What technological mega project is practical to build today?
What technological mega project is practical to build today?
Housing for everyone and in a way that mega-cities are walkable
99Billionaires did not like that
36Pfft with all that tax-subsidized rent to be made? They love it.
9
If its a mega city how can it be walkable? I wouldnt want to walk an hour to get to my job that would have been a 15 minute walk. Or am i misunderstanding what you mean by walkable?
-2Walkable doesn’t necessarily mean the entire city is within walking distance just that where you live doesn’t require you to have a vehicle and you can walk to everything you need. Being able to walk to work and the grocery store and to any entertainment is so nice.
20
High-speed rail connecting every North American city.
70Coast to Coast? Sure, but every city in North America? Nah, that isn't practical at all.
For instance France apparently builds high speed rail for 25 Million per kilometer so lets use their cost number. The straightline distance, shortest possible, from Denver to Omaha is 483 kilometers so the line from Omaha to Denver alone would cost 12 BILLION dollars.
Denver to Salt Lake is 590 Kilometers, again straight line, so there goes another 14.7 Billion dollars. (This is also absolutely impossible to do at this price) SLC to Los Angeles is 930 kilometers, another 23.2 Billion.
We've now spent 49.9 Billion to connect just FOUR cities and only have a single rail line that goes from Omaha to LA. If you want coast to coast then a single least possible distance link from D.C. to San Francisco would cost right at $100 Billion.
All of those calculations assume the 25 Million per kilometer can be done in the United States too. For example the High Speed rail being built in California is costing four times as much.
So no, trying to connect every city in North America with High Speed rail not only isn't practical it isn't economically possible on any reasonable timeline as it would require a major percentage of the US's entire GDP to be spent on it every single year for the next century. The US is fucking huge and we have a lot of cities.
20In 2020 the US state and local governments spent $116 billion for the construction of roads and highways and $94 billion of operating costs.
If you just cancel half of the road construction projects of the year you get more than enough money to fund the connection of the 4 cities you described.
18Pretty sure the interstate highway system isn't terribly practical either, but with enough funding it can be done. Maybe saying every major city would make it seem more practical.
8The total cost for the Afghanistan and Iraq wars was $8 Trillion over 20 years This country has the money it just doesn't the leadership that wants to change. And why would they want to change? The way this country runs work$ well for them.
7France's public infrastructure construction industry is one of the most corrupt and wasteful systems on earth 😂
Drive past any road or rail project, astonishingly, every single excavator or dump truck is brand spanking new, every year
5In 2020 the US state and local governments spent $116 billion for the construction of roads and highways and $94 billion of operating costs.
If you just cancel half of the road construction projects by a year you get enough money to fund the connection of the 4 cities you described.
4
The problem then is transport inside the city. Couple this idea with the (currently) top comment to make cities walkable and this is pure fire.
13Yeah light rail, bike lanes, and walking roads. We can build a constructed environment designed around human beings. A world that’s good for our health, both physical and mental, and for our planet. All we need to do is accept a reality that cars aren’t a good use of resources and that walking and biking are really good for us.
4Trains you can park cars on. Would be great for camping weekends where I need all of my gear but don't want to drive for hours.
4Not that there isn't a lot of room for improvement, but while I can't say I've been to every major city in the US, I've never had a major issue getting around once I'm inside the city. Even if things are spread out a bit, there's sidewalks and crosswalks, which is all I personally need to consider an area walkable. And public transportation will usually get you to different areas of the city even if you may still have to walk a bit when you get off.
Admittedly I'm probably more willing to walk around than the average person, and not everyone is capable of walking that much, so like I said, still lots of room for improvement.
