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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)."
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.
Someone's got to Hire and Manage the Engineering Team from the Pleiades.
What? You think mankind possesses the technology to build a pyramid?
oh, *that* Scott Adams...I thought it was the guy who made the text-based adventure games in the 80's
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
I've never seen an example of him telling the engineers of the world that they're doing it all wrong where he hasn't been right.
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.
(sorry, lost formatting)
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/) .05 dollars/kWh = 250,000,000 dollars
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 (http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=428636)
12^4*10^12 joules=2e16 joules = 5e9 kWh
Wholesale price of electricity is 5 cents per kWh
5e9 kWh *
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 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.
Presumably it would be just a hollow shell, and thus vastly lighter in weight than the pyramid of giza.
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.
The issue I see is not "Lifting the blocks is energy expensive, therefor wont work!", the issue I see is "Clearing the sand down to bedrock is expensive, and therefor wont work!"
Here's the deal:
Sand grains in the desert are small, and are carried by wind. Wind is powered by solar induced thermal exchanges. Wind energy routinely creates and moves humongous piles of sand around, and the formation of those piles of sand can be controlled by building or placing obstacles to redirect wind flow/speed/pressure. A nearly entirely passive process can be used to deposit the sand, even up on top of the pyramid while it is being built. The only thing you need to lift manually is the sintering system.
However, by the same token, you MUST place the pyramid directly on bedrock to avoid having the sand get blown out from under the pyramid by said wind patterns.(Unless you WANT your pyramid to break in half!) Clearing out several feet of sand is a non-trivial task that is energy intensive. Getting the wind to do this for you is not very feasible.
Once the pyramids(s) is (are) made however, you will have the undesirable consequence of their being made from glass, in an erosive sand environment featuring wind. Glass is substantively "softer" on the mohs hardness scale than is raw crystalline silicon dioxide-- the primary component of sand. The pyramid will get abraded HARD, and will require very aggressive maintenance.
You have: no tea.