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Dubai's Climate-Controlled Dome City Is a Dystopia Waiting To Happen
Daniel_Stuckey writes: Dubai is building "the world's first climate-controlled city" — it's a 4.3 mile pedestrian mall that will be covered with a retractable dome to provide its shoppers with air conditioning in the summer heat. The Mall of the World, as it's called, will become the sort of spectacular, over-the-top attraction Dubai is known for. Shortly after, it will probably become an equally spectacular real-world dystopia.
By sectioning off a 3-million-square-foot portion of the city with an air conditioned dome, Dubai is dropping one of the most tangible partitions between the haves and the have nots of the modern era—the 100 hotels and apartment complexes inside the attraction will be cool, comfortable, and nestled into a entertainment-filled, if macabre, consumer paradise."
By sectioning off a 3-million-square-foot portion of the city with an air conditioned dome, Dubai is dropping one of the most tangible partitions between the haves and the have nots of the modern era—the 100 hotels and apartment complexes inside the attraction will be cool, comfortable, and nestled into a entertainment-filled, if macabre, consumer paradise."
Someone sounds jealous...
It is just a big mall with AC, not beginning of Mad Max. Calm down.
It's just a mater of time before the desert swallows the place...
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Being the largest climate controlled dome of its kind, perhaps the engineering "lessons learned" could be applicable to creating a self-sustaining space colony -- one of the chief challenges being climate control. ..or else, I've just been playing too much Kerbal Space Program and reading too much Heinlein;)
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
I'm missing the part where something in Dubai is waiting to be a dystopia...
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
Someone sounds jealous...
Someone is well-informed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMh-vlQwrmU
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
and when the oil runs out they will have a nice place to park their camels.
"macabre, consumer paradise" or monitored controlled populace?
Actually, one giant building requires a lot less energy to cool than an equal volume of multiple tiny buildings, because the big building has much less surface area / volume and thus transfers heat more slowly.
A big shopping center - sounds like hell on earth! I just can't understand the obsession with shopping, once you have your clothes & stuff just leave and do something interesting.
and when the oil runs out they will have a nice place to park their camels.
Or, they can install the solar everyone else is spending a fortune developing in the plentiful sunlight they have.
But one large dome probably contains 100 times the volume of the individual buildings it encapsulates.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Or, they can install the solar everyone else is spending a fortune developing in the plentiful sunlight they have.
I think that they'll find that selling solar power is far less profitable than selling oil.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
That's what happened to Trantor in Asimov's Foundation series:
Trantor is depicted as the capital of the first Galactic Empire. Its land surface [...] was, with the exception of the Imperial Palace, entirely enclosed in artificial domes.
And so it begins...
If you look at the pictures, it's mostly enclosed walkways connecting all the buildings.
It's easier to cool a building if you're not pissing your cold air out the doors.
What will happen when eventually, inevitably, the oil and gas of the UAE starts to dwindle, the economy correspondingly does the same, and the energy supply to keep the whole thing cool becomes prohibitively expensive?
Here's some information for you. Oil and gas are a minor (and decreasing) part of the economy. Not sure about pizza and beer, though.
Volume and mass do not matter as much as surface area. This is an ecological win. The enclosed area will also mean less evaporation, so more green spaces and more efficient use of fresh water supplies. This is a win, at least in theory.
But one large dome probably contains 100 times the volume of the individual buildings it encapsulates.
As far as I can tell, it's not one large dome. I looks pretty well thought out. There is one largish dome in the complex, but it's the park part, and who knows if they'll even get to that.
I saw a documentary about solar panels in west Africa where main problem seemed to be cleaning those f. panels from dust. Guest what substance was used to remove the dust off the panels' surface.... To give you a hint - it is a drinkable liquid and there is not enough of it on a desert.
Dubai a city with a significantly challenging future and it has little to do with a dome. It's the center of little, its propelled by wildy deep pockets vs. social need, and wealth centers in the middle east are already distributing their investments to other regions. Forget the fact that once the oil's gone the wealth remaining in the region will leach away as there's so few people (though it'll take a very long time). UAE: 9mil, Yeman: 23mil, Oman: 4mil, Saudi Arabia: 30 mil. They have huge gulfs of weath distribution, and generally horrible climates. Why would people go to Dubai if it wasn't a spectacle or a huge weath gaining opportunity? My advice: Bilk Dubai for all its worth now, because in 50 years it'll be a distant memory of largesse gone awry by modern standards.
Bye!
Vokda?
I know someone who works on this kind of stuff.
He works on theme parks, recently getting hired (within his company) to fix mistakes and problems with them, in Dubai and the surrounding area. His take is repeatedly that they don't know how to do quality-control there. Their projects SOUND amazing, but they skimp on the essentials and end up with disastrous results much of the time. He believes this is a mess waiting to happen, given the area's track record, but isn't involved in the project.
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Global warming is measured using terms like "degree" and "decade" (degree, as in singular)
You are missing the point, people won't burst into flames because of AGW. However the Arab spring was preceded by the worst drought in the the history of the fertile crescent (the birthplace of agriculture). People didn't suddenly log on to facebook and find out they were living under tyrants. There were food riots in Cairo and other major cities BEFORE the uprisings, almost 10% of Syria's total population just walked away from their farms and went looking for work in the cities.
