At first I thought that this was a satire, but then the joke never landed. The author cites "Cadillac Desert" but then ignores everything in the book. This posting is fantasy in the same vein as "we can build a space habitat at L5 by 1995".
There is a lot of money to be made in water. If desalination was cost effective it would be being done today at scale. It isn't a regulatory issue, it is strictly economics. If someone could demonstrate the technology the author describes indefinite amounts of money would flow to them. It hasn't happened. It's not happening anywhere in the world.
Finally the author talks about pumping water up hill as though it is a trivial thing. 20% of all of the electricity generated in California goes to pumping water today. The author conveniently side steps the issue of building out the vast electrical grid needed just to pump the water. What was this even posted to hacker news?
> 20% of all of the electricity generated in California goes to pumping water today.
Hi, this is wrong. The 20% figure includes all electricity for water-related uses, not just pumping. Most of that (80-90%) is heating and other end uses, not pumping and transport.
>If desalination was cost effective it would be being done today at scale
An official from Irish Water (national water management agency) was being interviewed a while ago explaining that even if desalination was cost effective it has to be cut with fresh water at a ratio of 2:1 (I may be misremembering the exact ratio) because fully desalinated water leeches metal from the pipes.
Our of curiosity, is there any way to line the pipes with PVC or similar? Like a large scale version of those "pipe fixers" they pump up with air/water that lines existing pipes and hardens in place?
I could see problems with that, and of course cost is always one of the biggest, possibly health too, it's just weird to me that we don't seem to have a solution for this
RO water can strip chemicals from PVC, so it would be substituting one poison for another. Treating the water with minerals seems a much more practical way to go.
This post is set in a beautiful, liminal place between fantasy and reality. Could we actually do all of this? Probably not. But we don’t think about the specifics of things like this enough. It challenges us to think about ideas like this in ways more practical problems cannot.
I read somewhere that we dream as a way for our brains, as complex predictive analytical machines, from overfitting. This kind of post feels the same, but for our collective intelligence.
That's a neat way to look at it. I've always thought of dreams as a kind of garbage collection where we produce simulated situations to test whether new information will help us or if it's irrelevant to us, and throw things out that we won't need to remember. I read that one reason we can kind of remember our dreams when we first wake up but can't 5 minutes later is because our brain has some method of forcing our interpretation of what we see into some kind of reasonable cohesion according to what we consider to be physically possible or likely - this region is inactive in our sleep so like you say, we can play in scenarios free from the constraint of what is known to be possible
When we wake up, those impossible and unlikely scenarios in our dreams are still interpretable for a few minutes, but as we fully wake up we're just totally blocked from recalling that memory because what happened defies cohesive reality
Anyway, I agree that not everything needs to fit into a "serious proposal | speculative fiction" dichotomy
It's the opposite. We could, probably, do all of this, given colossal will, stupefying investment, and an infinite appetite for destruction. The trick here is to exercise the wisdom to know that we should not do this, despite there being, strictly speaking, no technical reason why we could not. It's like an intrusive thought writ large: just because you have the opportunity to jump off the lip of the Grand Canyon and plunge to your death, does not mean that you should.
Like, come on y'all: at least eye-popping megaprojects like the Panama Canal were economically and politically motivated. We don't need Lake Nevada.
100%. Also the author citing California and Florida as "successful" terraforming projects is a bit ironic in 2024. Nature seems to be taking them both back... The world is already super fragile, especially in regards to climate change. I'm not convinced doubling down on a country which struggles to maintain it's existing infrastructure and is hyper divided (to my chagrin) is a wise strategy.
The entire body of technological progress stands as a counter-argument to “if it was possible someone would be doing it”. Things are only impossible until they aren’t.
And the "until the aren't" part importantly involves a feasible plan to actually get there.
This article is just an art project. There are tons of easily identified questions that would need to be answered to make a project like this feasible. The author conveniently answers none of them because it would show how unrealistic this whole thing would be.
