A Physicist Says He Can Tornado-Proof the Midwest With 1,000-Foot Walls 501
meghan elizabeth writes: Temple physicist Rongjia Tao has a utopian proposal to build three massive, 1,000-foot-high, 165-foot-thick walls around the American Midwest, in order to keep the tornadoes out. Building three unfathomably massive anti-tornado walls would count as the infrastructure project of the decade, if not the century. It would be also be exceedingly expensive. "Building such walls is feasible," Tao says. "They are much easier than constructing a skyscraper. For example, in Philadelphia, the newly completed Comcast building has about 300-meter height. The wall with similar height as the Comcast building should be much easier to be constructed." Update: 06/28 04:14 GMT by T : Note: originally, this story said that Tao was at Drexel rather than Temple -- now corrected
Plus bonus.... (Score:5, Funny)
...kaiju protection.
Re:Plus bonus.... (Score:5, Funny)
But vulnerable to Titans.
And Trojan Rabbits (Score:2)
https://www.google.com/search?... [google.com]
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+1
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*rimshot*
Re:Plus bonus.... (Score:5, Funny)
*Pacific Rimshot*
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ONCE AND FOR ALL!
Comment removed (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Your taxes at work (Score:5, Funny)
Okay...I am embarrassed...I WENT to Drexel. A 1000 ft wall AROUND the mid-west?
What happens if somebody decides to fill it with water?
Re:Your taxes at work (Score:5, Funny)
One can only hope.
Re:Your taxes at work (Score:5, Funny)
One can only hope.
A fine display of liberalism.
Yes, liberalism runs on hope.
Re:Your taxes at work (Score:5, Insightful)
and success runs on work.
The best predictor of success in our society is parentage. Hard work is down around #7 someplace.
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Good parents teach the value of work.
They can, but that's not why.
You parents can give you a shit ton of money
Yes, they can. And that's why.
and send you to great schools. If you don't work you are not a success.
I think we all know of several high-profile examples of failing upwards.
You might have money and a good job, but if you did not earn it through some hard work of your own you are not a success.
Ah, you're going to drag around the goalposts. I knew that would come up eventually.
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The world's largest pool party?
Re:Your taxes at work (Score:5, Funny)
What happens if somebody decides to fill it with water?
"Why have you broken your promise, O Lord?" *many sounds of construction, and animal noises*
I know that joke! (Score:5, Funny)
at the corner where Minnesota, Iowa, and Wisconsin meet, three farmers were talking over the fence. they find a magic lamp, and the Iowa farmer rubs it. out comes the genie, and splits the three wishes between them. the Iowa farmer says, "I would like this place to be green and fertile forever, rich and promising." BANG! the corn is ten feet tall. the Wisconsin farmer says, "Our state is so beautiful, I would like a thousand-foot wall all around it, so we can enjoy these hills, this water, the land forever without interlopers." BANG, fence.
the Minnesota farmer looks at the wall, and says, "Genie, we love our lakes. Fill that fence with water." BANG!
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European or African swallow?
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You actually believe that such a fence would keep people out?
Amazing.
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You actually believe that such a fence would keep people out?
Amazing.
It works in Israel, and it more or less works in Spain. What's the difference? Israel proactively patrols the border. In Spain has various groups that actively work against the border patorls, much like in the US where the current administration is doing the same thing at the behest of various groups. You guys are dense as a post, and I can almost bet that Canada would have a fence in place with active patrols along the border if the US turned into a 3rd world state.
Re:Your taxes at work (Score:5, Insightful)
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You actually believe that such a fence would keep people out?
Amazing.
Great Wall of China... Mongols. I rest my case.
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Yeah, that worked real well. [wikipedia.org]
Re:Your taxes at work (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah, that worked real well. [wikipedia.org]
Actually, it's a common misconception to think that the Great Wall was built as a military defense mechanism in the event of full scale war. For one, it's too low, easily scalable by an army with the right tools. And secondly, it's too long, and can never be effectively manned along the full length. All in all, the Great Wall was never designed to function like a city wall.
