Given it’s designed in chunked neighborhoods with some sort of standardized system to allow commuting across the whole of its structure quickly, it absolutely sounds like something that could be built and tested in pieces.
Exactly. Cities evolve organically, over decades and centuries. An up-front design like this will never come to be. Something may come from it, but it will be much more similar to a regular city than this.
Designed cities are absolutely a thing in the two states that I've lived in. They'll build a bunch of amenities and a bunch of houses / townhomes all at the same time or near the same time and then people gobble up the town homes and already have a grocery store and a bunch of restaurants in this new, previously unoccupied area.
Yes, but they still evolve. Looking at this concept, all of the city will be within two walls. I doubt it will be that way. It will soon start to sprawl outside.
Almost zero chance the labourers and support infrastructure is within the walls. Similar to how Manhattan (or any functional urban core) outlays low-value facilities.
(To be clear, I think none of this will be built. But it’s not fundamentally unsound.)
Canals of Amsterdam was the one of the first centrally planned city development in 17th century and it still stands (and it quite enjoyable to live in) today. They did run out of money in the middle of building it though so the eastern part of the plan didn't happen. Smart money is on something similar happening to this as well.
They had this in Hong Kong. It's called the Kowloon Walled City. Quiet amazing actually. It almost ruled itself in that the police did not want to deal with the drug dealers and all the police were paid off. Check out Chasing the Dragon that used the city as a backdrop.
While the FSO Safer is a potential $20B humanitarian disaster in the Red sea that needs less than $20M more to start offloading the oil. Hope that the Houthi's do not sabotaged it to make him look like a fool.
> humanitarian disaster in the Red sea that needs less than $20M more to start offloading the oil
The Safer is at a Yemeni port [1], with recent UN safekeeping attempts having been inhibited by the Houthis. The environmental damage and economic cost will be borne almost entirely by western Yemen. Houthi territory.
TL; DR This is irrelevant to Riyadh’s global standing.
So the proposed strategy involves taking out the main rebel-controlled ports as well as their fisheries while doing aesthetic damage to Saudi Arabia? (Yanbu won’t be disrupted by an oil spill that far away.) This is nonsense. Hell, I see more sense in Riyadh busting the tanker.
Nonsense? As you state the Houthis have been inhibiting the safekeeping attempts, which amounts to sabotage; kind of dismissive to call affecting at least 3 Saudi desalination plants and Jizan "aesthetic" damage in addition to the effects on the Houthi like the blockage of shipments including food aid to Houthi controlled ports https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8682806/bin/NIH... Tactically, given the odds of a more advantageous outcome now during the summer it might make sense for the Saudi's to destroy it as this winter will likely be its last one fueled and the target June 1 UN defueling start date has long past, but the assured strategic international response seems more concerning. What would be nonsense would be to try and connive VC amounts of money off of this like making a deal with the Houthis to let a group of hired "Somali" pirates siphon off the oil and blame any "slow leak" scenario on the thieves.
Like technology, cities of the future are slowly built. Just dig into what New York city is doing in alternate/green energy. This doesn't happen overnight, unless you're a magical Middle-Eastern YouTube video.
Not really. The US had its absurd large scale infrastructure spending. Looking at you Robert Moses. But they didn't just walk out into a field and start planning insane cities.
If you're refering to dark ages it's only applicable to Europe just like Black Death is mainly European based pandemic [1],[2]. When Europe is in their dark ages the rest of the world seems fine. Heck it is only applicable to certain parts of Europe because some of the European countries and regions are doing really well [2],[3]. You probably know this anyway hence new account for trolling.
China and India likely had huge numbers dead due to the Bubonic Plague, but it's poorly recorded as far as I know. Definitely not 'mainly' a European pandemic, although it had such a great influence on European culture that we still talk about it today.
It's mainly a European pandemic. During the 14th century CE when the Black Death occurred, China and India were the two biggest and richest empires with the most literacy in the world. The probability that such significant event was not properly recorded is very low. Most of the Asian countries' history that we know today including Japan are known from the ancient and later Chinese writings [1].
[1]Japanese History Documented in Chinese Writings:
I would prefer a city of the dark ages MANAGED by government of the present. And since the dark ages are just part of the middle ages and we stretch our definition a bit, that's mostly what we have in Europe.
