Bill Gates Just Bought 25,000 Acres in the Arizona Desert (kgw.com) 313
What's the world's second-richest man up to now? A Phoenix news station reports:
One of Bill Gates' investment firms has spent $80 million to kickstart the development of a brand-new community in Arizona's far West Valley. The large plot of land is about 45 minutes west of downtown Phoenix off I-10 near Tonopah. The proposed community, made up of close to 25,000 acres of land, is called Belmont. According to Belmont Partners, a real estate investment group based in Arizona, the goal is to turn the land into its own "smart city."
"Belmont will create a forward-thinking community with a communication and infrastructure spine that embraces cutting-edge technology, designed around high-speed digital networks, data centers, new manufacturing technologies and distribution models, autonomous vehicles and autonomous logistics hubs," Belmont Partners said in a news release.
A former columnist for the Phoenix newspaper writes that "Unless Gates plans to turn the land into a preserve, he might want to know a few things that the locals didn't tell him..." First, Arizona doesn't have enough water to continue these kind of developments, no matter what the mouthpieces of the Real Estate Industrial Complex say... Second, climate change poses a clear and present danger to Arizona now. Summers are significantly hotter and lasting longer than a few decades ago. Massive wildfires are common, another new phenomenon. Whether Phoenix will even be inhabitable by mid-century is an open question. Already, it is a man-made environment totally dependent on electricity to power air conditioning and gasoline delivered by vulnerable pipelines. All of which make it questionable whether all the dreamed developments ever get built, much less last long.
"To be fair, wealthy people who were clever in one area -- especially tech -- often think they know a lot about everything," the columnist concludes. "If this is the case here, he might want to study up."
"Belmont will create a forward-thinking community with a communication and infrastructure spine that embraces cutting-edge technology, designed around high-speed digital networks, data centers, new manufacturing technologies and distribution models, autonomous vehicles and autonomous logistics hubs," Belmont Partners said in a news release.
A former columnist for the Phoenix newspaper writes that "Unless Gates plans to turn the land into a preserve, he might want to know a few things that the locals didn't tell him..." First, Arizona doesn't have enough water to continue these kind of developments, no matter what the mouthpieces of the Real Estate Industrial Complex say... Second, climate change poses a clear and present danger to Arizona now. Summers are significantly hotter and lasting longer than a few decades ago. Massive wildfires are common, another new phenomenon. Whether Phoenix will even be inhabitable by mid-century is an open question. Already, it is a man-made environment totally dependent on electricity to power air conditioning and gasoline delivered by vulnerable pipelines. All of which make it questionable whether all the dreamed developments ever get built, much less last long.
"To be fair, wealthy people who were clever in one area -- especially tech -- often think they know a lot about everything," the columnist concludes. "If this is the case here, he might want to study up."
Arcosanti II, anyone? (Score:5, Interesting)
I grew up in Arizona, and let me tell you, a couple decades ago it was HOT. Like, 122 F in Tucson and Phoenix was not unheard of. Now, it's fairly likely to hit that every year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcosanti
Since the 1950s, people have thought that the cheap land could be tamed and "new ideas" would just blossom out of the goodness in people's hearts. Arcosanti is a great example, but not the only one. Last I saw the place, it had a gift shop where the hippy owners took money selling semi-erotic paintings and charcoal drawings, and invited the young folks to spend some quality time mixing concrete with desert sand... or pose for the artist. There's never going to be an Arcosanti the way it was originally envisioned, or even with a population over 10.
Siiiiigh (Score:3, Insightful)
Learning to live in new environs is what resourceful life does when it refuses to die and depopulate at the edge of the Petri dish.
If we cannot figure out how to live (and eventually thrive) in the earthly atmosphere of the Arizona desert with its excessive heat and limited water, off-planet settlements are the dreams that come from pipes.
Proof of Concept: Phoenix (Score:3)
This settlement is 45 minutes outside of Phoenix, a city of population 1.6 million. And growing [forbes.com]. Rapidly [bizjournals.com]. All the critics here who are chorussing "oh, Gates is so stupid, he doesn't know that Arizona is uninhabitable" are silly: we already know it's possible because 1.6 million people already live there.
He merely needs to make a suburb that's somewhat more attractive than the other suburbs currently being built. And he can sell this to, not new people who had never thought of moving to Arizona, but som
Re:Proof of Concept: Phoenix (Score:4)
And people are saying the people already living there are in trouble. Not enough water, requires a lot of energy just to stay livable by our modern standards, and on top of that it's going to be far from work so that means even more energy to move people back and forth between home and work twice a day.
