Scott Adams's Plan For Building Giant Energy-Generating Pyramids 107
LoLobey (1932986) writes "Scott Adams has proposed a pyramid project
to save the world via energy generation and tourism. Basically build giant
pyramids, miles wide and high, in the desert to generate power via chimney
effect and photo voltaics with added features for
tourism (he's planning ahead for when robots take over all the work and we'll
need something to do). He's had a few "Big Ideas" lately (canals, ice bergs, ion energy)."
Qualifications: thinker and visionary (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyone can be an effective visionary if they have an analytical mind and aren't stuck in the mental rut of dogma. Authors, including authors of cartoons, tend to spend most of their time thinking, so they're a fairly good profession for spawning visionaries quite regularly.
Engineers make things, and they're very practical and pragmatic about it --- they make things that actually work, and as such they're the creators of everything technical in the modern world. Having both feet well anchored on the ground is almost the opposite of thinking about the distant future though --- if they do become visionaries, it's not so much a result of their profession but because they also enjoy pure science and futurism.
I'm an engineer, but I wouldn't poo poo Scott Adams just because he's not. If he (or anyone else) comes up with some interesting designs, I'm sure that many skilled engineers and scientists will sanity check them before the detailed design begins.
You're assuming it's solid. (Score:5, Insightful)
Presumably it would be just a hollow shell, and thus vastly lighter in weight than the pyramid of giza.
Re:Qualifications: thinker and visionary (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm an engineer, but I wouldn't poo poo Scott Adams just because he's not. If he (or anyone else) comes up with some interesting designs, I'm sure that many skilled engineers and scientists will sanity check them before the detailed design begins
As a Professional Electrical Engineer I have always enjoyed Scott Adams Dilbert cartoons and looking at his education he is no layman having attended Hartwick College and the University of California, Berkeley where he received an MBA in economics and management.
While his proposal seem to be the stuff of Sci-Fi the principles are valid although I personally doubt with our current technology that it would feasible in our lifetime and taking a few pages out of his Dilbert books the amount of management (includes private and governmental) cooperation would be staggering.
Taking a simple example: What has happened to the Space Elevator?