Building something like this in a democratic society is probably impossible. The reason is that there would be massive opposition to this and rhetorically powerful claims that the trillions of dollars this would cost in a Western society could be put to better use. Even if, by some Deus ex machina, one administration managed to get this project going, the next to come into power would likely can it.
Space is a perfect example. There's no technical reason we haven't established footholds on Mars and even the Moon, beyond the dilemma posed above. One administration would start a grand space program, the next would cancel it with partisan criticism, and start their own. And this has been going on for half a century.
Real progress back towards space only meaningfully restarted when private companies (or the owners thereof) started to become wealthy enough to fund their own space programs, without any regard for social criticism or worry about their leadership being canned next year if they don't get enough votes. Ironically this helped also somewhat kickstart governments back towards a focus on space as well.
The amount of material resources in space are breathtaking. Asteroid mining has the potential of delivering multiples of the amount of elements we've mined for our entire history in single asteroids. That alone could sustain a space economy.
There also isn't our massive gravity well. If you have materials (see point 1) it is easier to build large installations. We should be able to build GIGANTIC underground habitats in the moon.
There was also the powers-of-ten energy use as we climb Kardashev levels. That only happens with space settlement.
The other economic fact is that we have too many people for the Earth to sustain already AT THE CONSUMPTION THEY WANT. Sure we can impose a resource restriction by fiat (communism/authoritarian) or availability/poverty (capitalism), take your pick.
Space will come more easily with cybernetics. In a hundred years humans may be very very very different. But footholds are worthwhile.
But ultimately your comment harkens to the lack of vision of humanity, mostly I view it as a sign of increased control by the leisure elite over the world. They control the money and politics, and all they want are status and enjoyment, and the rest of the world to support them.
We have a thin margin for species survival right now. It's kind of like how when the tipping point for global warming in the 1990s was happening, everyone in America bought SUVs.
> The amount of material resources in space are breathtaking. Asteroid mining has the potential of delivering multiples of the amount of elements we've mined for our entire history in single asteroids. That alone could sustain a space economy.
At immense, non-economical cost. This idea is great in sci fi but we have nothing close to the technology to pull it of cheaper than mining things on earth
>There also isn't our massive gravity well. If you have materials (see point 1) it is easier to build large installations.
Point 1 is still sci fi
> We should be able to build GIGANTIC underground habitats in the moon.
Immense cost for no benefit
> There was also the powers-of-ten energy use as we climb Kardashev levels. That only happens with space settlement.
... and significant advancements in energy generation / capture
> Space will come more easily with cybernetics.
More sci fi non existing tech
> In a hundred years humans may be very very very different.
Sci fi
> But ultimately your comment harkens to the lack of vision of humanity, mostly I view it as a sign of increased control by the leisure elite over the world. They control the money and politics, and all they want are status and enjoyment, and the rest of the world to support them.
Ok and your vision of what we need to be doing now seems to consist of liking science fiction and ignoring realistic constraints.
Well, SPYWAREGORILLA have fun coding spyware, the height of technology in the internet age.
No really, it is.
That's the current crown of human achievement. All corporations and government know everything about you.
Written by you. I hope you're a total sociopath for your sake because all you can hang your crown on is enabling dystopia.
I can see why you don't want people in space. You can't spy on them as easily. The future of earth is authoritarian dominance and eventual death of the species.
The future of space at least has the hope of being better.
I should have added unsurmountable reason. With that, everything you've listed was overcome 53 years ago when we set foot on the Moon, aside from food. But within those 53 years we've grown food in space - a far less hospitable environment than the Moon and especially Mars, and even achieved a few other useful things along the way as well.
It won't be easy of course, but it's entirely possible. And has been for decades. Wernher von Braun, architect of the Apollo program, was the first individual to lay out technical plans for the colonization of Mars. He would go on to ultimately retire from NASA precisely due to this specific conflict between politics and progress in space.
> I should have added unsurmountable reason. With that, everything you've listed was overcome 53 years ago when we set foot on the Moon, aside from food.
