This is ambitious to say the least. I'm actually intrigued. The scenes from inside could be from a sci-fi movie with utopian very-dense-and-3d city design, one of those where mankind moved into enclosed spaces to find comfortable shelter from an outside world that has become unlivable (or almost so).
It will (have to) be as controlled and dystopian as in the movies too, with so many people living in a highly artificial environment.
Accelerando by Charles Stross has an even more prescient version where humanity dissembles the planets to make giant computers which end up being filled with sentient pyramid schemes.
> My dad introduced me to the genre with Jules Verne's The Mysterious Island, in which a team of five end up on an uninhabited island, and use their knowledge and ingenuity to rebuild a technological civilization from scratch.
This seems pretty cool. It fits in nicely with the Sci-Fi trope of sending machines with our genome out to other star systems where they proceed to print or otherwise grow a colony; a little far-fetched, but not nearly so much as humans traveling to the stars.
Not sure if it's covered in the novel but reading this really makes me think these adversarial environments could be very cool hosts for emerging (or seeded and self replicating) intelligent agents some day.
Not exactly hackerish or star-upish I know but I was going along this guideline:
anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
I find it fascinating that as a race we have reached a point where we are seriously discussing the possibility of making another planet hospitable enough to maintain human life.
The cylindrical colony is basically Arthur C Clarke's Rama. One of the images of the spherical colony shows a human-powered vehicle, which IIRC featured in the first Rama book.
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