My biggest issue tends to be getting into the city in the first place, or getting from one city to another. From my home in the suburbs I can drive to pretty much anywhere in my nearest city in about an hour or less as long as I can avoid any major traffic jams. If I try to take public transportation though, im looking at an hour walk before I get to somewhere I can catch a bus (which only comes a handful of times a day,) and then a couple more hours before I get where I'm going, probably having to transfer to a different bus or train at least once along the way. If I drive a half hour or so to a train station then I can get right to downtown pretty easily, but the train only comes about every hour so if I don't time it right and miss the train it's significantly faster for me to just drive the rest of the way than wait for another train. Then they mostly stop coming at about 11pm, which means if I'm going into the city for a concert or something, I'm cutting it close and may not be able to get back home on public transit.
And if I'm trying to get to another city, I'm pretty much SOL. I'm basically at the halfway point between that major city and 2 smaller cities, and there is no transit options to get to those 2 other cities from where I am.
3E-scooters, e-bikes or regular bikes if you want to go cheap.
2
Why not to everyone's front door?
1No, I'm afraid that's not possible. The UK government scrapping HS2 has shown this.
E: For the avoidance of doubt, /s
-3It was corrupt prime minister AFAIK
1
Car-independent livable cities.
38We've even been doing that for thousands of years!
14
A massive high speed railway network across North America, coast to coast. Russia did it, China did it, most of Europe did it. Canada and the USA have no excuse.
37Canada’s excuse is “we’re roughly as big as the US but have a way smaller population and GDP. I really don’t think it’d be financially justifiable for them to build a rail equivalent to the trans-Canadian highway. It’d be a non-starter in a political sense.
The US, on the other hand… yeah. We genuinely have no excuse.
8A majority of Canada's population lives in a straight line from Toronto to Québec, but they can't even manage that.
9
Property acquisition costs and legal fees are immensely more expensive in the US. Have to obtain those thousands of miles of land for rail development from somebody.
3Property acquisition in the US more expensive than in Europe? I think not, at least for the immense swaths of land that make up most of the US' land mass.
The legal fees I see, but that's why most developed nations have legislature for disowning property owners of land necessary for infrastructure at a set compensation. Whether that's fair or just is up for ideological debate, I'm sure.
8
I’m not sure any of these are quite as ambitious as crossing the entire continent of North America. In fact I’m not even sure that would make sense to do. That said lines connecting major cities on each coast and some parts of the Midwest would be a no-brainer.
-2If you look at the various proposals, you’ll see they start like that. You start with focus areas where cities are close together, such as connecting cities in the Midwest to Chicago. You have similar opportunities in southeast, Texas, California, northwest, and of course the northeast where we already have Acela.
However, once those are established, neighboring cities naturally want to be extended to. You can easily imagine that process eventually turning into a connected map - except maybe Great Plains and Rockies
1
Housing for everyone, food for everyone, clean energy (nuclear power, though we would do well to advance the tech a little is immanently practical).
Those are all easy mode stuff that would dramatically improve the world for a lot of people, but we could do more.
Hard mode: Orbital rings.
We would have to develop some tech, but not nearly as much as you might think.
29Universal healthcare, public transit, communism. Or at lease food for everyone, housing for everyone and communication for everyone.
14Economic communism won't be achievable until we fully automate the economy and institute some kind of technocracy or lottery style political system.
A truly "stateless" society is a joke, but separating the economy from the state is only possible if we are all out of jobs.
6uhh
2
Nuclear bomb fueled rockets to space. Look up project Orion.
6isn't that bad?
-1Depends on which side of the exhaust you are on.
7You didn't ask if it was bad, you asked if it was practical.
6
Just want a space elevator, surely we can't be that far
5We can't make long enough pieces of anything strong enough to handle that level of strain.
15Not yet!
0
Pinging acollierastro
5
We've recently figured out beaming power to another location. We might be able to start a Dyson swarm, which is just a collection of solar panel satellites that beam their energy back to earth.
I'd like to also see the start of space resource extraction/refinement. The more of that Dyson swarm we can build without having to lift it off earth, the better.
4That stupid 100 mile long building in Arabia.
3They could keep people from entering/leaving and suicide/(murder?) becomes much easier. Mass surveillance could also be built in.
2