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Seen from space, the longest conveyor belt is in Morocco
- arcticbull 5y agoThis looks like my first attempt at Factorio.
- nanna 5y agoNo it is NOT in Morocco. It is in Occupied Western Sahara. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Sahara https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Sahara The phosphorpus conveypr belt was built illegally, against international law without the consent of the Western Saharewi people. This is an illegal, brutal, military occupation that has largely been forgotten in Western circles. Please do not normalise it here on HN by calling it Morocco. Please correct the title.
- mardifoufs 5y agoIt is recognized by the united states as morocco. The rest of your comment is basic polisario propaganda, and does not reflect the reality on the ground. There's nothing "left" to normalize and there is no reason to give any credibility to a foreign backed separatist group that has basically done nothing for the Sahraoui people. A part from betraying it by waging a proxy war benefitting only it's algerian puppet masters, while holding it's own people hostage in Tindouf.
- pxeger1 5y agoThe US only recognised Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara in 2020, in exchange for Moroccan normalisation of relations with Israel. The fact that the US recognises it is pretty meaningless, since it was clearly just used as a bargaining chip.
- hutzlibu 5y ago"The United Nations considers the Polisario Front to be the legitimate representative of the Sahrawi people, and maintains that the Sahrawis have a right to self-determination."
- zo1 5y agoDoesn't mean much when so many countries in the world regularly codify the violation of multiple "human rights" supposedly agreed by the UN.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Markoff 5y agoEven UN doesn't recognize it as country, heck even Palestine has way way higher status.
- 5350-uiop-1130 5y agoDid you read the wikipedia article or just fishing for upvotes? Can you explain why the so called polisario has a strogner claim over western sahara versus morocco? Do you know anything about Moroccan history and territory before the colonial interference of the Spanish and French?
- Cthulhu_ 5y agoYou seem to be more educated in this area, please share your knowledge and link to some reading material instead of asking questions like it's a pop quiz in high school that nobody expected or actually studied for.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- grecy 5y agoFun fact, when I was driving from Morocco into Western Sahara and I had a map on the hood [1] that showed it as a separate country. I had multiple people warn me the Military would get VERY upset about that, and so I cut out that portion of the map. Many people have been detained over the years for having such a map. The Moroccan military DO NOT want anyone to think of Western Sahara as a separate country. Last I checked, the UN list it as "occupied territory", but nobody is going to do anything about it because money. [1] http://static4.theroadchoseme.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/dan-jeep-africa-hood-complete-720x480.jpg http://static4.theroadchoseme.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03...
- danamit 5y agoThe military does not care, nor interfere, nor decide what to do, nor there is a law against having a separated map. You will probably get looks from people, and have people constantly comment about the map, but I would assume that's normal and doing so about any disputed region would do so. Try it elsewhere and tell me. Now about Morocco and Sahara, Morocco proposed a referendum since 1991, and still continuously supporting the idea. UN's existence in Sahara is for the purpose of facilitating the referendum. But I will assume it will never happen as long as there is countries to gain diplomatically from keep the issue as a card in their hand. Most of Western Europe flip flop about the issue, depends on how their relationship and interest with Morocco is like. We gonna renegotiate fishing agreements in Moroccan waters? more Sahara talks. A country didn't succeed in barring the EU from importing a competing vegetable? more Sahara talks. Now about phosphate, most of Moroccan phosphate and especially production exist outside of Sahara.
- actionfromafar 5y ago> We gonna renegotiate fishing agreements in Moroccan waters? That would also be, "We enjoy our EU trawlers fishing in West Saharan waters, and we don't want find out what a would-be West Saharan government would say about these rights"
- danamit 5y ago
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Markoff 5y agoAnything can be seen from space under right weather, can we stop with these clickbaity headlines? Or do they actually mean Seen from space with naked eye? But it again comes down to definition where exactly in space.
- Fatnino 5y agoMaybe read the article? Or just look at the pictures.
- Markoff 5y agoYes, I can see there some satelite photo taken by camera, maybe I'm old but when I was young they didn't teach us to fly into space with our arms and I have still regular outdated natural eyes. But maybe your satelitte technology camera naked eye see things as pictured.
