Exclusive satellite images show Saudi Arabia's sci-fi megacity is well underway
technologyreview.com
technologyreview.com
From TFA:
> The strange gap in imagery raises questions about who gets to access high-res satellite technology. And if the largest urban construction site on the planet doesn’t appear on Google Maps, what else can’t we see?
This is ridiculous. Commercial satellite images are sold everyday to thousands of buyers. You only need a credit card. Google maps is just not updated immediately with all these images that people buy.
I'm surprised at the low quality of these MIT "reporters".
I think it is also one of the reasons why a majority of people have no idea how the infrastucture of world works, from electricity over supply chains to the internet and basically everything in between.
Also any and all European history dealing with Kings and royal houses. They are all basically the same: Property, religion, upstart sons and a king trying to stay king.
They dug a trench in the sand, which is not such a tall order given the consistency of sand.
It's also the reason why they can stick a straw in the sand and oil comes out.
The only big trademark Core infrastructure project made in Saudi up to now has been the Abraj-Al-Bait [0], spearheaded by the Bin Laden Group [1] (founded in 1931 by Osama Bin Laden's father) which is something comparable to the recent CityCenter Las Vegas Development.
And that trench is maybe 5-7 kilometers long (it's supposed to be 170).
I never doubted they'll build something, but until they reach that something the original presentation will get dumbed down a few times. It's still gonna be a long (but definitely not 170 kilometers) line with a metro and no cars, but that's about it.
It makes sense if you consider that when you have oil, it will make your currency strong, so exporting goods is expensive and that makes developing other industry difficult. Also, investments, people and other resources in your country will be all mainly directed towards oil, since that's where the profits are largest. So to escape this trap, you have to basically do something rather crazy.
Can someone better-versed in the economics of large development projects explain to me why this isn't being pursued in a more risk-reducing fashion, with a smaller section being built top-to-bottom to demonstrate its viability?
My guess would be the time. If this would be built in 3-5 years, then with a demonstrator it would take 5 to 10 years to complete. Also - not enough (heh) money constraints.
I'm no construction expert, but building the railway first so you can use it to ship material and workers seems like it could be good.
I have no idea on what the project details are, but - generally speaking and if possible - building an open-cut tunnel (as opposed to bored) is much cheaper (like 1/3 of the cost) and much faster (also because the works are not sequential and can thus be carried on easily in multiple stretches at the same time, given enough equipment and workers ).
The issue is the scale, which requires a construction effort probably spanning decades.
So if they really do start building it they'll likely start from one end and build it section by section until either it's complete or they give up. Even 1km out of the 170 will result in a very large building.
It's almost as if something happened in March which caused Maxar to focus on some other area of the world.
https://blog.maxar.com/for-a-better-world/2022/aviation-week...
Oh well, I guess at least some of those hundreds of billions will end up winkled out of the Saudis by consultancies, at least. Presumably it can then trickle back up and be lent out for something more useful.
I'm more surprised the Saudis haven't already slapped down a few trillion dollars worth of solar on empty desert and future-proofed their energy exports. After all, just because they sell solar energy wouldn't mean they've have to stop the oil overnight[2]. Electricity supply isn't going to be sufficient any time soon and demand isn't going anywhere but up[3].
[1]: it's easy to say "the money" but actually the money can be recycled once it's spent by the KSA royals, so it's kind of immaterial. It's the opportunity costs and resource use.
[2]: energy aside, polymers and petrochemicals aren't going anywhere, even if a few supermarkets have changed to paper tomato trays
[3]: moving all of the world to electrical heating, even fully leveraging ground- and air-source, and traction is going to require mind-bending amounts of installed capacity.
That being said, these aren’t exclusive tasks. It’s not like Saudi Arabia chose between feeding people and a multi-year 170km infrastructure project. It seems odd to compare building a city in one country with feeding people all over the world.