> If desalination was cost effective it would be being done today at scale.
It is being done at scale in places like Israel. It doesn't even need base load power, you could run it with the infinite amount of cheap solar energy available in the Southwest. The only reason it isn't being done is places like California is entirely regulatory. In fact Arizona might get there first, there has been recent progress between them and Mexico to do desalination in the Sea of Cortez, which is only 60 miles from the Arizona boarder.
According to the article, intermittent operation is assuming new desalinization technology that needs to be invented:
> Current RO plants cost more like $2000/kW, so they’re both financially and technically unsuited to intermittent operation, which fatigues their membranes. Thermal desalination could achieve radically lower cost, albeit at lower energy efficiencies, so there’s work to be done here designing new, low cost desalination machines that fully exploit the upside of cheap solar PV.
And that’s largely the point of the article. It’s not being done yet, but he thinks it’s technically feasible and could be a game-changer. Big if true.
It’s not something we should plan on until the technology is further developed, but seems like worthwhile R&D to fund.
At first, I thought this was satire, but then the joke never landed. The author cites "Modern Physics, 8th ed." but then ignores everything in the book. This posting is fantasy in the same vein as "we can have personal jetpacks for everyone by 1995."
There is a lot of money to be made in air travel. If commercial flights were cost-effective, they would be operating today at scale. It isn't a regulatory issue; it's strictly economics. If someone could demonstrate the technology the author describes, indefinite amounts of money would flow to them. It hasn't happened. It's not happening anywhere in the world.
Finally, the author talks about building massive fleets of airplanes as though it is a trivial thing. A significant portion of global fuel consumption goes to aviation today. The author conveniently sidesteps the issue of producing enough fuel and managing the environmental impact just to keep these planes in the air. Why was this even posted to Hacker News?
Before we try to bring water to a desert, we should stop turning livable places into deserts. If you take a ride on the I-20 or I-30, you will see a lot of harmful engineering and inconsiderate land use, both causing regions will lose the rain. You see, the annual average total rain is not given, it can change with the land use and rain handling. Gorchkov and Makarieva put it in good math and named one of these processes a biotic pump. Generally, we need to stop treating the rainwater as an obnoxious waste and we need to stop greedy water management practices and start sharing the water with nature.
BTW: just in case you need to know, I am not a dreamer, but I do have a good education in Hydrology. Currently, I am doing an experiment that will revive a couple of springs with very cheap and simple measures. Everything is measured and documented.
I don't know if invoking the Salton Sea, which is probably the canonical example of the risks of creating endorheic lakes by introducing water into an endorheic basin is really a good argument.
The Great Basin is North America's largest endorheic basin, and the one large natural endorheic lake, the Great Salt Lake is currently drying up.
Those of us who live down wind of it are already suffering the effects of it drying, and if it continues to dry. Millions will be displaced due to the health effects of Arsenic in the dust etc..
This also ignores other parts or hand waves away difficult problems. Brine from continental scale desalination as hazardous waist can be understood by the challenging problems with data center scale problems as an example.
Also water from Lake Meed and Powell would require serious treatment to move anywhere due to Quagga muscles etc.
Also large amounts of currently productive farmland are already at risk due to the Colorado being oversubscribed and declining aquifers.
Heck, just stopping at the dry lake bed at Xyyzyy would show the issue with trying to use the Mojave river.
While I am glad the author had fun with this thought experiment, the idea is simply not realistic in its current form.
> Those of us who live down wind of it are already suffering the effects of it drying, and if it continues to dry. Millions will be displaced due to the health effects of Arsenic in the dust etc..
It sounds like you agree with the author that refilling the salton sea and the great salt lake would be a big win… I don’t understand this line as a counterargument.
Refilling the salt lake should be a goal to protect existing populations, that is not the same as creating new population centers that we have even greater challenges.
Unfortunately curbing growth and shifting agriculture needs to other locations is probably the only practical way.
The Bear River divide is next to the Green River drainage, as that is already in a state of overallocation to support SW desert populations, that isn't practical.