Re:Proof of Concept: Phoenix (Score:5, Informative)
And people are saying the people already living there are in trouble. Not enough water, requires a lot of energy just to stay livable by our modern standards, and on top of that it's going to be far from work so that means even more energy to move people back and forth between home and work twice a day.
Sure, but of the 200K years mankind's footprint has been expanding on the planet, most of it has been spent exploiting the rich natural reserves of the planet.
The conservation of (and stretching of) resources has arguably only advanced in times of extreme shortage. The exponential growth (intended) of crop yields to keep feeding a booming population is but one example. People are resourceful, intelligent creatures for the most part, yet often complacent unless propelled by hardship.
It's not Arrakis, but living in desert cities has already prompted water conservation and recycling unheard of a few generations ago.
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And people are saying the people already living there are in trouble.
Since the 70's (as far back as I remember).
Re:Proof of Concept: Phoenix (Score:5, Interesting)
All the critics here who are chorussing "oh, Gates is so stupid, he doesn't know that Arizona is uninhabitable" are silly: we already know it's possible because 1.6 million people already live there.
Cool story bro, except it isn't that the desert is uninhabitable, it's that there are limits and you are pressing them. While your real estate brochure version of living in the desert is cool, it seems to assume that there will always be plenty of water, plenty of air conditioning, and will be just like living in 70 degrees all year round - perfect comfort.
And it's sort of funny - why move to an area when all you want to do is alter the environment to something the environment isn't.
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"why move to an area when all you want to do is alter the environment to something the environment isn't."
In other words, do what people have been doing since forever. You central planning types are too early, come back next century when your consciousness can be uploaded and you can exist in perfectly planned nirvana.
I think what happens iin these cases though is that people use a small set of desires. If someone wants to live in a desert, and has wanderlust and wants the experience, by all means. I love the stark beauty of much of the American Southwest.
But Joe Blow, who retires and wants warmth and a change of pace isn't being adventurous. He moves to Phoenix or Miami, then tries to make it over. Arizona used to be the place where people with allergeies were suggested to live. NOw places like Tuscon now have more th
Re:Proof of Concept: Phoenix (Score:4, Interesting)
All the critics here who are chorussing "oh, Gates is so stupid, he doesn't know that Arizona is uninhabitable" are silly: we already know it's possible because 1.6 million people *already* live there.
You are committing a fallacy. You are assuming the past and the future will always resemble each other. It will not in this case as there are resource limits and the resources are shrinking see: https://uanews.arizona.edu/sto... [arizona.edu]
Jared Diamond wrote a nice book on what happens to societies when a critical resource(s) are depleted.
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They could reduce the loss of water from evaporation by covering the reservoir with shade balls.
https://static01.nyt.com/image... [nyt.com]
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New Jersey is not that bad.
Re:Siiiiigh (Score:4, Informative)
New Jersey is not that bad.
Digressing here, but New Jersey is a state of incredible contrasts. The northern part is "which exit you live at" land, and the one most people think of. Urban AF. Then going south it becomes pine forests and a lot less population density, finally ending in Cape May, which is exceptionally different.
And in the meantime, they somehow produce enough food to support Chris Christie, and you know that can't be easy.
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Oh, jersey can be an adventure for sure. I'd just just be an entirely different KIND of adventure.
"Ding dong, the Christie's fed..."
"Follow the foul-smelling road..."
"If I only had a gun..."
"Crackheads and junkies and bums, oh my!"
"Just click your heels together and repeat: 'There's no place like SOHO... there's no place like SOHO...'"
Re:Siiiiigh (Score:4, Interesting)
As the population of humans on the planet continues to grow, it will becomes increasingly necessary to move into and settle regions previously considered inhospitable.
Learning to live in new environs is what resourceful life does when it refuses to die and depopulate at the edge of the Petri dish.
If we cannot figure out how to live (and eventually thrive) in the earthly atmosphere of the Arizona desert with its excessive heat and limited water, off-planet settlements are the dreams that come from pipes.
Your first sentence gives the answer for the last sentence. The numbers of humans are what makes it difficult.
Humans living in arid places has been done for a long time. Some incredible adaptation has occurred in Africa. But that is humans adapting to the local conditions. People have lived in America's southwest deserts as well, perhaps not as acclimated as Bedouins, but they got by. Even in Death Valley.
The difference is in the numbers. We try to convert the desert to what we think is ideal. We like the grass in our lawns, we like nice water fountains, and we like a lot of people inhabiting these places. This is completely unsustainable.
Going to Mars, it will be a few people, and probably living in containers like domes or maybe even underground. That isn't comparable to trying to turn the Southwest desert into paradise. 10 or 20 people - possible. Millions? Nope.
