Eco Factor: The world’s largest dome covering Houston to protect the city from climatic perils.
For all you Homer Simpson fans in Houston, your home city might become Springfield, not because you all are polluting a lot but because scientists want to save you from killer hurricanes. Some scientists think that covering Houston with a mammoth dome could help save homes and eventually billions of dollars and might just do some good for the environment as well.
In what might sound to be an extravagant ask, scientists have planned out a dome that will stretch over 21 million square feet, making it the biggest structure with the largest roof in the world. To keep the weight of this gigantic dome down, the system will not be made of glass as in the movie, but would be made from Texlon® ETFE, a lightweight climatic envelope that can stand the toughest of winds.
The dome’s highest point would be an array of hinged panels that can be opened to provide ventilation, help regulate temperature, humidity and reduce pollution or let out captive birds that might enter the dome’s premises. The dome will be made by assembling 147,000 panels, each measuring 15 feet across.
Of course, such extravagant plans have thousands of skeptics as well, here the skeptics believe that with the cost of such a structure well beyond imagination and the impact on the locals still undetermined, the structure might just be a fantasy similar to the one in The Simpson’s Movie. Moreover, if such a dome is actually built, will rain be a historic thing in Houston, if so then where will the people of Houston get water, both potable and non-potable, for plants and cleaning?
The dome will definitely save the people of Houston some precious watts of electricity that otherwise goes to keep their homes cool and pollution free, but keeping a city under a dome might require ventilators of the scale nobody has ever thought of, which could ruin the eco-plans of these scientists. For now the dome is just as mythical as the one in the movie and might as well remain the same.
Via: GreenPacks/Discovery/Huliq