Pumping water into death valley wouldn't be the way to get water into the the Salt Lake either, and would still have to deal with disposing of the brine in scales gar larger than any municipal supply.
Reminds me of one of the big open secrets of North America: northern Ontario and northwestern Quebec are fertile. There is a 250,000 sq. km clay belt that spans almost from Winnipeg to Ottawa. The growing season is short but sufficient for grains and beans and such.
It's the opposite problem. Drainage is poor and there is too much rain at the wrong time, so the land needs heavy drainage. Also it's miserably cold in winter, and it's far, far from the cities. The government tried settling it but most of them moved back south. Less than 5% of the area is under till or pasture today. The whole thing could be turned into a potato belt on the scale of the Prairies. If we could find anyone willing to live there. Truth is there are other places better suited.
Att 55 degrees latitude is is comparably pretty far south in Scandinavian terms, like Denmark. And we do grow crops in Sweden.
Inland climate in Canada and (for Scandinavia) the Gulf Stream could make the difference. Although I imagine the Hudson bay should give it more of seaside climate?
I just looked up Cochrane ON because I hadn't heard of it before and yeah, it seems a bit of a mystery to me why it isn't more settled. I live around Edmonton where farming is a major industry, and just for comparison:
Mean daily temperature range (min to max): Cochrane -19c to +24c, Edmonton -15 to +23
Growing season: Cochrane 155 days, Edmonton 123 days
Frost free days: Cochrane 99 days, Edmonton 135 days
Precipitation: Cochrane 90cm, Edmonton 42cm
Around the first world war when the area was being settled, wikipedia quotes "7 months of snow, two months of rain, and the rest black flies and mosquitos. If I had to describe Edmonton, it would be 6 months of winter, one month of rain (June), 2 months of mosquitos, and 10 months of sun.
If I had to guess, the frost free days is a big factor. Even though Edmonton is further north, we benefit from the jet stream coming over the mountains and largely keeping the arctic air mass away from us. The jet stream tilts further south into the US by the time you get over to Ontario so Manitoba and Northern Ontario can get some bitterly cold winds.
That is, if we build a ton of solar and storage capacity, wouldn't it actually make a ton more sense to use that to decarbonize the rest of our energy infrastructure, rather than going into a giant desalinization project? I'm not arguing that what TFA proposes is technically impossible, I'm just arguing that it makes 0 sense from an economic or societal perspective. For all the advancements the world has made in renewable energy, we still pump out a record (or near record) amount of greenhouse gases every year: https://ourworldindata.org/greenhouse-gas-emissions
It makes a lot of sense for the same reason California is the most productive agricultural region in the world. The arid climate is optimal for consistently growing crops with low risk of disease year-round. Instead of having to import winter crops from overseas we could instead grow them in Arizona, and transport them on rail across the United States vs. importing them on ships from around the world. That also would have a huge impact on greenhouse emissions, and farmland really does "Terraform" the desert and make it more livable by lowering temperatures and helping to keep down dust.
I obviously have no idea how the math works out in detail, but I'd be pretty surprised if the economics of this were feasible. That is, spend a ton of money (and energy) to terraform sizable swaths of the Arizona desert just to avoid transporting in crops from Mexico right across the boarder? I'd be skeptical that even a back-of-the-napkin estimate would consider this possible. Relevant example: there are a bunch of rice farmers near Houston that are dependent on the Colorado River for irrigation (note, this is the Colorado River in Texas that runs through downtown Austin - completely different river from the Colorado River that goes through the Hoover Dam and supplies a ton of the Western US with water). Given how we've been getting drier over the past decades, the rice farmers are now frequently cut off from water because that water is deemed more important for city dwellers upstream where the economic return on that water usage is much greater.
If we can't even get enough water to these rice farmers (where it's actually relatively swampy, and note TX is a leader in renewable energy generation in the US), it seems like a silly pipe dream to talk about growing kale in the Arizona desert.