They could have set up a global food infrastructure fund and used it develop sustainable and accessible food technology to produce the food and get the calories to everyone.
They didn't, and neither did anyone else, on the scale required (a few beleaguered charities, aid agencies and the UN notwithstanding)
Ditto for the other example I gave, and any others you can think of.
Countries facing widespread hunger do so due a mix of factors, including war, corruption, lack of policies promoting agriculture, etc…throwing money alone at the problem won’t solve it and at some point, these countries should be held responsible to fix their problems.
Just from the damage they've caused by inhibiting renewables, they're up there as some of the biggest contributors to global issues now and in the future. It's not only on them, many others are more then complicit, but they know what they've been doing.
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/21/climate/saudi-arabia-aram...
And then there's places where hunger is more of a factor of war or governnent corruption or ineptitude. It's hard to fix that without causing other problems.
Hell, they could have done what I would have done if I were an country and slapped a cool trillion on modular, exportable, nuclear reactor technology and become the world's supplier of those (though actually maybe we've waited too long and bulk solar is a better bet these days, which they're in on domestically, but not apparently as a mass export).
I don't think they'll get much useful return on these gigatonnes of steel, glass and concrete in the desert and that's more then a little sad to me. But maybe I'm wrong and it'll become a mega-Shenzhen and outshine the world.
If the tolerances are good, maybe the central rail makes for a decent linear accelerator site if the rest of the building is vacant.
In 10 years, or 20, or 30, there's going to insane water demand on all sides: the entire middle East and most of Africa is going to be at each others throats for water and will pay whatever you ask. Pretty much how it works now for oil, actually.
With that in mind, maybe it's indeed the best possible outcome that that KSA splash the cash harmlessly and uselessly rather then build a new chokehold on something.
Humanity does not need any extra money to solve hunger. We have enough food. Food prices, despite recent inflation issues, are being made more cheaply than ever in human history, in quantities more than sufficient to feed us all.
We just choose that some people go hungry, for being too poor.
But compared to a hundred billion dollar motorway perhaps it's actually a better investment. Maybe they genuinely will hit on how humanity can live in zero carbon harmony with the world. It would be pretty ironic that the Saudis crack that one first and finish what Paolo Soleri started.
I think the problem here is not that any one idea would have been better than this. The scale is just out there. It’s too much.
Especially on HN, it seems like it just begs the question, what would the MVP look like?
Maybe it's a grand megaproject to save humanity and worth many many lives and I just can't see it. We will see.
https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/2...
Edit: Thanks for the info, you are super quick!
I have a follow-up question:
Why build it 170km long and only 0.2km wide? This seems super inefficient, compared to making it shorter and wider. What's the advantage?
Lots of things will be (unnecessarily) far apart. Won't this be annoying for those living in this archeology?
I think the inefficiencies are overstated and gains are generally underrated.
Neom will run into the same problem, except without the ability to first scale laterally. There's a reason logistical systems aren't a straight fuckin line. Cities are logistics machines.
I think the average Factorio noob has put more thought into layout design than the architects of Neom.
I can think off many ideas off the top of my head which would be striking, revolutionary, and less dumb than a line when it comes to logistics. Hell, even a circle (of limited width) would be better, as your worst case transit time immediately is cut in half.
However, it gets more interesting if you're not flying like a bird between the two points. If you are taking metro rail, you care about your distance to a stop which you will walk plus the travel time that you will ride, and number of transfers. As you see, it becomes a lot more complicated. You would have to put down a lot more rail so that every person in a circle is within 200 M of a rail line.
A line 170km by 200m wide has an area of 34km^2. This equals a circle with a diameter of 6.6km.
it would take 694km of rail to fill that circle with a grid so that no point is further than 100m from the lines.
The same holds true for your power, water and sewage infrastructure.
Rail stations wouldn't be 200m apart, though, so maximum distance to the lines is too simplistic a measure to use for this.
