cost saving ideas

To make the project affordable, we need to be able to mass produce the villages and greenhouses rapidly and cost-effectively. One-off construction will be too costly.

  • Since it’ll be using so much of it, the arco will build its own facilities for producing
    • concrete
    • aluminum extrusion for green houses
    • pvc piping
    • greenhouse glass & extruded aluminum supports
    • compressed salt bricks
    • fired masonry bricks
    • Asphalt
    • Glass
  • Local production avoid transportation costs and minimizes the needs for hard currency.
  • Once the city gets big enough, we should probably also produce our own
    • steel and aluminum
    • basalt rebar
    • electrical cabling
    • paint
    • cargo-pods
    • photovoltaic film
  • We may want to set up in a place where the city can expand nearly indefinitely, so that these industries will always have customers. Eventually the city grow to house missions.
  • Surpluses can be sold externally for cash.
  • We buy, own and maintain our own diggers and dump trucks and heavy construction equipment.
    • Likely cheaper to buy and use for several years rather than rent month-to-month.
  • We need to be extremely efficient at building out and connecting villages.

cost savings- paying workers

  • Most of the workers are future residents.
  • Pay them in in a mixed portfolio:
    • A small amount of immediate cashflow
    • housing and food guaranteed and free on site.
    • Initial tranches of mortgages for their apartments are covered by the arco
    • rest of pay in the form of credit-bonds, that pay out later
    • For most of those workers, deferred payment would be fine, because what are they going to spend it on in the short term anyway? When the arco is ready, the bonds pay out, meaning that they can use the money to set up shop or start businesses.

ideal site

  • Near shipping lanes
  • Near a port or a place where a port could be built.
  • sufficiently upland to avoid any risk of sea water rise.
  • Flat outback style scrubland
  • good site for a sand quarry, land that nobody is using.
  • Ideally no further than 1 or 2 km from the port.

Order of Operations

secure a Site and Port

  • Buy diggers and dump trucks & transport them to the port.
  • Start with renting RVs for the initial workers and bring them to the port.
  • Rent generators for AC and power until we have initial solar set up.
  • Starlink for comms, set up a 5G cell tower.
  • Improve the port if needed.
  • Improve road from port to city site if needed

setup at the city site

  • Relocate rvs to from port to city site.
  • Build a sand quarry
  • Build recessed thermal mass bunk-house, medical clinic, canteen building, and office area, with enough solar on the ground to power it.
    • this should maybe a be a miniature version of a full-scale village, in order to test out building methods
    • This can later be used for a utility outbuilding
    • also a good test for salt-concrete-basalt building technique.
  • set up a small-scale versions of core services, to service the bunkhouse and test out construction methods. This will also be useful for media purposes as we can create an arcology in miniature and get documentaries filmed to cover it.
    • desalination plant
    • solar/greenhouse
    • overnight power storage
    • climate control
    • canteen and public kitchen
    • health clinic
    • cargo pods.
    • waste treatment and water reclamation
    • fish ponds and chicken farm.
    • sand quarry, cement production
    • Glass production
    • aluminum and pvc piping extrusion?
  • workers move into the bunk house, return the RVs.

build production capacity

  • continuously scale up all the core services listed above
  • Prepare production facilities for stamping out the full-scale villages.
  • 3d-printing in cement?
  • Build a full-scale basalt-rebar plant.
  • Build a full-scale Glass plant. (Assuming we can buy transparent perovskite film and roll it out over the greenhouse glass panels.
    • eventually we may want to consider building a solar film production facility as well.

stamp out villages

  • As each village is built, people can move in, thus increasing our labor pool and production facilities, allowing us to grow out the city exponentially.
  • At first, we have the underground subway tracks between the cities, but no subways, just cargo pods and bicycles. Once affordable and justifiable, build out the subway network.