> wouldn't it actually make a ton more sense to use that to decarbonize the rest of our energy infrastructure
Some portion of electricity is lost in transmission the longer the distances no? At some point it makes more sense for solar panels in San Diego to desalinize right next to them then try to get that energy to Maine.
High voltage transmission lines are remarkably efficient, with losses of 2-3% per 1000km. And while I assume you were using hyperbole, nobody needs to get power from San Diego to Maine in the first place.
How often has mankind attempted to alter the landscape to suit his purposes and found that, instead of improving it, it is destroyed instead. Far better is learn to live in the conditions as they are and adapt the techniques to utilize the natural resources. In some cases, maybe even that simply isn't possible so we just don't live there.
Don’t misinterpret what I wrote to think we should leave it alone! Obviously, we’ve been doing it for millennia but we’ve only had the tools and machinery to massively change things for 200 years, or so. A farmer digging ditches to route water to his fields using a shovel, plow, and some mules is hardly equivalent to something like Three Gorges dam, the LA aquaduct, or the deforestation of the Amazon basin on a massive scale.
The human lifetime and memory are short. Don't neglect that much forest (in at least the US) has been chopped down multiple times over. The effects of that are still playing out, similar that we have carved up animal habitat with a dense road grid, and have done things like remove the buffalo.
> I suppose the real problem here is agreeing on what "balance" means.
Yet I think we can hopefully all agree that expending unbelievable quantities of energy in order to desalinate seawater and pump it uphill a thousand miles in order to turn a desert canyon into a lake for absolutely no good reason whatsoever does not qualify as "balance".
I don't understand "expending" energy in this case. Obviously a key part of the plan would be to use the unbelievable quantities of solar energy currently just going to waste.
It doesn't even require high tech pv, just plain mirrors to make just plain heat for a large portion of the work.
And pumping water is not just a cost, it's also a battery, a hugely valuable thing we don't have enough of yet, which would enable more of the grid to live on renewables.
It's not all magic but it's not all impossible nor pointless either.
There's a difference between clearing a few trees for a cabin vs desalinating and pumping millions of gallons of water and transforming the ecology of a state.
Yes. Indeed there is a difference between a philosophical consideration and a practical one.
Of course we're part of nature and whatever we do will not "destroy" the world like the world was not "destroyed" when algae pumped toxic oxygen in the atmosphere.
But for all intents and purposes we're able to "destroy" the things we care about the world and turn it into a place we would quite hate to live in (while cockroaches and rates may have no problems with it)
Check pictures from before 1920 - note that all the trees are cleared from around towns and buildings. The cumulative scale is immense when everyone had a cabin and used wood for heating. I think you're understating the impact of "a cabin." European style living is not very sustainable, compared to those that lived in NA for many thousands of years prior.
Virtually all of Europe used to just be forest. Large swathes of East England used to be uninhabitable swamp, much of the Netherlands used to be underwater.
Partly proves the point of the OP: cutting out the forests and draining the swamps led to soil erosion, massive floods, and loss of biodiversity.
I'm not saying it had no reason or benefit, obviously it was for economic reasons (extra land for agriculture and human settlements), just that it is not something that should "obviously" be done.
GPs point makes it sound as though the destructive parts were unintended and a surprise. They often weren’t, and they very rarely are these days when it comes to “landscaping” (sorry if that’s the incorrect terminology in English).
We know perfectly well how to alter the land we live on. At least in the EU we’ve been turning fields into swamps or forests and back again for various reasons since we industrialised farming. Basically all of the effects are known. While we can agree or disagree with a lot of the choices that are made in terms of economic growth, it’s not like what happens is surprising or unintended.
> if you’re a fantasist thinking we should be living in a Bronze Age utopia.
Bronze Age people were smart enough to live in places with easy access to fresh water, so they're demonstrably wiser than whoever came up with this proposal.
