Saudi Arabia's $1T Mirror City plan looks like a videogame concept, and should probably stay that way

pcgamer.com:

Saudi Arabia's longstanding project to build Neom(opens in new tab), a science fiction megacity on the Red Sea, has seen a renewed marketing push, with a revamped official website and a spurt of activity on the project's official Twitter account. The Neom page has been posting concept videos and images of «The Line,» a proposed «vertical city» 200 meters wide and 170 kilometers (105 miles) long that would form a component part of the wider initiative.

First, the positives: This shit looks like Destiny. This thing looks like the dang Citadel from Mass Effect, Hollywood-caliber concept art of white terraces and neon signs with lush greenery throughout. It's like the rich part of Shanghai in Deus Ex: Human Revolution. It's interesting to see something like this imagined on the planet we inhabit.

Now, the hard part: Does it seem intuitively feasible to build a wafer-thin megacity a hundred miles long in the middle of the desert, and also somehow have it be a nice place to live that accommodates nine million people, with a transit system capable of sending them end-to-end in 20 minutes? I'm particularly curious about the promised mirror sheen on the city's exterior walls. One small-but-significant detail is the fact that ordinary glass skyscrapers already pose a large mortality risk to birds, but my mind boggles at the logistics of keeping this thing cleaned and maintained across all 105 miles.

The human race is no stranger to building impossible cities in the desert, but this concept may not have the best long-term returns. Las Vegas, America's adult playground, has embraced aggressive and forward-looking water conservation policies, but its primary source of drinking water, Lake Mead, has so drastically declined in capacity