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Ok, last question! How are you planning to build those walls? Where are you going to get all that stone? Have you priced out having someone build it for you? M

Ok, last question! How are you planning to build those walls? Where are you going to get all that stone? Have you priced out having someone build it for you? My rough calculation says 20 acres is about 1000 feet per side, 3 meters is 10 feet, 10 meters is 32 feet. So you'll need roughly (1000*10*32*4) 1,280,000 cubic feet of stone. That's a cube just over 100 feet per side. That's a lot of stone! If you're planning on something like that garden in Fresno, are you planning to excavate it from the land itself? If you could slice 1.2 feet of stone from the entire 20 acre property you'd have enough, but you'd probably need to move a lot of topsoil to get to it. If anything the engineering effort for the walls the by far the most impressive part! A thousand years from now they'll wonder what it's purpose was.

carapace 3y ago
The whole place is classified as "gravelly loam", it's rocks upon rocks in a loam matrix at least ten meters deep. ;D I don't really have topsoil, it's literally just rocks and rocks and more rocks. (I suspect it's the alluvial remains of something like the Great Flood of 1862: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Flood_of_1862 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Flood_of_1862) For moving them I'm making pick-and-place bots (probably simplified delta-bots, but the actual form isn't fixed yet) that will also scan and sort them. The tail wags the dog here, eh? Because I have essentially nothing but rocks I concocted this plan to make use of them. I can also build things like "sand batteries" to store heat. And because the rocks come in all different colors I could make patterns in the walls and floors and roads, etc... > A thousand years from now they'll wonder what it's purpose was. Ha! Right? I should add some weird features just for future archeologists? "We believe the frog eating a banana had religious significance." Embed some titanium spheres in a wall in the shape of the constellation of Pleiades --but as it was millions of years ago? Make the whole thing look like the base of one end of a vast bridge? Or like the foot of a huge statue? The possibilities are endless!

carapace 3y ago

The whole place is classified as "gravelly loam", it's rocks upon rocks in a loam matrix at least ten meters deep. ;D I don't really have topsoil, it's literally just rocks and rocks and more rocks. (I suspect it's the alluvial remains of something like the Great Flood of 1862: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Flood_of_1862 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Flood_of_1862) For moving them I'm making pick-and-place bots (probably simplified delta-bots, but the actual form isn't fixed yet) that will also scan and sort them. The tail wags the dog here, eh? Because I have essentially nothing but rocks I concocted this plan to make use of them. I can also build things like "sand batteries" to store heat. And because the rocks come in all different colors I could make patterns in the walls and floors and roads, etc... > A thousand years from now they'll wonder what it's purpose was. Ha! Right? I should add some weird features just for future archeologists? "We believe the frog eating a banana had religious significance." Embed some titanium spheres in a wall in the shape of the constellation of Pleiades --but as it was millions of years ago? Make the whole thing look like the base of one end of a vast bridge? Or like the foot of a huge statue? The possibilities are endless!