Saudi Arabia's Sci-Fi Megacity Is Well Underway 99
Mark Harris writes via MIT Technology Review: In early 2021, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia announced The Line: a "civilizational revolution" that would house up to 9 million people in a zero-carbon megacity, 170 kilometers long and half a kilometer high but just 200 meters wide. Within its mirrored, car-free walls, residents would be whisked around in underground trains and electric air taxis. Satellite images of the $500 billion project obtained exclusively by MIT Technology Review show that the Line's vast linear building site is already taking shape, running as straight as an arrow across the deserts and through the mountains of northern Saudi Arabia. The site, tens of meters deep in places, is teeming with many hundreds of construction vehicles and likely thousands of workers, themselves housed in sprawling bases nearby.
Analysis of the satellite images by Soar Earth, an Australian startup that aggregates satellite imagery and crowdsourced maps into an online digital atlas, suggests that the workers have already excavated around 26 million cubic meters of earth and rock -- 78 times the volume of the world's tallest building, the Burj Khalifa. Official drone footage of The Line's construction site, released in October, indeed showed fleets of bulldozers, trucks, and diggers excavating its foundations. Visit The Line's location on Google Maps and Google Earth, however, and you will see little more than bare rock and sand.
Analysis of the satellite images by Soar Earth, an Australian startup that aggregates satellite imagery and crowdsourced maps into an online digital atlas, suggests that the workers have already excavated around 26 million cubic meters of earth and rock -- 78 times the volume of the world's tallest building, the Burj Khalifa. Official drone footage of The Line's construction site, released in October, indeed showed fleets of bulldozers, trucks, and diggers excavating its foundations. Visit The Line's location on Google Maps and Google Earth, however, and you will see little more than bare rock and sand.
Ugh (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Ugh (Score:4, Insightful)
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I agree. https://www.propublica.org/art... [propublica.org]
Re: Ugh (Score:1)
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We spent well more than that. Our budget grew by like $7T from Covid alone. We could have done this. But our leadership is bereft of capability. Has been for some time
A simple truth modded as troll is great example of the echo chamber in which most Americans are now trapped. Blame everyone else is the only thing Americans are willing to hear.
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Half a trillion dollars, and not even a single place where someone can sit down and order a nice pint. What a fucking waste.
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I only learned of this project about a month ago.
Suffice it to say, I think it's cool, but Saudi Arabia didn't do it's due diligence by learning from the Burj Khalifa. The Burj is basically a mega-tower that all it's services are still handed by vehicle. That basically means it's not efficient, and not self-sufficient.
I see "The line" failing to learn the same lesson, and it may try to be "self sufficient" but ultimately it will be dependent on water resources, and that's pretty much why I see it ending bei
Zero Carbon (Score:3)
The site, tens of meters deep in places, is teeming with many hundreds of construction vehicles and likely thousands of workers, themselves housed in sprawling bases nearby.
Even if we grant the unlikely prospect that it's actually zero carbon once it's up and running, how much was released in the creation seems to be an important consideration. Frankly they don't even need to bullshit us when they could just tell us that at least it's not another indoor ski slope or something like that.
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Re:Zero Carbon (Score:5, Insightful)
170 km * 0.2 km = 34 square km
The average distance between any two random points is 85 km.
If it was laid out in a square grid, it would be 5.8 km on each side, and the average distance between two points would be about 3 km.
So 30 times the commuting time while burning 30 times the energy, and everyone gets to live right next to a massive freeway/railroad. Also, the transportation is a single point of failure 170 km long. So impossible to secure and a single accident/bomb means everyone starves.
MBS is nuts.
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Your metric is useless. A better one might be how much of your daily activity can be done in a ~3km x 200m x ~20m volume. As for the train, presumably there would be two tracks and separating them into different fire compartments would be easy enough.
There are many better things to make fun of the project for though. We will see who gets the last laugh though.
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3 km is about 30 minutes walk for an average person. I wouldn't say the metric is useless, although your calculation of volume is intriguing. You can stuff a lot of usable real estate in, if the initial plan has a lot of vertical space. One of their initial press releases talked about a density of ¼ million people per square Km, making it an order of magnitude more dense than any other city in the world.