Food is the easiest of everything mentioned. You just send them with enough food to last a while, and then send more
> But within those 53 years we've grown food in space
No, we've grown it in small controlled environments that are in space. We do not regularly grow crops in space to feed astronauts. The spatial requirements are too large to do it on the ISS.
> a far less hospitable environment than the Moon and especially Mars, and even achieved a few other useful things along the way as well.
They're pretty much equally hostile. On the moon the ground is super toxic dust. Mars doesn't really have soil like The Martian suggests. You might be able to make it work but again, not without a huge controlled environment.
> It won't be easy of course, but it's entirely possible. And has been for decades. Wernher von Braun, architect of the Apollo program, was the first individual to lay out technical plans for the colonization of Mars.
The only way we 'colonize' mars is by shipping them an absurd amount of crap and commit to the fact that they will do nothing productive aside from not dying there. They won't be able to farm. They won't be able to build domes or underground lairs. They'll sit in their starship heavies to hide from radioactive death beams and eat prepackaged food while a solar panel outside keeps the lights on.
> In his introduction to The Mars Project, von Braun stated that his study was not yet complete. He said that he had omitted the details of some topics that would need to be addressed further, including the eccentric orbit of Mars, interplanetary astronavigation, meteor showers, and the long-term effects of spaceflight on humans.[2]
> There are other shortcomings in The Mars Project that von Braun could not have anticipated in 1948. He had not planned on any uncrewed exploratory missions to Mars taking place before the first human expedition, and he had not foreseen the technological advances that would take place, or the development of robot spacecraft.[4] It was not until 1965 that the uncrewed Mariner 4 spacecraft found that the density of the Martian atmosphere was only one tenth of what had been estimated, making it clear that the huge winged gliders planned by von Braun would not have had enough lift to be able to descend safely onto the surface of Mars.[1] The danger of high energy solar and cosmic radiation beyond low Earth orbit was not known in 1948. The Van Allen radiation belts were not discovered until 1958, and von Braun did not plan for the protection of the crews from such radiation, whether in space or on the Martian surface.[1]
Probably not, but I also wouldn't presume Western economics. Saudi has supply to unlimited low-cost labor from Africa. Things get built with virtually no labor costs relative to the West.
I think I would be miserable without a yard, though. I don't think I want to spend my life inside of a manufactured block.
Millions of people already live in manufactured blocks of some sort of other under worse conditions than presented here.
This is not a space habitat. It is climate controlled, it has access to the surroundings and there actually isn't that much building around you at any time. The major difference is that it is more thought out and uniform over a large area. It's not going to be built, ever, but it's a nice idea and some of the counter arguments aren't valid.
At 170km long, 200m wide, 500m tall, the volume is 17,000,000,000 m^3. They're planning on spending just $29.41 per m^3.
Just trying to get a point of reference, the Burj Rafal is 308m tall with a 20,000 m^2 plot and cost $320M. Running the numbers they spent $520/m^3 on that, and it's shorter (I presume added height increases costs and complexity). Infrastructure was also likely already provided by the city, and not counted in that budget.
Honestly, I think even material costs are at least an order of magnitude higher than they want. The scope of this boggles the mind. They need 170M m^2 of mirrored glass just to cover the outside of this.
That's not even touching the foundation and reinforcement it takes to support a 170km long, 500m tall wall that's going to bear all the force of wind coming off the ocean. Wind speeds seem to peak at about 16m/s, so the force on a 1m section of the wall would be ~78 kN. That's roughly the force of 3 Tesla Model S' at full acceleration (but spread vertically). The force across the entire wall would be equal to ~381 Saturn V rockets at lift-off, or about 23 times the force that sunlight exerts on the entire Earth.
They are planning to pay a mighty high cost for a bunch of views of desert and stony mountains. Not that I am knocking the views, they have a certain serene value to them, but it is not that hard to get those types of views in Saudi Arabia.
Nah, keep the mirror. Then you can focus the light into the middle and you have a built-in incinerator for any dissidents / journalists who might pop up.
A circle is harder to build and has more issues regarding sunlight. The sun hitting the building(s) is both a benefit (solar cells) and a problem (heat generation) at the same time. A linear structure will get a much more even energy distribution than a circle.
Also one of the goals of the project is to reduce the energy needs of the population by making ways shorter. If you spread a city out on a circle, you got a much more complicated and expensive transportation problem than just the linear structure presented here.
