Here we sit at the tail end of 2011, with large masses of people around the country upside down on their mortgages, or worse...homeless, living in their cars or the streets. And what does one company, Pegasus Holdings, propose to do?
Build a ghost town from scratch in the desert expanse of New Mexico. Seriously. If they want to utilize a ghost town, what's wrong with Detroit? Snark.
Pegasus is proposing to construct the Center for Innovation, Testing, and Evaluation (CIT-E, get it?) in order to implement different energy-saving technologies in building and streets and then field test their performances. They may bring in some human test subjects from time to time to groundtruth the mechanisms, but for the most part the only humans will be confined in underground laboratories watching every quirk and nuance of these different experiments, ranging from surveillance to power grids to smart streets to security systems.
And this won't be some 10 city block testing lab. It will 20 square miles, consisting of an urban core, suburbs, and outlying rural areas. The infrastructure (water, sewer, electric, cable, gas) will be laid out to accomodate a potential 30,000 person population.
Coupled with PlanIT that I wrote about, the egghead community sure seemed to play as much SimCity2000 as I did growing up. But then my 2nd-tier thinking/conspiracy theorist starts kicking in....
By locating in New Mexico's deserts near Las Cruces, rife with energy and defense contractors, I highly doubt that CIT-E will be only for energy and traffic experiments. I have a feeling that the military will be field testing tactical weapons shortly after this opens -- to see how a city block reacts to different cutting edge technologies dreamed up by DARPA.
Just as long as the government powers-that-be don't set up their own Science City Zero, we should be OK, I suppose.
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