Masdar CityMasdar City sounds like a place from Middle Earth, but it's actually more likely to appeal to sci-fi nerds than fantasy geeks. The planned city in the United Arab Emirates is designed to be a carbon-neutral, zero-waste place where 50,000 happy citizens grow food fertilized with their own poop and drink water recycled from their own sweat -- all of which is powered by the sun and the wind.

We decided to highlight some of the most "science-fiction is science-fact!" aspects of the planned sustainable jewel in the UAE's crown.

Sweat Recyclers!
If the concept of having human sweat -- among other types of ambient moisture -- plucked out of the air and recycled into drinking water doesn't grab your attention, then you clearly never spent your teen years reading dystopian sci-fi stories involving a world with a severe water shortage (or watched "Tank Girl"). Either way, having a plan for water -- even if it does sound kinda icky -- is just a smart way of operating for a city located in the middle of the desert.

Cars Will Be Banned!
It's pretty impossible to imagine that even a city with a population as small as 50,000 could remain a zero-carbon place if it had gasoline-powered automobiles zipping through its perfectly symmetrical, northeast-oriented streets. Which is why Masdar is taking the direct route to reducing auto emissions, and just banning cars outright. Instead, Masdarvians will travel about via mass transit and -- wait for it -- personal rapid transit. What's that, you ask? Let us tell you ...

People Will Travel in Pods!
The personal rapid transit system will work kind of like cars, but you don't own it or drive it; it holds you and five people you don't know (though in a city with a population less than half the size of Green Bay, Wis., we suspect everyone will kinda know each other before long); and it runs underground, taking you anywhere you want to go. No word at press time if there's a robot butler with a delightful bow tie and charming English accent driving the thing, but we're optimistic.

Behavioral Changes Will Be Implemented in Residents and Workers!
Those who live and work in Masdar aren't just intended to be beneficiaries of the city's sustainable features -- they're meant to contribute. To that end, the people of Masdar -- plus the 60,000 or so commuters (three-quarters of whom will arrive in the city via sustainable modes of transportation) -- will be expected to take an annual five hours of sustainability awareness and training a year. That'll help them reach the city's goal of reducing water usage by 35 percent and waste by 30 percent.

A Big-Ass Wall Will Surround the City!
You know what would suck most about living in a city that's trying not to use too much electricity and is set up in the middle of a desert? The heat. Whereas 20th-century desert cities beat the heat through an ingenious combination of cranking the air conditioning to 11, hiding indoors and suffering miserably, Masdar opts for a new-millennium solution: It's going to have a giant wall built around the whole thing, to keep the blistering desert winds out.

This combines nicely with the fact that there are no cars, meaning that the cool breezes that do pass through can be funneled from one end of town to the other on narrow streets and not get dispersed to the undeserving masses living outside Masdar city limits.

So, to review: They're building a city with a giant wall around it, where people will drink glasses of their own recycled sweat in a robot-driven underground pod, while they're on their way to their annual sustainability training seminar. We're about 99 percent sure that Hugo Weaving and Christopher Lee's agents' phones have been trying to put together a sci-fi thriller set in this place since it was announced.