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A Physicist Says He Can Tornado-Proof the Midwest With 1,000-Foot Walls
meghan elizabeth writes: Temple physicist Rongjia Tao has a utopian proposal to build three massive, 1,000-foot-high, 165-foot-thick walls around the American Midwest, in order to keep the tornadoes out. Building three unfathomably massive anti-tornado walls would count as the infrastructure project of the decade, if not the century. It would be also be exceedingly expensive. "Building such walls is feasible," Tao says. "They are much easier than constructing a skyscraper. For example, in Philadelphia, the newly completed Comcast building has about 300-meter height. The wall with similar height as the Comcast building should be much easier to be constructed." Update: 06/28 04:14 GMT by T : Note: originally, this story said that Tao was at Drexel rather than Temple -- now corrected
...kaiju protection.
Homeland Security will jump on this as the perfect opportunity to build a prison large enough to hold us.
build the wall on the us-mexico border !
Now we know why there are no Tornados in Westeros.
--
Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
If you can go with a slope and build it as a triangular prism then it is easy to build, like a long pyramid. Jobs, jobs, jobs!
Could we achieve something similar by putting up a massive windmill farm? Getting some power out of it might make the idea more feasible.
How are these walls supposed to withstand the winds? Does he thinks even low winds would not be able to take down these "walls" ?
The rust-belt isn't that bad yet, if you ignore Detroit.
If you're going to build something that large you might as well make it dual use. How about an archology?
Great! Then we can let our hardest criminals 'take the black', and defend the wall from The Others and these monstrous windy beasts.
HSJ$$*&#^!#+++ATH0
NO CARRIER
Just, somebody stop the dickheads and their goddamned ionospheric experiments and that will stop the ten mile high storms they're creating with the chemicals and HAARP from falling sideways out of the ionosphere destroying America.
Really, I've met a lot of really smart physicists, i mean, WAY.
They can't put a nut on a bolt and normally are not allowed in a production lab without an escort.
Then of course you have the other type. Thousand foot wall types. They are usually not allowed out of school.
The only natural predator of trailer homes are tornadoes. Are we prepared for the inevitable population explosion if we defeat tornadoes in the Mid-West? I don't think we'll be able to build Wal-marts fast enough.
What they need is lasers. Frickin' lasers.
This idea is so batshit crazy...I think we should do it. I don't even care whether it works as advertised. The Great Wall of China will pale in comparison.
This could be our Apollo.
If it is not exceedingly expensive, it's not the infrastructure project of the century.
You missed the change in units. 300 meters is 984 (that is, about 1,000) feet. Don't feel bad, it happens to the best of us.
the kaiju are coming. the kaoju are coming.
on a less funny note, i'd be kinda embarrassed to be one of his students or colleagues right now. the paper even got into a journal?
Sounds great. But what happens if a tornado touches down, and starts bouncing around inside the walls? Not being able to move further, does it devastate everything within, like a massive snooker ball inside a table with blocked pockets?
Construct mighty engines of fearsome complexity and madness-inducing size to redirect the gyronormous aetheric power of these "tornadoes" towards the hated enemy.
Nobody thinks cyclopean these days, that's what's wrong with society.
to build three massive, 1,000-foot high, 165-foot thick walls
For example, in Philadelphia, the newly completed Comcast building has about 300 meter height. The wall with similar height as the Comcast building should be much easier to be constructed.
But the wall is not similar height, is it? it's 3 times that height. Also, it may be 165-ft thick, but how wide? all the way around the city is how many times wider than said Comcast building? a few thousand? so 9000+ times larger structure is somehow easier to construct?
I blame the stupid writers who mix their units. 300m is about 1000 feet. As stupid as various measurement systems might be from anyone's perspective, mixing them should be a capital crime.
I'd like an engineer to take a look at his plans. Claiming it is "feasible", and that it "should" be easier than a skyscraper does not exactly instill confidence.
This guy is also a physicist. It would be nice to know what a geologist would think adding a man made mountain, or three, would do to the bedrock in the mid-west.
Has he consulted with a climatologist? I suspect it would affect the local weather patterns at the very least. It would probably drastically change the weather pasterns on the east coat as well.
What about migratory birds and such?
the giants come and destroy it! ...seriously, anything preventing the tornadoes from forming within the wall?
In theory, everything works in practice. In practice, it doesn't.
"Who are you?" "No one of consequence." "I must know." "Get used to disappointment."
That it only works for square tornadoes on an infinite plane of uniform density?
Wouldn't it be cheaper to move all of the people in the midwest to China? That's where all the jobs went anyway
to build three massive, 1,000-foot high, 165-foot thick walls
For example, in Philadelphia, the newly completed Comcast building has about 300 meter height. The wall with similar height as the Comcast building should be much easier to be constructed.
But the wall is not similar height, is it? it's 3 times that height. Also, it may be 165-ft thick, but how wide? all the way around the city is how many times wider than said Comcast building? a few thousand? so 9000+ times larger structure is somehow easier to construct?
Some points to consider
1000 foot = 304 meter.
It is easier to construct a 3'x3' cube of concrete than a CPU, so size does not seem to be the only factor determining difficulty.
If my comment didn't sound as good in your head as it did in mine, then I guess we all know who's to blame
try {
while() {
build_wall();
tear_down_wall();
print( "Recovery!!!!1!!!!1!" );
}
}
catch (error) {
blame_Bush();
}
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Even if it works, the side effects are unpredictable.
Glorious 1000ft tall side effects
It would be pretty spectacular if he created something like the first ice-nado of death. It would be an F-10 with an average temperature of -100f
Hey, those could be Solar Freakin' Walls and they could be made out of scratch-proof glass, topped with windmills and LEDs that you can see in the daytime and generate eleventysix times the electricity of [[transmission garbled]]
The needed resiliency for buildings and communities in tornado alley would be far beyond cost prohibitive without federal and state subsidy. Tornado resilient buildings are fiction. Today even the most resilient areas will succumb to massive disruption of life and economic output due to tornados. I live in Texas, and when Fort Worth had a tornado in the middle of downtown, talk buildings were essentially out of order for months due to damage. These were modern commercial structures too!