Pretty often. The article's title is a bit misleading to it's own detriment; "terraforming" brings to mind images of using massive furnaces to burn mass to release CO2 on a barren planet. What the author of this article is proposing is pretty routine relative to human societal needs, which is shifting the flow of bodies of water to get water to Nevada. I'm not a geology expert so I don't know the viability of this proposal, but it seems the author is proposing to bring flow back to rivers that have dried up at some point in the past.
I took enough geology in college to understand that humans have been shifting riverflows since at least the Ancient Egyptians (with the Nile river), and Los Angeles' vitality is a product of artificial waterflow shift (the movie Chinatown touches on this at least tangentially). If I'm not mistaken, even Hoover Dam diverts a significant amount of water that once flowed elsewhere, though many environmentalists would tell you today that dams are horribly harmful to local ecosystems.
My guess is that with climate change causing significant changes to multiple regions via weather and climate, causing massive upheavals for large swaths of populations, it might be in America's interest to consider where it could create new population centers again by shifting waterflow.
It wasn't the lack of water that made Florida inhospitable, it was the climate. Florida's population explosion precisely coincides with the adoption of air conditioning in American households, in the post-war period[1]. Very few people want to live in a place where it's so hot and humid all the time.
> During the last ice age, only 10,000 years ago
We're still in an ice age. An ice age is simply when the earth's poles have an ice cover.
Interglacial periods are a part of ice ages. Even tells you right at the beginning of that article.
> Individual pulses of cold climate within an ice age are termed glacial periods (glacials, glaciations, glacial stages, stadials, stades, or colloquially, ice ages), and intermittent warm periods within an ice age are called interglacials or interstadials.
You can actually see the definition (albeit a little verbose) as the first sentence of that article:
> An ice age is a long period of reduction in the temperature of Earth's surface and atmosphere, resulting in the presence or expansion of continental and polar ice sheets and alpine glaciers.
On a technicality, you can get me for not mentioning the snow capped mountains part, I'd concede on that. That part is actually news to me. All the same, the earth is colder than it usually is. [1]
An interesting thing I like to bounce around in my head: Could we live in the interior of the Pangean super continent if we had to? Interesting stepping stone between Earth's current, very mild climate, and trying to live in a place like Venus. Definitely would have to live like mole people.
> Could we live in the interior of the Pangean super continent
We already avoid living in the interior of Australia, because living at temperatures of +50°C is just not very compatible with having body temperature slightly below +37°C. Same applies to the middle of Sahara desert. It's not impossible though, because the humidity is very low there, so, given a supply of water, you can cool by evaporation. At high humidity. you'd just die; such things happen during heat waves on the Indian subcontinent, for example.
> ...humans evolved during the coldest epoch of the Phanerozoic [the time period from 540 million years ago to the present], when global average temperatures were as low as 51.8 F (11 C).
> “We built our civilization around those geologic landscapes of an icehouse,” Judd [one of the study's authors] said.
Absolutely agree. So far, the transistor (i.e. computation, internet, mobile, AI) has been less transformative than earlier breakthroughs like refrigeration, the automobile and the airplane.
In my view politics is largely a sideshow compared to technological advancement as it is mostly about how to divide up the pie as opposed to growing it. While people can communicate various political ideas more freely, it actually doesn't matter than much unless the political situation gets bad enough that it leads to a dark age. Therefore technologies that merely make it easier to communicate political ideas are less impactful than technologies that directly improve life (e.g. most people would not trade their fridge for a Twitter account). Of course, I am glad that both exist.
I agree with your overall point, but I would add that technology has significantly increased leisure time, and the fact that communication platforms are how many people use that extra leisure time proves their value beyond what you might expect just looking at a hierarchy of needs.
I'm not sure that it has. The workweek remains at 40 hours and most people still work about 40 years. Furthermore, in advanced economies the per household cumulative hours worked has roughly doubled since the transistor was invented. The dishwasher and washer/dryer are the last technologies that actually increased leisure time and predated the transistor.