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Living on the Space Station, for example, recycling water and testing how our bodies respond to the lack of gravity are much better tests for humans considering off-planet settlements.
Yet, learning to live within the confines of what the environment is able to provide is not without value. Xeriscaping, rainwater collection, grey water reuse, and Municipally-mandated water restrictions are all the offspring of scarcity. It's not inconceivable that scarcity could lead to more innov
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It's not inconceivable that scarcity could lead to more innovative approaches to the fresh water shortage we're destined to endure if the population growth continues unchecked.
A settlement for humans won't really solve the real problem. Fresh water for humans will never be a problem. We could survive on bottled water. Also, there is plenty of water in the ocean and we have plenty of technology for purifying, and piping the water to where it needs to be. Water is also dirt cheap. Even desalinated water is dirt cheap for human usage. Swimming pools and even lawns are not the problem. The problem is really agriculture. We cannot afford to desalinate water and use that water
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We will terraform Mars. It will be what the first travelers want it to be.
It will be a constant battle as the solar wind strips the atmosphere away.
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We will terraform Mars. It will be what the first travelers want it to be.
It will be a constant battle as the solar wind strips the atmosphere away.
Possibly. Or possibly we may set up an artificial magnetosphere. There are actually some practical methods for doing it. It would be a major project, of course. One proposal is an equatorial superconducting loop, Another is a giant electromagnet at a Lagrange point (trouble with that one is that, every time I hear about it, I wonder how much thrust the deflected solar wind would generate. Going by the numbers I can find for magnetic sails, a magnetic "bubble" of 100 km diameter would produce 70 Newtons of thrust at 1 AU. So, it would be about 30 Newtons at about Mars distance from the sun. The bubble for protecting mars would need to be at least as big as Mars, and probably about 50% bigger. So it would need to be 10,168.5 km in diameter, and would have a cross sectional area (facing the sun) of 81,208,838 sq km. So, that would be 10,340 times the cross section of the 100 km bubble, so it would be about 310.2 kN of force (basically 31 tons of force). That's quite a lot, but the equipment to produce such a field would have to be quite massive, so that wouldn't send it instantly hurtling into the outer solar system. It might be possible to keep it relatively stationary by putting it in a "virtual" Lagrange point where the push from the solar wind keeps it locked to the actual Lagrange point. Maybe a solar sail array could even be used to help keep it in position.
Yes - I forgot about the Lagrange point electromagnet scenario. That would probably work, and certainly isn't the biggest technical issue.
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I used to hate it growing up there, but now that I'm older, I don't know another place where I'd rather live, except it is becoming very crowded with people moving from more hospitable places to live.
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You know this is utter bullshit, right? As our population continues to grow we will eventually have to USE more of he land on Earth, but it doesnâ(TM)t mean cities are going to have to grow up in the desert or tundra. Look at the US, the vast majority of the central part of th country is minimally developed yet FAR easier to live in than the desert or tundra. People can cram into extremely dense communities the problem is food production and raw material sourcing.
That's not the point. The point is that it is still FAR FAR easier to live in the desert or the tundra than it is to live on mars. Yeah, Bill Gates could buy a bunch of great farmland but what's the point of that. Just like Bill Gates doesn't need any more money, he doesn't need an easy project. Buying dirt cheap land in the middle of a desert, with lots of free solar, a few minutes outside of a major city and he both gets the challenge of building something out of nothing and possibly even gets the cha
Re: Siiiiigh (Score:3)
Look at the US, the vast majority of the central part of th country is minimally developed yet FAR easier to live in than the desert or tundra.
Hicks, ticks, fleas, flies, mites, mosquitoes, roaches, leeches, snakes, spiders, humidity, mold, fungus, earthquakes, tornadoes and ice storms... Oklahoma: not fit for human habitation (don't ask me how I know). I'll take the high desert (minimum 7,000' elevation) any day...
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Who's the dullard? The AC post you responded to had a flashing red sarcasm tag 10 feet tall, How did you miss that?
Because of Poe's law.
We'll see... (Score:5, Insightful)
According to Belmont Partners, a real estate investment group based in Arizona, the goal is to turn the land into its own "smart city."
I'm really interested in how they plan to deal with the water issue, it seems like a show-stopper. Maybe they can build something to recover water from the dry arid air - because otherwise they're going to have to pipe it in, and the Colorado River is already over used... They must have considered this issue when they bought the dry desert land...
Re:We'll see... (Score:5, Interesting)
Or you use water smartly and not waste it. Sure you have to truck some in now and again, but if they're envisioning a next-generation "smart city", smart water use would also be a part of it.
