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Meanwhile, the world is burning and flooding. But sure, build your fucking vanity project while disrespecting every human right on the planet.

• omer9 2y ago
  [flagged]
• dinobones 2y ago
  There’s this guy on every comment. The vast majority of human experience has been tough. Arguably the vast experience of most life is pretty cruel. Should they just donate the wealth of their country to some other one? Would you like to donate some of your personal income to the nice homeless people outside? The leaps from people build dumb glass city => world is bad => people building dumb glass city are bad because world is bad aren’t obvious to me.
  • throw310822 2y ago
    Agree; however it's true that building a city with the most inefficient possible shape in a hostile environment doesn't sound like a good use of money in any case. I really don't understand the project, it makes no sense at all. Does anyone have an idea of what might be the thinking there?
• wruza 2y ago
  A bigger picture is them spending this money on building is infinitely times better than spending it on war.
  • Sporktacular 2y ago
    Because those are the only two choices.
    • wruza 2y ago
      Because nothing motivates them. It’s mostly chinese money but also US. Stop giving them it and find a better use, simple. Or say something like “I’ll buy it, if you do X”. That’s motivation. They will say “nah, if we do X, Y, you just don’t understand”. Etc etc. It was probably all said before and we are just exploring naive ideas on how the world should work. I’d just take penis city over war any day of week and thank them sincerely.
      • Sporktacular 2y ago
        This is one highly confusing sentence. Nothing motivates who? Saudis? Arabs or Muslims generally? Or do you mean Brown people?
        • wruza 2y ago
          I was speaking of specific group of people who own this project. Is there a reason to generalize over someone else?
• mcdonje 2y ago
  The finger should be pointed at us. We could've built our cities much more efficiently, but we chose to prioritize cars over common sense. We funnelled our wealth to them and ironically they're using it to build a city that is dense and efficient, thereby respecting nature. People need to live somewhere. We don't need - and shouldn't - live everywhere. Where it's burning and flooding, we should stop rebuilding. The Amazon sized forest in the eastern US should be largely regrown. In that way, they're actually providing a good example. We need to think about future infrastructure for a post-oil, post-climate change world. That's exactly what they're doing.
  • Renaud 2y ago
    10 minutes reading into the madness of this project, it's claimed sustainability, and you realize that the amounts to be spent there, and the fact that it's build on the necessity to solve dozens of huge technological hurdles, make it a pure waste of money. This is a project championed by MBS himself, and no-one dared telling him it was nonsense. Architects and consulting companies are doing what they do best with these types of pie-in-the-sky project: play along and take the money. The vision is a nightmare of population control and surveillance. It wants to be sustainable, but go cool nearly 150M m2 of glass walls in one of the most inhospitable hot environment for humans... and tell me this is sustainable. There are flying pods and glow-in-the-dark sand scapes... Nothing in that project is energy efficient or makes even little sense. It's a vanity project. The money could have financed real breakthrough in science and engineering. Instead, it's wasted moving sand around. They won't even be able to build and host the 1.5km they now target.
    • mcdonje 2y ago
      Your first and last paragraphs are at odds with one another. They have to solve a lot of problems to do the project, but it's too bad they're not spending money to solve problems... The walls are mirrored, not glass. Even if it were glass, would cooling it use more energy than having most of the population drive in and out everyday and sit in traffic jams on km upon km of concrete? It's even worse in areas where that concrete is placed where vegetation could be doing the job of fixing carbon. It's sustainable because of the density, and because it's built around public transportation. We should get back to vertical, dense towns and cities that are connected by trains.
• whitehexagon 2y ago
  Well at this rate we are eventually going to need these types of massive projects to relocate the world's coastal cities. It does seem strange that they build almost at sea level, although not as bad as the palm island things.
• Ekaros 2y ago
  This seems reasonable solution to try out. Location is not at least flooding. Also goal of making denser living environments seems more reasonable for future emissions reductions. Other places are likely to rebuild the massively inefficient and wasteful urban sprawl in risk prone areas. In every single way worse choice.