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Scott Adams's Plan For Building Giant Energy-Generating Pyramids
LoLobey (1932986) writes "Scott Adams has proposed a pyramid project
to save the world via energy generation and tourism. Basically build giant
pyramids, miles wide and high, in the desert to generate power via chimney
effect and photo voltaics with added features for
tourism (he's planning ahead for when robots take over all the work and we'll
need something to do). He's had a few "Big Ideas" lately (canals, ice bergs, ion energy)."
Perhaps you could 3D print yourselves to Egypt and deploy your 3D printers to "make" (gag) this pyramid over the weekend?
Surely it is a brave new future for the species, so it should be easy?
So a bored guy who draws jokes for a living is telling the engineers of the world that they are doing everything wrong.
Sure, let's give him more attention!
Will the food stands sell dilberitos?
He doesn't have the pointy hair necessary to manage the project
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Does he not know about the four corner time cube? Pyramid power isn't just less efficient, it's evil!
Someone's got to Hire and Manage the Engineering Team from the Pleiades.
What? You think mankind possesses the technology to build a pyramid?
Rainwater can be collected and recycled fairly easily. Crops of hydroponic vegetable gardens can be grown using robots. One level could be set aside for chicken and cows. Wind power can be generated on the top levels. A few levels can be set aside for humans. I would think that making the base with steel and upper levels with aluminum beams would be the most practical. It would have the best balconies ever! I can't wait to move in!!
Nothing to see here folks, the joke is in the subject line.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Anyone can be an effective visionary if they have an analytical mind and aren't stuck in the mental rut of dogma. Authors, including authors of cartoons, tend to spend most of their time thinking, so they're a fairly good profession for spawning visionaries quite regularly.
Engineers make things, and they're very practical and pragmatic about it --- they make things that actually work, and as such they're the creators of everything technical in the modern world. Having both feet well anchored on the ground is almost the opposite of thinking about the distant future though --- if they do become visionaries, it's not so much a result of their profession but because they also enjoy pure science and futurism.
I'm an engineer, but I wouldn't poo poo Scott Adams just because he's not. If he (or anyone else) comes up with some interesting designs, I'm sure that many skilled engineers and scientists will sanity check them before the detailed design begins.
Let's math: Assuming that the miles high pyramid uses free sun power to melt sand and we only need PV to power lifting the glass blocks The great pyramid of giza is 455' tall and has 10^12 joules of potential energy (http://what-if.xkcd.com/95/) A 2 mile high pyramid with the same dimensions is about 12x taller if you scale up the pyramid by 12, that's 12^4x more energy (using this formula: http://www.physicsforums.com/s...) 12^4*10^12 joules=2e16 joules = 5e9 kWh wholesale price of electricity is 5 cents per kWh 5e9 kWh * .05 dollars/kWh = 250,000,000 dollars
This could easily triple depending on motor losses and other energy costs. So you could make your giant pyramid with "free" energy or you could sell the energy on the open market for almost a billion dollars
the sad part is there is a huge market for pv and concentrated solar thermal, and we don't need to build pyramids to do it.
'solar roadways' are far fetched yet they exist and we can turn broken beer bottles into them. but more interesting is a omnidirectional solar concentrator that channels all the solar and moon light with a magnification of up to 10,000 times the concentartion of available light. which then makes solar thermal and solar photovotaics that run in moon light and on cloudy days.
in fact there are so many solar concentrator tech available i don't know which one to link to, perhaps the solar roadways also use a concentrator i don't know, but if we can build 10 billion cars why can't we build all the solar concentrators and pv to power our cities and electric vehicles?
i know this doesn't fix a lot of problems with our society, but having energy that doesn't require the production of greenhouse gasses is something every society needs, reguardless of if they are ready for it or not.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
Instead of being like a giant battery to power the city, instead it is a evil giant CAPACITOR?
The concept is nothing new, and in fact there are active and semi - active attempts at building some or at least exploring some elements of them. Notable (per Wikipedia) are Masdar City near Abu Dhabi, many Las Vegas hotels, and Arcosanti in Arizona.
fencepost
just a little off
Great, just what the world needs, another pyramid scheme.
Why build a massive pyramid, why not just use an existing object that is miles high and adapt it for the chimney effect...a mountain?
It's Adams', not Adams's. How could you not know that?
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
Authors, including authors of cartoons, tend to spend most of their time thinking, so they're a fairly good profession for spawning visionaries quite regularly.
IMO he should have spent more time thinking about his cartoon strip, which (back in the day) had one that was funny, interesting, or insightful out of every few hundred.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Presumably it would be just a hollow shell, and thus vastly lighter in weight than the pyramid of giza.
Here I thought we were going to see something along the lines of Siva!.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
There's no value in being a visionary. Most people have a thousand and one save-the-world ideas before breakfast; what matters is figuring out which ones actually work and dismissing the ones that don't, something Adams has shown no particular aptitude for. Nikola Tesla may be remembered for a bunch of fantastical ideas that never came to pass, but he's respected for the ideas he pulled off.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
I'm an engineer, but I wouldn't poo poo Scott Adams just because he's not. If he (or anyone else) comes up with some interesting designs, I'm sure that many skilled engineers and scientists will sanity check them before the detailed design begins
As a Professional Electrical Engineer I have always enjoyed Scott Adams Dilbert cartoons and looking at his education he is no layman having attended Hartwick College and the University of California, Berkeley where he received an MBA in economics and management.