Our daily lives we waste enough water to make any third world country cry. Watering lawns is practically a complete waste of water unless you are using it wisely as a filter medium for example.
Lots of sunlight also means cheap solar stills for water purification.
And I'm sure Gates has considered the water issue. In fact, he may have bought it because of that - with climate changing, the real issue IS going to be access to water. (We are relatively fortunate in North America as we have almost half of the world's reserve of freshwater).
It could be a very smart play - get the technology used to recycle and conserve water working now, so when its really needed, you've just cornered the market in patents, and the technology has matured to be usable, while everyone else is scrambling to find fixes.
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And I'm sure Gates has considered the water issue. In fact, he may have bought it because of that - with climate changing, the real issue IS going to be access to water. (We are relatively fortunate in North America as we have almost half of the world's reserve of freshwater).
Perhaps Gates already *has* AI (or has used his money/power for either/or bribes/research to find out) and it looked at climate change and predicted, as the Sahara has been similarly predicted, that it will become "green". Maybe not rain forest levels or tropical/sub-tropical ranges, but dramatically higher average rainfall averages than current.
Maybe Gates (or his estate/successors) will become even richer selling excess rain water to California/LA, etc, while simultaneously reaping profit and accolades fo
Re:We'll see... (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't get why people assume that 'global warming' means 'desert'
Jungles are hot as well.
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Or you use water smartly and not waste it. Sure you have to truck some in now and again, but if they're envisioning a next-generation "smart city", smart water use would also be a part of it.
But most people don't want to conserve in that manner.
Our daily lives we waste enough water to make any third world country cry. Watering lawns is practically a complete waste of water unless you are using it wisely as a filter medium for example.
It depends on where you are located. Here in the rainy Northeast, we worry a hella lot more about floods than we do about running out of water. I water my lawn, and it doesn't make a difference. No one is harmed, and no one goes without. There is no point in conserving water unless we are experiencing a rare drought.
And since it isn't practical to pipe it to the places where water is in short supply, we might as well just use it
Lots of sunlight also means cheap solar stills for water purification.
And I'm sure Gates has considered the water issue. In fact, he may have bought it because of that - with climate changing, the real issue IS going to be access to water.
And those solar stills
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Perhaps they'll produce enough reliable power to offset some of the production of the nearby Palo Verde nuclear power plant that consumes as much as 20 millions of gallons of water per day.
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Desert air is generally quite wet, in an absolute sense. In a relative sense it's low humidity, because warm air holds so much water. But cool it down to 5C and you'll see quite a lot of water precipitate out of it.
I did a quick Googling, and Phoenix apparently has quite high relative humidity in summer, whereas it is lower in spring and autumn. This is handy, as that means the water extraction has lots of humidity available right when solar panels are at peak output.
Re:We'll see... (Score:5, Informative)
Extracting water from the air would only work at all during summer monsoon, which is from early July through early September. The rest of the year, the air is so dry that the adjacent nuclear plant is the only nuke in the world that uses desert air as a heat sink, rather than a large body of water. It gets a boost from Phoenix municipal sewage.
Re:We'll see... (Score:5, Insightful)
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I'm really interested in how they plan to deal with the water issue, it seems like a show-stopper. Maybe they can build something to recover water from the dry arid air - because otherwise they're going to have to pipe it in, and the Colorado River is already over used... They must have considered this issue when they bought the dry desert land...
They aren't going to be able to do that, and there are some presumed cheap ways to extract water from the air, but they just cannot provide enough water on a city scale. If this smart city is to live within the desert conditions, and not just be another drain on the overwhelmed Colorado river, people there will have to learn to exist in some pretty hot temperatures in the daytime,cold at night, a massive reduction in the number of showers that Americans are used to, extreme water conservation, and a stand
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Gentrification (Score:2)
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It's a self-enforcing gated community
A community with Gates? Duh. Of course it is.
ENERGY dependence? (Score:3)
"Already, it is a man-made environment totally dependent on electricity to power air conditioning and gasoline delivered by vulnerable pipelines."
Those really aren't the issues if photovoltaic cells get as good as they are on course to. Will they even bother to go on the grid for electricity? The real issue is water.
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"Already, it is a man-made environment totally dependent on electricity to power air conditioning and gasoline delivered by vulnerable pipelines."
Those really aren't the issues if photovoltaic cells get as good as they are on course to. Will they even bother to go on the grid for electricity? The real issue is water.
There's a whole ocean of water that can be used for drinking water if you've got a lot of free or cheap electricity. Just add some pipes and a desal plant.
Cheap energy pretty much makes every other problem easy.
