Sybil Derrible
speaker
48 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Sybil Derrible’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Well, then there's different treatments for that. It's called the sludge. And so usually you try to dry it, and then it ends up in a landfill with the waste that you throw as well, your garbage. So it just goes to a landfill, yeah.
I mean, every city is different. The older a city, the more infrastructure you'll have there. The funny thing about cities is that, at least for the ones that really expanded in 1950s and 60s, we don't even know what's out there. You can ask your electric utility or sometimes the sewer systems.
They don't really know what's out there because a lot of it was built in 1950s and 60s, and they didn't keep detailed record about that. That's the funny bit. So often, you know, that's why you hear stories of, oh, we've started digging and then we, you know, found this and we didn't expect that.
And so something that was supposed to take two weeks actually takes two or three months just because, yeah, we don't necessarily know everything that's down there.
Exactly. So natural gas naturally is odorless. So when you collect it, it's odorless. When they transmit it in those large gas lines, it's odorless. And then just when it arrives at the city, they add something called mercaptan that gives it its wonderful, beautiful rotten egg smell.
They started to add that smell, I think it was in 1920s or 30s, when there was a big tragedy in Texas in a school where a lot of children died.
Oh, there's always a plan, right? There's always a plan for transportation. If there's one thing that people need is to be able to go from places to places. I mean, there's very few infrastructure systems as important as transportation for the economy. As people can go as far as possible, as fast as possible, it's probably one of the leading factors for the economy. So there's always a plan.
always i know one of your areas of expertise or that you're working on right now is depopulation can can you explain that depopulation means that your city is actually losing population all right so usually uh when you talk about infrastructure when you build infrastructure you always have a growth plan you're like okay now we have x number of people we assume that it's going to grow by one two three percent in the next you know few years um
And at some point, the opposite happens. So a city actually starts to lose population, and then you might need new infrastructure, but it's hard to justify it because there's no growth. There's actually, you know, you're shrinking. And so you're left with a lot of infrastructure that's now oversized, often that's aging, and that needs to be in maintenance, but there's no resources for it.
And what cities are shrinking? There's many of them. I actually published an article last year, and you can look at all the cities in the U.S. that are shrinking. Most of them are small, right? Most of them, there's usually a lot of media attention to when large cities are shrinking, like Detroit, but most of them are smaller.
A lot of people are going to the cities. The big cities. The big cities, yeah. And places like the US, pretty rich countries, usually the birth rate is pretty low. And so most of the publishing growth is coming from immigration. And when you have immigrants, usually they prefer to go to larger cities than smaller cities.
So the price really came down. It's actually in Israel, I think it's 80%, 70 or 80% of waters consumed in the country is coming from the sea. So it's absolutely possible. Before, we really tried many technologies and the one that works best right now is something called reverse osmosis. And so you really take, so you have a membrane
and it's very packed and it looks like it's impermeable like water can't get through but you have tiny pores but they're so small that only pure water can get through so you push that salt water you push it very very very hard against that membrane and then only the pure water gets through and you collect all that pure water
once you have it you don't distribute it yet because that pure water is good but doesn't have any minerals and humans need minerals so first you bond you you you put a bunch of rocks into that water so a lot of limestone to add minerals and then you distribute that water and you know you can consume it you can drink it in a city where there's all this infrastructure there's transportation and water and electric and gas and all that
That's the shift. That's the trillion-dollar question for this coming century. What happened in the 20th century is that they were very, very much siloed. For example, a good example is water, water treatment. You need a lot of electricity. You don't really care where it comes from. You just ask your electric utility company, give me that electricity and I'll pay you for it.
And the problem with that is that whenever something happens to electricity, then it affects the water and then it affects the people. And so it's so interdependent that now we're really trying, talking, figuring out how we can have those people talk with one another a lot more so that systems that are interdependent by nature are a lot stronger, a lot more resilient.
So that's a conversation that's happening now. And I think that's one of the biggest shifts that's going to happen in this century in infrastructure.
In the U.S., a lot of times you have the back alleys or you might have some of those cables are not underground. It might be overground. But usually in cities that have both underground, yeah, you'll keep water on one side and electricity on the other. But that's like physical, right? They're separated physically, but you still need a lot of water for electricity.
So the way that you generate electricity usually requires a lot of water. And you also need electricity to treat and distribute water. So they're interrelated. physically apart.
yes yes but these are the smaller lines right so your mains are far away from your big electric distribution lines you know so your your large pipes are away from your large wires and then you have the smaller pipes crossing over but that's okay because if you have a leak it's not gonna you know impact it too much for the small pipes i see well that makes sense and where's the gas right down the middle
Showing 21–40 of 48 · page 2 of 3
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