$160 million per mile, to prevent an average of 50-60 tornado deaths per year?
1) Build 1000 miles? Only $160 billion? Is that cost of labor alone? What about the cost of land?
2) Build just for cities? Which cities?
3) How does a city afford even 1 mile of wall?
We can drop nukes in tornadoes too for much less, not that I'm advocating that either.
Just last year, there were 32,850 vehicle fatalities in the good ol' USofA.
Driverless cars would've prevented 99% of the crashes. Let's concentrate on rolling those out first and soon.
Well I have an idea!! Lets move all our trash to the Midwest and create mountains. Not only will the mountains create a barrier for tornadoes they can also be tapped to natural gas from the rotting trash....Great idea I think :)
Jack of all trades,master of none
Anyone else tempted to get them to build a forth wall?
That way even if there are tornadoes we will not even here about it ;) .
Needs it's own Bad News Brian meme. Here you go.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
Keeping the Texans out.
Good luck with that. Also, keeps out White Walkers and giants.
Tornado resilient buildings are simply buildings made out of concrete instead of toothpicks held together with toxic glue.
Note: Resilient is not the same as damage proof.
Completely.
Once vehicle deaths are down to a livable number, civilian gun ownership advocates will no longer have it as an overwhelming comparative value used to minimize the sense of risk for such ownership. Until we do this, all arguments about "wanting to save lives" are too easily swept aside by "if you meant that, you would advocate for driverless cars."
Proven... I think you should stop using that word.
They're coming here, stealing our jobs. We need to build a fence to keep them out, and allow warrentless searches of anyone who looks like a tornado. Ironically, to save on costs, most of the wall will actually be built by tornadoes.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
The proposal isn't to build a wall "around" anything. The proposal is to build three east-west walls to mimic the mountain ranges that have successfully limited supercell production in tornado alleys elsewhere on earth. Why OP threw in the word "around" is beyond me.
As an earthmoving project, each kilometer of wall is 18M cubic meters. The Panama Canal was about 250M cubic meters of earthmoving. So every 14KM of wall is one Panama Canal. The proposed Arabian Canal near Dubai (to create "valuable waterfront property" accessable by yacht) would require about 1100M cubic meters of earthmoving. So one Arabian Canal is about 60KM of wall.
In terms of speed, one Bagger 288 can move about 250K cubic meters of earth a day. That's 5KM of wall per year. With one such $100 million machine for every 100KM of wall, the project would take 20 years.
It's a big project, but not impossibly big. Just expensively big.
Would the wall affect the amount of rain that fell?
The Ogallala Aquifer has already lost a lot of water. I'd hate to block winds that brought rain, and exacerbate the problem.
Fantasy flush!
People could stop living in places where a tornado comes through every few years. You hear the same complaints about people living in flood plains
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
On the other hand, building a concrete *anything* that is a thousand feet tall and 165 feet thick isn't easy. They're claiming that a one-mile stretch of the wall would cost $160 million, which comes out to 871.2 million cubic feet of concrete, or a cost per cubic foot (including labour and materials) of about $0.18. That sounds really unlikely to me.
Let me put it this way, the hoover dam is actually relatively similar to what we're talking about here. It's roughly 700 feet tall, varies from 45 to 600 feet thick, and is about a fifth of a mile wide... So let's say that the cross section of the hoover dam has about the same area as this proposed wall.
OK, so now we just need the length of the wall. Well, the circumference of the American midwest is roughly 3900 miles (cutting through the great lakes, because what the hell). So basically, what we need to do, is build the equivalent of roughly 20,000 hoover dams.
The hoover dam cost the equivalent of about $750 million to build. I suspect it would cost a lot more today than pure inflation would account for (unions, health and safety standards, etc), but let's say that technological progress would counteract all that...
So, $750 million, times 20,000... and we come up with $15 trillion.
Some sort of structure that, when placed in the path of wind, produces a clockwise rotation in it (opposite that of cyclonic rotation). Ideally, these could be built as earthworks in the path tornadoes take to approach high value targets (towns, etc). If the earthworks could be built low and wide, the land could still be used for agriculture.
I'll leave the details to actual mechanical and civil engineers. And collect my patent fees per the usual USPTO process.
Have gnu, will travel.
I live in the Appalachian mountains. As I watch weather radar, observing weather systems come at us from the west, I've seen dozens if not hundreds of times over the years where very powerful, well-defined weather systems (individual cells as well as frontal systems) totally disintegrate as they cross over from flat regions of North Carolina and Tennessee into Virginia, because they hit a literal 1,000 foot wall of mountains. Tornadoes are extremely rare here. A few years ago we had small one that messed up a couple sheds and the canopy over a gas station, and that was the first in decades. So I do believe this physicist is onto something that would be effective. Whether or not it's practical or acceptable to construct such a thing is another question.
Better known as 318230.
"Why OP threw in the word "around" is beyond me."
Summaries are required to be inaccurate at the very least, outrageously misleading is preferred if you can manage it.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
Does he know something we don't?
Between the Higgs-Boson crap and this thread, I think Dice has decided to declare it "Give A Wingnut A Headline Week". :(
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
It is an engineering problem. A physicist would be unqualified for such a problem.
These walls, which will allegedly have enough of an effect on the climate to stop tornadoes, will certainly not cause any other form of climate change, like droughts or floods, that might cause much more damage than tornadoes.
Phew, with that out of the way, what could go wrong?
But then there's the fact that that's not how tornadoes work and they won't do anything.