Re:ENERGY dependence? (Score:5, Insightful)
I just checked, Arizona is landlocked. If desalination was the plan, surely it would make sense to move the project closer to the ocean?
It's the freeway (Score:5, Interesting)
They bought the land to develop because a big freeway is supposed to go right through the middle. They'll extort the state for a ton of money, make a huge amount of profit and then exit before the community is fully done. So the long term viability of the site is irrelevant.
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A big freeway which is not yet funded, that is. And in Trump's America, there seems to be little motivation to spend money on anything that will improve the country. But maybe Gates knows something we don't about that?
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So, pork projects and tax increases or deficit spending.
I thought Republicans wanted smaller federal government?
Sounds like Trump played you like a fiddle to enrich his cronies.
Bates (Score:5, Interesting)
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Are you saying that the desert is an ocean with its life underground and a perfect disguise above?
I thought it was the other way round.
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What is this shit? (Score:5, Insightful)
Unlike say columnists?
C'mon, I'm sure Bill didn't just smoke a blunt and decide to go build a new city in the desert. You can bet there's a ton of experts involved who have already thought about whatever it is Mr Columnist or Mr Forum poster thinks and then some. Because that's the thing with smart people, they think about all the things you think about, plus some more.
Why did we need this ignorant opinion in the summary? It only serves to dumb down the real story which could be something really interesting.
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C'mon, I'm sure Bill didn't just smoke a blunt and decide to go build a new city in the desert.
I'm not so sure. Marijuana is legal in Washington, Arizona, California, and 20+ other states. Maybe one of his buddies shared his blunt while talking about retiring in the desert and Bill took the idea and ran with it. Judging by some of his past projects I suspect mind altering substances were involved in many of them as well.
Lightings anyone ?!? (Score:2)
From some statistics [vaisala.com], although Arizona isn't exactly in the "hottest" place for lightings, in Summers it seems they get a lot of thunderstorms as well. Raising constructions over a flat land could easily change statistics, however.
To be fair... (Score:2)
To be fair - technologists nearly always know a hell of a lot more about whatever the columnist is pretending to be knowledgeable about.
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Gates' Gulch? (Score:2)
Wonder if this is an escape hideout for when the shit hits the fan?
Energy Independence (Score:2)
Concentrated solar with molten salt storage, plus electric vehicles, could easily produce energy independence for Belmont. Water could be a problem, but if cables are run, they could use some of that electricity to power a desalination plant on the west coast (and pump the water back via pipeline). Given that high-speed internet is a major part of the city, that suggests fiber. Electric lines could be buried underground along with the fiber. Bonus points if there's a hyperloop between Belmont and the Bay Ar
Don't worry (Score:2)
"I hear your vacation to Belmont went poorly." (Score:2)
"Well...there was a girl...and a lighthouse..."
The Drying of the West (Score:2)
The water knife? (Score:2)
Musk can help solve the water issue. (Score:2)
If you can just get the water from the pacific ocean to the desert then there should be half a dozen ways to turn it into fresh water with all that dry sun during the day and cold at night. Just having a large enough lake and the ground should filter the salt and replenish some small portion of the ground water that is being sucked dry. Arizona and New Mexico and eastern California could become exporters of clean water. They could also build massive molten salt plants and instead of generating electricity
Naysayers (Score:4, Informative)
"First, Arizona doesn't have enough water to continue these kind of developments,"
Just if for some reason you want to have lawns around each house, that ship has sailed, not only in Arizona.
"Summers are significantly hotter and lasting longer than a few decades ago."
Great! The solar roofs on every house and garage will like that. That's one of the reasons they chose Arizona.
"Massive wildfires are common, another new phenomenon. "
That's why they chose the desert, with no trees, no fires.
"Already, it is a man-made environment totally dependent on electricity to power air conditioning "
Yes, great for solar and no heating in winter, what's not to like?
"and gasoline delivered by vulnerable pipelines."
Gasoline? This is new 21th century, nobody needs gasoline anymore. These people will drive Teslas, not F150s.
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Solar panels don't run off heat, they convert sunlight to electricity. As the temperature rises, they become less efficient.
Because columnists are always right... (Score:5, Insightful)
Look, Bill Gates can get a lot of things wrong, that much anyone can tell.
But quite frankly the smugness of the columnist is quite hillarious, on how stupid someone can be.
As if he's more equipped to know how Bill's investment will pan out from a very superficial reading, like in comparison to a guy who made his top 3 world fortune position out of a garage upstart and is currently driving one of the most effective and important foundations in the world. Smugness tied to ignorance, good way to show the entire world how much of an idiot you are.