I'm hopeful that AI + robotics will improve the situation but so far there have been very little quality of life improvements due to the transistor (coding is very fun however).
I don't hate your argument, but the Arab Spring citation is some idealism from over a decade ago. The Arab Spring mostly failed and almost all of those countries remained autocracies?
True, but the fact that a revolutionary social movement was organized across an entire global region was enabled because of the internet was what I was trying to highlight.
Oh come on, that take is too cute by three halves. The internet was the biggest change in human society of the 20th Century, if not the millennium. And while you’re peeling that one apart, the transistor also laid the bedrock for GPS, modern medical devices like pacemakers and insulin dispensers, mass-communication/mass-media with live broadcast capable of reaching billions of people, and like 10 even bigger things my brunch-addled mind isn’t thinking of at the moment.
I know it’s a cool thought exercise to go “what if the things I like/care about actually aren’t that important in the grand scheme of things?” But at the end of that exercise you’ve got to come back to reality.
Air conditioning was huge, but surely mosquito control and the elimination of malaria also played a major role in making Florida habitable. People drained the swamps and sprayed enough poison to kill off at least most of the mosquitos.
> In Florida, a combination of development, drainage, and air conditioning created one of the most desirable cities on Earth from a previously pestilential swamp.
No, thanks. People are destructive to the planet in every way possible, and we don't need more. It's not as if we'll solve the mysteries of existence twice as fast by having twice as many people. If anything, having double the consequential pollution will halve the speed of discovery.
I agree. Megaprojects that make large changes to highly chaotic systems never end well. From Mao's Four Pests to the ongoing wildfire crises that plague the west coast thanks to all the terraforming California has undergone (exacerbated by ongoing climate change)
To say nothing of the fact that this is wanton environmental destruction. Just because something is arid, it's alright to completely change it? And for what? Having lived in Dallas, which is not unlike Nevada but more humid and wet, it's not a proper place to live. People jump from pool of air conditioning to pool of air conditioning. You go outside and walk for just 5 minutes, and you're completely soaked in sweat. Shade does not help. Lack of concrete does not help, you can drive 2 hours into the middle of nowhere and it's still like being in a preheated oven. You can't really do anything fun outside for half the year because you'll get heat stroke, or generally just be extremely stinky.
If you want to make use of empty land, going to the miserably cold uninhabited swaths of Canada are far wiser. You can always bundle up, but you can only take off so many layers of clothing.
Arguably the wildfires occur due to not enough meddling by humans. That is, due to not cutting enough old and dead trees, which dry up and become easier to catch fire, and not cutting wide enough openings in the forests to stop the spread of a fire when it occurs. The current wildfire situation is what the natural order of things looks like :-\
There used to be redwoods all over california. Hardy fire resistant trees, now they are relatively scarce. Second,wood is heavy. The economics to remove dead trees is not there, does not get done for reasons. Next, the area of the land is immense. Cutting fird brakes through it us tens of millions of acres. Further, fire breaks do little in high wind situations. What does move the needle are forest fires. Letting them burn. We've been practicing industrial scale fire suppression since the 50s. Next, immense areas of tree farms, second and third growth forests.
Best thing, get the hell out of the forests and let them all burn on a regular basis.
Previously, people raked the forest, and that worked OK for 1000’s of years. Before that, fires burned uncontrolled, which also cleared out the underbrush.
The problem we have now is due to almost a century of fire suppression. We stopped raking the forest and also stopped letting small fires clear out the accumulated fuel.
Of course, global warming doesn’t help. Neither does PG&E’s historic lack of line maintenance.
There is also a second way of stopping fires, which is to create 10x more man-made lakes, ponds, and streams everywhere in the region. It will increase the local humidity, which will in turn diminish the risk of fires. The approach is to maximize the surface of the volume of water exposed to the air. This works because fires require dryness, which will be impossible with sufficient water evaporation and humidity in the area. It is a superior form of terraforming than controlled fires.
That’s probably a losing battle. The coast is already extremely humid due to fog drip.
