Looking at the construction site photos makes me wonder, might it not be better to build The Line as a 150-meter-deep trench instead of a 150-meter-high wall? I suppose all that excavation might be even more expensive than the high-rise construction, but I've seen enormous mining equipment already in use elsewhere that appears up to the task. The excavated rock might be useful as ore, or be crushed up to alleviate the worldwide sand shortage, or used to build new artificial islands or pyramids or pyramid-shaped islands. Meanwhile, The Trench would be easier to cool, less obstructive to migrating birds, and highly defensible with a few dozen turbo-laser towers should anyone attempt to fly along it in a one-man fighter to reach the small thermal exhaust port.
Merged Neom / The Line - genius, crazy, delusion, dystopia?
bruto
Penultimate Amazing
I imagine a trench would less resemble the gauzy, pastel-hued, airy paradise envisioned in the project's projections, not to mention the projected protagonists. The tall, slim urbanites, sipping their drinks (not officially alcoholic of course) and tapping their stylish devices as they make reservations for next week at the Kobe steak tower, the week after that at the ski chalet. Maybe a bouquet of genetically rare orchids for that girl in the corner....you know the one with the red dress and the penthouse eyes. That is not to say it wouldn't happen, and it may be in the plan already. If the project follows the usual cinematic vision it seems to be emulating so far, there will have to be an underworld, a steerage, where the grim forgotten people who man the boilers and the incinerators and the mangles and such will huddle, uttering guttural grunts in an unwritten language, making sad and hurried love, munching on rats and licking sweating pipes in the crepuscular gloom....the hand forged blades hidden deep in the chinks of the fetid sewers....
I mean, you wouldn't want the grand scheme half-baked, the great story half-told!
Sorry, 500m not 150m.
No Trogs laboring in the 'Neath because everything will be done by AI! And it's a shame that's a capital I not a lower case L, because it would be kind of fun to have some guy named Al running around doing everything, and probably more practical too.
Another big advantage to making it a trench is that if it's a wall it'll just collapse into a 170km linear heap a few decades after falling into ruin, but a trench would provide a wonderful dungeon adventure setting for centuries, or at least until the climate zones shift enough for it to fill with water.
No Trogs laboring in the 'Neath because everything will be done by AI! And it's a shame that's a capital I not a lower case L, because it would be kind of fun to have some guy named Al running around doing everything, and probably more practical too.
Another big advantage to making it a trench is that if it's a wall it'll just collapse into a 170km linear heap a few decades after falling into ruin, but a trench would provide a wonderful dungeon adventure setting for centuries, or at least until the climate zones shift enough for it to fill with water.
bruto
Penultimate Amazing
Perhaps, but I think there will always be trogs. Refuseniks who escape the roundups, convicts who don't, sex workers, glue sniffers, and just the poor and ethnically challenged who do the dirty work under it all. AI does a bunch, but it doesn't unclog toilets and hammer railroad spikes and dust the knick-knacks and scrape your dishes. In the real world stuff breaks, cakes, rots and spills, and anyway I think there's a part of humanity that will always want someone beneath them, to ◊◊◊◊ over figuratively or literally. We shouldn't forget here that we're dealing with something that resembles the sci-fi dream of an adolescent with money, whose vision of paradise is an endless Playboy mansion, who maybe read Brave New World (or maybe the Comics Illustrated version) and thought "yeah, that sounds like a sweet deal for alphas like me!"
Anyway, in those fictions, the details are an afterthought, and I enoy the afterthinking, the subversive part. "Midnight at the north garbage bay in Ayn Rand park. Sharpen the edges on your dustpans and shovels. The password is Huckleberry. "
arthwollipot
Limerick Purist Pronouns: He/Him
Depends on what you mean by "ready". If you mean completed and ready for people to start moving in, that was never suggested. Ready to proceed with the next (first?) stage of construction? It may well have been intended to be at that stage now.