I think transport would be infinitely worse in a linear city.
In a traditional street network, there are many ways to get from A to B and one link being unavailable is not the end of the world. Forcing everyone onto essentially the same street is guaranteed to cause both high fragility and high congestion, since everyone has to squeeze into the same line.
There's no need to have only one line to connect everything, even in a linear structure. It's still about the topology.
At the simplest there would be one line connecting from end to end, which should be the fastest and the one with the fewest stops. But then you have smaller lines, travelling in their own tubes, connecting local areas. That way you can travel between any two points relatively fast and avoid congestion. You can build redundancy into this system. But also, it's not a catastrophe on a normally 20 minute trip if there is blocked section and you have to walk a few minutes, take a local connection to bypass the blockage and then go on. Happens to me all the time...
The big benefit in a linear city is that the transport pods never need to turn around. You also don't need to manufacture curved rails or things like that. You can build structures like that in a "2D" city, but it's harder.
In 2D, you can build a grid of straight line railways. Riders transfer zero or one times. Cost scales proportionally to area (and hence population) assuming constant density. Time between two random points scales as sqrt(size). Ridership on a given rail segment scales like sqrt(size), which may be tolerable.
In 1D, you can build a linear railway. Cost scales proportionally to length (and hence population) if you assume that the the railway merely needs to get longer as population grows, but this gives a system where ridership on a given rail segment scales linearly with population, which is much worse. Time between two random points also scales linearly with population. The added costs associated with improving performance given the worse scaling seem likely to blow the whole thing up.
> In 2D, you can build a grid of straight line railways. Riders transfer zero or one times. Cost scales proportionally to area (and hence population) assuming constant density. Time between two random points scales as sqrt(size). Ridership on a given rail segment scales like sqrt(size), which may be tolerable.
I doubt this would work. Cities don't do this for a reason.
Transit lines get built according to transportation needs, not mathematical coverage of the space. You have pockets of housing that need to get to pockets of commerce. You can't practically run transit cars connecting [0,0] and [end, 0].
Grid like comes with a caveat. Most grids are only in city center (so that lines can connect to every other line in the city with most demand), and subways are not often grids but rather interlocking L shapes and curves depending on which radial direction out of city center got to have a subway first (but usually you can still see distinct gridlike patterns). And then there's geographic impediments like where streets and parks are.
It's harder to build a grid of straight railways. You need more bridging or crossing at the very least. You are right about 2D being more efficient in terms of the length between two random points, but there could be scenarios where the simplicity still outweighs that benefit, especially given all the other factors in this project, like sunlight.
The length is also much less of a concern than in traditional transport systems because of less friction and less need to brake, so most of the energy is for accelerating and decelerating at the stops.
Of course it would blow up if you wanted to build a fully connected city that is twice that length or even longer, but that's not proposed.
I’d assume this linear city would also involve a lot of bridging, since due to the width trains would basically almost be on top of each other.
Trains crossing perpendicular have to bridge maybe 6m at most. You’d have to bridge the entire length of city for this. And a fire would render any lines above or below unsafe to run until extinguished.
Most people in Hong Kong don't own a car, it's just not necessary due to the high density. This city is expected to to be ~15 times as dense as Hong Kong.
You don't need high density to not need a car. Its totally possible to design cities where most people don't need cars that are not full of huge towers.
The idea that car-free or very limited car is only possible if you have absurd density is false.
Its totally possible to have nice suburbs that are totally walkable and don't require a car for 90% of the population.
Remember, this is still a 2D project. The second dimension is up! Instead of XZ axes, it's XY.
There are still multi layer travel options available. And some previously unthinkable possibilities (e.g. moving walkways like the kind you see in airports, for short distances within a block – or different colored trains on different levels like ground/underground) are still possible.
wrong on all counts. A disc has the same transit "solution" that a line does, just draw a spiral. for a line however, this is the only solution, and boy is it terrible. Imagine if society were all in one skyscraper and the only mode of transit was the elevator.
I think it would have regularly spaced tunnels traversing the structure and they would just move sand with machines if necessary.
