Quote: Original post by owl
What other government besides China's and North Korea's would be willing to make such an investiment just to provide some cheap energy to a small sector of such a city? From a capitalist point of view that's just nuts.

The point of the building the city with a solar tower on top isn't to build the solar tower, but rather to build a planned city WITH a solar tower.

Also Japan was building a planned city. And why would you assume a single group such as a government would fund such a project? No, they would fund the Design and then sell the right to different companies to actually build a section of the city.

Why build planned cities? To make far better use of resources rather than letting existing cities simply sprawl out in an uncontrolled fashion. Natural cities are horrible creations. They are loud, noisy, dirty, and a pain to travel around in. Imagine a city where getting across town is more like riding the elevator up to the 100th floor of a building.

Quote: Original post by Talroth

Quote: Original post by owl
What other government besides China's and North Korea's would be willing to make such an investiment just to provide some cheap energy to a small sector of such a city? From a capitalist point of view that's just nuts.

The point of the building the city with a solar tower on top isn't to build the solar tower, but rather to build a planned city WITH a solar tower.

Also Japan was building a planned city. And why would you assume a single group such as a government would fund such a project? No, they would fund the Design and then sell the right to different companies to actually build a section of the city.

Why build planned cities? To make far better use of resources rather than letting existing cities simply sprawl out in an uncontrolled fashion. Natural cities are horrible creations. They are loud, noisy, dirty, and a pain to travel around in. Imagine a city where getting across town is more like riding the elevator up to the 100th floor of a building.

Just to clarify, I totally think that such a city would be awesome and a lot more efficient that the ones we have now. Robert Silverberg envisioned this sort of cities (actually very crazy ass ones) in his novel The World Inside. Still, from my understanding of how things works in the world I can see the orbital solar panel working (or at least backrupting) way before such and idea gets mentioned to a group of investors.

Aren't there already plans/investments to build a planned super city in Dubai?

Capitalism for all it's merits can't get together the concentrated wealth to do these mega projects. To create a planned city would require trillions of dollars of investment, no single capital venture even comes close to that level of funding.

It would require the investment of an entire country and that is more in the political realm than the economic. On those scales money really doesn't mean anything, the US government bailout out the banks for nearly 1 trillion dollars, what does that really mean? When you get into those scales it's very divorced from reality and becomes arbitrary. Political will is dictated by need and perception. The US spent 100's of billion on the space race not because of some noble goal to enlightenment mankind, they did it to own space before the Russians do.

Governments like people are driven by fear and once the fear of peak oil, fear of global warming, fear of never ending drought, fear of global pandemics hit them, then they will have the political will for change.

-ddn

dont worry, new zealand is about to join the space race (countdown in T minus 2 weeks)
thats should give the others a hurry up