According to their plans, it will be built with repeated 'nodes' (or 'modules'), and all location
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Stringing it out along 100 miles with obvious points of failure is just fucking stupid. And clearly there is a lot of magical thinking going on ass
Re:Zero Carbon (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, the distance between two arbitrary points is further, but rarely will you travel to an arbitrary point. Even in a normal city you're much more likely to shop at a nearby store, visit a nearby doctor, etc. than go to one at the opposite side of town.
The real question is how much real estate is within X km of you - and The Line is vertical. You're not in a spread out city that mostly averages maybe 2 floors tall outside the densest downtown areas, and considerably less wherever there's space between buildings. (If your parking lot has to have twice the footprint of your shopping center, you just cut the average number of floors in the shopping center to 1/3.)
You're talking an insanely dense high-rise city center 500m tall. At the average highrise height of around 12ft per floor you're talking 136 floors tall. That's easily 50 times as much commercial and residential space per square mile than a typical US city.
So, within ten km of an point inside most of a normal US city you have maybe pi*(10km)^2 *2 floors = 628 square km of real estate. (technically considerably less since we should really be measuring grid-wise distance on the roads rather than crow-flight distance, which gives a four-lobed "flower" within x distance rather than the full circle, but I don't know that scaling factor offhand)
And within ten km of a point inside The Line you have 0.2*(2*10km)*136 floors = 544 square km of real estate. So a bit less, maybe roughly the same after scaling a normal city area for the grid effect.
That's probably about the break-even point though - over longer distances the amount of accessible real estate increases slower in The Line - but if it has high-speed rail (and it's a Saudi vanity project, so it probably will) distances beyond that scale matter a lot less, and it's more a question of average distance to the nearest rail station.
And below that distance The Line gets better fast. I find walking more than a couple km between places on a daily basis to get a little tedious - and within 2 km The Line contains ~109 square km of real estate, compared to less than 25 in a typical US city.
And then there's the other factor - access to areas that *aren't* city. In a typical city, getting *out* of the city is an extended voyage, while in The Line you're never more than 100m from the edge - at least if nothing grows up outside the walls, and it's rather harsh looking desert out there.
Though, The Line will also be a terraforming project. Running east-west and standing half a km tall, it's going to cast a hell of a shadow to the north, and wind maps suggest that it'll be standing across the prevailing winds a lot of the time as well, at least where it's starting near the gulf. Both of which will likely create a milder micro-climate and help vegetation get established in currently inhospitable desert.
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tl;dr: it's dumb as fuck and there's a reason cities are built the way they are
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Nope.
There are only two logical shapes for a city:
A cone (eg think how a hard drive is laid out) or a grid.
A cone gives you two layers of redundancy with no congestion, spoke-to-hub, and spoke-to-spoke, where as a grid gives you variable redundancy at the cost of congestion. @ vs #
If you setup a cone or a sphere city (a sphere has issues with land efficiency) any two points will not be further than the diameter of the city. If you setup a grid, then the farthest two points are going to be a zig-zag from one
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...lone and level sands stretch far away. (Score:2)
It's a boondoggle. And a deathtrap.
We're watching money burn in preparation for the fire that will burn it all to the ground, killing thousands.
It's basically a closed space, stretching for 170 kilometers.
Some drunk expathetic fires up a grill on the balcony, [bbc.com] everyone inside dies from smoke inhalation, then everything burns to the ground.
Re: Zero Carbon (Score:3)
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I don't know... having spent some time living in the festering hive of humanity that are cities, and deciding I do not like it, this actually has some appeal.
Consider, at probably somewhere around 130 floors tall you're looking at the equivalent amount of real estate from a maybe 12km wide corridor of typical US urban sprawl compressed into a space two city blocks wide. That's an incredible amount of proximity to... everything, Including to the edge of the city - you'll rarely be more than 100m away from
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It reminds me the design of some huge space ships in science fiction. Or Begich Towers in Alaska.
Can a society live in that or not? I would at least place huge parks, lakes and sport areas on each side of the wall. And to start with much smaller scale.