It's Drexel University, and in any case, google search seems to indicate he's actually from Temple University, not Drexel.
Lets wall of Texas first, keep the cray cray on their side of the wall.
After the walls were up for a while, some jackass land developers and greedy politicians would start building houses on top. And then we'd all of a sudden have the problem of exposed property again.
Consider similar cases from history:
- Houses on flood plains.
- Houses right near beaches, especially eroding ones.
- Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
I'm pretty sure the idea here isn't to create walls that block tornadoes from going past them... that wouldn't work and it would be stupid. I'm pretty sure the idea here *is* to create a system which alters the way that wind and clouds flow in the area, causing rainfall and dispersion of environmental factors that lead to tornadoes...
I do see other flaws to a design like this - rain fall becomes less common in the enclosed area, as the sudden height rises cause the rain to fall before crossing over the walls. Changes in weather patterns may have other unknown consequences.
I think you should stop misreplying.
Does anyone feel like this could potentially alter climactic patterns across the whole continent? No big deal, just a fairly large mountain range where there wasn't previously one.
https://www.google.com/search?...
Quote:
Each year in the U.S., 1,200 tornadoes on average kill 60 people, injure 1,500, and cause roughly $400 million in damages, putting long-term average tornado losses on par with hurricanes, according to a new report by Lloydâ(TM)s of London.
âoeTornadoes: A Rising Risk?â finds that the U.S. experiences more tornadoes than anywhere else in the world. The year 2011 was especially vicious, with a record-breaking 1,600 tornadoes causing more than $25 billion in damages, surpassing records for the most tornadoes in a single month and daily.
Other key findings in the report include:
* With urbanization creeping into formerly rural areas, tornadoes are more likely to hit densely populated areas and cause more damages, as evidenced in the increase in the number of billion-dollar events.
---
A big spread from $400 million to $25 billion per year.
If it cost 160 million per mile... the potential payoff is 3 to 60 miles per year.
So, in theory, this could pay for itself in 30 years.
It seems like you could also combine it with wind generation and perhaps some other items (such as a very long high speed transportation system.
I don't think it would have to be solid to work tho. At a minimum, I bet it would be nearly as effective if it were 90% solid. It only has to disrupt the wind patterns (basically long cylinders on their sides- not suppress them.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Wouldn't giant fans at strategic places perform the same function?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Salt Lake City and the Salt Lake basin are surrounded by much higher natural "walls". Downtown SLC still managed to get a tornado. No, it was not a massive F5, but it was definitely a tornado in a place that doesn't even usually get them. Any meteorologist will tell you that mountains don't prevent tornadoes, so I'm highly skeptical of the whole idea.
He's a physicist of course, so this only works on spherical chickens in a vacuum.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
More like walling in the entire midwest for a military-led mass culling of political dissidents.
Something tells me this idea wasn't very well thought out. And this guy has a PhD? I can also think of better things to spend that money on to save 500 lives a year...
See if we cant trap all the weather between the plains and the Rockies or see if we cant erase everything due east? The energy does not magically disappear
Except as you said the hoover dam is far from uniform, it varies from 45 to 600 feet thick, and the walls themselves are only part of it - a large part of that cost has to do with the turbines and generators and associated machinery, not just the walls. Plus you have that whole deal about diverting a major river during construction, and of course the whole "we are turning the river back afterwards and making a lake" thing adds requirements and expenses as well.
That's pretty clearly not comparable to something very uniform that only needs to stand on dry land and obstruct some wind.
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Modify the proposal to build 3 massive 1000ft supermax prisons, and you will get all the investment needed. The prison industrial complex would be foaming at the mouth to get started. Plus you would have enough room to intern entire sub groups, like everybody on the no fly list, everybody that looked vaugly arabic, everybody who watches foxnews and everybody who used a word with more than 6 letters in it on twitter, facebook or in a private email.
"In 2011, 553 people perished due to tornadoes," he said, and "most of them were in Joplin, MO"
Why not simply abandon Joplin?
Will the protect us from Wildlings?
If we sell major media companies the rights to terrestrial views in the midwest its possible we could convince them that these walls are necessary to protect their rights from those who would otherwise infringe upon them. I should copyright 'Terrestrial Rights Management' and TRM so I can get a piece of the action.
at the corner where Minnesota, Iowa, and Wisconsin meet, three farmers were talking over the fence. they find a magic lamp, and the Iowa farmer rubs it. out comes the genie, and splits the three wishes between them. the Iowa farmer says, "I would like this place to be green and fertile forever, rich and promising." BANG! the corn is ten feet tall. the Wisconsin farmer says, "Our state is so beautiful, I would like a thousand-foot wall all around it, so we can enjoy these hills, this water, the land forever without interlopers." BANG, fence.
the Minnesota farmer looks at the wall, and says, "Genie, we love our lakes. Fill that fence with water." BANG!
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
1) Build huge, tornado-stopping wall system
2) ?
3) Profit!
I mean, obviously.
(PS: full-disclosure, I'm a Drexel alum)
-Z
ok, so he doesn't mention a length... but lets just start with one mile.
The internal volume of 1000' * 165' * 5280' = 871,200,000 cubic feet
That's 32 million cubic yards.
Concrete, the most basic thing you'd have to make it out of averages about $75 per cubic yard.
So this thing would cost $2.4 billion dollars, per mile, to build.
This doesn't even factor in grading, paying workers, rerouting highways, etc...
Oh, and you'd likely consume all the concrete in the US, driving up the price and crash industries all over the country because of it.
Good luck!
Except as you said the hoover dam is far from uniform, it varies from 45 to 600 feet thick, and the walls themselves are only part of it - a large part of that cost has to do with the turbines and generators and associated machinery, not just the walls. Plus you have that whole deal about diverting a major river during construction, and of course the whole "we are turning the river back afterwards and making a lake" thing adds requirements and expenses as well.
