Saudi Arabia Crown Prince Prince Mohammed bin Salman announced last year the country's plan to create The Line, which they described as a "civilizational revolution" that is about 105 miles (170 kilometers long) that can house up to 9 million people in a zero-carbon megacity.
However, any recent work on Saudi Arabia's sci-fi megacity does not show up on Google Maps. So, the Australian satellite image aggregator Soar Earth took some satellite images of the progress of the future megacity.
Satellite Scan of The Line
MIT Technology Review obtained satellite images from Soar Earth, showing marked progress of The Line with some spots already dug out deep below the surface. The $500 billion project is already taking shape, which is as straight as an arrow across the deserts and through the mountains of northern Saudi Arabia.
The site is tens of meters deep and is teeming with hundreds of construction vehicles with thousands of workers housed in nearby bases. An analysis of the satellite images suggests that the works have e already excavated an estimated 26 million cubic meters of rock and soil, which is equivalent to 78 times the volume of the tallest building in the world, the Burj Khalifa.
The official drone footage of the construction site of The Line in October also showed fleets of bulldozers, diggers, and trucks excavating the foundations of the structure. But for now, Google Maps and Google Earth have not shown any progress yet on the desert site.
The gap in imagery raises questions about who could possess the high-resolution images of the construction. Until now, it is nonexistent as Soar Earth CEO Amir Farhand told MIT Tech. Some experts are intrigued by why the imagery is not showing in other satellite imagery providers, such as Maxar Technologies.
Controversy on The Line: |Is Saudi Arabia's Megacity Really Possible?
MIT Tech reports that The Line is a controversial project as critics doubt the practical and environmental wisdom of such a massive structure in the desert, as well as the gap in the imagery of its progress. More so, many of the technology it's supposed to incorporate remain unproven, such as air taxis, cloud seeding, domestic robot servants, and seawater desalination using renewable power.
Another point critics are saying is that part of the site is home to the Huwaitat people who have been evicted from the area to make way for the construction of the megacity.
The construction is said to have started in April 2022 and The Line's parent company, Neom, awarded construction companies the tunneling and blasting contracts for high-speed passenger and freight rail tunnels. It was when the official drone footage of the construction was released.
Soar Earth's image analysis of the construction suggests that only about half of the proposed over 100-mile-long megacity and a quarter of its final area have had construction as of today. The Line will be about 200 meters wide, while shadows from the excavations' walls suggest it could have a depth of up to 20 meters.
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