Go and find out why that one guy set himself on fire in the public square, and why it resonated across the Arab world. Don't believe the "hunger for freedom" bullshit, these people were hungry for bread.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
A domed city with a shopping mall inside? How long til they implant the palm-flower and exterminate anyone over 30? Obligatory link for those who don't know Logan's Run: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
The extra ironic part is that by selling you the gasoline to burn, they contribute to the slow heating and eventual flooding of a city that is basically on an island at sea level ...
"Because Science" is one step from "Because old book". Try "Because of my experiment testing my falsifiable assertion".
Nuclear plants need large supplies of water for cooling.
Yeah, but who the f wants to live in a place like that?
It has great appeal to statists, because they want to crowd the entire population into highrise apartments along mass transit corridors... but I like having a yard (not a manicured one, there are enough people at work nuts about crabgrass and shit like that.) We have what is essentially a 100 year old yard. It has a fairy ring in it (a fairly ancient ring of mushrooms) and rabbits and there are coyotes singing in the distance out across the pasture in the evening and sometimes the morning... And the scree of the red-tailed hawk (plus all his singing food.)
If you live in an area where AC is mandatory and cannot be overcome with proper architecture (earth sheltering, big shaded porches, fans, etc.) then you're living in a place not viable and should relocate. Not because 'I say so' but because economics should be telling you that. The days when we can subsidize kentucky bluegrass lawns in suburban tracts in any environment anywhere are over.
I'm fully expecting an economic collapse to hit Dubai eventually, and this air conditioned paradise will turn into a blast-furnace hellhole.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Does it need to be fresh water? There's plenty of sea water around Dubai.
The AC system expels hot air through a small thermal exhaust port, about 2m wide. In order to access it, we'll have to drive really fast down Main St.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
or weed, or free speech. In fact you better hide those elbows and knees, or you can be stoned on the street. Did I mention proffered neck line is a turtle neck?
If you are lucky police will be called instead of immediate stoning/being beaten with sticks. Official punishment for dress code violations is 1 month in the slammer.
Dubai - perfect sausage fest vacation destination.
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
What you say would have more merit if there was free choice for these Bangladeshi people to come and go. Why have their passports been confiscated? Why is there not a viable means (steerage in low cost cargo ships) for them to return home if they wish? The arrangement as it stands amounts to what is called 'Indentured Servitute' which is a fancy name for slavery.
Extra points, though, for trying to turn the issue into something 'dirty and sexual' by using the term fetishise. Tell your masters to give you an extra bonus for your effort, because you've written some excellent propaganda.
Well sure, that's the anaerobic decomposition portion of the equation.
However, do you think those little microbes are pulling carbon from the rock?
Of course the production of any and all fossil fuels is ongoing. The problem is the time scales needed to produce an appreciable amount of them, and the geological structures required to facilitate the wholesale conversion into an extractable hydrocarbon.
In summary, and correct me if I'm wrong (with real citations, please), things die. These dead things leave carbon in the ground. Heat, pressure, and in some cases bacterial processes convert said carbon into hydrocarbons. If the geology is right, you'll get a big concentration of these. How is the fuel not fossil? What evidence that a significant amount of hydrocarbons with a recent origin have been extracted from a well? (Why did they just start eating that organic carbon that was fixed into the ground hundreds of millions of years ago?)
Still why people live in such places
Because that's where they're allowed to live. You think some European country with a nice, mild climate is willing to give up a large fraction of its territory so that the entire population of the UAE can relocate their country there?
If you read the news from Europe these days, they seem to be doing exactly that.
Here's the trick, the people who say there is plenty of stuff are throwing coal, shale, tar and anything else they can think of into the mix and pretend it's the same as easy to extract liquid oil. Another common trick is to pretend that all that unsurveyed land in Iran, the arctic, wherever has huge oil basins when we do not know one way or another. There's plenty of fossil fuels. Oil we can get out of the ground - not so much. The only reason I have the job I have is that the more computing power you have the easier it is to find the stuff from survey data.
The social setup has some similarities to Fritz Lang's Metropolis. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...
Everyone will be free to visit - like Manhattan or San Francisco or countless other desirable places in the world. Most will not be able to afford to live there - again like all of these places. Cost of housing will probably subsidize construction that couldn't sustain itself just on visitors. By all signs, they are trying to keep out desert heat and not their own people. If I lived in this kind of climate, I would love a place to cool down for a couple of hours. I think people just feel jealous that we don't make this kind of projects in United States.
A domed city isn't really that impressive when you compare it to what they could be building.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
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Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
If you buy gasoline, it was probably your money they used.
No, it is their money that they used. Once you traded your money for gasoline, it's no longer your money. If you don't like that then don't make the trade, nobody is forcing you to do so.
Enigma
I have modpoints but I'm still waiting for some of you fucktards to figure out you're talking about a 50 year old reactor design
and post instead about, you know, a modern design, or even a, gasp, non weaponizeable design, that has a self limiting reaction and doesn't need water to cool it.
apparently nobody has any idea, and your liberal/green propqganda lies are going to propagate for yet another generation of idiocrats because no one stands in your way to correct you for me to mod up