What the wall really does, and it does well, is act as a deterent and early warning mechanism against the annual and semi-annual small scale border raids from the northern nomadic tribes, where riders would just charge down south, loot what they can and quickly retreat back into the great prairies. It's actually a (relatively) economical answer to a persistent problem -- for it's very expensive for a settled agricutural civilization to mobilize an army, while it costs almost nothing for the nomads to gather up a group of riders and raid a small border settlement.
And BTW, China is far from the only one in building a wall. Almost every settled civilization on the Eurasian continent, from Korea [wikipedia.org] all the way [wikipedia.org] to England [wikipedia.org], built a wall at some point in their history. The Chinese wall was the largest simply because China face the greatest threat from the Mongolian plains, which produced some of the most brutal and effiecient nomadic people in human history.
Re:Your taxes at work (Score:5, Insightful)
"Pantywaisted policies"? Fine. Swarm this land with Homeland "Security" goons to find anyone who looks a little brown, ask them sus papeles, por favor and beat the mierda out of them when they answer in English. Oh, and we want freedom and small government, too. And low taxes.
"Teach our kids Spanish"? Qué horror, que nuestros hijos aprendan otro idioma.
"Offer Spanish cable TV channels"? What have you got against the free market?
"Bilingual highway signs"? Citation needed, but yes, it's so much better to have people on the road who don't understand the signs.
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Hey, defending the border is actually one of the things the feds are supposed to do. Someone shows up at the border from abroad and shows a passport? American citizen? ok, let him in. Passport and no citizenship? well does he have alternative legitimate travel docs? if so, let him pass. If not, deny. Anyone else trying to get past the border is arrested and sent home. Mass invasions are dealt with by deadly force. I don't see a problem with this. It's not racist to do this. The borders keep the peac
Re:Your taxes at work (Score:4, Insightful)
Yup, we in the US are racist for wanting some form of immigration control (keeping people from crossing the border south-to-north) but the Mexicans are simply exercising their sovereignty when they actual do work to prevent north-to-south movement.
At least he is currently modded +2 while you are modded -1.
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Have you actually tried? It is easy-peasy to walk across the San Diego border to Mexico.
Re:Your taxes at work (Score:5, Interesting)
I always thought the best method was to create inverted solar heated funnels with built in wind turbines at ground level and at the outlet, to basically create safety valves to enable hot air at ground level to continually vent to upper atmosphere and as a bonus provide energy to pay for the system. This to prevent the destructive funnel that would otherwise occur. You would need to space them so as to substantially reduce the risk of the natural funnel forming. You could also use them as communication towers, wireless and microwave broadband and mobile phones. As an additional bonus dependent upon region they can also collect water via direct rainfall as well as condensation.
So rather than just attempting to solve one problem badly. A little out of the box thinking and funnel, 'heh' 'heh', many problems into one solution and achieve a far higher level of cost efficiency.
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Who wants it?
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Now we know (Score:5, Funny)
Now we know why there are no Tornados in Westeros.
Flat or angled? (Score:4, Funny)
If you can go with a slope and build it as a triangular prism then it is easy to build, like a long pyramid. Jobs, jobs, jobs!
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If you can go with a slope and build it as a triangular prism then it is easy to build, like a long pyramid. Jobs, jobs, jobs!
To me, the whole things sounds suspiciously like the Law of Unintended Consequences just waiting to happen.
Dual use (Score:3)
If you're going to build something that large you might as well make it dual use. How about an archology? [wikipedia.org]
We'll be overrun by double-wides! (Score:5, Funny)
The only natural predator of trailer homes are tornadoes. Are we prepared for the inevitable population explosion if we defeat tornadoes in the Mid-West? I don't think we'll be able to build Wal-marts fast enough.
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Calm down or you'll break your trailer springs!
The infrastructure project of the decade (Score:5, Insightful)
If it is not exceedingly expensive, it's not the infrastructure project of the century.
