[Tanada]

Like a big Mecca. Well I hope they have more luck that Dubai did with it's "World" islands mega project.

Sand: Around 50 billion tons of it – enough to build a wall 27 metres deep and 27 metres high around planet Earth – is used every year, in everything from the production of glass to concrete blocks.

This volume makes sand the second most used resource worldwide after water.
https://www.agbi.com/analysis/gulf-cons ... -shortage/

Sort of, but unlike water Sand comes in many types and grades like Petroleum. Some types are perfect for making concrete while other grades are useless for concrete but still ideally useful for making glass.

[theluckycountry]

There are many pieces to the puzzle. Concrete for example, which is another hidden use of oil and coal. Cement is the key, the basic ingredient of concrete.

The cement kiln heats all the ingredients to about 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit in huge cylindrical steel rotary kilns lined with special firebrick. Kilns are frequently as much as 12 feet in diameter and longer in many instances than the height of a 40-story building. Approximately 4,300 million tons of cement was produced in 2021.

So we go back to the Arcology, how is it built, expanded, maintained. People paint them as self-sufficient but how can that be? If it's made of concrete, any of it, then in 100 years that part is crumbling and they need to build a cement kiln and heat it to 2700. It's why they demolish old concrete hi-rises, why they will never need to demolish the Empire State building. Mohammed bin Salman is 37 years of age, and a total dictator with an unlimited check book. When I was 37 I could have cooked up some mad scheme like a living wall across a desert too. Monuments to stupidity. Lets hope he finishes it before concrete becomes too expensive.

[Tanada]

There are many pieces to the puzzle. Concrete for example, which is another hidden use of oil and coal. Cement is the key, the basic ingredient of concrete.

The cement kiln heats all the ingredients to about 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit in huge cylindrical steel rotary kilns lined with special firebrick. Kilns are frequently as much as 12 feet in diameter and longer in many instances than the height of a 40-story building. Approximately 4,300 million tons of cement was produced in 2021.

So we go back to the Arcology, how is it built, expanded, maintained. People paint them as self-sufficient but how can that be? If it's made of concrete, any of it, then in 100 years that part is crumbling and they need to build a cement kiln and heat it to 2700. It's why they demolish old concrete hi-rises, why they will never need to demolish the Empire State building. Mohammed bin Salman is 37 years of age, and a total dictator with an unlimited check book. When I was 37 I could have cooked up some mad scheme like a living wall across a desert too. Monuments to stupidity. Lets hope he finishes it before concrete becomes too expensive.

Funny thing about reality, it laughs when people say silly things. In point of fact the Roman Empire built a lot of thing out of concrete 20 times your century ago that are still standing today. Some of their aqueducts still operate today, carrying water from the same mountain streams down to the valleys below uninterrupted for 2,000 years or longer.

[Plantagenet]

Monuments to stupidity.....

Of course.

But the significance of huge buildings and monuments also depends on your point of view. If you want to be hypercritical, just about all the world's great "monuments" are monuments to stupidity. The Roman Coliseum, for instance, was literally a theater of cruelty where people were killed as a form of entertainment for the masses. Stupid? You can't get much more stupid than that, at least in the framework of our modern liberal worldview. But Romans 2000 years ago liked it a lot. It was central to their culture. And the last gladiator died and the last Christian was martyred 1600 years ago so today we can be sophisticated enough to appreciate the Coliseum as one of the greatest engineering feats ever completed and part of the historic legacy of the Roman empire.

Just about every historical monument can be judged to be intrinsically "stupid", i.e the pyramids are just glorified tombstones, the Acropolis is a temple to imaginary gods, Angor Wat is product of slavery, etc. etc. But I think it makes more sense to appreciate them for their beauty, audacity, shear size, and historical importance.


The Bar Khalifa is currently the tallest building on earth

IMHO it's the same with the bizarre but monumental construction projects being planned and built now in the middle east like the Barj Khalifa (above). They aren't the kind of thing I would build, but it's their culture and their money and their society and their megalomaniacs who are doing the building, and personally I wish them luck with their huge mega-projects and I hope to see them after they are completed.

CHEERS!

[kublikhan]

It doesn't have to be an either or choice, we can build things that are both grand and functional. Both the colosseum and the aqueduct where not just momentous, they were functional as well. Look how impressive the Golden Gate Bridge is. Beautiful, audacious, huge, historically important, but functional as well. Over a hundred thousand vehicles cross it everyday. Contrast that with the Russky bridge. Beautiful, audacious, huge, but connecting to an island with a total population of 5,000 people and ending in a dead end shortly after the bridge. People on the island ended up still using the ferry even after the bridge was completed. Monument of stupidity. Surely with a billion dollars the Russians could have built something else that would have checked all of the momentous boxes but actually have been useful as well?

Or how about building a sewage line to the planned location of the shiny new Burj Khalifa tower that can hold 35,000 people? Instead of a sewage line they got poop trucks sucking out the sewage, some of which was taken to a treatment plant and some of which was dumped into storm drains and washed up on the beaches. Swimming in raw sewage kind of takes away some of the glamour of the city.

[theluckycountry]

Funny thing about reality, it laughs when people say silly things. In point of fact the Roman Empire built a lot of thing out of concrete 20 times your century ago that are still standing today.

I won't post the links, you can search for them yourself tanada, but the concrete the roman's used was not made with portland cement as all of ours is, and the Roman monuments still standing are made of solid stone, not steel reinforced concrete, as all out big structures are. The buildings are supported by the very stones themselves and the utilization of load bearing arches. Their use of concrete was largely decorative, to fill the gaps.



It doesn't surprise me that you don't know these facts. It's endemic, this form of ignorance. Hardly anyone in modern society questions how our world is built. They simply believe what they are told on the TV and go about their busy lives. Any civil engineer will tell you that modern Hi-rises have a limited lifespan, typically around 80 years.

lifespan reinforced concrete buildings:
Early 20th-century engineers thought reinforced concrete structures would last a very long time – perhaps 1,000 years. In reality, their life span is more like 50-100 years, and sometimes less.

Other common delusions
Nuclear power will be so cheap it won't be metered
We will have bases on the moon by the year 2000
The United nations has brought an end to war

[theluckycountry]

Monuments to stupidity.....

Of course.

But the significance of huge buildings and monuments also depends on your point of view... Just about every historical monument can be judged to be intrinsically "stupid"

Well personally I don't regard all building projects as monuments to stupidity. Bridges are not stupid, neither are many civic structures. But to build a wall across a desert for people to live in, well that's another matter.

A case can be made though that many modern structures are not as inherently practical compared to older ones that used more conventional building methods.

[AdamB]

Well personally I don't regard all building projects as monuments to stupidity.

Yeah, but the Aussies sure do those kind great! Maybe if they just stuck to ferrying tourists to big rocks and didn't try to build anything more complex than a shovel?

Described by its operators as "the Southern Hemisphere's only giant observation wheel",[9] it is 120 m (394 ft) tall and has seven spokes, reflecting the seven-pointed star of the Australian flag.[10]
Source.
It opened two years behind schedule in December 2008, but closed 40 days later due to structural defects, and was subsequently dismantled for major repairs.