
CITE: A $1B city that nobody calls home - ojbyrne
http://www.cnn.com/2015/10/06/business/test-city/index.html
======
Animats
This is total vaporware, and likely total bullshit. See the Wikipedia article.
That project has been promoted for years, by some guy who has no funding for
it. He was previously promoting a private spaceport at White Sands.[1] Nothing
was ever built. And a private satellite network using lasers.[2] Also didn't
happen.

He's good at PR, though.

[1] [http://www.pegasusglobalholdings.com/international-
commercia...](http://www.pegasusglobalholdings.com/international-commercial-
space-launch-facility.html) [2] [http://www.pegasusglobalholdings.com/laser-
light-communicati...](http://www.pegasusglobalholdings.com/laser-light-
communications.html)

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strictnein
> "Others are skeptical of the premise of testing without people."

The quotes following that are what annoy me about journalism today. No one is
saying "never test around humans!". It's that wouldn't it be nice to put, say,
50 autonomous vehicles in a controlled city-scape and see how they behave? Run
them 24/7 and see how long it is until an accident occurs. Now add in 10, 20,
30, etc human driven cars and repeat the experiment.

~~~
jsprogrammer
Shouldn't existing autonomous vehicles already be tested that way? Aren't
they?

Why do we need a new corporation-town?

~~~
strictnein
I'm sure they are, to a degree, but if we're at all thinking about starting to
replace wide swaths of our vehicles with autonomous ones over the next few
decades, a wider scale test site, with things like a freeway and off ramps
(from the picture), seems like it would be necessary.

~~~
jsprogrammer
I was under the impression that some autonomous vehicles have been driving
existing freeways and off ramps for many years.

Am I wrong?

~~~
strictnein
No, but you're starting to be kind of pedantic.

What percentage of possible scenarios involving getting on and off a highway
do you think autonomous vehicles have encountered so far? I would guess the
number is quite low.

Now extrapolate that across a city. And the point isn't that it is not
possible to test these scenarios in the real world, but that it would be far
easier to do so when you can control scenarios to a greater extent.

The bigger point: When you create a new version of software, do you re-run
your existing tests on it, or just play around with it in production and call
it good enough? The real world is production. This would be your QA
environment.

~~~
jsprogrammer
And your QA facility will not have every possible on-ramp, off-ramp, or other.

My point is that these things have already been tested on a much larger scale
than this QA (I actually think it was billed as Research) facility would seem
to provide.

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nogridbag
Sounds like the original plan for EPCOT (Experimental Prototype Community of
Tomorrow):

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPCOT_(concept)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPCOT_\(concept\))

Well, minus the residents :)

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robgering
_" You can bring new things to have them stressed, break them, and find out
the laws of unintended consequences"_

It seems to me that human beings are often the very stressor needed to produce
the unintended consequences.

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dougmany
>Planned for a population of 35,000

Does that mean it is possible to build a city for $28,571 per person including
housing and business sectors? Sounds good to me. I wonder if it really is
livable or just mock-ups.

~~~
doyoulikeworms
I have a feeling that the land there ("In the arid plains of the southern New
Mexico desert") is really cheap though.

~~~
mchannon
Dirt cheap. I'd wager that land would ordinarily go for about $250 an acre if
all purchased at once.

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hugh4
Couldn't you just buy a slice of Detroit?

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bra-ket
it seems like one of these ideas that look great in a PowerPoint presentation

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jacknews
This doesn't make sense to me. Tech for people does indeed need people,
otherwise you just test it in the company/lab's back yard. Now, what would be
really interesting is if they created a city called BETA, which you could sign
up to live in for a year, obviously after also signing a clutch of no-sue
clauses and safety disclaimers. I think they'd find 35000 willing
participarnts for that.

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1024core
> You can bring new things to have them stressed, break them, and find out the
> laws of unintended consequences

Sure. But how will they do it without people?

Say you want to stress-test the new sewage handling system. How will you get
the sewage? How will you get 35,000 people pooping in a day with a certain
distribution?

~~~
LastZactionHero
There may be some prior art here:

[https://patents.google.com/patent/CN203310960U/en?q=feces&q=...](https://patents.google.com/patent/CN203310960U/en?q=feces&q=simulator)

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ericgoldberg
Interesting that communications lines are underneath water lines. The engineer
in me wonders if that's a good idea, and also wonders if there's a good reason
for it. Anyone have an idea?

~~~
nfriedly
My best guess is that's not the actual layout, it was just "simplified" for
the video.

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nickpsecurity
That they're testing a place designed for human interaction and living without
people is retarded. They should instead consider allowing people to live there
that would cause minimal disruption and accept tradeoffs. Whole area doesn't
need to have people but activity going on would be good for research. Might
even pay for some of it in form of taxes or bills for infrastructure. Later
they can test the stuff in areas with more diverse crowds.

Seems having people there would be minimally disruptive while giving more
real-world information about the stuff. I'll also throw in that they might
have those people there in one spot and people in other spots picked for
controlled studies. You can do both.

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mariusz79
what happened to Eureka?