You are "in a city", but you are "living on Earth", both are present, separated by your front door..
Culturally, most of the residents will be observing sunrise and sunset prayers which makes the transitions of the sun a little more anchoring. Traditionally morning prayer is twilight until sunrise, the evening is sunset until the red leaves the sky in the west. (So says Wikipedia anyway, then it gets into astronomical math, so I expect everyone just has an app for it now.)
The systems logic that they have in this project makes sense: A more efficient structure would definitely make running a large urban region much more effective. And Saudi Arabia has a lot of flat, uninterrupted, unused space that is largely outside the earthquake, storm and other disaster zones, so a big linear structure can be easily workable there.
The line structure seems to be well calculated - its long, but its very thin. Meaning that they plan to run everything one single, uninterrupted, well, line of infra. Which totally makes sense from an engineering standpoint. If it was a vanity project or wasteful indulgence as some claim, the systems side of this would not be made as simple as this and it would be something more grand. Moreover, the linear building concept that apparently does not seem to inspire anyone judging from the comments, is another evidence that it was chosen for its systems efficiency, and not awe factor or tourism value.
Again, its an interesting project. Even if they can pull off a fraction of it and succeed in developing a large, uninterrupted urbanization that is efficient, it can make a great breakthrough in terms of urban technology.
It is comically inefficient, offers no fault tolerance nor ability for expansion. I don’t even know where to begin.
By all means put it in a forgettable sci-fi movie. Don’t take it further.
Why.
That we are building cities in non-linear fashion because we dont have enough flat, contiguous land in most of the world does not make it the best paradigm.
Moreover, there were historic communities that were built in such linear fashion. Ancient Egypt itself, was a gigantic line around the Nile river where the Nile played the role of the infrastructure.
But even in the plentiful places where we do, cities grow in two dimensions.
> Ancient Egypt itself, was a gigantic line around the Nile river where the Nile played the role of the infrastructure.
This is indeed a good example, though it proves the opposite of your point. The Egyptians spread in a linear fashion because (and only because) the land far away from the Nile was pretty much uninhabitable (except with a nomadic lifestyle).
We don't have plentiful places to be able to construct any linear cities. The majority of the world's habitable zones do not permit such construction. You would eventually have to oblige with what geography and geology imposes on you even after a few kilometers.
Saudi Arabia has immense desert stretches that are uniform and that are fit for this purpose. What would prohibit it would be the desert environment not being conducive to living. But an efficient planning and infrastructure like they are likely doing would make it possible.
> This is indeed a good example, though it proves the opposite of your point.
No, you disproved your point:
> The Egyptians spread in a linear fashion because (and only because) the land far away from the Nile was pretty much uninhabitable (except with a nomadic lifestyle).
That is precisely the reason why Egyptians lived in linear fashion, and thats also the reason why their entire civilization never had infrastructure problems and it was able to undertake construction projects like the pyramids.The reason for having to urbanize in such a linear outline does not negate its merits.
Moreover - the majority of the world's civilizations and urbanization has developed along the rivers. That many rivers do not follow a straight line and turns in curvers does not mean that they are not line-like in their behavior. Even when the land far away from the rivers were arable and habitable, the urbanization did not spread too far away from the river. The infrastructure that the river provides is way too efficient to give up. Even if it is only for providing water for consumption and for irrigation.
Actually, it is so even today - the majority of world's urbanization and mega cities and even industries are still spread along the rivers.
Certain coastline cities are built as a narrow stripe along the coast, especially those either restrained by mountains or evolved as a resort. (not as narrow as 200m though)
Aren't we just falling for their plans for giving it that much media attention?
Saudi Arabia has billions raining from the sky.
Both make you rich, but the societies function very differently.
This is the problem with unfathomably rich authoritarian rulers with unchecked power. They don't have people pushing back on their grandiose and insane ideas.
A great example of this is Turkmenistan's capital, Ashgabat.