum amount of arable land required to
sustainably support one person is 0.07 of a hectare. This assumes a largely
vegetarian diet, no farmland degradation or water shortages, virtually no post-
harvest waste, and farmers who know precisely when and how to plant, fertilize,
irrigate, etc.
Thus , Babylon could
support 133437/0.17 = 784 923 persons from it’s vertical farms alone .
4.Babylon’s population :
Babylon about 200 000 .
This leaves a huge surplus , used in projection of power
throughout the region .
5.Babylon exported food . Amazing !
The rural areas did not feed the city !
But it had to keep control of the waterworks . Hence the
continual large military presence .
Empire in self-defense .
6.Copycats :
Niniveh .
They did it better .
7.Destruction :
No wonder the cities never recovered .
The walls and irrigation works were deliberately destroyed ,
and with it the foundation of the power of Babylon and Niniveh
See how the Persians retained some remnants of the city-wide
air-conditioning and intensive agriculture .
8.How on earth did this develop ?
After the collapse of the Bronze age and really bad droughts
in the region and volkewanderung reivers
Former agricultural societies depopulated , and was forced
to grow food inside fortified compounds .
This naturally evolved into vertical farms and some very
good farmers .
The Hanging Gardens of Babylon .
The whole city was one big ,air-conditioned hanging garden , with aerosols of water
cascading from above .
Cool .
Eat your hearts out , greens .
9. Something similar is happening today in the Greening of
Inner Cities . A sure sign of collapse .
10. The Tower of Babel.
An extravagance of learning , enabling large trees in
terraces .
The trees came first , then , because it was elitist , the
academics followed .
Scholars from everywhere , all talking different languages .
The original inspiration for Plato’s Academe of trees .
11. Vertical farming in the middle East was deliberately
destroyed by local powers for short term gain , as was the quanat system later
by the Mongols .
The result is the desert of today .
Typical of the Tragedy of The Commons .
Grow up or die .
Andre .
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