That's pretty clearly not comparable to something very uniform that only needs to stand on dry land and obstruct some wind.
Speaking of incomparable, I fail to see how you would classify an F5 tornado as "some wind".
Then again, we're talking about a project to build a wall around a massive part of a country. I guess it's rather silly to point out only the stupid parts of an inconceivable idea. We can't even build a wall to keep illegal immigrants out.
I read TFA.
Height? Check!
Thickness? Check!
Length? FAIL!
This is why engineers generally build things and physicists don't. They forget those simple little details that end up being the most expensive issue!
First, can it work? Next, will the wall be so heavy that it sinks?
Does anyone else find this post hilarious?
The last part sounds angry, but the first part includes
Tornados disrupt shit in their path, flinging gerbils and seeds and pollen and critters everywhere
In my mind, I see surprised gerbils being flung around by a tornado, and I can't stop laughing.
Give me a break; this story KEEPS popping up :/.
Not just the heat of the curing concrete, but the heat the atmosphere dumps into a tornado? So it'll be someone else's problem? Nice.
They're only doing it so that the tornadoes deter planes from flying over and dropping their mind-control chemtrails.
Lemont Illinois got hammered in the 70s-80s, plainfield,il got blasted in the in the 90s - and in the 2012 era the tornadoes have swung south of I-80 or along that line.
This is a tiny fraction of the area that three gigantic walls are supposed to do something to protect.
Anyone who thinks that Man can build Tornado Killer Walls should ask themselves why we can't predict gigantic storms on a regular and professionally reliable basis less than three hours in advance , but can back "tornado killing walls" and saying the science is settled - this can be done.
I think we have a better chance of predicting an earthquake or volcano sometime in the next hundred years, than we do predicting how to stop tornadoes from hitting the midwest in the near future.
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
I didn't see anything about the climate effect, if there would be one. Mucking around with wind flow in the area that makes a lot of our food may turn out to be a bad idea, in which case we'd get to see the biggest demolition project ever, and hope it's reversable.
It worked against the Germans in WWII.
So that would be 166.67 (2 dp) fathoms of unfathomably massive wall?
There's a fairly easy way the death toll due to tornadoes could be lowered over time in states like Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri, etc -- adopt the same building codes we have in South Florida.
Most people don't realize it, but South Florida experiences the most urban tornadoes per square mile per year in the entire United States. Granted, we basically never see EF4 and EF5 tornadoes... but we get plenty of the smaller ones.
The strength of South Florida tornadoes is EGREGIOUSLY under-reported by the Enhanced Fujita scale, because the EF scale is defined primarily in terms of observed damage rather than measured wind speeds -- damage that just doesn't happen in Florida, even with directly-comparable storms. An EF1 tornado capable of wiping a neighborhood of matchstick McMansions off the map would barely make a dent in a neighborhood of concrete post-Andrew South Florida homes with large-missile impact glass windows (Google "ASTM 1886-1996"), and would probably be reported as an EF0 unless it hit a trailer park or a neighborhood with older homes. An EF1 tornado is basically 30 seconds of a category 1 or 2 hurricane... and a direct hit by a category 1 hurricane is the South Florida equivalent of a snow day in upstate New York.
Anyway, the point is, if homes in suburban Kansas were built from reinforced concrete, deaths from anything short of an outright EF5 monster would basically fall into the category of "rare, unfortunate freak accidents" in areas where all the buildings were built to Dade County standards.
Assorted SoFla torn-porn:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Instead of a wall, I wonder if building a massive irrigation system to support forests of trees would be effective and less costly in these areas. To my knowledge, tornadoes don't seem to happen often in dense woodlands. So, why not convert some of the grasslands to woodlands?
It would have made more sense to complement the 1000 foot measurement with a measurement in yards. But any physicist crazy enough to propose a huge wall around the American midwest is most likely crazy enough to use metric.
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
We are Tornado. Resistance is futile, you will be assimilated.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
That's how to sell Obama on it.
"Speaking of incomparable, I fail to see how you would classify an F5 tornado as "some wind"."
He isnt talking about a wall to stop tornadoes. He's talking about a wall to stop tornadoes *from forming.*
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If we displace tornadoes from their natural habitat, where will they go? One can only assume that being pinched between the Rockies and the Great Tornado Wall of America, they'll have no choice but to migrate into Canada where they'll be too polite to destroy anything. "Good Morning! eh!... I was wondering if it would be alright if I displaced your mobile home a few feet... no damage or anything, and I'll be gone before you're home from work. P.S. I left a 6 pack for your trouble."
http://www.monolithic.org/
Don't forget the bulk purchase discount.
politics will always kill these utopian ideals...
you show me a 1,000-ft tall tornado-proof fence, and i'll show you a 1,001-ft tall tornado ;)
it doesn't need to be a wall. just a few random pyramids.
Yeah, but even engineers can get lazy. Why try to get 3900 mile lines even when you can just copy an paste the hoover dam blue prints 20,000 times?
Georgia Tech, the leader in Chia(tm) technology.
Yeah, but he's talking about a wall that is about 3.4 trillion cubic feet of concrete. Doesn't matter what the purpose is, that's an insurmountably high cost. Some googling shows that concrete costs roughly $3 per cubic foot. So... you're looking at a bill of materials for this wall of about ten trillion dollars for concrete alone, before the cost of labour and equipment...
Yes. I bet you could get a sweet deal on that 3.4 trillion cubic feet of concrete, because any company would love to have your ten trillion dollar concrete contract.
No need to mention that the wall alone would require doubling the world production of concrete for 12 years just to produce enough...
I'm guessing you're not a Michael Hastings fan?
Yes, the government can assassinate anyone they want by remotely taking over a car. This "feature" has been in place in all vehicles since 2008.
I'd take my liberty over your security any day, but then again, you are a good little indoctrinated slave aren't you?