How Is the Alaska Town Where Everyone Lives in One Building Handling the Pandemic? [insidehook.com]
There’s a pragmatic reason for this living arrangement: high winds make going outside in winter hazardous. But how does a town where everyone lives in close proximity deal with a pandemic where close proximity can be dangerous?
Whittier, Alaska [wikipedia.org]
Whittier is a city at the head of the Passage Canal in the U.S. state of Alaska. At the 2020 census, the population was 272, up from 220 in 2010, almost all of whom live in a single building, the Begich Towers.
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MBS wtf (Score:2)
Re: MBS wtf (Score:2)
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Read up on criticisms of it, it won't work, it's pure fantasy, it's also completely environmentally unfriendly and unsustainable, no-one will want to live there. Travel and commuting are the main thing that won't work, it's logistically a no-go from the transportation of people and goods perspective.
Re: MBS wtf (Score:2)
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I certainly never said anything about flats. Travel, heating, cooling, shopping, services, many aspects of life that work well in cities which sprawl in 2 dimensions wouldn't work well in this one-dimensional long line system. Property prices will likely be eye-watering. The consensus is that it won't work, others have given more detailed reasons why, it just straight up isn't feasible and certainly won't be carbon neutral given how much glass, steel and concrete will be needed.
This will go well (Score:5, Insightful)
The most epic abandoned building in history. What a clusterfuck. Rich people won't want to live in an arcology like moles, and poor people won't be able to afford it.
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That, and the trains up and down will be completely packed 24/7 and most people will never leave their houses. Did they even run a simulation as to how many people need to move from place to place and loading and unloading times? I think food supply will also be a difficult issue.
Re: This will go well (Score:2)
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How far does the average person travel within a well designed city? E.g. ones where business and residential areas intermingle so that ridiculous commutes aren't mandatory?
Keep in mind that at half a kilometer tall you're probably talking over 130 floors, compared to *maybe* 2 for most of a typical sprawling US city. (taking into account yards, parking lots, etc - if your parking has to have the same footprint as your shopping center, you've just halved the average number of floors in the shopping center)
S
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That, and the trains up and down will be completely packed 24/7 and most people will never leave their houses. Did they even run a simulation as to how many people need to move from place to place and loading and unloading times? I think food supply will also be a difficult issue.
Hang on, how can the trains be packed 24/7 if people never leave their houses?
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The most epic abandoned building in history. What a clusterfuck. Rich people won't want to live in an arcology like moles, and poor people won't be able to afford it.
Myanmar: "we've completed Naypyidaw, the worlds emptiest and most useless city".
Saudi Arabia: "Hold my Hummus".
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"Rich people won't want to live in an arcology like moles, and poor people won't be able to afford it."
As long as they don't name the planned AI 'Deus', all should run smoothly.
"Already taking shape" (Score:3)
So far all they've done is some digging. That's almost trivially easy - humans have been doing that for millennia.
Let us know when the actual construction is "well under way".
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Badgers have been doing it for even longer.
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Let us know when the actual construction is "well under way".
Ground preparation is by far one of the largest and complex components of "actual construction". Incidentally ground preparation also shows a very defined shape of the construction that comes on top.
Put on some underpants, no one wants to see your no true Scotsman fallacy under your kilt.
Re: "Already taking shape" (Score:1)
Built dumb like a fox? (Score:3)
This structure makes more way sense as a giant wall than a building, what could be the purpose of building a wall there?
Re:Built dumb like a fox? (Score:5, Funny)
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To try and lure Roger Waters into performing a concert there?
These are the days of miracles and wonders... (Score:3)
We've managed to dig a few km worth of ditch in the desert! AMAZING!!!!!
Why not a ring? (Score:2)
If not a ring world, we could have had a ring city.
Just like Dubai’s islands (Score:5, Insightful)
I expect it to end up like Dubai’s famous palm islands. https://youtu.be/tdExZj3JBc0 [youtu.be]
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So do I but for completely different reasons. Dubai's islands got absolutely screwed by external economic factors that caused a complete stop in investment in Dubai.
But while Dubai is actually a generally welcoming place for foreign investment and foreigners in general, Saudi Arabia is largely a shithole. It would appeal to the oil rich, but there aren't enough of them in the middle east to actually live in this megacity (assuming they want to leave their already lavish places), and wealthy foreigners would
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"Two small corrections: you misspelled palaces and they would use a 3.048 meter pole."