Pedestrian (Score:4, Funny)
Construct mighty engines of fearsome complexity and madness-inducing size to redirect the gyronormous aetheric power of these "tornadoes" towards the hated enemy.
Nobody thinks cyclopean these days, that's what's wrong with society.
Reminds me of one engineer's maxim (Score:5, Insightful)
Did he mention (Score:5, Funny)
Oh Geeez (Score:4, Insightful)
Wouldn't it be cheaper to move all of the people in the midwest to China? That's where all the jobs went anyway
Solar Freakin' Walls! (Score:5, Funny)
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To play Pong of course.
Driverless cars prevent more deaths and cheaper (Score:5, Insightful)
$160 million per mile, to prevent an average of 50-60 tornado deaths per year?
1) Build 1000 miles? Only $160 billion? Is that cost of labor alone? What about the cost of land?
2) Build just for cities? Which cities?
3) How does a city afford even 1 mile of wall?
We can drop nukes in tornadoes too for much less, not that I'm advocating that either.
Just last year, there were 32,850 vehicle fatalities [nhtsa.gov] in the good ol' USofA.
Driverless cars would've prevented 99% of the crashes. Let's concentrate on rolling those out first and soon.
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Fucking this.
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What's the economic damage of shutdowns due to tornados?
A lot of talk about a city's traffic problems essentially focuses on the fact that a major car accident can wipe out productivity for an entire morning or day in a metropolis. How much productivity is being lost due to tornados? If you could prevent them entirely, then it could easily pay back many, many times the construction cost.
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NHTSA: Economic costs of car crashes $277 billion [detroitnews.com]
I've provided two links now. Where are yours?
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Why do you want to be on a snow covered road in January with cars around you that are being driven by some twenty-somethings with the standard overconfidence and thrill seeking that comes with that age group?
I would prefer driverless cars over many human drivers nowadays. Especially in snowy conditions. I have had a tailgater while there was 20 cm snow. Winter tires are still uncommon here because it doesn't snow that much so (s)he probably didn't have those.
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We can drop nukes in tornadoes too for much less, not that I'm advocating that either.
But we should probably keep this in mind in case of Sharknado.
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One mile of this wall would seem to me to be like roughly five hoover dams. The hoover dam cost $750 million in today's dollars. So wouldn't one mile of this super-wall cost $3.75 billion, not $160 million?
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> We can drop nukes in tornadoes too for much less, not that I'm advocating that either.
But MAN.... that'd be cool to watch. From a safe distance.
Trains (Score:4, Informative)
Driverless cars weigh more, but if you put the car on a rail and let a computer drive it would move 10x faster on 10x less energy and have no accidents. I added the costs that it would take to build a system like that and then realized it would pay for itself in 5 years.
Welcome to Europe. Let me introduce you to this wonderful technology called "TRAINS" that we have here.
We've scaled up your plan a bit (they also transport 100x the number of passengers).
We've also jumped on the "electrical vehicle" bandwagon while we're at it (very few are still diesel powered)
(also there's a human in front who can override the system just in case, though some metropolitan transport have gone 100% driverless).
What could possibly go wrong? (Score:3)
Stealing our jobs (Score:4, Funny)
They're coming here, stealing our jobs. We need to build a fence to keep them out, and allow warrentless searches of anyone who looks like a tornado. Ironically, to save on costs, most of the wall will actually be built by tornadoes.
OP summary is bad. (Score:2)
You must be new here. (Score:2)
Summaries are required to be inaccurate at the very least, outrageously misleading is preferred if you can manage it.
How many Panama canals? (Score:5, Informative)
As an earthmoving project, each kilometer of wall is 18M cubic meters. The Panama Canal was about 250M cubic meters of earthmoving. So every 14KM of wall is one Panama Canal. The proposed Arabian Canal [wikipedia.org] near Dubai (to create "valuable waterfront property" accessable by yacht) would require about 1100M cubic meters of earthmoving. So one Arabian Canal is about 60KM of wall.
