WTC1
Article
WTC1 is a recurring venue in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between August 04, 2022 and August 08, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as “a skyscraper the height of WTC1”; “But he uses the cost of WTC1 as a base”. It most often appears alongside Neom, ACX, AI.
Metadata
- Category: Venues
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: August 04, 2022
- Last seen: August 08, 2022
Appears In
Related Pages
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- Neom (2 shared issues)
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- ACX (1 shared issues)
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- AI (1 shared issues)
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- AI risk (1 shared issues)
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- Alexandros (1 shared issues)
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- Alexandros M (1 shared issues)
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- Bulverism (1 shared issues)
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- CFTC (1 shared issues)
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- Connor Leahy (1 shared issues)
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- Dubai (1 shared issues)
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- Eliezer Yudkowsky (1 shared issues)
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- ESP (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
My post mostly just makes fun of Neom. My main argument against it is absurdity: a skyscraper the height of WTC1 and the length of Ireland? Come on, that’s absurd!
2: Comments of the week: John Schilling tries to calculate the cost of building Neom, and comes up with an optimistic estimate of $4 trillion (compared to its $0.5-1 trillion budget). But he uses the cost of WTC1 as a base; this is unfair because it’s one of the costliest skyscrapers ever. If we use the similarly-sized Princess Tower in Dubai, one of the cheapest, we get a base cost of $2 trillion before applying economies of scale, and ??? afterwards (potentially much less because they can mass produce, or potentially much more because they exhaust the global concrete market). But the $1 trillion Neom budget also has to cover the Floating Octagon Of Clean Industry, the giant ski resort, etc, so it’s still a long shot. Also, Reader talks about his experience working in one of the companies that designed Neom. And Honourary notes that the Saudis are big investors in hyperloops, and a working hyperloop could make good on Neom’s otherwise-hyperbolic transportation claims. Maybe one way to think about Neom is as the first city designed from the ground up around hyperloops, in the same way that Levittown was the first city designed from the ground up around cars. This makes me update very slightly towards plausibility - but it’s still based around combining ~5 things that have never been tried before, and hoping none of them goes wrong or exceeds projected costs.