3.048 indeed, everybody knows that you take back one kadam to honour the Hebrew god, whose Arkthis is.
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Keyboard cleanup, aisle one please.
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No, it's not just 2008. They did not do enough market research.
There's a fairly small number of people who's can afford to spend several tens of millions of dollars for something on the island. Dubai isn't that nice with its 40 C heat in the summer. It doesn't get comfortable until November and quickly heats up to unbearable again by April. So at best it's a winter home.
Now how many people can afford a winter home of more than say, $20 million? Obviously their total disposable wealth has to be twice or more
The design isn't even done (Score:3)
Take the largest structures in the world, the Boeing factory, Burj Khalifa, Pentagon, etc and this thing is supposed to bigger than all of them by exponential margins at 170km. I can't imagine any part of the design is finalized.
The whole thing screams someone saw a pretty concept drawing and nobody could convince them you don't actually build that, it just looks neat, it's actually pretty terrible to design an actual city like that.
Mohammed bin Salman dismembers people... (Score:3)
The whole thing screams someone saw a pretty concept drawing and nobody could convince them you don't actually build that
...who disagree with his brainfarts. He's kinda famous for that. [wikipedia.org]
The screams you're imagining are probably just more people being cut to pieces. In preparation for the screams of people who will burn inside this fire-trap.
We are witnessing preparations for a massacre.
A 1D city? Why? (Score:4, Insightful)
The point of a city is to put lots of people close together. A 1D city is less efficient than a 2D or 3D city. I grant you their building is quite tall and fairly wide, for a building. But a 170km*200m base is the same area as a 6km*6km base, or 7km*7km if you leave room for some streets in between. The 7km*7km version has everyone within 7km of everyone else, instead of up to 170km for this thing. The 7km*7km version doesn't have the traffic bottleneck in the middle that the 170km line has, either. The view isn't as good though.
White Elephant Building (Score:3)
You are being western-stupid. (Score:2)
If you goal is well paying jobs for Saudi citizens and their kids
Sorry, but you are assuming there is a logical, clear-minded, profit-driven, reasonable goal behind this. In the interest of the masses, no less.
This is built on orders from a guy who has his extended family, along with a couple of hundred other political, military and business figures, arrested and locked up in hotels.
Where they were tortured until they signed off their money and assets. [wikipedia.org]
You think he is doing this for "well paying jobs for Saudi citizens and their kids"?
He's doing this, like everything else
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I grant you their building is quite tall and fairly wide
Wait, it can't be both tall and wide! That's 2 dimensions!
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It's 100+ stories tall.
That's kinda like increasing the width 100 times.
It's like a flat city 170km long x 20km wide.
Also, it's not really physical distance that counts so much as travel time.
A train makes distances shorter (in travel time).
Long in the train dimension makes sense (well, at least isn't as stupid as it seems at first glance).
In theory, everything in the building/city is an elevator ride, a train ride and another elevator ride away.
Of course, in practice it will be horrible, because everything
How many slave workers from SE Asia and India (Score:3, Insightful)
are going to die trying to build this thing, before its abandoned ?
200 meters is laughably skinny (Score:4, Insightful)
Are they fucking stupid? 200 meters is pathetically skinny. You can sprint across it in 30 seconds. It is claustrophobic. You can't even fit a sports stadium or even a decent mall in that. How about playing loud music or outdoor parties? Impossible because of the noise even if they designate a non-residential section. Forget about a golf course, or trails, or car race tracks. And what if you have a hobby like rocketry or RC airplanes? Forget about that too.
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Are they fucking stupid?
Compared to you?? That's debatable.
And what if you have a hobby like rocketry or RC airplanes?
See above.
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YHBT, YSF. AYN? HTH, HAND.
Re: 200 meters is laughably skinny (Score:2)
Sci-Fi Place Where Women are Treated Like Dirt (Score:3)
Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Many Sci-Fi stories are dystopian
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Soviet style with 21st century gloss paint (Score:4, Interesting)
This is the kind of architecture I thought we would move away from - the forced disturbance of nature standing out like a sore thumb, rather than integrating with the environment as much as possible. Well, at least Muhammed bin Salman has his own version of the pyramid to satisfy his ego.
