Architects have designed a Martian city for the desert outside Dubai | Hacker News Reader

Architects have designed a Martian city for the desert outside Dubai

edition.cnn.com

Yet another paid off Dubai marketing puff piece advertorial, yet another article by a so called journalist that doesn't question the architect Bjarke Ingels Group on the ethics of what will almost certainly be built by basically slave labour.

the likelihood of it actually being built are about zero, Dubai has had a lot of these projects these are just marketing vaporware.

CO2 emissions per capita in the United Arab Emirates are equivalent to 23.37 tons per person, one of the few countries with higher per capita emissions than the USA.

This is including the massive (60-70%) low-paid immigrant worker population that I assume doesn't have a significant foodprint compared to the Emiratis and Western expats living there.

Those "martian" cities will be needed as giant shelters on Earth before we can build them on Mars.

Does that stat include all the "expats" in UAE? I mean, only a tiny percentage of the people in UAE count as citizens (a problem in its own right, but ok), so if that was used as the denominator then it's not a very worrying statistic.

This number assumes UAE's population of 9~10 million and includes (I think) the immigrant population.

I am not sure what you consider "not very worrying", as I don't think that the 5 million Indians and Pakistanis living in the UAE are responsible for much of the carbon footprint of the country. So for the Emiratis and Western expats, we should consider their per capita footprint to be at least double the average.

So much of the carbon footprint of Dubai is air conditioning and water from desalination. Even the immigrant workforce will have a considerable carbon footprint.

1) I am not sure how many of the low paid workers even get A/C but I am pretty sure that those who do require much less energy to cool down their dormitory room than the fancy dubai palaces, open air A/C streets and stadiums, empty malls, etc. It's appalling that you would even compare the two.

2) Israel uses desalination and their carbon footprint is 3 times lower.

A lot of the immigrant workforce in Dubai uses that same lavishly air-conditioned infrastructure as anyone else. They use the bus system and so sit inside the air-conditioned bus shelters. They use what free time they have to visit the malls, too. And so many of the Indian-subcontinent restaurants and markets in Dubai and Sharjah exist purely to serve fellow Indian-subcontinent people, and those are air-conditioned, too.

Yes, Israel uses desalination and has a low carbon footprint, but they also have leadership that has historically been more concerned with water conservation.

I've seen many videos about migrant workers in Middle East, and I highly doubt that they have money to spend in malls or have proper living conditions. E.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0EsOFDA6uM#t=3m24s (though this video is from Qatar, there are similar from Dubai)

You have "seen videos", but have you ever actually been to Dubai or Sharjah? The lowest tier of workers toiling in squalid living conditions is not the entirety of Indian-subcontinent workers in the UAE. For decades the Emirates have had a huge population of Indian-subcontinent (and Filipino, and Eastern European) migrant workers who work all the service-economy jobs so that the local Emiratis don't have to, and yes, these workers like the malls, too. Even if they don’t have so much money to spend in malls, malls are still the place that anyone goes to have a stroll around on a day off, because as air-conditioned spaces they serve as the local parks and squares.

Please, WHAT does Israel have to with this?

It's another rich country in a hot climate? It's a pretty apt comparison.

No need to assume that any mention of Israel is a hot headed take on the Israel-Palestine situation.

I know (and agree on the comparison bit), it's just that the whole course of logic just felt so sentimental and incoherent. Very difficult to reason with such ... reasoning, because arguments just fly in and out without warning. Not saying he was implying anything about Palestine.

> as I don't think that the 5 million Indians and Pakistanis living in the UAE are responsible for much of the carbon footprint of the country. So for the Emiratis and Western expats, we should consider their per capita footprint to be at least double the average.

While I acknowledge your sentiment, making these kinds of arguments is not acceptable. Please base your conclusions on facts or at least coherent, easy to follow logic. This will be better for you as well as your point will come across more easily.

Right now it just sounds like a lot of prejudice from someone who watched a lot of (quite sad) documentaries but actually has never been there in person nor is very well-versed in its politics and/or statistics.

I'm not the OP, but I really think you are taking a very negative approach to their comment, and you come off like you are accusing them of something.

It is a fact that there are a lot of low-paid migrant workers from India and Pakistan in Dubai, and it's a fact that many live in dormitories, and it's a fact that Dubai and the Emirates have a very dubious record on migrant worker rights, and indeed on human rights in general.

>> They don't even have a space program.