With the sort or money and power Gates has, he can turn any desolate land into paradise. He could build a tropical paradise out of Antarctica. It's the sort of backing that made places like Las Vegas and Disney.
Climate change, massive wildfires, hotter summer? Does this guy even know who he's talking about? There's a whole range of ways to make the region profitable.
And even if he doesn't, people have to understand that the stuff Bill Gates invest on these days are not always running around profit.
You can hate his Microsoft years and whatnot all you want, and you can throw arguments about tax deductions and whatnot against his foundation all you want, the fact is that there's probably no one else in the world right now investing more on charitable causes. We're talking billions of dollars often on causes that will have no financial return.
People often don't realize how much he and his foundation did because most of the stuff it's currently investing on are ways to address basic health, hygiene and sanitation problems in the poorest countries, so we don't directly see results as much, but for certain regions in the world his contributions probably advanced things several decades in years time.
He's not the kinda guy who is gonna be worried about infrastructure problems in an arid region. He's the guy who has the best chances of finding out a way of solving such problems there, and then selling or sharing the knowledge to do the same to other parts of the world.
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Look, Bill Gates can get a lot of things wrong, that much anyone can tell.
But quite frankly the smugness of the columnist is quite hillarious, on how stupid someone can be.
At least it wasn't written by E J Montini, our other Democrat.
Experimentation comes into play (Score:2)
For all of the people seeing the reasons for this to fail, there are other possible motivations that may be at play. First, he may actually put up a dome over the whole place, and there may be some ways to pull in whatever moisture there is in the air at night, though I don't know if it would be nearly enough. The dome solution would help with both the heat and the pure dehydration effects caused by the heat, and might also apply to those who want to see people living on Mars.
This is all speculation, bu
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Well, if he really wants to build a city with a dome over it, he should contact someone with experience like the EPA [wikia.com].
Martin Chuzzlewit (Score:2)
Smarty city? (Score:3)
A "smart" city would be one that's not built in a freakin' desert .
I lived in Phoenix for about 4 years, here's what (Score:5, Funny)
I found...
There's no shade.
There's no water (except at the golf courses)
All the plants have thorns
All the insects are venomous
All the animals are venomous
It's too hot to be outside for about 9 months of the year.
Everything about the place screams "humans do not belong here!", yet most of the population lives in the Valley of the Sun.
I guess that explains the voting record...
I guess ... (Score:2)
25.000 acres for what?? (Score:2)
Yeat another rich retirement community (Score:2)
There's just nothing for miles around there. Nobody employed will want to live there because the commute will be insane. We've already got at least two such failed experiment communities outside of and both already much closer to Phoenix (called Verrado and Anthem) I guess Gates doesn't do his homework.
The last thing AZ needs is yet another half-occupied community full of seniors and snowbirds.
Useless pop-sci newb calls BS on useless reporter (Score:3)
Solar and Wind - These two tools are really useful for solving power issues. They're not end-all solutions and large batteries in the desert will get hot and cooling them to a reliable operational level that don't leak constantly will require large air-conditioned facilities or at least massive underground storage. On the other hand, using it should be possible using Elon Musk's tech to build most internal walls of each climate controlled home and office to collect and store quite a bit of power without the need for large centralized facilities. A reliable automated method of washing roof tiles will be needed, but I imagine that sprinkler systems mounted on the roof should assist with this.
Niagra falls and the NYC aqueduct. This was accomplished originally in 1907 with technology from 1907... as a government project it was expanded substantially in 2015 and that was one of the biggest examples of government corruption in NY history... the land of the mafias... Those aqueducts have supplied tens of millions of people with water across a 262km stretch for over a hundred years. The issue is to bring water...not necessarily fresh, but simply water to the desert. It should be possible for Bill Gates to buy a "Boring Company" drill and get zoning to drill from the Gulf of California to his plot. Alternatively, he can lay an above ground pipe which might be more profitable. The reason is that using vacuum a heated pipe will start sucking water uphill without the assistance of pumps if the pipe is correctly designed. In addition, pumps will further assist. This can allow a large salt water reservoir to be established near/on his plot. Then the problem is desalination.
Desalination - The only real problem with desalination is the energy cost and salt disposal... which in a desert isn't overly problematic. One method is either to use solar electricity. An alternative is to build glass boxes
There is also ground water. Ground water is quite plentiful but difficult to access in the desert. Of course, this option debatable as there are many ground water problems in the desert. The most obvious is that as the water level decreased, the desert sinks too. This can be a nightmare for construction and infrastructure.
There are also many methods for extraction of water from the air. This is becoming more and more common in African deserts. Of course, the yield is low (at least on an urban scale) and dries out the environment further.
