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The western half of the US was still being colonized as the modern railroad/machine-gun/telegraph economy was coming into place and is dramatically "clumpy" compared to urban distributions in the eastern half of the content. Maps of lighting at night make this vivid.

California has relatively recent historical urban development so its infrastructure has mostly been deployed with modern optimization pressures in mind: no city cores based on roman military encampments, no walls to avoid being "sacked" by barbarians, but lots of strip malls... There are about 37.2 million people in the state, and the combined population of the counties of Los Angeles, Ventura, Orange, Riverside, and San Benadino (which contain a vast metropolitan conglomeration, plus bedroom/vacation communities) is about 18.3 million giving a probably overestimate around 49% of the total population of the state. South Korea and Japan are in the same ballpark, and both are notable for historically recent wars that involved a substantial reboot of their urban infrastructure afterwards.

I wonder what China's urbanization patterns will look like in 80 years?

This weakly suggests that such cities might be running up against a political limit – the reluctance of neighboring nations to let these cities absorb their city activity.Agreement with political limits but I think they are diffuse, heterogeneous, and mostly accident in their effects of urban expansion. In California, squinting from the outside, there are basically two "cites": SF and LA. Both are constrained in their expansion by bodies of water, mountain ranges, and vast tracts of state and federal land. If Camp Pendleton didn't exist then I would expect San Diego and Los Angeles to have merged already, and San Diego and Tijuana are basically a single city sharply bifurcated by the US-Mexico border.

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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

And presumably, ems would want and need bodies for the same reasons that humans do. Emulating a human will also emulate his psychological needs, etc.

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