OK, let's do the math. 1WTC has a 56x56 meter footprint. If NEOM is 200 x 170,000 meters, that's a about 10,800 1WTC towers. 1WTC cost $3.9 billion, so NEOM should come in at $42 trillion. OK, let's credit them with a learning curve at an exponent of 85%. It would still cost $4.8 trillion, approximately seven years of Saudi GDP.
And some things don't have learning curves. 10,800 1WTC towers means 486 million tons of structural steel, and 2.16 billion tons of concrete. At current prices of $1220/ton for steel and $80/ton for concrete, that's $765 billion for the most basic raw materials alone. And really, purchases at that scale will distort the market so that they're spending a terabuck by the time the project is just a mountain of I-beams and bagged cement on the shores of Aqaba.
To be fair, it's supposed to have a population of nine million people. So you recover the $42 trillion cost by selling off nine million apartments at a price of $530K each, which is fairly normal big-city prices. All you have to do is find nine million people who have $530K and want to live in this crazy thing.
Now, that's still not going to happen, but it sounds less insane when you put it this way. And if you scale down your ambition from a 130 km city housing nine million people to a 3km city housing 200K people attracted to this Monaco-of-the-Middle-East by a favourable tax situation then maybe it starts to seem reasonable.
Now I'm wondering whether the real agenda here is the desire to build a city where rich people can live without even needing to see the houses of poor people. If you go to Dubai then you've got (I assume, having never been to Dubai) a bunch of apartments housing rich people, whose amenity is spoiled by being surrounded by the ugly houses of all the poor people needed to keep the rich parts of the city going. In a linear city, on the other hand, all the rich people can have their apartments up one end and the poor people live up the other end; the rich never need to see the poors' houses nor interact with them when they're not actively working; the poors will be delivered by high-speed train every day to do their menial jobs and then whisked away to their vertical slums which, thanks to geometry, cannot even be seen from any window in the rich part of town.
I don't think this is what people are thinking. There are plenty of neighborhoods all around the world where rich people can't see poor people. All suburbs and a bunch of nice districts in cities.
I don't know. I mean, if you live in Beverly Hills you don't have to see poor people as long as you never actually leave Beverly Hills, but if you actually want to go to the beach or the mountains you've got to pass through poorer neighbourhoods, even if it's on a freeway.
The Line lets you pass straight from a super-rich dense walkable city to unspoiled wilderness within minutes . Now, maybe there's a few places in the US where you can get some approximation to that, but The Line probably isn't trying to attract people from there, it's trying to attract people from Mumbai and Moscow.
Hey you're right. I actually meant to use the OP's second estimate (which was $4.8 trillion) not the first one (which was $42 trillion).
(I do think you can mass-produce skyscrapers in the Saudi desert using Pakistani labourers cheaper than you can build a one-off skyscraper in downtown New York City using New York City union labour, so the $42 trillion is definitely an overestimate.)
You're ignoring the part where building the WTC doesn't meaningfully impact the market for raw materials, whereas building 10,000 WTCs all at once does. If its even possible to produce the supplies necessary for this to be done by 2030, it would only be possible by prices for materials skyrocketing and inducing supply, blowing out any cost estimate.
Right, I definitely wouldn't say that building the whole thing by 2030 is within the realms of possibility.
The main point I wanted to make is that as long as you consider this a _city_ rather than a single structure, the materials and cost requirements no longer seem insane. (The layout is still insane.)
But the cost of building any city of nine million from scratch would seem prohibitive if you tried to do it all in one go, securing all the funding before the first house is sold.
The Burj Khalifa is about 1/3rd of the cost of the 1WTC per cubic meter of area, if wiki's claim that it cost $1.5B and Quora's claim that it has 1.6M cubic meters of volume are true.
The question is, how much lower than the Burj Khalifa can you go? If you are trying to finish this project by 2030 you're going to need enough concrete and steel to impact the world's production of those two goods I think?