Purification generally requires power and filters. The most obvious filter which solves an economical problem as well is coal. I am no expert on chemistry and don't understand the process of producing the specific types of coal required for water purification, but I would imagine that this would increase demand for non-energy related coal.
Wildfires are always a problem in hot climates. So the solution for this is increase water, that means pumping more sea water in. The desert is a nightmare to make lakes in, but it's possible to do. On method is major concrete basins. Other methods could be to scorch the earth further to bring the sand closer to glass. I'm sure there are people far smarter than me who can come up with methods of building massive pools for salt and clean water
This columnist is an idiot... (Score:3)
First of all, it isn't "Arizona's" west valley. It is the west valley of Phoenix, a city in the state of Arizona.
Secondly, in Tonopah there are massive aquifers (underground rivers essentially) and the water is very close to the surface. Makes it easier and cheaper to drill wells.
"Whether Phoenix will even be inhabitable by mid-century is an open question" - I think he meant habitable. In any case, lots of people are moving there. Minnesota in January - that's inhabitable.
"Already, it is a man-made environment totally dependent on electricity to power air conditioning and gasoline delivered by vulnerable pipelines." - That may be true now but Arizona is perfectly set up for solar and wind. The kind of city that Gates envisions is achievable.
Phoenix is expanding in basically two directions. Due west, towards Los Angeles. And north west towards Las Vegas. The east valley (Scottsdale, Chandler, Tempe) are basically built out. There is very little land left and what is left is very expensive. To the south, South Mountain effectively cuts off everything south of it from Phoenix making travel into Phoenix difficult. To the north you have the densely packed suburb of Anthem. Beyond that the only freeway (the I-17) goes down to two lanes. And there are Indian reservations hemming in the east valley. In fact, many of the big office towers in Scottsdale are built on land leased from Indian tribes. And they are never selling that land.
People in Scottsdale have traditionally looked down their noses at the west valley of Phoenix. But those are the only large parcels of land left. Jerry Colangelo, who used to own the Phoenix Suns basketball team, made a shit-load of money developing land in the west valley. As did a guy named John F. Long, whose family donated the land that the Arizona Cardinals stadium sits on today. They were buying up land at $5-10 dollars an acre. Today an acre of raw land - no house, no utilities, no water - will set you back about $100,000.
Gates knows exactly what he is doing.
Re:water shortages are bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
The naysayment regarding water is dumb.
It is also dumb for another reason: 90% of the water in Phoenix goes to water lawns. So just build the new city without grass, and use xeriscaping [wikipedia.org] instead. Problem solved.
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The plants used in xeriscaping can save water, but they don't supply any significant amount.
Dust and gravel works too. But I kind of doubt that's what Gates had in mind.
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What do you mean by "they don't supply any significant amount"? As if lawns are supplying any water on their own?
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It is also dumb for another reason: 90% of the water in Phoenix goes to water lawns. So just build the new city without grass, and use xeriscaping [wikipedia.org] instead. Problem solved.
Because people like their lawns, and their golf courses and fountains and ponds and swimming pools and daily showers.
It's the "I want it all" syndrome. Make the people exist in the actual environment, and with the actual amount of water that the environment provides, and the number of people that select to live there will plummet. Here in the green rainy northeast, we hardly think about water until it reaches flood stage.But that's why the predominant color is green. But it gets uncomfortably humid in t
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Not gonna happen (Score:2)
And yeah, nobody thinks much of Phoenix when it comes to wealth, but it's full of multi millionaires and even billionaires. When you get old the dry air is good for you so lots of folks come her
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First, one of the reasons Arizona is hot is because it is dry. There is less moisture to be had from the air than in, say, the Olympic Peninsula.
Solar stills are not very efficient in desert conditions. Their use as a method of even emergency survival in a desert area is discouraged because it takes more energy to build enough stills and time to build them than it is worth. You'll likely die of thirst in the interim.
To get anything like the amount of water for a large community, y
Re:water shortages are bullshit (Score:4, Insightful)
If Los Angeles could produce its own water by desalination, inland areas would be able to retain the water we are now sending them. But until that happens each state on the Colorado River gets a specific annual allocation of the water in it. The Phoenix metro area has a local supply of mountain drainage, but Arizona law requires that any new development prove out a 100-year supply of water before it can be built. Water is the limiting factor for any development in this state.
Energy will not be a problem. The area gets over 300 days of hard clean sunlight a year, and is next to a large nuclear plant. But Gates is going to have to change the name. There is already a Bellemont on I-40 in the mountains, a large new residential development near Flagstaff.
