My take on Project Blue

Amazon wants

Amazon wants to build cavernous data centers in the middle of a vast dry desert which is destined for extreme heat and chronic drought thanks to climate change.

Bezos will form a technological bucket brigade to deliver water and his AI data centers will share the water they’ll use with the Los Reales Landfill. And they’ll bring in more jobs than a baseball stadium. And we’ll all get a piece of Mr. and Mrs. Bezos’ Wedding Cake. Or not.

Just ask any Chat GPT. Do not ask Alexa.

The Inevitable

AI and massive data centers are inevitable. Hundreds are planned in America.

Just not here, thank you.

Here, where the skyrocketing cost of cooling such leviathans in an extreme heat zone is inevitable.

Here, where drought is inevitable.

When it comes down to you and your family versus an oligarch getting a desperately needed resource who will always win?

By the end of this century

Here, where, by the end of this century, the global population will have been starved down from billions to millions. Where Phoenix will be a vast sun-desiccated ghost town with ghostly humming giant chip and data boxes sucking the last three drops from the Salt-cum-Trickle-cum-Spit-cum-River, clogged with ash from Arizona’s dying, burned and blighted forests.

These industrial dead zones will be manned by dusty robots driven by AI whose directives will be to maximize profits for Jeff Bezos III and to restore the electrical grid every time a haboob blows it out. For the industrial zones.

The grim broiled wasteland to the north, long abandoned by humanity, will be home to hundreds of square miles of buckling asphalt, crumbling stucco and chicken wire ruins, an empty megalopolis spent by the Republican fever dream of endless consumption, prosperity and growth, an apocalyptic dust bowl known as “Southern Utah”.

Tucson

By contrast with the crumbling forbidden zone north of the Gila, Tucson thrives. Once ridiculed for its conservation ethos, Tucson is the Federal capitol of the People's Republic of Baja-Zona, a living sun-powered community that aggressively harvests all of its annual rain to support its entire population, and no more, by strictly enforcing a population limit calibrated to rainfall.

The Chinese won the AI race thanks to MAGA dropping our cyber defenses, killing research in the beginning of the century and surrendering Taiwan and their chip factories to China.

Many of our empty obsolete data centers became useful as climate refugee centers during the great climate migration, as vast hordes of Central Americans, fleeing the crop scorching heat at our equator, poured north across our region, heading for Canada, Idaho and Wyoming.

Not many made it alive passing through “Southern Utah”.

The many small nuclear reactors that were eventually built to power the energy gobbling data centers were decomissioned. The irradiated wildlife made desert travel doubly daunting.

With limited drought resistant foods a global issue Tucson is feeding its own, surrounded by thousands of family farms living off the grid and growing “local native” foods that are historically drought resistant, thanks to O'Odham mentors.

As the saying goes, we’ve been here 10,000-years. For good reason. We understand survival here. We have our priorities straight.

What was the question again?