" 10,800 1WTC towers means 486 million tons of structural steel, and 2.16 billion tons of concrete"
World production of steel: 1,950.5 million tonnes in 2021
World production of concrete: 4.4 billion tonnes in 2019
Hmm, so actually if your consumption is smoothed out over 8 years, you'd need 3% of the world's steel per year, and 6% of the world's concrete per year. That's not likely to affect the prices directly, but I would wonder how transportation to the site will work.
Are we assuming that they're telling the truth about the dimensions? What if we start by assuming there's a ton of "advertising puffery," aka bullshit, going on. Then it's not literally 500m tall and 170km long, it's just "tall, narrow, and long". You could do 20m tall buildings along a 10km line, new-urbanist style, and that would still give you room for a lot of people (200 wide by 20m tall by 10,000m long is 40 million cubic meters, enough for 400,000 people to have 100 square meters each) with a reasonable commute even with stops along the way. You might have to travel farther than you would in a normal city, but it's made up for by never having to wait for a transfer or walk too far from your stop. And presumably they'd go all-out on transit since that's the only option.
When you put it that way, it starts to make sense. Build it along a nice beach somewhere and you can actually justify the linearity, too.
Imagine a version of Miami where everything has been demolished except that thin island that runs north-south from South Beach to Palm Beach, with cars banished to the mainland and an ultra-efficient north-south transit corridor installed. It sounds like a pretty nice place to live.
At this scale it would be worth it to vertically integrate everything. Mine the raw minerals from mines that you own, and build the factories to do all the processing yourself. No way this is done on a timescale less that several decades, and there's a huge list of reasons why it wouldn't work at all.
OK, let's do the math. 1WTC has a 56x56 meter footprint. If NEOM is 200 x 170,000 meters, that's a about 10,800 1WTC towers. 1WTC cost $3.9 billion, so NEOM should come in at $42 trillion. OK, let's credit them with a learning curve at an exponent of 85%. It would still cost $4.8 trillion, approximately seven years of Saudi GDP.
And some things don't have learning curves. 10,800 1WTC towers means 486 million tons of structural steel, and 2.16 billion tons of concrete. At current prices of $1220/ton for steel and $80/ton for concrete, that's $765 billion for the most basic raw materials alone. And really, purchases at that scale will distort the market so that they're spending a terabuck by the time the project is just a mountain of I-beams and bagged cement on the shores of Aqaba.
Why not start with the first km first, and then see how it goes? :)
*Narrator voice* "The line is optimized for scalability and extensibility"
To be fair, it's supposed to have a population of nine million people. So you recover the $42 trillion cost by selling off nine million apartments at a price of $530K each, which is fairly normal big-city prices. All you have to do is find nine million people who have $530K and want to live in this crazy thing.
Now, that's still not going to happen, but it sounds less insane when you put it this way. And if you scale down your ambition from a 130 km city housing nine million people to a 3km city housing 200K people attracted to this Monaco-of-the-Middle-East by a favourable tax situation then maybe it starts to seem reasonable.
Now I'm wondering whether the real agenda here is the desire to build a city where rich people can live without even needing to see the houses of poor people. If you go to Dubai then you've got (I assume, having never been to Dubai) a bunch of apartments housing rich people, whose amenity is spoiled by being surrounded by the ugly houses of all the poor people needed to keep the rich parts of the city going. In a linear city, on the other hand, all the rich people can have their apartments up one end and the poor people live up the other end; the rich never need to see the poors' houses nor interact with them when they're not actively working; the poors will be delivered by high-speed train every day to do their menial jobs and then whisked away to their vertical slums which, thanks to geometry, cannot even be seen from any window in the rich part of town.
I don't think this is what people are thinking. There are plenty of neighborhoods all around the world where rich people can't see poor people. All suburbs and a bunch of nice districts in cities.
I don't know. I mean, if you live in Beverly Hills you don't have to see poor people as long as you never actually leave Beverly Hills, but if you actually want to go to the beach or the mountains you've got to pass through poorer neighbourhoods, even if it's on a freeway.
