Location Selected For $1 Billion Ghost Town 172
Hugh Pickens writes "Although a fully operation city with no people sounds like the setup for a dystopian sci-fi novel, the Boston Globe reports that the Center for Innovation, Testing and Evaluation will develop a $1 billion scientific ghost town near Hobbs, New Mexico to help researchers test everything from intelligent traffic systems and next-generation wireless networks to automated washing machines and self-flushing toilets on existing infrastructure without interfering in everyday life. Bob Brumley, senior managing director of Pegasus Holdings, says the town will be modeled after the real city of Rock Hill, South Carolina, complete with highways, houses and commercial buildings, old and new. Unlike traditional cities, City Labs will start with its underground 'backbone' infrastructure that will allow the lab to monitor activity throughout the 17-mile site. Since nobody lives in the Center's buildings, computerized systems will mimic human behavior such as turning thermostats up and down, switching lights off and on, or flushing toilets. The Center's test facilities and supporting infrastructure may require as much as 20 square miles of open, unimproved land where the controlled environment will permit evaluation of the positive and negative impacts of smart grid applications and integration of renewable energies for residential, commercial and industrial sectors of the economy. 'It's an amusement park for the scientists,' adds Brumley."
Reminder: Facebook costs the same as 100 cities. (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, Facebook costs the same as 100 fully-automated and instrumented cities.
Economy is doing fine, indeed...
Wouldn't it be easier.... (Score:4, Insightful)
So ... people are losing their houses ... (Score:1, Insightful)
People are losing their houses due to the housing bubble and they are going to build an entire town where no one is allowed to live and have computers simulate human activity?
I ... I don't even know how to express my feelings for just how wrong this is on so many levels.
Best sims are real people (Score:4, Insightful)
I know it's not as controlled, but letting actual people live in this town would have a few benefits.
1. Some people would get a place to live.
2. If you want simulation data for humans, why not just use humans?
Seriously, let people live there for free or nearly free and the deal is they have to let scientists into their homes whenever for testing and upgrades. They also give up privacy for all of their anonimized actions and give up certain privacy for identifiable information, like photos. Bonus round, let them run the businesses too. Seriously, in the days of the WPA there were all sorts of co op planned communities that went up all at once, like Greenbelt, MD. Many of them are still thriving.
They should have just used Detroit. (Score:3, Insightful)
Much of Detroit consists of vacant buildings these days, with at least some sort of roads still in place.
In a way, the government is already "employing" (i.e., wasting welfare dollars on) most of the people still living there. Turning lights on or off and flushing toilets for research purposes would at least indirectly allow them to provide something of value to society, rather than merely being the drain they currently represent.
Re:Wouldn't it be easier.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Wouldn't it be easier to just simulate the entire city on a supercomputer? And when it's not calculating wattage of incandescent vs led lightbulbs, it could do something, oh, I don't know, useful, like curing cancer?
Re:Reminder: Facebook costs the same as 100 cities (Score:3, Insightful)
Exactly!
And look what happened to Myspace (that was the last Facebook).
This valuation is for something less stable than the price of tulips.
Re:Wouldn't it be easier.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Simulations won't work because we don't know enough about the line to fully simulate the system.
Testing on existing homes won't work because existing utilities don't have the right to force a homeowner to endure low power quality while some engineer runs a test.
I would rather see the money being used to pay off homeowners to deal with testing that may destroy their homes. However, most people would rather it be done on another person's home.
This looks like a scam (Score:5, Insightful)
This looks like some kind of scam or hoax. There's a web site [cite-city.com] for the project, but it's all clip art. "Pegasus Global Holdings" is suspicious. The "Pegasus Global Holdings" behind this project is here. [pegasusglo...ldings.com] But there's also Pegasus-Global Holdings [pegasus-global.com], with a dash. The one with a dash seems to be real. The one without the dash, the one behind this project, not so much.
Their "head office" is supposedly at 1875 "I" Street, NW, Suite 500 Washington, DC 20006. Many other companies have the same address, including a small law firm and a PR firm. It seems to be a mail drop of some kind. Their address in Reston, VA is a small furnished space currently for lease. [furnished-spaces.com] Their "London office" is a is a "virtual office" package [executiveoffices.co.uk]: "Executive Offices Group can provide a Virtual Office business address at any of our 34 highly sought after locations. "
"Pegasus Global Holdings" isn't listed in the SEC's EDGAR system, so they're not publicly held or doing anything big financially. They previously announced a "commercial spaceport" project; nothing came of that.
Re:They should have just used Detroit. (Score:4, Insightful)
Much of Detroit consists of vacant buildings these days, with at least some sort of roads still in place.
It would probably also be much better for testing new technology. Self-flushing toilets may work fine in city with all new plumbing. But will they work with old rusty pipes? Does a self-timing traffic system work with old wiring? New Mexico has little rain, low humidity, and a mild climate. Detroit would be much more challenging. If you can make something work in Detroit, it will work anywhere.
Urban planning: So much easier without the humans (Score:4, Insightful)
It takes a special person to decide the real problem with design is too much user input. By all means, enjoy your city-of-things. But for the love, please don't bring any of it back to the real world until you run it by some humans.