Actually this is factually incorrect. They do have a space program and planning to send their first satellite to Mars this year: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/09/it-is-about-ou...

Fair enough, I removed this sentence. Looks like it was distracting from the core of the message.

Without getting into a semantics argument:

They do have a satellite program.

They don't have a launch program, that mission will launch from Japan on a Japanese rocket.

They have quite an ambitious space program, several successful satellite missions, and 2 astronauts (so far). Their Mars orbiter is launching next month.

> They have quite an ambitious space program, several successful satellite missions, and 2 astronauts (so far). Their Mars orbiter is launching next month.

> Those "martian" cities will be needed as giant shelters on Earth before we can build them on Mars.

Which is a far stronger argument for building them than any space program. The harder problems of colonizing mars do not include "can we build domes without a substantial pressure differential tearing them apart".

Replace “low paid immigrant worker population” with “slave laborers” and you’ll be correct.

The UAE exports oil and gas as well. How is that accounted for?

While I think this looks really cool, there are people who think domes are not the way to go. Part of the reasoning kind of makes sense.

https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/11/28/domes-are-very...

Either way, these things are fun to read about...

This isn't strictly related but in the section on tensile structures the author mentioned the Goodyear Inflatoplane[1], which is one of the craziest things I'd never heard of.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodyear_Inflatoplane

Pah! If you're going to get crazy with inflatables, why not ride one all the way to low earth orbit:

http://www.jpaerospace.com/ATO/ATO.html

One of the sections of the wikipedia article is titled, "Survivors," which made me think there had been some horrible disaster.

It's about surviving examples of the plane.

Building underground makes more sense. Due to the radiation shielding. But its not an issue in fake Mars (earth desert)

I always enjoyed the layout of the Moonbase[0] from Space 1999, I don't recall a single dome in that setup yet it made sense.

[0]https://alphanpeter.tumblr.com/image/177610992673

The massive thick solid aluminium domes in Andy Weir's Artemis make sense I think, but they wouldn't be nearly as pretty.

Nice link from Casey there. I was captured by his analysis of perchlorates in the soil, because you can decompose it to release oxygen, as well as obviously make another type of rocket fuel (on top of other local products like methane, oxygen, and hydrogen).

https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2020/04/20/even-the-dirt-...

"on Mars, a pressurized dome actually supports its own weight and then some. As a result, the structure is under tension and the dome is attempting to tear itself out of the ground. Since lifting force scales with area, while anchoring force scales with circumference, domes on Mars can’t be much wider than about 150 feet, and even then would require extensive foundation engineering."

Huh, I always knew you could "float" domes from reading Red Mars but the lifting force sounds pretty gnarly.

Boring rectangular boxes for all!

Boxes face the same lifting force problem.

Burying it (dome or box) below enough dirt can alleviate the problem, but it's a lot of dirt.

Or you just make the structure with a lot of tensile strength. Run wires from the floor to the ceiling to hold the ceiling down.

I've read "somewhere" that hollow lava tunnels/tubes could be used. Coat the inside with the plastic mentioned in the blog shared in another comment, and you possibly have an airtight (except for the soil) massive habitat. Although you'd have to string big lights along the top to grow plants.

This is a common idea - in a way it is as a shorcut to piling dirt on top of a structure that you make. Critics often bring up that exerting a huge force on the inside of lava tunnels might destabilize them in bad ways, and that sealing rough surfaces might be harder than just building a pressure vessel of your own.

Oh I see - the natural shape for a pressure vessel is a sphere, after all, so a dome will be constantly trying to make itself spherical.

That does suggest that on Mars we should just make them spherical in the first place...

Casey Handmer argues [0] that The best solution is an “air mattress” structure where anchor cables are spaced throughout the structure to resist the pressure load.

The anchor cables can scale linearly with area just like the pressure does, while a perimeter wall anchor scales with radius and therefore sets a limit on enclosure size.

The cable anchor approach also lets you build arbitrarily high ceilings, like kilometers up hypothetically.

I really wish someone would build one of these on Earth. It would actually be easier because you’d just set the pressure high enough to resist wind loads. You could make an incredibly gigantic greenhouse in some otherwise inhospitable climate

[0]: https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/11/28/domes-are-very...

> I really wish someone would build one of these on Earth. It would actually be easier because you’d just set the pressure high enough to resist wind loads. You could make an incredibly gigantic greenhouse in some otherwise inhospitable climate

This would require 2atm pressure (to be equivalent to mars) - how well do humans react to that sort of pressure for long periods of time?

