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I mean, jeez—first they were selling ice to the eskimos, now they’re selling sand
to the Saudis.
Next you’re going to tell me that the sky isn’t blue, that narwhals are real, and
that our capitalism machines move by burning dinosaur juice—what has the world come to?
The reality equivalent of the Office Season 9, that’s what—it’s just too much—but
back to what I was talking about 60 or 62 or 64 or 66 words ago—the fact that Saudi
Arabia, a country that on Google Maps looks like a caramel mocha latte viewed through
a sepia filter, imports sand.
Now, don’t worry, Saudi Arabia’s sand didn’t all blow away into Iraq or something.
They still have plenty of it.
95% of the country is considered desert and most of that is composed of sand dunes.
Now, I’m no arenologist—all I know is that sand is course and rough and irritating—but
just, as a thought, what if you just took all the sand from here, in Saudi Arabia, and
used it here, in Saudi Arabia.
Would that not make a ton more sense than importing it from all around the world?
Well, just like the US said when Vietnam asked if it could do the communism, no.
The thing is, nobody wants this kind of sand—it’s the mineral equivalent of happy birthday songs.
What they want is rather that high quality, top-tier, premium Scottish sand.
Wait, whaaaaaaat?
Is that really true or did I accidentally start writing a Brightside video—where facts
don’t matter and reality can be whatever you want.
Well, no.
This is unfortunately still Half as Interesting and Saudi Arabia really has imported sand
from Scotland.
To be fair, most of Saudi Arabia’s sand comes from non-kilt-wearing countries like
Australia but the reason behind this all is the fact that desert sand is actually quite
different than maritime sand.
Desert sand is eroded by the wind which makes it quite smooth.
Ocean and river sand is eroded by water which makes it comparatively coarser and that is
what people want.
That’s because that kind of sand is used quite a bit in concrete—a material super-useful
for things like making buildings exist and acting as something for those spinny truck
things to carry.
The smoother properties of desert sand make it functionally useless for building.
How much maritime sand is in concrete varies quite a lot as different ratios are used to
get different properties, but overall, sand represents a pretty sizable portion of concrete.
The issue, though, is that sand, much like dinosaur juice, is a non-renewable resource.
It takes far longer to make more sand than it takes to make more humans.
Therefore, some countries that have a particular affinity for building things now have a particular
lack of usable sand.
Saudi Arabia is one of those places that likes building things.
They like building systems of institutionalized gender discrimination, human traffic networks,
systems of repression against dissidents and journalists, and buildings.
For example, they decided it’d be kinda cool to build a clock tower that happened
to be the world’s third tallest and largest building.
By the way, just so we’re clear on how enormous this is, here’s the Empire State Building.
So, yeah, now that all of its sand is in big clocks and stuff, Saudi Arabia doesn’t really
have any sizable stocks of usable maritime sand left, so it has to get it elsewhere.
It turns out, though, that taking a bunch of sand from nature and putting into buildings
isn’t great.
It destroys native habitats, causes erosion, harms coral reefs, and does a bunch of other
bad stuff that nobody cares about because it doesn’t affect them directly, so we’ll
swiftly move on from that point.
Sand sells for upwards of $3 per cubic foot which may not seem like a lot, but considering
how easy it is to get your hands on a cubic foot of sand and how much people need sand,
it’s no wonder that not all sand is gathered, let’s say, legally.
Sand theft is such a significant phenomenon that it has its own Wikipedia page which is
how you know you’ve really entered the big leagues.
I mean, I would know.
There have been incidents where entire beaches have been stolen in places like Jamaica, Hungary,
and India just for the resale value of their sand.
Globally, it is now considered that there is a sand shortage.
Just like with the astroid that killed the dinosaurs, Maroon 5’s terrible Super Bowl
halftime performance, and the heat death of the universe, we can blame China for this
as in just 2011 through 2013 alone, they used more concrete than the US did in the entire
20th century, but it’s also everyone else’s fault too.
Of course, it’s actually super easy to not use sand in construction—you can recycle
concrete, use other materials, etc—but nobody really cares so we’re going to keep turning
our finite supply of little rocks into concrete to build skyscrapers until we all end up dead
and gone after the sand wars of 2027.
If you want somewhere to hide out during that war, the place to do so would be St Helena.
This island is in the middle of the South Atlantic ocean so, naturally, I went there
and filmed a documentary about it, and put it on Nebula—the streaming site founded
by myself and tons of other educational creators.
What’s so interesting about St Helena is that, two years ago, after 500 years of being
connected to the world by only a boat, they opened an airport and that changed everything.
That’s what the documentary is about.
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