They could also put nets some kilometers in front of the thing to catch most of it and deposit itself as dunes there, maybe try to fixate is with some vegetation if at all possible.
This is basically the New Urbanist plan from the book “Carfree Cities” but with more of a vertical dimension and all the curves of the central railroad unfolded into a straight line. It doesn’t seem totally impossible.
Or the segments don't shift but rather the connections to their foundations move by a few millimeters a year. Then the foundations would be independent and move and the whole thing can still be perfectly straight the whole time.
265,000 people per sqkm, that's some nice population density. Cool concept, but I wonder what they mean by "equitable views". I presume not all housing units will be on the edges given that it's 200m wide.
I had the same thought but at the same time, population density can be desirable in itself and not just out of necessity. I'd definitely rather live in a dense city rather than in the desert country side.
I think that is very over-rated. Really nice cities with very urban environment don't actually have to be very dense, even if they feel like that.
And places that are very dense can still be worse then a US subburb in terms of feeling like a city.
One concept from a city planner said basically urbanism is not about density. Connectivity and access is what makes a good city, not density.
You can have a city with anywhere between 50k and 5M feel very livable and nice. And you can have a city with between 50k and 5M feel like a lonely place. Its all about the city design.
9M residents housed, 170 km traveled in 20 minutes- all for the low low price of 0.5T USD. An obsession with narrowing the width of the city to 100m! This is some kind of "visionary fantasy" of an idiot who has become a dictator. Sounds like a plan a 10 year old would chalk up.
there's a similar concept a couple years ago that proposes excavating new york's central park and building skyscraper walls on all sides. seems like egotists around the world are interested in this type of concept because it is simple to understand.
From the Atlantic profile of MBS earlier this year:
“What struck me was that Neom’s vision is really an anti-vision. It is the opposite of the old Saudi Arabia. In the old Saudi Arabia, and even to an extent today, corruption and bureaucracy layered on each other to make an entrepreneur’s nightmare. Riyadh has almost no public transportation. No matter where you are, you cannot walk anywhere, except perhaps to your local mosque. No one in Neom mentioned religion at all. Even Neom’s location is suggestive. It is far from where Saudis actually live. Instead it is huddled in a mostly empty corner, as if seeking sustenance and inspiration from Jordan and Israel.”
That corner of SA is a little cooler due to latitude and the seabreeze. It's also designed to sit atop and support a desalinated water pipeline. So that part seems reasonable.
What will this solve? What if a fire breaks out? Can protestors block a single street? Where are people going to dry clothes? Won't those who live at the base feel claustrophobic?
Most of these problems are probably already solved or could be solved. You are of course using dry cleaning services in some form. Fire suppression systems are built in. The structure is quite narrow, so you have a view to the outside from pretty much anywhere, and it's not much worse than any skyscraper, better probably because of (hopefully) better design.
As to social aspects... That is my major concern also. Of course this city has a police force and would clean up anybody blocking the central hubs. There is no street btw, but rather different kinds of corridors for walking and trains of different speeds and ranges. I guess it is relatively easy to disturb the system, on the other hand if realized there would probably be an authoritarian kid of police force making sure nobody does.
263 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 263 ms ] threadI mean, christ scale it back a bit no?
Paris [1] and D.C.’s cores were engineered. Several cities after WWII were bombed to a blank slate.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haussmann%27s_renovation_of_...
Almost zero chance the labourers and support infrastructure is within the walls. Similar to how Manhattan (or any functional urban core) outlays low-value facilities.
(To be clear, I think none of this will be built. But it’s not fundamentally unsound.)
You really compared it.
Maybe something like Brasília or something is a better comparison.
Is it really different from what the communists did, except with a more modern design?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_planning_in_communist_...
The Safer is at a Yemeni port [1], with recent UN safekeeping attempts having been inhibited by the Houthis. The environmental damage and economic cost will be borne almost entirely by western Yemen. Houthi territory.
TL; DR This is irrelevant to Riyadh’s global standing.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FSO_Safer
So the proposed strategy involves taking out the main rebel-controlled ports as well as their fisheries while doing aesthetic damage to Saudi Arabia? (Yanbu won’t be disrupted by an oil spill that far away.) This is nonsense. Hell, I see more sense in Riyadh busting the tanker.
