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The body really isn't all that fond of electricity and doesn't use it for power, just to send messages. Energy is generated by the cells individually from sugar, mostly. The body can generate more than sufficient amounts of energy but not electrical energy in the nerves. Basically like taking...

If you thought your stool was dark before... Sounds pretty cool actually. But honestly, the point of the mental exercise was to see if I could come up with a justification for agri-worlds, which I was able to do via massive caloric needs from genetic engineering. Adding "But what if they had...

Might make it worse too though. Would you rather have to plug your cyberlegs into a USB port each night to recharge and risk becoming a parapalegic if you forget oorrrrr.... have your cyberlegs powered by chemical energy extracted from what you eat, at the low cost of getting to eat an extra...

So I had a thought regarding agri-planets. Humans optimizing their genetics might actually justify this. Simply put, an enormous number of limiters on our bodies are in place to reduce calorie needs. The reason you lose muscle you're not using, and your body isn't fond of putting on more...

Assuming it's a container ship (These seem to be rare in sci-fi with most ships going for currently-obsolete internal cargo bays) the ship could simply drop off its containers full of food and load containers of manure immediately with no fuss and no chance of cross-contamination. This would...

Yeah, Irregular Webcomic was really good at pointing out that kind of thing and doing the math to show how badly sci-fi writers scale things.

They could import minerals from mineral planets as readily as they export food though. There's bound to be plenty of worlds that are rich in phosphorus et al, but unsuitable to life due to having the wrong gravity, some horrifying poison in the atmosphere, Pluto/Mercury distance from a star...

Probably a mix of reclamation and importing from mineral planets. If we tried to make Earth an ecumenopolis, f'rex, we'd likely run out of key macronutrients like phosphorus before we had enough people to citify the entire planet. I recall reading an Isaac Asimov essay where he analyzed how...

I would certainly expect to see at least some of that going on for sure. However, aquaponics generates a relatively limited assortment of foods. Unless you've got replicator-type tech to turn the algae and yeast into anything people are likely to want fruit, and meat, and bread, and a host of...

Depending on how well communications work, an ecumenopolis is as nonsensical as an agri-planet, but in reverse. Agri-planets only make sense if space travel is very inexpensive. Ecumenopoli only make sense if FTL communications are trash, otherwise setting up an FTL internet with FTL!Zoom...

You also have to look at energy concerns. A major problem with IRL urban farming is how much grow-lights can add to the electric bill, it turns out it's surprisingly hard to compete with sunlight for cost. Now maybe you're thinking "Oh, but they have superpower plants, energy won't be a...

There's also a bit of a question in my mind on how fast and efficient interstellar transport is. The easier it is to ship stuff, the more sense an "agriculture" world makes since it would be cheaper and faster to just ship food one way and machinery the other. It makes no sense in BattleTech...

In Space Opera planets basically substitute for "towns" in a normal fantasy epic. Thus you have backwater farming planet, trade hub planet, all-one-megalopolis planet, swamp planet, smuggling center planet, pirate-owned planet, etc. These would be farm villages, trade ports, The Capital, a...

Yup. I can recall a couple of EU Star Wars stories that involved super-tankers full of excrement leaving Coruscant (and Jokes about how various types of excrement, both political and not, being its main export) and heading to agri-worlds to dump millions of tons of manure on them.