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My first thought when seeing this is the high density soviet housing - cold, lifeless, depressing horror housing. Putting a mirror on it and glossing it over with current buzzwords ("net zero") doesn't make it any more appealing
The difference is that the Soviet design was actually good. I mean in terms of urban design, not necessarily the execution of the buildings themselves.
You had these things called micro-districts which which combined residential housing with everything you might need on daily basis (grocery, kindergarten, school, clinic) within walking distance. There's usually plenty of green space around, and if you need to go elsewhere in the city, the nearby arterial road would have several bus and/or tram routes.
I know
Comment removed (Score:3)
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Before anyone with a scant few brain cells in here here actually gets excited about this "sci-fi megacity", I recommend watching Thunderf00t's busting-video of this whole idiotic thing at https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com] . There are a ton of problems with the design, but e.g. only the top level of the city getting any actual sunlight and the bottom of it becoming basically inhabitable, dark slums for the slaves is a pretty big flaw.
As well as the aspects he notes - If I were to have a country as an enemy, the tactical nirvana of these line cities is exactly what I would want them to do.
A few properly placed bog standard missiles and the whole place is just a hot easy bake oven for it's members. A very short war.
But that's just a pipe dream, Thunderfoot outlines the utterly ridiculous dainbread idea it is.
And to repay the favor of the Thunderfoot link, here is Sam Kinison weighing in on the desert. https://www.youtube.com/short [youtube.com]
Basically a mix of THX1138 and the Dark Ages. (Score:3)
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Brilliant analogy. Also Idiocracy
Haters gonna hate (Score:3)
News about Neom, the Line and recently the yacht marina place always attract the haters. it's like they never played Sim City but need to be distracted from the failure of the West to keep up with some sort of new urban development.
In Asia they build new cities, or knock down the old to make modern city centres, while we're stuck with medieval infrastructure, suburbia and high rent all around. Haters need to look closer to home.
This is one big dystopian troll pet project (Score:2)
I clicked on the previous submission and read the article, and this whole thing lost me at "robotic avatars." WTF is that supposed to mean? The Saudis have a huge problem with lots and lots of foreign workers, so the solution is . . . peripherals? F-me! I didn't know that we had those! Why didn't someone tell me? I don't even have an Oculus! Goodness, I really need to keep up.
Seriously, am I the only one who thinks that $500B is low for a skyscraper that's over 100 miles wide? That's what this is: a 100 mil
What about the key facilities? (Score:2)
Greater living through hydrocarbons (Score:2)
Note that none of this would be possible without the ability to produce and sell hydrocarbons.
Our fuel dollars at "work" (Score:2)
It's all about the giant construction contracts (Score:2)
I was in Qatar, 31 years ago, for a job interview (didn't get it, which was lucky, as it turned out): ... the pictures of the then-dusty town of 100,000 with only a few buildings over 10 stories, are fairly hilarious now.
http://brander.ca/dora/2022112... [brander.ca]
I remember how empty the whole city felt, how surprised I was when ex-pats also there to interview walked me around, showed me the giant post office, which was bigger than the 19th-century palace of a P.O. in Madrid. Our steps echoed in the empty corridor
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Very interesting. I watch Al Jazeera enough that I'm sick of the World Cup coverage and how they're trying so hard to put on a good face for the world to see. Their reporting is reasonably unbiased unless it has anything to do with Qatar.
Your picture of the empty Corniche is quite a contrast to the images they've be showing from the World Cup full of people from other countries. Seeing certain stories about Qatar on other news outlets that I don't see on AJ doesn't make them look very good in my opinion
Good luck with that (Score:3)
Oscars (Score:2)
Pauli Shore and Stephen Baldwin will star in a movie about this.
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And I would be stupid enough to watch it one day when I was bored. That's how I saw Bio-Dome anyway.
what are the odds on a (Score:2)
Cubic meters? OSP please! (Score:2)
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A better name given the motivation would be... (Score:2)
Ozymandias.