A Dutchman and his man-made mountain | Hacker News Reader

A Dutchman and his man-made mountain

cyclingtips.com

36 pointsdocdeek9 comments

“It had become more of an innovation platform than a building project; it was used by scientists and universities to think outside the box.”

OK, I love whimsy and spitballing of wild ideas as much as the next person, but... innovation platform? Did anything actually come out of this? New ideas that have been put into use? Research that changed how we understand things? A focal point for education of the public, even?

I love the idea, but I see nothing in this article that backs the spirit of the claim "a meeting of minds that sparked a new wave of innovation in the Netherlands".

Design is cheap. And this appears to have never gotten out of the early CAD & Photoshop phase.

It's fine to just say "it was a wild idea and we had a lot of fun thinking about it".

The piramides must have been a very strange idea from the start. Transporting larger than life stones to build an abstract geometric monument.

Im glad they did because it speaks to imagination to build the impossible.

Imagine a mountain as high as the Alpes still standing there in 10.000 years.

I also think the first people to build dikes where seen as a bit strange. You are well aware that industry has made the dutch engineering name in the world.

OK, but... they didn't build the mountain. It's only the existence of the pyramids that inspires. We don't have any records of the amazing, inspiring, innovative plans to build the pyramids—or at least, if we do, they sure don't have cultural currency.

I believe everybody knew there was not going to be a mountain. But people are curious creatures. The main question became: can it be done?

It is interesting a lot of money was put into the project while most people knew there would never be a mountain. But they learned so much from it. So I think you can't say it was a waste of time and money.

But for the coming years I still believe the Netherlands (lower countries) will remain flat.

They made a ski-hill in saskatchewan, which is definitely as flat as the netherlands.

There seem to be two artificial ski hills there, both quite small in comparison to this proposal, Timber Ridge and Blackstrap Ski Hill (closed), but also quite a few non-flat natural ski areas [1]. I think they have better building materials available than the Netherlands, though, which was proposing to use sand (dredged from the sea floor?).

[1] https://www.skicentral.com/saskatchewan.html

It's a much better idea than building a wall!

Without walls (dikes), I’m not sure the Netherlands would even exist...

Back in the day people did believe in it. People wanted it. That's why there was money. Whether it was a waste depends on where the money came from. For a scientist, doing work related to something in the media can help their career. For a uni, it can raise their profile. For a building company it would have been questionable though. Some of it was wasted, no doubt.

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