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Where does this "cheap energy" come from? Extracting water from the air, desalination, and so on are all energy expensive operations. Like, really expensive. Its pretty clear theres no such thing as "cheap energy" anymore, not on the old scales, since carbon based fuels logically have to be phased out sooner rather than later. And all the other options, Nuclear, Solar, or Wind , are not "cheap" at all.
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Given that when I lived in Tucson the house was cooled by evaporating water (they are called swamp coolers) and the house had no A/C, I just don't see squeezing enough water out of the air to be worth it even with free energy. I think it was like 6-8% relative humidity. There is a reason Tucson has a giant airfield for mothballing thousands of old Air Force planes.
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Looks like all that time I spent learning the binary language of moisture vaporators is finally going to come in pay off.
Now all you need is a scrawny and whiny teenager that knows how to swap out bad motivators in maintenance driods.
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And hopefully he'll get a droid that knows enough about languages that it can fix your posts.
Re:water shortages are bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
Everyone's got an argument where 'plenty of solar power' solves each of the myriad problems of living in a sun-baked desert. The far easier solution is not to live in a sun baked desert.
Location is still the most important consideration in sustainable development, because the annual energy cost of living is proportional to how far the temperature is from 70 oF. Everything after that is just mitigating the cost of the environment you've chosen. We could live in a comfortable area, or we could install a big power plant to make it comfortable. We could live somewhere with reliable access to clean water, or we could install a big power plant to harvest, purify, or import water. We could live somewhere with easy transportation, or we could install a big power plant to knock down mountains and catapult goods from 1000 miles away.
Just because your big power plant is solar, doesn't prevent it being wasteful.
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Everyone's got an argument where 'plenty of solar power' solves each of the myriad problems of living in a sun-baked desert. The far easier solution is not to live in a sun baked desert.
Humans really like temperatures around 70 F/21 C. Solar power in the desert doesn't work very well unless there is water to evaporate. There you tend to need the "swamp cooler" type AC.
I'm a big fan of solar power. But to provide cooling in the desert, it's best use is being under the panels in the shade they throw.
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from 70 oF
As you become acclimatized, this number goes up. We used to cool our house down to 84F, 29C, and it seemed normal. And as the population ages, old people prefer warmer temps.
Re:water shortages are bullshit (Score:4, Funny)
I know a place that condensed so much water from the air that in the end they flooded the entire place. There's a bad side to this story though, the place was full of warlords fighting for a spice of some kind.
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I know a place that condensed so much water from the air that in the end they flooded the entire place. There's a bad side to this story though, the place was full of warlords fighting for a spice of some kind.
Sounds like the Poppy growers in Afghanistan.
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The great lakes are polluted with mercury and other heavy elements used from wood harvesting and heavy industry. Effectively the equivalent of that green stuff from a Doom level.
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If Gates and company can show off a nuclear reactor that can operate without water in the Arizona desert heat then he will be a very rich man... I mean richer than he already is.
There are already plans for reactors that can run without water. In fact the lack of water is their greatest safety feature. When exposed to heat and radiation water likes to boil, corrode metals, separate into its constituent elements, and sometimes all three at the same time... very rapidly... and then explode.
A molten salt reac
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If that's part of the plan then we'll hear about it, the federal government frowns on unlicensed reactors under their jurisdiction.
That was before Trump handed the keys to the Department of Energy to a guy who wanted to shut the whole department down, if he could only remember its name. [nytimes.com]
I say let Gates give it a shot. He can hardly make things worse than they'll be soon enough anyway, given the current bunch of drooling stooges in charge.
Re:Nukes? (Score:4, Insightful)
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"The DOE was created in 1977 - we did pretty well without it up until that time."
Sigh. Another fucking Libertarian cretin...
DOE was a reorganization of ERDA, which was a reorganization of the AEC. It raised some three decades of Nuclear Research to the Cabinet level, which was an extremely good thing. It also took most of the Weapons Delivery out of the Research side, and transferred it to the Cabinet level DOD.
Along the other ongoing realignments, the Nuclear Industry now reported to the NRC, which was not
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This might be why he chose this particular location. Palo Verde has ample room for expansion, so why not add some of his experimental units to it?
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I'll agree. So many other planned communities failed based on far smaller problems.
That's one thing that bothered me about some of these planned projects for a new floating nation-state, or some other plan to create some kind of new community, they never considered the basic problem of having an economy. People will need jobs, they need food, and the two kind of go hand in hand.
Reading the article it sounds like they've figured out a lot of such things. Creating a government will be a problem, especially
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You know who was never clever in any area but still thinks he knows a lot about everything? Reporters.
Journalists are trained to give us Pulitzer-winning coverage of political scandals. They are piss-poor at developing any sort of science/technology story.
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