In terms of speed, one Bagger 288 [wikipedia.org] can move about 250K cubic meters of earth a day. That's 5KM of wall per year. With one such $100 million machine for every 100KM of wall, the project would take 20 years.
It's a big project, but not impossibly big. Just expensively big.
Or (Score:2, Insightful)
People could stop living in places where a tornado comes through every few years. You hear the same complaints about people living in flood plains
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> People could stop living in places where a tornado comes through every few years.
Unfortunately, that's where the food grows.
> You hear the same complaints about people living in flood plains
I think you do have a point there.
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Here's what we need (Score:2)
Some sort of structure that, when placed in the path of wind, produces a clockwise rotation in it (opposite that of cyclonic rotation). Ideally, these could be built as earthworks in the path tornadoes take to approach high value targets (towns, etc). If the earthworks could be built low and wide, the land could still be used for agriculture.
I'll leave the details to actual mechanical and civil engineers. And collect my patent fees per the usual USPTO process.
Appalachians (Score:5, Insightful)
I live in the Appalachian mountains. As I watch weather radar, observing weather systems come at us from the west, I've seen dozens if not hundreds of times over the years where very powerful, well-defined weather systems (individual cells as well as frontal systems) totally disintegrate as they cross over from flat regions of North Carolina and Tennessee into Virginia, because they hit a literal 1,000 foot wall of mountains. Tornadoes are extremely rare here. A few years ago we had small one that messed up a couple sheds and the canopy over a gas station, and that was the first in decades. So I do believe this physicist is onto something that would be effective. Whether or not it's practical or acceptable to construct such a thing is another question.
Re:Appalachians (Score:4, Interesting)
OK, we should all read this [ustornadoes.com]
My big take-away is that the altitude makes all the difference. The "barrier" effect is less apparent.
So. If the guy builds a wall, he'll take away Sunlight nearby. Maybe there could be some effect due to the local average altitude being higher; but a puny little wall or even a small mountain range vs. the entire continental pattern? Even if we could alter the climate of a continent... I thought climate change was bad.
What the hell? (Score:3)
Between the Higgs-Boson crap and this thread, I think Dice has decided to declare it "Give A Wingnut A Headline Week". :(
It would only work temporarily (Score:3)
After the walls were up for a while, some jackass land developers and greedy politicians would start building houses on top. And then we'd all of a sudden have the problem of exposed property again.
Consider similar cases from history:
- Houses on flood plains.
- Houses right near beaches, especially eroding ones.
- Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
Costs (Score:2)
Quote:
Each year in the U.S., 1,200 tornadoes on average kill 60 people, injure 1,500, and cause roughly $400 million in damages, putting long-term average tornado losses on par with hurricanes, according to a new report by Lloydâ(TM)s of London.
âoeTornadoes: A Rising Risk?â finds that the U.S. experiences more tornadoes than anywhere else in the world. The year 2011 was especially vicious, with a record-breaking 1,600 tornadoes causing more than $25 billion in damages, surpassing records for
Salt Lake City (Score:3)
Salt Lake City and the Salt Lake basin are surrounded by much higher natural "walls". Downtown SLC still managed to get a tornado. No, it was not a massive F5, but it was definitely a tornado in a place that doesn't even usually get them. Any meteorologist will tell you that mountains don't prevent tornadoes, so I'm highly skeptical of the whole idea.
He's a physicist of course, so this only works on spherical chickens in a vacuum.
No wind or rain, either? (Score:2)
maths (Score:3)
ok, so he doesn't mention a length... but lets just start with one mile.
The internal volume of 1000' * 165' * 5280' = 871,200,000 cubic feet
That's 32 million cubic yards.
Concrete, the most basic thing you'd have to make it out of averages about $75 per cubic yard.
So this thing would cost $2.4 billion dollars, per mile, to build.
This doesn't even factor in grading, paying workers, rerouting highways, etc...
Oh, and you'd likely consume all the concrete in the US, driving up the price and crash industries all over the country because of it.
Good luck!