Los Angeles.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography)
[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Death
[3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constantinople
[4]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%C3%B3rdoba,_Spain
[1]Japanese History Documented in Chinese Writings:
https://studycorgi.com/japanese-history-documented-in-chines...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_plague_pandemic
Space is a perfect example. There's no technical reason we haven't established footholds on Mars and even the Moon, beyond the dilemma posed above. One administration would start a grand space program, the next would cancel it with partisan criticism, and start their own. And this has been going on for half a century.
Real progress back towards space only meaningfully restarted when private companies (or the owners thereof) started to become wealthy enough to fund their own space programs, without any regard for social criticism or worry about their leadership being canned next year if they don't get enough votes. Ironically this helped also somewhat kickstart governments back towards a focus on space as well.
Lack of atmosphere, dangerous voyage, radiation, lack of easily available nutrients, dangerous weather, different gravity, likely one way voyages
and of course the everpresent lack of any particular economic incentive to do so
There also isn't our massive gravity well. If you have materials (see point 1) it is easier to build large installations. We should be able to build GIGANTIC underground habitats in the moon.
There was also the powers-of-ten energy use as we climb Kardashev levels. That only happens with space settlement.
The other economic fact is that we have too many people for the Earth to sustain already AT THE CONSUMPTION THEY WANT. Sure we can impose a resource restriction by fiat (communism/authoritarian) or availability/poverty (capitalism), take your pick.
Space will come more easily with cybernetics. In a hundred years humans may be very very very different. But footholds are worthwhile.
But ultimately your comment harkens to the lack of vision of humanity, mostly I view it as a sign of increased control by the leisure elite over the world. They control the money and politics, and all they want are status and enjoyment, and the rest of the world to support them.
We have a thin margin for species survival right now. It's kind of like how when the tipping point for global warming in the 1990s was happening, everyone in America bought SUVs.
Sad.
At immense, non-economical cost. This idea is great in sci fi but we have nothing close to the technology to pull it of cheaper than mining things on earth
>There also isn't our massive gravity well. If you have materials (see point 1) it is easier to build large installations.
Point 1 is still sci fi
> We should be able to build GIGANTIC underground habitats in the moon.
Immense cost for no benefit
> There was also the powers-of-ten energy use as we climb Kardashev levels. That only happens with space settlement.
... and significant advancements in energy generation / capture
> Space will come more easily with cybernetics.
More sci fi non existing tech
> In a hundred years humans may be very very very different.
Sci fi
> But ultimately your comment harkens to the lack of vision of humanity, mostly I view it as a sign of increased control by the leisure elite over the world. They control the money and politics, and all they want are status and enjoyment, and the rest of the world to support them.
Ok and your vision of what we need to be doing now seems to consist of liking science fiction and ignoring realistic constraints.
No really, it is.
That's the current crown of human achievement. All corporations and government know everything about you.
Written by you. I hope you're a total sociopath for your sake because all you can hang your crown on is enabling dystopia.
I can see why you don't want people in space. You can't spy on them as easily. The future of earth is authoritarian dominance and eventual death of the species.
The future of space at least has the hope of being better.
Have fun making the world a terrible place, dude.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BonziBuddy
It won't be easy of course, but it's entirely possible. And has been for decades. Wernher von Braun, architect of the Apollo program, was the first individual to lay out technical plans for the colonization of Mars. He would go on to ultimately retire from NASA precisely due to this specific conflict between politics and progress in space.
Overcome for what? 20 days? Have we overcome any of those items for say, a 1 year old stay? I doubt it.
Food is the easiest of everything mentioned. You just send them with enough food to last a while, and then send more
> But within those 53 years we've grown food in space
No, we've grown it in small controlled environments that are in space. We do not regularly grow crops in space to feed astronauts. The spatial requirements are too large to do it on the ISS.
> a far less hospitable environment than the Moon and especially Mars, and even achieved a few other useful things along the way as well.
They're pretty much equally hostile. On the moon the ground is super toxic dust. Mars doesn't really have soil like The Martian suggests. You might be able to make it work but again, not without a huge controlled environment.
> It won't be easy of course, but it's entirely possible. And has been for decades. Wernher von Braun, architect of the Apollo program, was the first individual to lay out technical plans for the colonization of Mars.