The Line lets you pass straight from a super-rich dense walkable city to unspoiled wilderness within minutes . Now, maybe there's a few places in the US where you can get some approximation to that, but The Line probably isn't trying to attract people from there, it's trying to attract people from Mumbai and Moscow.
You probably never been to Moscow. Because Moscow is actually very nice , convenient and green city. Among top 10 in the world
Yeah and it has pristine wilderness in the oblast with 45 min train ride.
Now Mumbai yeah...
$530,000 * 9,000,000 = $4.77T, not $47T.
Hey you're right. I actually meant to use the OP's second estimate (which was $4.8 trillion) not the first one (which was $42 trillion).
(I do think you can mass-produce skyscrapers in the Saudi desert using Pakistani labourers cheaper than you can build a one-off skyscraper in downtown New York City using New York City union labour, so the $42 trillion is definitely an overestimate.)
You're ignoring the part where building the WTC doesn't meaningfully impact the market for raw materials, whereas building 10,000 WTCs all at once does. If its even possible to produce the supplies necessary for this to be done by 2030, it would only be possible by prices for materials skyrocketing and inducing supply, blowing out any cost estimate.
Right, I definitely wouldn't say that building the whole thing by 2030 is within the realms of possibility.
The main point I wanted to make is that as long as you consider this a _city_ rather than a single structure, the materials and cost requirements no longer seem insane. (The layout is still insane.)
But the cost of building any city of nine million from scratch would seem prohibitive if you tried to do it all in one go, securing all the funding before the first house is sold.
The Burj Khalifa is about 1/3rd of the cost of the 1WTC per cubic meter of area, if wiki's claim that it cost $1.5B and Quora's claim that it has 1.6M cubic meters of volume are true.
The question is, how much lower than the Burj Khalifa can you go? If you are trying to finish this project by 2030 you're going to need enough concrete and steel to impact the world's production of those two goods I think?
" 10,800 1WTC towers means 486 million tons of structural steel, and 2.16 billion tons of concrete"
World production of steel: 1,950.5 million tonnes in 2021
World production of concrete: 4.4 billion tonnes in 2019
Hmm, so actually if your consumption is smoothed out over 8 years, you'd need 3% of the world's steel per year, and 6% of the world's concrete per year. That's not likely to affect the prices directly, but I would wonder how transportation to the site will work.
That's the plot of Snowpiercer
$530k may not be crazy per-apartment, but it's crazy per-person.
200 m x 200 m x 100 km
2 million persons
Rodes.pub/LineLoop
Are we assuming that they're telling the truth about the dimensions? What if we start by assuming there's a ton of "advertising puffery," aka bullshit, going on. Then it's not literally 500m tall and 170km long, it's just "tall, narrow, and long". You could do 20m tall buildings along a 10km line, new-urbanist style, and that would still give you room for a lot of people (200 wide by 20m tall by 10,000m long is 40 million cubic meters, enough for 400,000 people to have 100 square meters each) with a reasonable commute even with stops along the way. You might have to travel farther than you would in a normal city, but it's made up for by never having to wait for a transfer or walk too far from your stop. And presumably they'd go all-out on transit since that's the only option.
When you put it that way, it starts to make sense. Build it along a nice beach somewhere and you can actually justify the linearity, too.
Imagine a version of Miami where everything has been demolished except that thin island that runs north-south from South Beach to Palm Beach, with cars banished to the mainland and an ultra-efficient north-south transit corridor installed. It sounds like a pretty nice place to live.
The Nazis built that! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prora
200 m x 200 m x 100 km
Rodes.pub/LineLoop
At this scale it would be worth it to vertically integrate everything. Mine the raw minerals from mines that you own, and build the factories to do all the processing yourself. No way this is done on a timescale less that several decades, and there's a huge list of reasons why it wouldn't work at all.
Thanks for some approximate numbers. That was my first impression too that 500 billion is way too low.
It should be even more costly now due to construction costs skyrocketing for various reasons, inflation and promised high-tech.