Can we put a Dome over Las Vegas?

“▶ What should be build next? Subscribe for tomorrow’s build!@IfWeBuildIt We Sealed Las Vegas Under Glass. Then It Rained Inside. How big is it? A pyramid with a 12-mile base and the same steep slope as the black glass pyramid hotel on the Strip would reach about 7 miles high, around 37,000 feet. That’s the height where airliners cruise and the outside air sits near -60°F. Its four faces would hold roughly 220 square miles of glass. Why does it get so hot? Sunlight passes through glass easily, warms the streets and roofs, and they give that energy back off as infrared heat, which glass blocks. It’s the same reason a parked car’s dashboard can pass 160°F on a summer afternoon. At noon in the desert, the sun delivers about 1,000 watts on every square meter of ground. Across the pyramid’s footprint, that’s about 370 billion watts of heat pouring in at midday. Las Vegas has already hit 120°F outdoors, in July 2024. How does tinting glass work? Smart glass already exists in some office towers and airliner windows. A small electric charge moves ions into a thin coating, and it darkens in minutes. The chilled-beam idea is real too: many modern buildings cool rooms by running cold water through pipes in the ceiling instead of blowing air. Where do the indoor clouds come from? Every person gives off close to a quart of water a day just by breathing and sweating. For 2.3 million people, that’s around half a million gallons, before you count pools, fountains and lawns. Air cools as it rises, about 3 to 5°F for every 1,000 feet. Miles up near the cold peak, the vapor condenses into cloud. Once a cloud climbs high enough to form ice, ice and water drops colliding in rising air build up electric charge, and that is what makes lightning. The numbers are our own rough estimates for a “what if”. Nobody has built anything close to this. Music: “Epical Drums 02” by Grigoriy Nuzhny (Mixkit, Mixkit Stock Music Free License). 3D models (CC BY 4.0, sketchfab.com): pyramid hotel and lake hotel models by Dimiter; “Las Vegas City” by aaelick; “Skyscraper Hotel Apartments Marina” by asleshka; “City pack 7” by Pasha; “B737-800 Model” by hakai315; “Palm Trees” by YadroGames; “Generic passenger car pack” by Comrade1280. Characters: Quaternius (CC0). Terrain: AWS Terrain Tiles (Mapzen; USGS/SRTM data). Sources: NASA (solar energy at the surface, ~1,000 W/m² at noon); National Weather Service Las Vegas (120°F record, July 7, 2024); U.S. Census Bureau (Las Vegas metro population); U.S. Department of Energy (electrochromic windows, chilled-beam cooling); NOAA/National Severe Storms Laboratory (how lightning forms). #shorts #lasvegas #whatif #megastructure #science #engineering #ifwebuildit”