As climate change activists are urging the world to take drastic steps to limit carbon emissions, Saudi Arabia is taking the messaging to a whole new level, so much so that it wants to stick millions of people in a giant, shiny, wall — seriously.
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) reports that Saudi Arabia is planning to build a massive “eco-city,” unlike anything seen before.
The whole city will be a line that stretches for 75 miles with various vertical layers of homes, offices, schools, and parks.
The Wall Street Journal explains that it will be contained by “two buildings up to 1,600 feet tall” that run parallel for the length of the city.
“A high-speed train will run under the mirrored buildings… To feed its residents, the project plans vertical farming integrated into the buildings. For entertainment, the Mirror Line plans a sports stadium up to 1,000 feet above the ground. It will also boast a marina for yachts that lies underneath an arch in the two buildings,” it added.
It is supposed to be completed by 2030.
A video circulated on social media on Wednesday depicting what the “Mirror Line” will look like.
“For too long humanity has existed within dysfunctional and polluted cities that ignore nature. Now a revolution in civilization is taking place. Imagine a traditional city and consolidating its footprint, [designed] to protect and enhance nature. The Line will be home to 9 million residents,” a narrator states.
Why do we need a redesign of a traditional city? The video explains this city will “provide a healthier more sustainable quality of life.”
Watch the video below:
What is this dystopian hell line city. pic.twitter.com/s7JxC9MsC5
— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) July 27, 2022
It will reportedly provide residents with “all their daily needs within five-minute walk neighborhoods.”
“The Line’s infrastructure makes it possible to travel end to end in 20 minutes with no need for cars, resulting in zero-carbon emissions,” the video adds.
Additionally, the developers plan to leverage artificial intelligence to make services autonomous.
The city will also reportedly use 100% renewable energy.
This looks like something out of a dystopian sci-fi movie and right out of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (D-N.Y.) dreams.
Aside from the fact that this is essentially a giant wall and we were reliably informed by the media that walls are racist and bad, a 75-mile-long city without cars seems to pose a logistical challenge, such as, what happens if the trains stop running?
It’s nice to have everything hyper-localized and within walking distance, but if people are relying on trains to go further distances and they don’t work, that’s a long hike.
Also, the idea of using only renewable energy is a noble goal, but with the current technology, it seems like the risk of blackouts would be rather high.
That shouldn’t be too far-fetched since the city is supposed to rely on renewable energy, and so far, the technology does not exist on a scale large enough to store renewable energy for a city for the days when there’s no sun or no wind.
And even if the conditions were optimal so as to ensure that there was never a concern about storing energy, wouldn’t you want to test running a city on renewable energy to make sure it can hold up to demand before foisting it on millions of people?
Then there are the issues of infectious disease spread and the potential risks of biological warfare attacks that having millions of people literally living on top of each other pose.
While this technologically advanced, shiny, clean city may seem cool at first, it’s not hard to imagine how easily things go devolve into chaos when you have millions of people living in a glass wall and the infrastructure and services they rely on for work and food and transportation stop working.