"...it would theoretically break up that flow, preventing the winds from becoming strong enough to form deadly tornadoes. Tao points out that in 2013, there were 811 tornadoes in the US, most of them in Tornado Alley. In China, there were three. "In an ideal world," Tao told me in an email, "we should build three walls in Tornado Alley"
In an ideal world they would just give me lots of money and I would theoretically stop the tornadoes using special powers of awesomeness.
Instead of building a giant wall, just require that any new buildings (including replacements for damaged/destroyed ones) built in Tornado Alley MUST be strong enough to withstand a certain amount of force, that way if its hit by a big tornado, it wont collapse. Its been done elsewhere (mostly in areas where cyclones/hurricanes are a problem but the same standards will stop all but the biggest/most extreme tornadoes).
Silly as the idea is, the wall doesn't need to be as solid as the Hoover dam and just has to be strong enough to not blow away in normal storms. I also don't understand why it has to be a wall and not a line of Mesas that cut down enough airflow. :)
There's been success with far less extreme windy weather in one case of just planting lines of trees along roads to break up the air flow and cut down on minor storms. I wonder if some lines of much shorter obstacles would have a similar effect to this idea of an enormous wall - especially "soft" obstacles like trees that are moved by the wind and remove energy? Multiple lines of millions of cacti sound almost as ridiculous as 20,000 Hoover Dams but probably stand more chance of getting past a Science Fiction editor
How long untill they wrap whole US with it and add guns (pointing inwards and outwards) on the top?
How are you going to ship it from china?
I'm surprised no one (especially the guy who proposed it) has thought of this, but you wouldn't need a *wall*, per se. It would be MUCH cheaper to have a series of columns or earth mounds (or column reinforced earth mounds) spread out in the right locations (think pachinko array). Check out the seismic cloak and tsunami cloak ideas. You don't need to prevent the winds from mixing, just make sure they do it in a controlled manner so that the energy is dispersed more evenly. This would have the additional benefit of preserving most of the "normal" weather patterns in the area that allow crops to grow properly.
WTF.... It may be possible who would want to live next to a 300m wall?
Just fricking virtualize it with yet another kind of evil force field instead! Gee, new for geeks...
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
Even if you're skimming the summary, if you see "1,000 foot" in the title, and then see the number "300" in the body text, then the immediate reaction should be "oh, they're probably using metres here". That's even if you're ignoring the fact that explicitly states the units used.
mixing them should be a capital crime.
Bollocks - I regularly mix units, because it sometimes makes a lot of sense. I've described something as a metre by a yard (it wasn't quite square). Similarly, I've described items in feet or inches in area, but thickness in millimetres (it tends to be anything less than 1/4 inch).
Before you complain that not everyone knows basic conversions (not everyone's an engineer), it helps if you do any amount of travelling, especially if you're from the US or UK. Also, this topic is physics/engineering, so it usual to see mixed units - we see them when talking about rocket payloads all the time. Similarly, would you complain about the mixing of AUs, light years, millions of km/miles in an article about astrophysics or astronomy.
Yes, but you can't build the wall just to survive prevailing winds, what happens if it *does* get hit by a tornado?
The problem is also that a long wall isn't like a rectangular tower - the drag coefficient will be far higher as a wall of this size can be assumed to act similarly to 2d flow (~2), compared to a tower (~1.3 -> 1.5), so loading will be much higher too. I might load up OpenFOAM to have a look.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drag_coefficient
will be good target practise for fighter pilots
As another contributor suggested, build everything from reinforced concrete. That way, there's no lengths of timber for the violent winds to tear off and fling around as deadly missiles in the first place. Also, perhaps some wind tunnel research could help with tornado resistance.
Or, just build underground! Yes it initially costs more, but surely it's better to have property that you only need to build once rather than risk having it destroyed by weather. I bet the insurance would be damned cheap too compared to conventional building. Climate control is also going to be far easier and cheaper - anybody who's ever visited a show cave knows that the temperature stays almost constant throughout the year.
As for the person who suggested the tornado wall, there are special places for people who are this confused......
I've been trying to watch the entirity of Star Trek TNG. In one episode a system for monitoring and abating tornadoes is mentioned. I would expect any viable solution to tornadoes is going to be based on detecting likely tornadoes faster and applying counter-measures on a case by case basis. Most big tornadoes form from mesocyclones within supercells. Intervention to disrupt the formation of those mesocyclones, perhaps targetting the hot air updraft, is probably the most plausible way of stopping tornadoes.
Just make it hollow and live inside.
Been there, done that...
It's called HAARP.
Driverless cars weigh more, but if you put the car on a rail and let a computer drive it would move 10x faster on 10x less energy and have no accidents. I added the costs that it would take to build a system like that and then realized it would pay for itself in 5 years.
Welcome to Europe. Let me introduce you to this wonderful technology called "TRAINS" that we have here.
We've scaled up your plan a bit (they also transport 100x the number of passengers).
We've also jumped on the "electrical vehicle" bandwagon while we're at it (very few are still diesel powered)
(also there's a human in front who can override the system just in case, though some metropolitan transport have gone 100% driverless).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Yes, the government can assassinate anyone they want by remotely taking over a car. This "feature" has been in place in all vehicles since 2008.
Do not confuse:
- onboard I.A. that can react accordingly to surroundings.
(we're progressively heading this way as more anti-collision features are shipped on cars)
and doesn't rely at all on any remote access
- a car that communicate with the network and the mothership can issue "kill the engine" commands (which, if the cars happens to be on a fast highway, also boils down to "kill the driver" command). There's no need of camera. There's no need of any IA. A pure classic car can be made to remotely shutdown given the proper hardware.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Could they find a name that sounds more like a James Bond villain?
Combines his "tornado alley" fascination with the mega-construction in the ATHSCME fans in Infinite Jest.
