The World's Smartest Ghost Town

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The World's Smartest Ghost Town

Something big is about to happen down in the desert of southern New Mexico: a billion dollars’ worth of construction. That’s how much Pegasus Global Holdings expects to spend building a new city from scratch in the dry expanse between White Sands National Monument and the Mexican border.

But while it will sprawl over 15 square miles and have all the infrastructure to support a population of 35,000, this city won’t become home to humans. Instead it will serve as the world’s largest laboratory, a life-size model of urban, suburban, and rural living where researchers can test cutting-edge technology without disrupting anyone’s daily life.

This is CITE, the Center for Innovation, Testing and Evaluation, and if all goes well it could break ground this year and go to work in 2018...

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The Moon, Mars, and New Mexico

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The Moon, Mars, and New Mexico

There’s something otherworldly about the dunes of White Sands National Monument. They appear out of nowhere in an otherwise dirt-brown basin rimmed by mountains, but once you crest the first dune all you see is miles of white. Gypsum sand scatters sunlight in a blinding ocean of undulations unlike anywhere else on Earth. When I climbed them barefoot this past week I never got over my disorientation: was this a warm snow-scape? A dry beach? Or something even more alien?

Some might say these 275 square miles of mineral glitter resemble their vision of the lunar surface. After all, this pale sand is ground-down selenite, a crystalline form of gypsum named centuries ago for the Greek goddess of the moon.

In reality this region has less in common with the moon than with the Red Planet. Mars also has a region of selenite sand near its north pole that’s sculpted into dunes by thin CO₂ breezes. Compare the aerial texture of airless lunar regolith, Martian gypsum fields, and the white sand right here in New Mexico...

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Run, Ground Cuckoo, Run!

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Run, Ground Cuckoo, Run!

Walk the trails around Albuquerque long enough and, while you may never hear a meep-meep or get bowled over in a blur of legs, you’re bound to spot a roadrunner or two kicking up dust. These little guys are all over the scrublands around here, earning their title as the state bird of New Mexico.

Roadrunners are in the cuckoo family, a diverse grouping of over a hundred species living across several continents. Since the family includes tree-dwellers as well as terrestrial birds, the species that dominates in the American Southwest is called variously the New World ground cuckoo, the chaparral cock, or simply the greater roadrunner. So how do they really fare against wily coyotes, let alone creepy-crawlers like tarantulas and rattlesnakes?

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Great Balls of Fire

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Great Balls of Fire

Seventy-one years ago the night sky of southern New Mexico was suddenly illuminated by a blast the likes of which the world had never witnessed. In just a few microseconds, a 13.6-pound sphere of plutonium went critical, unleashing the energy of 19 kilotons of TNT.

The shockwave rippled outward at the speed of sound, blowing out windows over a hundred miles away; observers ten miles from ground zero described being bathed in an oven-like heat. Soon a mushroom cloud seven miles tall began drifting eastward with the wind. Months later, fallout would be discovered in Indiana rivers 1,300 miles away when the Kodak Company observed that their cardboard packaging was emitting radiation that fogged the pristine film it was supposed to protect. 

This was Trinity, the code-name for the culmination of the Manhattan Project... 

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