- pengaru 5y agoMakes me wonder if the Twenty-mule team could have been replaced with a conveyor belt, 165mi according to wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-mule_team https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-mule_team
- vbezhenar 5y agoLooks like factorio before trains.
- Cthulhu_ 5y agoIs Australia like Factorio with trains?
- chakintosh 5y agoTrains are expensive and slow and there is a limit to how long they can get. The conveyor on the other hand can be continuously loaded and you don't need to invest in storage facilities to stock phosphate for when the next train comes.
- depaya 5y agoBelts also don't consume any power whereas you need to keep trains stocked with fuel, though late game this becomes a nonissue if you throw nuclear fuel into them.
- CaliforniaKarl 5y agoI’ve always liked the Tim Traveller video on this: https://youtu.be/67FzgaSWDDw https://youtu.be/67FzgaSWDDw
- teh_klev 5y agoI really enjoy his channel. He recently did a collaboration with Geoff Marshall who I also very much like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EtBKPcHPrE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EtBKPcHPrE
- netsharc 5y agoGeez, he tries too hard to be cute with his jokes, based on the conveyor belt video. Like a cheap copy of Jay Foreman. At least Jay Foreman's jokes come seemingly naturally and subtly. https://www.youtube.com/c/JayForeman https://www.youtube.com/c/JayForeman
- teh_klev 5y agoMaybe so, I like both of them and they each have their own qualities.
- colordrops 5y agoHow is friction overcome in such a long conveyor belt?
- dmurray 5y agoYou can make a long belt out of two short belts placed end to end: ore falls off the end of one and onto the other. So you build each short belt only as long as can be powered by a reasonably sized motor.
- rob74 5y agoReminds me of the Black Mesa and Lake Powell Railroad (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Mesa_and_Lake_Powell_Railroad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Mesa_and_Lake_Powell_Rai...), which was a 117 km (73 mi) railway completely isolated from the rest of the US network, built with the sole purpose of shuttling coal from a coal mine to a power station. As a Half-Life fan, I mostly remembered it because of the cool name...
- alkonaut 5y agoWhat does "seen from space" mean? I think to have any useful meaning it should mean "Can be seen with the naked eye, from an altitude X which we can consider space such as The Kármán line". Just that something can be resolved on a satellite image using an arbitrarily large telescope doesn't say much about what size it is.
- version_five 5y agoIf the headline writer wanted to precisely convey the size, they would just provide the length in km or whatever. "You can see it from space" is pretty clearly a poetic way to imply something is of the same scale as big geographic features. It's not meant as a way of concisely conveying something's size. To be fair, your comment was basically the first thing that went through my mind too, but I tried to check my natural urge to correct such things... and now find myself giving a pedantic answer to your comment instead :)
- alkonaut 5y agoNow that I think about it, it might actually be possible to see from space, indirectly. If it casts a shadow that is really big (e.g. 100m wide) when the sun is low then you could potentially see that, even though you don't see the object directly. The problem I suppose is that just as that happens, you also lose a lot of light. I guess my second question would then be: to properly see something from space in the not-just-poetic-way-of-describing-something-as-very-big, how large does it need to be?
- danbruc 5y agoMy interpretation is that can-be-seen-from-space means can be seen with the naked eye from the ISS or something else in low Earth orbit. In this case you will probably not see the actual conveyor belt but different surface colors on both sides of the conveyor belt caused by dust being blown mostly in the predominant wind direction. Looking at it in Google Maps [1] shows that there is a noticeable color change extending between about 100 m and 2000 m to the south west. [1] https://goo.gl/maps/R97QZpBabs9mLh3d6 https://goo.gl/maps/R97QZpBabs9mLh3d6
- aaron695 5y agoGoogle maps - https://goo.gl/maps/EBKN4Xu8JXeBfBJM7 https://goo.gl/maps/EBKN4Xu8JXeBfBJM7
- s1artibartfast 5y agoThanks!
- fmajid 5y agoPhosphorus is essential to life and actually quite rare in Earth’s crust, and probably the bottleneck element to biomass on the planet. It’s a much more critical non renewable resource than oil or strategic minerals but is completely off the radar if most policy makers. Just search for “phosphorus bottleneck”, it makes for sobering reading. The Office Chérifien des Phosphates, personal property of the King of Morocco, is the world’s largest producer. Occupying Western Sahara costs the Moroccan state more than it brings in taxes, maybe this explains why.