"ATHSCME: Manufacturer of “giant protective” air “displacement fans” which keep toxic clouds from drifting south of the Great Concavity"
Just put the bloody trees back, dammit.
Putting those responsible behind bars instead of back on the road again with a slap on the wrist should be exercised first
Because exercising punishment is the best approach to bring back the deads ?
What about putting some technology that would have prevented the deaths in the first place... "Oh, noes! Me don't want a NANNY STATE!"
Humans have been driving themselves around for over a century now, and yet we're at our deadliest ever every single year we continue to do so.
Over that century, the number of driving humans and their density on the roads has increased. The more cars in the same place, the higher the chance of two of them colliding.
When exactly did humans become so irresponsible with 2 tons of steel and why?
When they started to be too many on the roads.
- People are stupid (even if every single person is average when singled out. But pack them together and they start doing stupid things). The more people you put on the road, the higher chance that some cretin will try something asinine and dangerous.
- Also by increasing the number of cars, you increase the level of responsibility and concentration needed for the same level of safety. A century ago, if you lifted your eyes from the road a few seconds, the most likely to happe is that you would crash on a tree on the side of the nearly empty country-side road. Now, the same behaviour in our modern over-crowded fast highways would result into a massive death toll.
We put a helmet on to ride a bicycle
And we put seat-belts into cars (requirement nearly everywhere)
And we put air-bags into cars (requirement in lots of places around).
And we put collision avoidance system into cars (standards with some manufacturer like Volvo, and soon a requirement in EU in the next few years).
all this are technologies that help diminish the death toll (proven by statistics).
autonomous cars are just the next evolution of features that can help diminish the deaths.
Just an additional tool. For when the driver is distracted, at least the AI can take care of the driving.
but won't take a cell phone away from a teenager when they get behind the wheel.
Yup, just tell the kids not to use the phone, your are 100% certain that every single one of them will comply.
People will always be people. Bring enough of them at the same place and they'll invent new way to behave stupid.
Hey, why don't we remove seat-belts, air-bags, etc. and just tell the people to be more careful ?
Even better idea: remove traffic lights, remove traffic signs, etc. and just tell people to drive sane and not to crash?
There's a point where you can't just trust that absolutely every single individual will behave perfectly.
The more redundant safety you put into the system, the less risk that when the driver fails something bad will happen.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
They should just build it out of wood. Much cheaper.
What would be the offshoot effects and costs?
Eg changes to microclimates, downstream rainfall patterns, transport interruptions etc?
Has this been studied?
Why are we even thinking of this humongous expensive castles in the air projects? All we need are a set of trained butterfly wranglers in the Amazon to make butterflies to beat their wings at 180 degress out of phase with the tornado seeds. Like Bose noise cancelling device these counter wing beats will cancel the tornadoes. People never think of simple solutions. Always it has to be a huge multi trillion dollar project.. sheesh.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
They're claiming that a one-mile stretch of the wall would cost $160 million, which comes out to 871.2 million cubic feet of concrete, or a cost per cubic foot (including labour and materials) of about $0.18. That sounds really unlikely to me.
And don't forget about the huge amount of high quality steel reinforcements this would require. Cost aside, can we even produce enough steel?
Most tyres mix units. I have 220/50/R17 on mine - width in mm, depth in percentage ratio, and wheel radius in inches. This might seem utterly daft, until you realise that it makes dimension transposition quite difficult - you'll (almost!) always be able to sort the units into numeric order and get consistent results.
A 1000 foot wall of pinwheels can be used to suck the energy out of the tornadoes and generate electricity to offset the cost of creating cat videos.
How about a strong steel mesh like thing inside concrete frames. Probably does not need to be a continuous wall either. Just throwing out ideas...
Now this is an idea of a physicist, however did he consider the impact on the environment? Just to mention a few things, what impact can we expect on the local ecosystems due to less wind exposure, what about the sun energy the wall absorbs during the day how will this affect the local climate...
This project is absurd, as the public money wasted on its construction could be used to provide tax benefits to who decides to build its home following higher technical standards and using concrete; on most videos I see on youtube about tornadoes, the houses flying around look like they were built from plasterboard without a concrete structure.
This is likely to result in several unintentional weather effects that are not desirable for an area used heavily for farming. Firstly, decreased wind. There are several wind farms in service in the Midwest, which would undoubtedly have a problem with these walls. Second decreased rainfall. Moisture carrying wind will hit the wall before traveling over the enclosed land. When the wind hits the wall it'll cause water to precipitate out before the wind passes over, which is bad for farming, especially in an area known for having had some dust bowl problems in the past. Also, the infrastructure to supply the building materials does not exist. No existing business can supply the quantities of cement, aggregate, and steel to create the wall in a reasonable amount of time.
Right so, instead of building stronger homes that don't collapse into a heap during strong winds, we'll create an absolutely gigantic wall to protect all the flimsy nailed together timber and drywall constructions within?
Yeah that makes perfect sense.
I always wonder why houses in the US are built from what looks like cardboard rather than concrete.
Yes, this. I wonder why building codes in tornado-prone areas don't require tornado-proof construction.
appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars
'physicist' ... hmmm probably one of those 'scientists' who signed the petitions about manmade global warming too.
Does he mention anywhere how long these 'walls' are (I would expect they dont have to be continuous to work, so make that accumulated length of 300 meter high 'walls') ???
WOULDNT it be simpler/cheaper/less-batshit-crazy to make every city/town/village/gas-station in the region Tornado proof (under ground in a mound of earth)??
Im a lowly Engineer, so am I presuming to know better than this 'physicist' ?
That might have been where they went, but it's not where they're going...
"I have no special gift, I am only passionately curious." - Albert Einstein
Does he say what happens to agriculture in the Midwest by doing this? It would seem that if large scale wind farms can change rain patterns, a 1,000 foot wall could, too. One might even think it could have implications around the world -- the whole butterfly flapping its wings thing.