The only way we 'colonize' mars is by shipping them an absurd amount of crap and commit to the fact that they will do nothing productive aside from not dying there. They won't be able to farm. They won't be able to build domes or underground lairs. They'll sit in their starship heavies to hide from radioactive death beams and eat prepackaged food while a solar panel outside keeps the lights on.
Let's look at von Braun.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mars_Project
> In his introduction to The Mars Project, von Braun stated that his study was not yet complete. He said that he had omitted the details of some topics that would need to be addressed further, including the eccentric orbit of Mars, interplanetary astronavigation, meteor showers, and the long-term effects of spaceflight on humans.[2]
> There are other shortcomings in The Mars Project that von Braun could not have anticipated in 1948. He had not planned on any uncrewed exploratory missions to Mars taking place before the first human expedition, and he had not foreseen the technological advances that would take place, or the development of robot spacecraft.[4] It was not until 1965 that the uncrewed Mariner 4 spacecraft found that the density of the Martian atmosphere was only one tenth of what had been estimated, making it clear that the huge winged gliders planned by von Braun would not have had enough lift to be able to descend safely onto the surface of Mars.[1] The danger of high energy solar and cosmic radiation beyond low Earth orbit was not known in 1948. The Van Allen radiation belts were not discovered until 1958, and von Braun did not plan for the protection of the crews from such radiation, whether in space or on the Martian surface.[1]
I think I would be miserable without a yard, though. I don't think I want to spend my life inside of a manufactured block.
This is not a space habitat. It is climate controlled, it has access to the surroundings and there actually isn't that much building around you at any time. The major difference is that it is more thought out and uniform over a large area. It's not going to be built, ever, but it's a nice idea and some of the counter arguments aren't valid.
At 170km long, 200m wide, 500m tall, the volume is 17,000,000,000 m^3. They're planning on spending just $29.41 per m^3.
Just trying to get a point of reference, the Burj Rafal is 308m tall with a 20,000 m^2 plot and cost $320M. Running the numbers they spent $520/m^3 on that, and it's shorter (I presume added height increases costs and complexity). Infrastructure was also likely already provided by the city, and not counted in that budget.
Honestly, I think even material costs are at least an order of magnitude higher than they want. The scope of this boggles the mind. They need 170M m^2 of mirrored glass just to cover the outside of this.
That's not even touching the foundation and reinforcement it takes to support a 170km long, 500m tall wall that's going to bear all the force of wind coming off the ocean. Wind speeds seem to peak at about 16m/s, so the force on a 1m section of the wall would be ~78 kN. That's roughly the force of 3 Tesla Model S' at full acceleration (but spread vertically). The force across the entire wall would be equal to ~381 Saturn V rockets at lift-off, or about 23 times the force that sunlight exerts on the entire Earth.
Also one of the goals of the project is to reduce the energy needs of the population by making ways shorter. If you spread a city out on a circle, you got a much more complicated and expensive transportation problem than just the linear structure presented here.
In a traditional street network, there are many ways to get from A to B and one link being unavailable is not the end of the world. Forcing everyone onto essentially the same street is guaranteed to cause both high fragility and high congestion, since everyone has to squeeze into the same line.
At the simplest there would be one line connecting from end to end, which should be the fastest and the one with the fewest stops. But then you have smaller lines, travelling in their own tubes, connecting local areas. That way you can travel between any two points relatively fast and avoid congestion. You can build redundancy into this system. But also, it's not a catastrophe on a normally 20 minute trip if there is blocked section and you have to walk a few minutes, take a local connection to bypass the blockage and then go on. Happens to me all the time...
The big benefit in a linear city is that the transport pods never need to turn around. You also don't need to manufacture curved rails or things like that. You can build structures like that in a "2D" city, but it's harder.
In 1D, you can build a linear railway. Cost scales proportionally to length (and hence population) if you assume that the the railway merely needs to get longer as population grows, but this gives a system where ridership on a given rail segment scales linearly with population, which is much worse. Time between two random points also scales linearly with population. The added costs associated with improving performance given the worse scaling seem likely to blow the whole thing up.
Your point about length is true, but about population scale might not, because it's still in 2D. There are still ways to segregate tracks.
