Land
A Five Million Person City In The Desert? Really?
It seems wanting to launch new cities - or indeed, mini-cities on boats (see below) - is something that's impossible to get out of people's heads, and the latest attempt is apparently a billionaire wanting to build a city of five million people in the middle of the American desert.
Now, I'm sure they've done some research, but five million is a LOT of people - the only bigger city in the USA would be New York, at 8 million people. Even if you take into account metro areas, you're looking at being the tenth-largest metro area in the US. And let's not forget the fact that this is a country whose arid areas are currently experiencing intense drought.
I am a big fan of urban design and planning, especially around car-free cities, but it's something you've got to do progressively and where people want to work and live, not just in the middle of nowhere. Maybe I'll be eating my words in a decade - Dubai pulled it off due to tons of oil money and virtually-imprisoned labour - but I suspect not.
It's A Station, Not A Swimming Pool
A couple of very heavy downpours in London over the last few months have highlighted some... deficiencies, let's say, in the design of the drainage around stations. Unlike New York during the recent hurricane weather, these weren't underground, though - they were on the surface.
Surface flooding (especially flash flooding) is generally a Very Bad Time and actually pretty hard to design for - especially in cities, where the large amount of hard, non-porous surfaces really make it easier for a lot of water to build up on the surface, and find its way to anywhere that's a little bit lower - like in this case, Pudding Mill Lane station, the future site of a virtual ABBA.
As the article notes, modern drainage design is actually moving away from getting rid of water as fast as possible to trying to make every area release water at a predictable rate, avoiding the downstream areas getting overwhelmed. Well, that plus actually having funding for drainage - with weather getting more extreme, though, that may not be quite as optional for very long.
Sure, Just Dump It Into The River
Brexit continues to be a bad idea as Brexit-related supply chain issues now mean that sewage treatment is at risk, and since you can't really just let the sewage pile up in the treatment plant, the government is now allowing unclean sewage to be dumped directly into rivers.
Water and sewage treatment is one of those things people rarely think about, but it's kind of critical to get right - and both Brexit and COVID have revealed weaknesses in it, given that Florida was starting to experience pressures on its water supply after the liquid oxygen it used was diverted to hospitals.
If there's one lesson we learn from all this, it's hopefully how to make more resilient supply chains. Or, at least as a start, have a full insight into the supply chains rather than the large amount of hope that seems to have driven them in the past.
Power Storage: It's All A Bit Up In The Air
There's a whole load of energy storage companies out there trying to fill the load gap left by renewables - giant battery packs, compressed air storage, molten salt, and the good old reliable pumped storage.
Well, add "suspending giant weights" into that equation as Energy Vault, a company whose plan is to store energy by lifting up giant weights and then recover it by dropping the weights, is apparently planning to go public, even though I can't find any evidence of a working installation past a test rig they made with some cranes.
It also doesn't seem particularly energy-dense when I do the physics calcuations, though I guess it helps that it's not explosive or molten in any way. It's likely just a sign of how much the tide is changing on power supply - the death of fossil fuel power and the rise of renewables seems almost inevitable now given how cheap the latter has become - but hey, I am all for making renewable energy even easier to work with, giant concrete blocks or no.
Sea
Seasteading Is Still Not A Good Idea
As long as there have been rich people who don't want to pay their taxes, there have been groups of people trying to "seastead" - build communities or cities out at sea. In this case, it was a load of cryptocurrency people, and boy, did they do it completely wrong.
They got hold of an old P&O cruise ship for a mere $10 million - which is about where I start getting very suspicious that the plan is not going to work - but they then proceeded to show a complete lack of knowledge of maritime law, what it takes to run a ship, and all the insurance companies quickly ran in the opposite direction as they knew very well what they didn't want to get involved with.
They couldn't even manage to send it for scrap properly, until a new cruise line appeared from the ashes of the pandemic and snapped it up for a bargain. There's more juicy details in the article, but unlike some of its seasteading predecessors, this scheme never even had a chance.
Did That Lighthouse Just Move?
This is a little bit of an old story, but I couldn't pass up the chance to mention how lighthouses are literally being moved inland to escape erosion - in this case, in Denmark.
Sure, it wasn't being moved very far, but it's still a telling story of how landscapes are not nearly as static as we sometimes give them credit for, especially around coastlines. I'm glad they're saving them at least - I am a big fan of lighthouses, and honestly would quite like to live in one, in a weird way - but I fear not nearly enough of them will get such loving care and attention.
Sky
Literally Sucking It Out Of The Air
In some good news on climate change, the world's biggest carbon-capture plant has just come online in Iceland - sucking carbon dioxide directly out of the air and injecting it deep into the ground, in a very poetic reversal of drilling for oil.
The new plant, called Orca, can suck 4,000 tonnes out of the air each year, which might sound like a lot, but is sadly only about as much as a thousand cars emit over the same time period. On the positive side, though, it's not that big, so there's plenty of room to build more like this or make them bigger, alongside other climate-change-fixing efforts.
There's some other efforts in this area, too - most notably using olivine, which requires a lot more surface area but doesn't need a large industrial plant to do it. Promising stuff.
Medicine
Ventilation, Ventilation, Ventilation
The spread of COVID-19 has taught us many lessons, and a good number of them are unpleasant. One thing it has highlighted, however, is how relaxed we've been about respiratory viruses until now. Other outbreaks had us adapt our infrastructure to fix them - sewers to stop cholera, for example - so why not COVID?
Modern building ventilation has come a decent way but there's still plenty we could do, and increasing the number of air changes in rooms isn't just good for stopping COVID - it could also help prevent a whole host of other respiratory diseases, as well as the side-effects of too much CO2 in a room.
It's not amazing that it goes somewhat against energy-efficiency gains - the problem with refreshing using outside air is that it tends to be too hot or too cold - but modern HVAC technology has got pretty good at recovering both temperature and humidity from exhausted air. A lot better than just opening windows, anyway.
And Finally
The American Mecha Robot
Once upon a time, the US wanted to make nuclear-powered bombers. But they had a problem - nuclear reactors need a lot of shielding, and shielding is heavy. So, why not remove as much shielding as is safe, and maybe a little more? Well, now you have a radioactive plane that no mechanic can stand next to while they're fixing it.
Enter the Beetle, a literal mecha that the US Air Force built for the sole purpose of servicing and maintaining these bombers while keeping the maintenance crews safe. Of course, it was the 1960s, so robotics was very much in its infancy, and so the Beetle was... well, it was incredibly unreliable. They joked that its short circuits had short circuits.
Just as well, then, that the nuclear bomber it was designed to service never made it into the air; they never did manage to get enough shielding removed from those reactors to make them light enough to fly. As for the Beetle? It went off into the depths of the Nevada storage facilities, where I worry that it still sits to this day, alone, never having fulfilled its singular purpose.