While his proposal seem to be the stuff of Sci-Fi the principles are valid although I personally doubt with our current technology that it would feasible in our lifetime and taking a few pages out of his Dilbert books the amount of management (includes private and governmental) cooperation would be staggering.
Taking a simple example: What has happened to the Space Elevator?
There ain't no such thing as proprietary standards only proprietary formats. Standards are by definition open.
In my opinion concentrated solar will continue to lose out, it's raison d'etre is the high price of PV cells ... but the concentrators themselves are never cheap, generally require tracking and can't efficiently handle diffuse light.
En Sabah Nur! En Sabah Nur!
Didn't ideas like this used to be really popular in the 90's? Where everyone was trying to design buildings, sometimes called archologies, that could serve all of life's needs in a sustainable way. Technically, I think Adams was talking about more of a utility plant, but for a structure of this size, why not make it a fully sustainable community? Extract water from the air, build some green houses, and then you don't even need robots, you've got people to do the maintenance. Frank Herbert would probably take it a step further and make all the people wear still suits.
We're still trying to make a material that's strong enough, and in sufficient quantities. Then there's a bunch of other issues, like how you tether it. It's a perfectly good idea in principle, but the engineering problems make Adams' Pyramids look like a doddle.
That being said, I don't think Adams really falls into that camp of informed speculators. He says at one point "If you put some scrubbers in the device I think there's a way to deal with pollution and climate change too. I saw some sort of tube-to-the-sky concept that was supposed to do that but I'm too lazy to search for the link." He's just screwing around. He's having fun playing with ideas, but can't actually be bothered to do the math or even Google something before saying it. It just comes across as self-indulgent and vain, not insightful or intelligent. For someone who spent so much time deriding people for being stupid or intellectually lazy, he's showing a lot of intellectual laziness himself.
Taking a simple example: What has happened to the Space Elevator?
The materials don't exist that could build it. When / if they do, I'm sure it will be built - the savings compared with rocket launched payload delivery would be staggering.
You do realise when you post these inane remarks using such words people don't think "oh, I should research what's happening in the Muslim world", they think "this guy needs some professional help; his world is tiny and cold, and he's scared of people who look different, and lacks the ability to ascertain what's happening in the world at even a very basic level"? In short, the only person you are hurting with your comments is yourself.
Wouldn't mirrors mounted on the surface of a pyramid reflect light back up?
It was 10 years-from-now technology in 1995, and it's still 10-years-from-now tech. I imagine that in 1000 years it will still be just 10 years away.
Hint: Investors aren't going to go for an outlandish idea if it won't pay back in their lifetimes or a reasonable period.. So the maximum window stated is always 10 years,
Why not just find a suitable mountain for the job?
people don't think "oh, I should research what's happening in the Muslim world"
The public knows exactly what OP is referring to, no need to go do research. This isn't 1989.
they think "this guy needs some professional help
You're giving too much weight to the comment. When most people read something like that, they think "Heh, +1 sad but true" and move on. Even if someone dedicated their lives to posting anti-Muslim comments, most people would only see one of them, ever, and would not conclude "This guy needs professional help!"
If it is vastly lighter in weight than the Pyramid of Giza, it will be even easier for a certain Gates look-alike to steal. Watch for a great increase in incidents of Chinese soldiers shooting down doves and pigeons should this pyramid scheme come to pass.
My scheme was to use convict labor to build great pyramids by hand. Escape would not be likely as the desert spots would be way to far from the first water holes. Give convicts a credit for each good work day put in. That way instead of a ten year sentence we could give a 3,000 work day sentence. If the convict chooses not to work diligently he auto converts his sentence to permanent imprisonment. A few years of hard manual labor in the sun will tame almost anyone.
>I imagine that in 1000 years it will still be just 10 years away.
No: that's controllable fusion reactions for commercial energy purposes. ;*)
Each pyramid can generate enough energy to power over 2 households.
The Religion War by Scott Adams: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
"Global Information Corporation (GIC) (an all-encompassing, worldwide future sort of TIA created out of fear of terrorism) to analyze GIC's massive databases using software. Also, people's phones are, in the name of preventing terrorist communications,"
I'd never heard of a TIA
TIA wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T... "TIA was the "biggest surveillance program in the history of the United States".[8] The program was suspended in late 2003 by the United States Congress after media reports criticized the government for attempting to establish "Total Information Awareness" over all citizens.[9][10][11] Although the program was formally suspended, its data mining software was later adopted by other government agencies, with only superficial changes being made. According to a 2012 New York Times article, the legacy of Total Information Awareness is "quietly thriving" at the National Security Agency (NSA).[12]"
Solar Tower, anyone?
http://www.enviromission.com.au/
I believe California is building one of these in Arizona, and (at least the paperwork part of) another just got started in Texas. At a kilometer in height, one would generate around 250 megawatts.
The "informed" part is what I'm referring to when I say "figuring out which ones actually work". Larry Niven did the maths.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?