From 1,000 People to a City Across Earth

We begin beside a blue bus shelter at the edge of a small town. Streets spread across the fields, neighbouring towns merge, towers fill the horizon, and the city reaches the sea. Then the thought experiment moves beyond Earth, into orbit, onto the Moon, and towards a civilisation spread through the Solar System. Along the way, the question changes. How big can a city get? And what happens when there is no countryside left to reach? This is a fictional thought experiment told through on-screen captions and procedural 3D animation, with an original instrumental score and scene ambience. There is no narration. The growth rate, population model, ocean construction and space settlements are imagined—not predictions or demonstrations of viable engineering. Population figures use a stated illustrative density and assume resource problems that the film deliberately leaves unresolved. Combined astronomical views compress distances for composition. Inspired by the premise explored in Beyond If's “What If A City Expanded and Couldn't Stop?”:    • What If A City Expanded and Couldn’t Stop?   Factual background: NASA, Earth facts: https://science.nasa.gov/earth/facts/ NASA, Moon facts: https://science.nasa.gov/moon/facts/ US EPA, urban heat islands: https://www.epa.gov/heatislands/guide... Dyson sphere energy-balance discussion: https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.16734 Original music: “A Place Left Alone,” composed and synthesized for this film. All environmental sound layers are original sound design. No audio from the reference video is used. Coastline geometry: Natural Earth, public domain. 3D rendering: Three.js, MIT licence. #WhatIf #FutureCities #Space #Animation