Ahh, Cancun.
No better place to kick back, relax, and enjoy the sounds of a teenager getting their stomach
pumped for the very first time.
And when I say “no better place,” I’m being very literal—the city of Cancun was
built entirely from scratch in the 1970s when the Bank of Mexico calculated that that exact
location in the Yucatan Peninsula would make the statistically best vacation spot in the
entire country.
Sound interesting?
Well, uh…
I sure hope so, because that’s what I’m going to be talking about for the next four
minutes.
In the late 1960s, Mexico was primed for a tourism boom.
International flights were becoming much cheaper—made possible by larger planes that carried more
people and served fewer lobsters.
The American middle class also not only existed during the 1960s, but people had the money
to leave their house for longer than two hours at a time without going bankrupt.
So, the Mexican government went to the Bank of Mexico and said, “hey Bank of Mexico,
here’s 2 million dollars, which, by the way, would be worth about 17 million dollars
in 2022.
You’re in charge of our tourism industry now.”
And the Bank of Mexico said, “wait, don’t we use pesos?
Also, why did you adjust for inflation for 46 years from now?
Is that even possible?
Y’know what, never mind, we’ll figure it out.”
The objective was pretty simple: Infratur, the bank’s new tourism division, set out
to find the perfect Mexican tourist destination, and build a resort there.
But the question of how to go about finding that perfect spot was much more complicated;
after all, Mexico is a big country—even bigger than the biggest cookie ever made—with
a little over 6,000 miles or 10,000 kilometers of beach to consider.
To make matters more complicated, the bank didn’t want to just throw money at some
existing beach town and call it a day; they wanted to build an entirely new city from
the ground up.
That meant that they weren’t just looking for the perfect town, they were looking for
the perfect stretch of coastline–the mathematically most relaxing combination of sand, sea, and
ambient bird sounds in the entire country.
Now, the Infratur committee couldn’t just walk the full coastline of Mexico in search
of the perfect spot—according to Google Maps, this isn’t how Google Maps works.
So instead, they decided to use a new-fangled technology called computers—which I guess
sounds like a joke, but they were new-fangled at the time—to create a statistical model
for the average Caribbean tourist; what sort of weather they were drawn to, how far they
were willing to travel, and what sorts of things they did on vacation.
They pulled data from other successful resorts in places like Miami and Acapulco, where they
accounted for every possible variable—available occupancy, rainfall levels, frequency of hurricanes,
everything; or at least everything that their plucky little 1970s computers could handle,
because, fun fact: this whole project nearly melted the bank’s computers and they eventually
had to outsource the work to a guy in California.
After weeks of hard thinking and tantrum-throwing, the computers generated a list of geographic
locations that matched those in their model.
To narrow it down from there, the bank dispatched a team of engineers, economists, and lawyers
to meticulously vibe check each site; they vibe checked the shark populations, they vibe
checked the local insects, they checked the vibes of basically anything that could eat
part of a drunk, slow-moving American tourist.
They also studied local economies to see how they might benefit from becoming the world’s
most popular non-stop puke-fest; they needed a large labor force, and one that actually
needed work.
In the end, all of these scientific models and investigations yielded one perfect location:
a tiny island off the coast of the Yucatan Peninsula whose name roughly translated to
“overfilled with snakes,” and was home to exactly three people.
The geography was perfect, the sharks were minimal, and with the collapse of the local
sisal industry, the population was desperate for a constant stream of the worst 19-year
olds the United States could produce.
Over the course of the next few years, the bank crossed their fingers that the computer
was right and completely overhauled what was basically just a deserted island and a couple
miles of jungle.
They dug 16 wells so that the tourists had something to drink, built 62 miles or 100
kilometers of sewers so that the tourists’ drinks had somewhere to go, and brought in
power lines from a city 100 miles or 160 kilometers away so that…
I don’t know what they used electricity for in the 70s, but they did that for some
reason, too.
Not only did they have to develop an entire tourist corridor with hotels and golf courses
and all that, they also had to develop an entire city around the corridor in order to
support the people who would live and work there; that meant building schools, hospitals,
houses, roads, well… you know what a city is.
And on top of all of that, Cancun needed to be easily accessible to American tourists;
one of the big problems with building a new city in the middle of nowhere on an underdeveloped
peninsula is that it’s in the middle of nowhere on an underdeveloped peninsula.
So… they just went ahead and built a giant international airport, too.
This whole development project could honestly use its own 20 minute video essay, but it
seems like Sam from Wendover is busy making videos about… gas prices!?
Really?
He could literally make a video about anything, and he chooses to make a video about—whatever,
nevermind.
Anyway, it kind of goes without saying, but this project was a big success; Cancun became
the occasional host of MTV’s Spring Break, which, believe it or not, is the only metric
you can use to accurately track tourism.
The computer, it turns out, was right all along.
So the next time someone tries to tell you that computers are just a fad and don’t
have any use, you can just laugh and shake your head because you know that they have
at least one use: triangulating the approximate location of Cancun.
But I’m gonna let you in on a little secret—computers actually have a second use: browsing high-quality,
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Me and my friends started Nebula because we wanted to unshackle ourselves from the YouTube
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