Climate effect? (Score:4, Insightful)
I didn't see anything about the climate effect, if there would be one. Mucking around with wind flow in the area that makes a lot of our food may turn out to be a bad idea, in which case we'd get to see the biggest demolition project ever, and hope it's reversable.
Re:Climate effect? (Score:5, Interesting)
The entire point of the wall is to change the climate by preventing moist gulf air and cold air from the north from mixing. The change to the rainfall regime would probably create an even larger desert than already exists in the area. If you do not believe me look at the current climate of northern China he cites. That is what will be created.
Just adopt Dade County building codes in OK/KS/etc (Score:5, Informative)
There's a fairly easy way the death toll due to tornadoes could be lowered over time in states like Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri, etc -- adopt the same building codes we have in South Florida.
Most people don't realize it, but South Florida experiences the most urban tornadoes per square mile per year in the entire United States. Granted, we basically never see EF4 and EF5 tornadoes... but we get plenty of the smaller ones.
The strength of South Florida tornadoes is EGREGIOUSLY under-reported by the Enhanced Fujita scale, because the EF scale is defined primarily in terms of observed damage rather than measured wind speeds -- damage that just doesn't happen in Florida, even with directly-comparable storms. An EF1 tornado capable of wiping a neighborhood of matchstick McMansions off the map would barely make a dent in a neighborhood of concrete post-Andrew South Florida homes with large-missile impact glass windows (Google "ASTM 1886-1996"), and would probably be reported as an EF0 unless it hit a trailer park or a neighborhood with older homes. An EF1 tornado is basically 30 seconds of a category 1 or 2 hurricane... and a direct hit by a category 1 hurricane is the South Florida equivalent of a snow day in upstate New York.
Anyway, the point is, if homes in suburban Kansas were built from reinforced concrete, deaths from anything short of an outright EF5 monster would basically fall into the category of "rare, unfortunate freak accidents" in areas where all the buildings were built to Dade County standards.
Assorted SoFla torn-porn:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Better idea (Score:5, Insightful)
Instead of building a giant wall, just require that any new buildings (including replacements for damaged/destroyed ones) built in Tornado Alley MUST be strong enough to withstand a certain amount of force, that way if its hit by a big tornado, it wont collapse. Its been done elsewhere (mostly in areas where cyclones/hurricanes are a problem but the same standards will stop all but the biggest/most extreme tornadoes).
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If we're going to send the Mexicans back anyway, sending the drug using Americans back in the same bus works for me. (A selling point might be that they'd be closer to the drugs.) Let's also send the business owners who increase profits by using "undocumented" workers as near-slave labor.
best idea (Score:2)
while() {
build_wall();
tear_down_wall();
print( "Recovery!!!!1!!!!1!" );
}
}
catch (error) {
blame_Bush();
}
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Personally, I'm thinking about experiments in tsunami protection which involves rods/posts set up in such a way it creates a resonance effect that disrupts the whole thing, reflecting the energy back upon itself. Neat stuff, but I'm not an expert and am probably not using the right words.
Still, setting up some massive wind turbines in the correct patterns should have the same effect at massively less cost, and actually provide power to boot.
Re: better idea (Score:4, Interesting)
This physicist obviously hasn't thought this through and is looking only at the height of the tornado, however as a thought experiment it's truly worthy of a full xkcd "what if" analysis.
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A wall such as the one proposed would act as a mountain range diverting prevailing winds upwards, this is the very reason "tornado alley" exists in the first place, the storm cells are the physical manifestation of turbulence created by mountains.
Don't you just love it when the Gaians on the continent west of you start terraforming up mountain ranges and all your rainy squares start disappearing?
Oh, and then there's the whole part where even though they're supposed to be the ecologically-sensitive faction they'll build just as much, if not more, boreholes and shit everywhere. Totally not inconsistent at all :)
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The East German wall was put up to keep the East Germans from escaping Communism. Countless people died trying to get over the wall to the West. Is there any documented case of somebody trying to escape INTO East Germany over the wall?