Why not just build real mountains with landfill Not like we don't have enough garbage to do it.
It will also conveniently provide a method to keep out Mexicans.
"Yes, but you can't build the wall just to survive prevailing winds, what happens if it *does* get hit by a tornado?"
Presumably one section of the wall would be badly damaged. It would still be a relatively small section, and I would guess the wall would probably continue to function effectively even with several small sections taken out of it.
I'm not saying the idea isnt ridiculous and impractical - just that it isnt ridiculous and impractical for the reasons the guy I was replying to gave.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Damage proof wouldn't be too difficult or expensive either, it would simply require sacrificing some aesthetics. A home sunk a few feet below grade with reinforced doors would be pretty much impervious to all but the largest tornadoes and would work in most rural/suburban areas. However you would have far fewer (if any) windows and no exterior to show off to family/friends. If your property had some significant elevation changes you might be able to have a few windows (think of a hobbit house) but they would need to be set a few feet back into the hillside and reinforced.
and certainly not University of Drexel. https://phys.cst.temple.edu/directory/faculty/tao.html
Every mile of this wall will waste 871,200 square feet of land (20 Acres), and they want it to encircle the entire midwest?
While we're at it, let's bend time and space and use warp speed to meet Klingons and built transporters for superfast transportation....
According to this theory we should already have no tornadoes as we already have mountains to the west and to the east, as well as smaller mountain ranges of about that height within the midwest itself.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
You are assuming the wall has to be solid and be able to withstand the same pressures as are put on the hoover dam by a giant lake full of water? It just needs to be able to withstand normal wind and by breaking that up, it will prevent the formation of tornadoes in the first place.
Not that I'm advocating this is a sensible plan or whatever, but it is an interesting thought experiment. Lets just think about it properly :)
mixing them should be a capital crime.
Bollocks - I regularly mix units, because it sometimes makes a lot of sense. I've described something as a metre by a yard (it wasn't quite square). Similarly, I've described items in feet or inches in area, but thickness in millimetres (it tends to be anything less than 1/4 inch).
Before you complain that not everyone knows basic conversions (not everyone's an engineer), it helps if you do any amount of travelling, especially if you're from the US or UK. Also, this topic is physics/engineering, so it usual to see mixed units - we see them when talking about rocket payloads all the time. Similarly, would you complain about the mixing of AUs, light years, millions of km/miles in an article about astrophysics or astronomy.
Even you would not be so stupid as to mix units when directly comparing two things. You would never say something like "Alpha C is 4.3 light years away, while the voyager spacecraft has already traveled 18.2 billion kilometers! The stars are ours, if we take the time!" You wouldn't do that because the vast majority of your audience would not be able to make the comparison without a fair bit of work. Sure, using mm to describe the thickness of something who's other dimensions are described in other units could be appropriate, but using mm to describe the thickness of one thing, then comparing it to the thickness of something else in thousandths of an inch is just stupid. Your "metre by a yard" comparison is cute, but relying on people to know that a metre is about 3 inches more than a yard certainly is something that can lead to troubles.
So we don't build it out of concrete. The Yellowstone supervolcano will eventually blow and wipe out most of civilization sometime in the next few millennia, unless we do something about it. We can't simply drill a hole to the top of the magma, since that would set it off. What we have to do is tunnel down deep, to the lower part of the magma column, where the density is much higher and the pressure much lower. From there, we can allow the magma column to bleed off pressure gradually, providing us with a constant stream of incandescent magma that can be used for whatever we like. Then all we'd have to do is come up with a high-temperature insulated conveyor belt to transfer all the fresh magma to wherever the current end of the casting is. We could build 1000-foot walls, cast castles, create huge canals or reservoirs, whatever we like. So long as we keep coming up with good uses for a never-ending stream of white-hot magma, we're set.
Its an interesting idea, but a complete waste of resources. There are a lot of other areas where such expenditures of time, labor, money & materials would do FAR more good (national aqueduct/irrigation system, national transportation infrastructure upgrade, etc) and still have money left over to give every home in tornado alley a basic storm shelter.
Even bigger than the Great Lakes.
It should be noted that Rongjia Tao is the Chair of the Department of Physics at Temple University. I can't tell how Drexel University (not "University of Drexel") got dragged into this, except perhaps that Tao gave a colloquium on the subject at Drexel back in April:
http://events.drexel.edu/EventList.aspx?view=EventDetails&eventidn=5223&information_id=16403
". . . without federal and state subsidy"
democrat, are you nuts!?!?!?!?!!?!?
Our government ALREADY HAS TOO MUCH DEBT!!!!!! Why would we want our government to take even more of our hard to earn wages to provide subsidies to only a few families and businesses!?!??!?!!?!? MORE GOVERNMENT IS OFTEN THE WRONG SOLUTION!!!!!!
I live in the Denver, CO area. We are less than 50 miles from the Rocky Mountains (14,000+ ft) and we get tornadoes regularly. So how are three 1,000 ft walls going to protect people several hundred miles beyond them?
This guy just has serious investments in concrete manufacturing.
Why not divert the proposed funds towards housing that can sustain the conditions of its environment? Do your feet not develop a callus from walking without shoes? Do we not use mittens when taking dinner out of the oven? Why are so many lost when challenged with problems already solved in the natural world?
looks foolish. News at 11.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I'm not the first to say this, but I've got two words for you. Pacific Rim.
Along those lines, the Obligatory XKCD....and SMBC's Lifecycle of a Physicist
http://xkcd.com/793/
http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id...
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Wouldn't this cause a rain shadow? The midwest would stop being useful farm land if all the moisture coming from the gulf stopped at the north end of Texas...
Move along, no sig to see here.
