Clean Slate location

I think it's time to return to the 'where this city should be' debate. And I think it needs its own thread.
Besides the original Australian location Somalia was suggested as offering certain advantages but I've come to thing that perhaps a clean slate city state also needs a cleanslate location.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantropa
Perhaps what's needed is a clean slate geography from which to pick a clean slate location, so forgetting the bit about daming the med how about we flood africa and put the the city on the shore of one of the new super lakes?
http://strangemaps.files.wordpress.com/2008/06/africa-1.jpg

Also,
http://www.xefer.com/2005/03/lake

I'll quote myself from the other thread:

Quote :

just shouting out places here, but what about the Rocha district, in Uruguay?





I would put it at or near that extrusion where it says 'south Atlantic ocean'.

This is in the Rocha district. This district has about 10,500 km^2, woth a population of 70000. This gives about 6 2/3 people / km^2.

Uruguay has all of those other things as well, stable republic, good world image, not excessively bureaucratic (I think), etc etc. Not to mention it is not a member of that dumping treaty, although it is near good fishing already. I've seen pictures, I can assure you the beaches are quite nice.

Where ever it is I do think the location should be future proofed against any future catastrophic sea level rise.

http://www.globalwarmingart.com/sealevel?lat=-0.703&lng=19.688&zoom=3

From your location it will either be underwater with just a couple of meters or it will take all of antarctica to melt.

Speaking of which, some impressive geoengineering could be achieved by strategically planted nuclear weapons in the antarctic ice sheet to calve it off into the ocean there by drastically raising sea levels.
That way we could perchase ahead of time some worthless expanse of inland desert beforehand only to end up with a valuable beach front city after our geoengineering, ala Lex Luther and Calafornia in the first superman film.

Well, I've suggeted an undergroundish city, so how about warton crag? Of course, I only said it because it's about a mile away from me, but the point remains: just dig into a big rock.

What's the advantage of a beachfront location? Plentiful water? We could 'Terraform' a desert, possibly, and turn it into an inland sea via artificial mountains.

Oh, and I like the quick reply, it speeds things up.

Quote :

Where ever it is I do think the location should be future proofed against any future catastrophic sea level rise.

http://www.globalwarmingart.com/sealevel?lat=-0.703&lng=19.688&zoom=3

From your location it will either be underwater with just a couple of meters or it will take all of antarctica to melt.

Speaking of which, some impressive geoengineering could be achieved by strategically planted nuclear weapons in the antarctic ice sheet to calve it off into the ocean there by drastically raising sea levels.
That way we could perchase ahead of time some worthless expanse of inland desert beforehand only to end up with a valuable beach front city after our geoengineering, ala Lex Luther and Calafornia in the first superman film.

That sounds drastic

And it seems that we want the benefits of the coast with the safety from CC of being inland. Here's my suggestion: make a false ground level. In other words, make an arcology up to an arbitrary point, say 70 meters, then have the city go as current ones, if desired.

Well it it is a true clean slate solution, and you know the old saying, you can't start with a clean slate until you've cleaned away the old one first.
It just so happens that in this case that means by killing a billion or so people and destroying western civilisation as we know it.
Maybe that is a bit much, come to think of it.

IDK... Why not just make a huge SF6 factory, kill all life as we know it, then come out and declare ourselves the rulers of the new 150 C world.

Because that would defeat the kill 2/3 of the population, destroy western civilisation as we know but save the world point.
With such a dramatic downturn in the world economy carbon targets will be much easier to meet, with fewer people there would be less consumption, a collapse in the fossil fuel trade etc.
Also in this specific case there would be a cooling of the worlds oceans due to the vast volume of colder melt water mixing with the surface layer. There might though be possible warming reprecussions from the loss of ice cap but, on the whole I suspect it would be somewhat of a turning point in terms of climate change.
If that's what you care about. Of course you might prefer not to kill everyone and just build some more nuclear.

I was kind of joking...Our shiny new city should be isolated enough to protect its own borders.

Then what about antartica itself?
We could build an ice fortress.

Digging tunnels under the ice? Only problem is, it's dodgy politically. Of course, we could argue that we never signed the Antartic treaty, so it shouldn't apply to us.

People seem to think that Australia 'owns' most of Antartica. This is false. Under the treaty, claims are not recognised or disputed, and cannot be made (by those you ratified the treaty). There is also the small fact that most claims OVERLAP!

The treaty is coming up for renegotiation in 2011, and Marie Byrd land is unclaimed, plus as you say, we're not signatories.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Byrd_Land
The hard thing would be to build there sustainably, antarctic bases tend to have a short brutal life of about 30 years before you have to rebuild.I think you'd really want to aim for a longer life than that.

