Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Saudi Crown Prince unveils plans for $500bn structure to house 9M people

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 264 posts

Re: Saudi Crown Prince unveils plans for $500bn structure to house 9M people

#81

Post by bigDinosaur »

teleforce wrote: post #42
inversefft wrote: post #9

City of the future built by a government stuck in the dark ages.

If you're refering to dark ages it's only applicable to Europe just like Black Death is mainly European based pandemic [1],[2]. When Europe is in their dark ages the rest of the world seems fine. Heck it is only applicable to certain parts of Europe because some of the European countries and regions are doing really well [2],[3]. You probably know this anyway hence new account for trolling. [1] https://en.wikipedia.o…

China and India likely had huge numbers dead due to the Bubonic Plague, but it's poorly recorded as far as I know. Definitely not 'mainly' a European pandemic, although it had such a great influence on European culture that we still talk about it today.

Re: Saudi Crown Prince unveils plans for $500bn structure to house 9M people

#85

Post by harvey9 »

plumeria wrote: post #66
bayesian_horse wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of these problems are probably already solved or could be solved. You are of course using dry cleaning services in some form. Fire suppression systems are built in. The structure is quite narrow, so you have a view to the outside from pretty much anywhere, and it's not much worse than any skyscraper, better probably because of (hopefully) better design. As to social aspects... That is my major concern also. Of c…

> You are of course using dry cleaning services in some form People are moving out of dry cleaning into "wet cleaning" to avoid chemical solvents. Wet cleaning requires a drying machine.

Hot, dry air should be easy enough to get at that location. Just need some means of recovering the water as that will be more scarce.

Re: Saudi Crown Prince unveils plans for $500bn structure to house 9M people

#86

Post by colinmhayes »

plantwallshoe wrote: post #68

$500bn to house 9m would be a steal. I’d definitely buy a condo there for $55k

Not that this will actually be built, but construction costs are probably low in Saudi Arabia since they use quasi slave labor.

Re: Saudi Crown Prince unveils plans for $500bn structure to house 9M people

#89

Post by MisterBastahrd »

So when someone finally gets fed up with them and declares war on the Saudis, they can basically terrorize a large fraction of the nation just by setting fires to the giant structure at regular intervals. Imagine trying to evacuate from that thing.

Re: Saudi Crown Prince unveils plans for $500bn structure to house 9M people

#90

Post by amluto »

bayesian_horse wrote: post #71
bobthepanda wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think transport would be infinitely worse in a linear city. In a traditional street network, there are many ways to get from A to B and one link being unavailable is not the end of the world. Forcing everyone onto essentially the same street is guaranteed to cause both high fragility and high congestion, since everyone has to squeeze into the same line.

There's no need to have only one line to connect everything, even in a linear structure. It's still about the topology. At the simplest there would be one line connecting from end to end, which should be the fastest and the one with the fewest stops. But then you have smaller lines, travelling in their own tubes, connecting local areas. That way you can travel between any two points relatively fast and avoid congesti…

In 2D, you can build a grid of straight line railways. Riders transfer zero or one times. Cost scales proportionally to area (and hence population) assuming constant density. Time between two random points scales as sqrt(size). Ridership on a given rail segment scales like sqrt(size), which may be tolerable.

In 1D, you can build a linear railway. Cost scales proportionally to length (and hence population) if you assume that the the railway merely needs to get longer as population grows, but this gives a system where ridership on a given rail segment scales linearly with population, which is much worse. Time between two random points also scales linearly with population. The added costs associated with improving performance given the worse scaling seem likely to blow the whole thing up.

Post reply on HN