I definitely think we should make some crazy big fucking thing:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oq_1KdZIsM
Yes, because the idea of harnessing a supervolcano to build a 3900 mile long tornado-killing wall sounds so much more reasonable ;)
If you can go with a slope and build it...
Real nice, I'm sure Rongjia Tao would find that very funny, you racist jerk.
I seriously doubt that a South Florida EF1 is comparable to the Great Plains EF4 it would take to wipe a neighborhood of "matchstick McMansions" off the map. But, for the sake of argument, let's assume that your reinforced-concrete South Florida home corresponds to a "MAM" or "LRB" structure type on the EF scale. Throw an EF4 tornado at it, and the expected damage would be:
* Uplift of pre-cast or cast-in-place concrete roof decking.
* Collapse of top-story walls.
* Significant damage to exterior walls and some interior walls.
* Possible complete destruction of all or a large section of building.
as well as the usual loss of roof covering, broken glass, etc. In short, about the same damage as you'd expect from throwing it at a "matchstick McMansion" (building type "FR12").
Incidentally, a strong category 1 hurricane would barely qualify as an EF1 tornado; a category 5 would be a middling EF3 tornado.
Not being american this is what has always surprised me about the images of tornado aftermaths.
Basically you can see the path the tornado took through the city as is completely levelled the houses in it's wake, but then you see the half-surviving houses next to them and realise they were essentially built out of pressed wood.
Where are those people buying their houses? Ikea?
Then sure enough you see one single house still standing in the middle of the rouble, and invariably it's a standard (to my European eyes) concrete house which was actually build to withstand more than a mild summer breeze.
You would never say something like "Alpha C is 4.3 light years away, while the voyager spacecraft has already traveled 18.2 billion kilometers! The stars are ours, if we take the time!"
Well, to be fair you were originally complaining about the authors mixing units, and nowhere did they do so in a single sentence.
Your "metre by a yard" comparison is cute, but relying on people to know that a metre is about 3 inches more than a yard certainly is something that can lead to troubles.
i made this comment (I can't remember what it was about) in front of a group of friends in uni(engineering, management, nursing students) - some of those I knew would understand. Those that didn't, they asked, because it was obvious there was a difference, otherwise I would have said "a metre by a metre". Now they know, or at least knew for a period afterwards. As far as I'm concerned, there's no reason to be embarrassed about being ignorant of something simple. Choosing to stay ignorant is a different matter.
Call me crazy, but why not just build tornado-proof houses instead?
Because winter is coming.
You're right that concrete isn't a guarantee... but true EF5 tornadoes are almost as rare as landfalling category 5 hurricanes... and EF4 tornadoes aren't a whole lot more common. On the other hand, EF0 tornadoes are abundant, EF1 tornadoes are common, and EF2 tornadoes aren't particularly UNcommon. Switching to Florida-style construction wouldn't eliminate the risk of death or injury from a tornado altogether (because frankly, the only place that's safe to be when an EF5 hits your house is "somewhere else, far away")... but it WOULD basically eliminate meaningful damage from common EF0 tornadoes, would dramatically reduce property damage and injuries from EF1 tornadoes, and would almost certainly reduce the death toll (though not necessarily number of injuries or number of houses rendered uninhabitable) for EF2 and EF3 tornadoes. So yes, an unlikely (but non-inconceivable) EF5 tornado hitting downtown Kansas City mid-afternoon would still result in unfathomable carnage... but the dozen or so EF0 and EF1 tornadoes that hit the KC metro area over any given 5-year timespan would barely earn more than a few minutes of semi-sensationalistic coverage on the local TV news (maybe CNN, if someone gets good video footage of the tornado itself & it's a slow-news day).
And what does he mean exactly: Feet with people still attached to it or severed feed?
-- 29A the number of the Beast
Or let me put it this way, get on a train in Belgium and go to Israel. Go on, I dare ya. Oh wait, you can't!
Leave apart the fact that it is actually possible, but it would be a journey that takes several days and quite a few stops to change trains in european capital cities (these are distances where using air planes start to actually make sense). (Although I happen to have taken night trains across europe over long distance. But these are easier: instead of having to change trains, they switch the trains' cars around and so you stay in the same cabin until you arrive at your destination city)
Leave also apart the fact that we happen to have "geography" between these two points: mountains (Alps), sea (e.g.: the Mediterranean sea that you mention), etc. whereas your country is mostly flat (that's why the tornadoes happen much more easily, to go back to TFA's point. that also means that if anything, building a large-scale rail-road system would probably be much more easy in the US than in EU).
The main problem is: why in the first place should I travel such a long way ?
Answer A: for vacations.
Yup, why not. Go on, go visit Israel for you vacations. I've heard there are nice surfing spots there too.
And as said above, taking an airplane is the most sensible solution. (Though I've been on such long distance road trip across Europe by car, in addition to train as mentioned above). (And money-broken students take busses, that's the cheapest way around).
The thread was talking about cars, and driverless cars. Given the speed of current cars, such a long distance trip would take even longer by car than by rail. So "my country is bigger" argument won't actually work in favour of cars against trains, but in favour of planes against trains and cars.
Answer B: for work
And that's the biggest problem regarding transportation you have in the US: your society is organised in such crazy way that the biggest part of the population has to commute over such bat-shit crazy distance on a regular basis. Nobody in his/her right mind will live in Belgium and travel for work to Israel. Not even by car. Nor plane or trains. If you get a job in Israel, you move there, so you're living nearby your work place. And if you miss Belgium, you can always travel back there for vacation (refer to "A" above).
The main problem is not that train would be impossible. (They are possible), neither is the huge distance (it's flat. it would actually be easier to build train there than here).
The main problem is the distribution of the population (spread all over) and their travel needs (bat-shit fucking crazy distance, each individual travelling that distance in a completely different direction) so it's not easy to group those needs together and have the people travel together in groups (the basic requirement for any public transportation network).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
They are called Red woods...