Humans do remarkably well at high pressures. 2 atm pressure is the equivalent of being 10m underwater.

If you go a lot higher you run into some issues and need to modify the gas composition/ratio, this has been thoroughly studied for diving purposes.

Domes aside, underground is obviously the right idea. You can use the tailings to mine for ice while you're digging the spaces.

The one surprise here: water filled skylights are brilliant. They let light through, block radiation, and you can use them for fish and excess water storage.

Irradiated space Sushi. Yummie!

Wanna try to get Biosphere-III right, first?

Just about every architectural firm has made big bucks by selling glorious empty buildings to those oil barons. It's almost comical to hear them talk of "sustainability" in the world's least sustainable place and autocracy, where the coming tourism collapse collides with decades of unprecedented real estate waste, borrowed money and oil drying up.

This sounds like the USA, or any other country when they are still growing and developing as it sounds like the UAE.

Did the industrialists in the UK care about sustainability? Did the European colonialists care about sustainability?

Only now that our countries somewhat have our shit together we start caring about how clean our air is, how long our stockpile of resources/money lasts and how good and kind we are to our earth.

When your biggest struggle is having enough money to eat. That's your priority. Later on when your biggest issue is pollution because it will shorten your lifespan that's what you fight for.

The UAE is not struggling to have enough money to eat. It's spending money to spend money because they have extensive oil and gas resources (and at least the wisdom to diversify their economy to enable them to better survive oil shocks).

"These oil barons"? Dubai is not oil rich. That is why it has built its economy on trade. I could understand people misunderstanding this in the early millennium when Dubai was just starting to rise to its global importance, and they had only Arabian-peninsula stereotypes to go by. But it baffles me how people don't know this by now. They most might have learned it, for example, from the fallout of the 2008 crisis which hit Dubai's trade and real estate-based economy and forced it to turn to other parts of the UAE which do have oil.

What is your basis for saying this? The UAE has the third highest oil production per capita in the world.

The contribution which oil makes to Dubai's economy has been in the single-digit percentages for many years.[0] While the UAE overall is known for oil output (though this chart[1] states that it is lower per capita then you suggested, at least for 2017), the UAE is an only loosely joined federation, and so the oil output of other emirates is not reflective of Dubai.

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-01-14/dubai-... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_oil_produ...

LOL

I don't know the details of this project—and the UAE's affinity with grand projects certainly warrants a grain of salt—but I've often thought these baby steps could be useful for space exploration.

Sure, Mars, the Moon, etc. are not like anything found on earth. But at the same time getting good at surviving in the least hospitable places on Earth could certainly yield some insight when living in even lesser hospitable places.

And like so many other space research projects, there might even be useful outcomes for everyday life on earth.

Wishing them all the best, and even if they "fail", I hope valuable insight is learned from this.

I think the biggest challenge in terms of a sustained presence on Mars is not the engineering [or scientific] challenge, but the human [and] personal one,"

Politics/location aside, that seems to imply that if you come out of lockdown self-isolation without going crazy, you may well be suited to live in an environment like that.

I see it differently.

People who initially go there will self-select.

The problem is, to my mind, people’s mental breakdowns—maybe induced by the new enviro, but also other things, including perhaps genetic.

And that’s the people who self-select. What about new generations? Large populations will produce a variety of minds. Many will be sound, some not.

How do you deal with the Kaczynskis of the world?

Could you even have protests that could erupt into collapse? One thing you could do is compartmentalize “cities” so that if one implodes/explodes it doesn’t take the whole “mars civilization” with it, but still...

China style full spectrum surveillance with predictive policing like in Minority Report, orwellian telesupervisor gadgets everywhere, any time, and implants, from the beginning. Tracking not only YOU, but every object, tool, material, ingredient, keeping stock of everything in real time.

What else?

I think you're going to want a system of nested spheres. Each "layer" of nested sphere has a pressure gradient. With Martian gravity (~0.4G if i recall correctly) and geodesic designs you can make really big structures (tens of kilometers).

Speaking of Martian cities, shouldn't SpaceX start working on their Mars base already? I assume it will need years of testing on Earth before it's ready to launch.

I think that NASA is doing that research for now... They'll most likely collaborate on the Mars base.

https://www.news.com.au/technology/science/space/nasa-mars-b...

Architects? What do these clowns knowabout Mars conditions? Shouldn't we get engineers building working stuff first before engaging more vain activities.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com