- spookthesunset 5y agoI really hope space mining takes off in my lifetime. The idea of having near unlimited quantities of “rare” earth elements will bring so much coolness to the world.
- technofiend 5y agoI think the first trillionaires will be born from mining the Kuiper belt.
- timinou 5y agoOCP is the Moroccan government's property, not the king's (the king's properties are generally under the Al Mada group). He still has a day in its strategy but he doesn't pocket the money the way he would for Al Mada companies. Also, most of the ore is not in contested territories. You can look up the sludge pipeline for a more modern take on exporting phosphates that was built 15 years ago, it's not in the Sahara. The biggest natural resource of contention there is fish, not phosphates. That industry is huge and extractive, and not talked mucb about. Also the Western Sahara issue is geopolitical more than anything else. If that country were a thing Morocco would be surrounded by Algeria (the separatists are kept alive because of Algeria's support at this point, it's a puppet state of the Algerian military). And yeah it's an important resource that will become increasingly important as climate change and overpopulation become current issues. Hopefully it doesn't bring the bad juju that other non renewable resources have brought on developing countries
- tobyhinloopen 5y agoAlmost as long as their cookie popup
- djaychela 5y agoIn 2007, I did a "buy a car for £100, drive it to Africa" type thing. Best adventure I've ever been on. Western Sahara (where this is) was really interesting - getting out of it and into Mauritania involved driving through a mined no-man's land and having to pay a bribe to the Mauritanian army who manned the checkpoint... One of the things I saw there was a train that was miles long - we just missed the crossing and had to wait for what seemed like forever. It was full of ore, apparently. There was a brand new road in the country which was paid for by China, apparently in return for mining rights there. All of this part of the trip was pretty desolate - just sand, rocks and the occasional bush. Drove for literally hours seeing no change whatsoever in the vast landscape.
- yial 5y agoWhere did you start your trip from? Also, what car did you buy and did you have any breakdowns / maintenance issues ?
- djaychela 5y agoHi. Started from Plymouth, went to Banjul. Car was an old Skoda Felicia Estate. I gave it a going over before starting the trip, which really meant changing the head gasket (it was blown when I bought it, that's why it was cheap). I made a sump guard out of scrap metal, and aside from some old forest tyres (I had a felicia as a stage rally car at the time too, so had plenty of spares) that was it. No issues whatsoever over 4400 miles in the car. Didn't miss a beat - one of the reasons I chose the car was because I knew them well. I did have to convert it to left hand drive before doing the rally, which was interesting - I had some LHD bits (dashboard, steering rack) already, but the wiring was done by re-soldering the RHD loom over to be LHD for the driver (as an LHD loom swap wasn't an option as so much of it was different, it would have been more work doing that). Also had a fun point where the car had LHD steering wheel, but RHD pedalbox, so it could be driven by two people at the same time. Only moved it up the drive like this as I didn't fancy explaining that to the police / insurance company!
- jonasdegendt 5y agoI've done this with a 500EUR Citroën ZX! We didn't cross into Mauritania though. How'd you cope with the heat? It almost did me in, 42 degrees C in a dark green car without AC is pretty much hell. Ten years later and I can't believe we coped that.
- aceazzameen 5y agoWhat's the maintenance like on that thing?
- boringg 5y agoIt looks like they are starting a megabase. Watch out for the biters, build turrets quick.
- JKCalhoun 5y agoMe, I see a slidewalk. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slidewalk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slidewalk
- throwaway743 5y agoFactorio vibes
- omegant 5y agoI don’t know if this can be seen from space, but it is easy to see from an airplane 38000’ high. It’s some kind of ore or gas prospection. A giant grid in the middle of the Algerian Sahara. It goes across mainly of a large mesa, but also actoss the small dry creeks and hills around. There is some kind of industrial installation to the west of the grid. 27°17'20.3"N 1°17'19.0"E https://goo.gl/maps/xbGqQVezPUuNNss1A https://goo.gl/maps/xbGqQVezPUuNNss1A
- Terr_ 5y ago> Indeed, on its way to Laayoune, wind blows the lighter particles of white ore off the belt. I was wondering why it didn't have any side-walls. Maybe it's just not cost-effective to try to avoid losing pieces below a certain size.