I doubt this would work. Cities don't do this for a reason.
Transit lines get built according to transportation needs, not mathematical coverage of the space. You have pockets of housing that need to get to pockets of commerce. You can't practically run transit cars connecting [0,0] and [end, 0].
Beijing is a grid: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/07/Beijing_...
Shanghai is a grid: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_Metro#/media/File:Sha...
Tokyo is grid-like east and south of the Imperial Palace: https://i0.wp.com/transitmap.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/...
Taipei has a grid: https://english.metro.taipei/cp.aspx?n=1BE0AF76C79F9A38
The gridded portion of Manhattan has a grid between 14th St and Central Park: https://english.metro.taipei/cp.aspx?n=1BE0AF76C79F9A38. Buses fill out the grid in outer areas like the Bronx: https://new.mta.info/map/5366
Paris is gridded about as much as it can be due to the non-grid road layout: https://www.ratp.fr/sites/default/files/plans-lignes/Plans-e...
Berlin is gridlike: https://sbahn.berlin/en/route-map/
The length is also much less of a concern than in traditional transport systems because of less friction and less need to brake, so most of the energy is for accelerating and decelerating at the stops.
Of course it would blow up if you wanted to build a fully connected city that is twice that length or even longer, but that's not proposed.
Trains crossing perpendicular have to bridge maybe 6m at most. You’d have to bridge the entire length of city for this. And a fire would render any lines above or below unsafe to run until extinguished.
The idea that car-free or very limited car is only possible if you have absurd density is false.
Its totally possible to have nice suburbs that are totally walkable and don't require a car for 90% of the population.
If everyone in Hong Kong was shoved into one train line, it would also be congested.
There are still multi layer travel options available. And some previously unthinkable possibilities (e.g. moving walkways like the kind you see in airports, for short distances within a block – or different colored trains on different levels like ground/underground) are still possible.
What gets finished first Oxagon or The Line? NEOM is clearly having fun.
https://globetrender.com/2022/03/03/saudi-arabia-oxagon-floa...
Suddenly then you have “the segments”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_city
https://www.reddit.com/r/RetroFuturism/comments/uh9mhp/the_l...
Aside from sand, it also lets animals, humans, and vehicles pass through.
They could also put nets some kilometers in front of the thing to catch most of it and deposit itself as dunes there, maybe try to fixate is with some vegetation if at all possible.
They would have to build independent sections that, over time, will shift relative to each other.
And places that are very dense can still be worse then a US subburb in terms of feeling like a city.
One concept from a city planner said basically urbanism is not about density. Connectivity and access is what makes a good city, not density.
You can have a city with anywhere between 50k and 5M feel very livable and nice. And you can have a city with between 50k and 5M feel like a lonely place. Its all about the city design.
but it would probably cost way more than $500 billion
This is going to be much harder than anyone realizes.
0: https://www.wsj.com/articles/expatriate-executives-flee-saud...
9M residents housed, 170 km traveled in 20 minutes- all for the low low price of 0.5T USD. An obsession with narrowing the width of the city to 100m! This is some kind of "visionary fantasy" of an idiot who has become a dictator. Sounds like a plan a 10 year old would chalk up.
“What struck me was that Neom’s vision is really an anti-vision. It is the opposite of the old Saudi Arabia. In the old Saudi Arabia, and even to an extent today, corruption and bureaucracy layered on each other to make an entrepreneur’s nightmare. Riyadh has almost no public transportation. No matter where you are, you cannot walk anywhere, except perhaps to your local mosque. No one in Neom mentioned religion at all. Even Neom’s location is suggestive. It is far from where Saudis actually live. Instead it is huddled in a mostly empty corner, as if seeking sustenance and inspiration from Jordan and Israel.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/04/mohamme...
As to social aspects... That is my major concern also. Of course this city has a police force and would clean up anybody blocking the central hubs. There is no street btw, but rather different kinds of corridors for walking and trains of different speeds and ranges. I guess it is relatively easy to disturb the system, on the other hand if realized there would probably be an authoritarian kid of police force making sure nobody does.
People are moving out of dry cleaning into "wet cleaning" to avoid chemical solvents. Wet cleaning requires a drying machine.