Re: better idea (Score:4, Funny)
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to build three massive, 1,000-foot high, 165-foot thick walls
For example, in Philadelphia, the newly completed Comcast building has about 300 meter height. The wall with similar height as the Comcast building should be much easier to be constructed.
But the wall is not similar height, is it? it's 3 times that height. Also, it may be 165-ft thick, but how wide? all the way around the city is how many times wider than said Comcast building? a few thousand? so 9000+ times larger structure is somehow easier to construct?
I blame the stupid writers who mix their units. 300m is about 1000 feet. As stupid as various measurement systems might be from anyone's perspective, mixing them should be a capital crime.
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to build three massive, 1,000-foot high, 165-foot thick walls
For example, in Philadelphia, the newly completed Comcast building has about 300 meter height. The wall with similar height as the Comcast building should be much easier to be constructed.
But the wall is not similar height, is it? it's 3 times that height. Also, it may be 165-ft thick, but how wide? all the way around the city is how many times wider than said Comcast building? a few thousand? so 9000+ times larger structure is somehow easier to construct?
Some points to consider
1000 foot = 304 meter.
It is easier to construct a 3'x3' cube of concrete than a CPU, so size does not seem to be the only factor determining difficulty.
Re:stupid comparison (Score:5, Informative)
On the other hand, building a concrete *anything* that is a thousand feet tall and 165 feet thick isn't easy. They're claiming that a one-mile stretch of the wall would cost $160 million, which comes out to 871.2 million cubic feet of concrete, or a cost per cubic foot (including labour and materials) of about $0.18. That sounds really unlikely to me.
Let me put it this way, the hoover dam is actually relatively similar to what we're talking about here. It's roughly 700 feet tall, varies from 45 to 600 feet thick, and is about a fifth of a mile wide... So let's say that the cross section of the hoover dam has about the same area as this proposed wall.
OK, so now we just need the length of the wall. Well, the circumference of the American midwest is roughly 3900 miles (cutting through the great lakes, because what the hell). So basically, what we need to do, is build the equivalent of roughly 20,000 hoover dams.
The hoover dam cost the equivalent of about $750 million to build. I suspect it would cost a lot more today than pure inflation would account for (unions, health and safety standards, etc), but let's say that technological progress would counteract all that...
So, $750 million, times 20,000... and we come up with $15 trillion.
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The idea IIRC is not to disrupt the tornadoes. It's to disrupt the much more benign winds that interact to form tornadoes once they reach the mid west.
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Picture a massless, spherical cow.
Now picture that massless, spherical cow bouncing like a pinball around a giant tornado hemmed in by a thousand-foot wall...
Re: A truly idiotic democrat idea! (Score:2)
The needed resiliency for buildings and communities in tornado alley would be far beyond cost prohibitive without federal and state subsidy. Tornado resilient buildings are fiction. Today even the most resilient areas will succumb to massive disruption of life and economic output due to tornados. I live in Texas, and when Fort Worth had a tornado in the middle of downtown, talk buildings were essentially out of order for months due to damage. These were modern commercial structures too!
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Wouldn't giant fans at strategic places perform the same function?
Re: A theoretical wall? (Score:2)
This why engineers exist to translate. They talk to the physicists so the we don't have to*.
*guess the movie reference?
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Re:You know... (Score:5, Funny)
> This idea is so batshit crazy...I think we should do it. I don't even care whether it works as advertised. The Great Wall of China will pale in comparison.
The idea of doing a gigantic project just because it's batshit crazy has an appeal, I grant you.
> This could be our Apollo.
Erm... we already had our Apollo... unless you're talking "our generation", in which case, get off my lawn.
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Does anyone feel like this could potentially alter climactic patterns across the whole continent? No big deal, just a fairly large mountain range where there wasn't previously one.
Good point... that could be really interesting. Let's build it and find out.
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What if both sides of the wall are crazy?
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Yes, this. I wonder why building codes in tornado-prone areas don't require tornado-proof construction.