Just thinking about it Antarctica does have a fair number of pros in its favour.
The low ambient temperature will be useful in a number of ways, nuclear reactors will be more efficient, superconducting technologies will be cheaper to operate, data centers will require less cooling, cryonic repositories would be cheaper. There must be more.
The ice lends itself to much easier construction underground, unobtrusive bedrock mining, crosscontinent maglev tunnels, a truly impressive winter olympics. A perfect location for a super collider.
Given construction would be in , at most, 40mt blocks it would be a good dry run for an off world colony as the end result would have to be a harsh all weather sealed enviroment cut off from the world for four months of the year.

Plus its good experience for Ice world colonies.

Construction in the permafrost, provided it's deep enough, should be safe from almost anything. Including the radiation from that hole that people seem to worry about. Vitamin D might be a problem, but I can forsee people having a higher life expectantcy due to the lower radiation doses (natural light could be provided by Fibre-Optics running through the ice).

A little radiation is generally a good thing.

But is it?

It's only a Hypothosis at the moment.

Isn't everything?

No.

What can you prove, beyond all exception?

It's a shame Russia is in the shape it's in today, there are dozens of prime locations there.

Let's head out ASAP and claim the Marie Byrd portion of Antarctica for our yet-to-be-named country.

I'll just get my coat then, might be a bit nippy.

Just read this article on using the abundant limestone available in the Nullarbor region to sequester CO2 in Cosmos magazine today:

http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/node/2117/full

Is this just a coincidence that this limestone location happens to be the same location suggested for our clean slate city-state, Mike?

Yep, purely coincidental!

I knew that the area was basically just one big chunk of limestone, but I didn't know limestone was useful in such a large scale CO2 sequestriation process.

Maybe this is a little subconcious intuition and that little voice was telling you this would be a great location because of this!!

If the CSCS is run on nuclear and renewables (garg! terrible word) is there really much need for sequestration? Also do you really want to build a city on top of a potential artificial liquifaction site?

Here's another location to consider, Iceland. It has many desirable qualities, a low population density, highly developed society, and is aparently on the verge of bankcruptcy due to the world economic crisis. As such Iceland could easily be purchased for a reasonable sum and used as the seed from which to grow the CSCS.

Actually I was looking at the limestone as an exportable commodity to other markets for sequestration as well as a potential building material.

Given it's almost unlimited geothermal potential Iceland would be a great place to start a CSCS.
How about you go find a bank that isn't broke and will give us a loan based on this potential. Considering how fast and loose they have been in the lending department in the past few years this should be a problem at all!! LOL!

I was thinking of a middle eastern sovereign wealth fund that might want to diversify its land energy holdings out of oil, Dubai maybe.

Well, you have my blessing, but not my collateral! LOL

davamanra wrote:

Actually I was looking at the limestone as an exportable commodity to other markets for sequestration as well as a potential building material.

Given it's almost unlimited geothermal potential Iceland would be a great place to start a CSCS.
How about you go find a bank that isn't broke and will give us a loan based on this potential. Considering how fast and loose they have been in the lending department in the past few years this should be a problem at all!! LOL!

Well, didn't I just post on the massive geothermal potential of the Cooper Basin region in Australia? See CS Electricity and here for the map. Compare that map to this one and you can see where I'm going. Esperance City would be right in the middle of the action. Although would the necessary ~1000km long electricty cable (to connect the mining and sequestration operation with the geothermal plant) be viable?

Here's an edited version of that map, with everything together:



FYI: The distance between the proposed site of Esperance City and the nearest geothermal hotspot (the blue line on that map) according to Google Earth is about 700km.

But is Australia broke?

Probably. The rest of the world seems to be.

Not nearly as broke as Iceland though. With a population of just 300,000 and a gdp of $12 billion it has a financial sector eight times larger than its economy. It's screwed.

How about greenland?

I would suggest the large green part on the southwest. We could probably buy enough land for a city pretty cheaply, since the whole Island has a population of 60,000.

Well they're having a self-governance referendum in a month so if we can whip up a proposal it could be put to a vote. Bare in mind though that Denmark refused to sell it for $100 million ($8 billion today) in 1946.

yes, but we would only buy a small sliver.

I think my point was that they've already refused a large chunk of money on principle. I think they might retain those principles in the face of a much smaller chunk of money.

I think they would accept a few million dollars for one of those Fjords. Especially since greenland has home rule, and we would be buying it from them. (If our city grows to a measley 100,000, that would be tripling the population of greenland, and more likely than not we would end up with the whole island.)

If we purchased a chunk of glacier, it might be cheaper and a solid investment for when it melted due to global warming and we then had virgin land.

yeah, or we could purposely melt it (Gasp!)