The problem is that we get crazy weather patterns now due to global warming. For instance, it was ~100F for about a week a few weeks ago, which made everything nice and crispy.
Then, when it cooled off, we got hit with a long windstorm and 15-20% humidity. If that storm had brought lightning, there would have been widespread uncontrollable fires (too windy for helicopters).
It’s not just California. This sort of thing has happened repeatedly in the last few years in most states in the western US.
That is highly debatable. There are overhead electric cables that often cause the trees to catch fire. Installing cables underground or with stronger insulation and auto-power-shutoff could help prevent several of the fires.
Fires have their own cadence - they happen when the dead leaves and plants accumulate enough there’s sufficient fuel to maintain a forest fire. When we stop all fires the fuel piles up and the next fire is much worse and harder to stop. Up to a point we simply can’t stop it and it consumes all fuel and the forest starts from scratch.
> People are destructive to the planet in every way possible,
Are we already on track to cause our planet to no longer be a planet?
> It's not as if we'll solve the mysteries of existence twice as fast by having twice as many people
Imagine if the people at ASML (or your favorite other one-of-a-kind cutting edge place) had twice as many hours in their days. Or alternatively, if there were twice as many of them. Shouldn't that make them able to do more cool things?
You conveniently ignored the part where I noted that having double the consequential pollution will halve the speed of discovery. And yes, the pollution will double because more humans means more pollution that accumulates without getting recycled. Plastics, PFAS, CO2, etc. are all examples of pollutants that do not get recycled. It harms brains, aging them prematurely. A cleaner environment without strong financial pressure for survival is a much better way to do more cool things. Once the CO2 exceeds 800 ppm, brains will be tired all of the time, too tired to invent anything cool.
Have you traveled to third world countries with very high population densities? Have you breathed the air on their streets? Travel to China, India, parts of the Middle East, other parts of Asia, and realize just how foul the air there is to breathe. That's what you want for the US? The evidence is already strong that plastics, PFAS, and CO2 are not recycled; they just keep piling on in the environment and in the human body. You can literally smell plastic burning in the air in those countries and regions, and the immune system reacts very strongly to it in a negative way. Developing anything cool will be the last thing on the mind at that time.
You don't even have to travel that far. The air between middle of nowhere US and everywhere else USA is very different. It is amazing how quickly we get used to our local environments (order days/weeks).
> Travel to China, India, parts of the Middle East, other parts of Asia, and realize just how foul the air there is to breathe. That's what you want for the US?
I'll go out on a limb and predict that their answer to that would be "no". I don't think you're assuming good faith here.
I am assuming bad faith for a good reason, which is that the parent comment failed to acknowledge the obvious, which is that the listed pollutants keep accumulating in the environment, proportional to the number of people that exist. In fact, the parent comment even rejected this established knowledge, thereby proving its bad faith.
You are assuming bad faith because you are reading things into my words that are not there.
I do not deny that (some) pollutants accumulate. I also do not deny that pollution is quite bad in some places.
I am specifically questioning your claim that doubling pollution would specifically halve the rate of innovation. I was pointing out that you have not supported that statement. You claimed it twice, you still haven't supported it, and I'm pretty sure that you can't support it.
Stop trying to read into my statement wild claims that aren't there. Can you support your claim?
Yes, microplastics accumulate in the brain over the years [PMID: 38765967]. They cause anxiety [PMID: 37269995] and brain inflammation [DOI: 10.3390/ijms241512308]. There is a lot more research on them than I am quoting here.
When someone is suffering from crippling anxiety, if you have ever suffered from it, the last thing on their mind will be to develop anything cool.
Moreover, microplastics accumulate and harm various organs, not only the brain. They also cause generational infertility due to the pervasive co-presence of toxins like phthalate in them [PMID: 39446714].
Similarly, higher CO2 levels are detrimental to cognition. This has been known for years and is established knowledge.
First, these studies merely suggest that microplastics have these effects in humans, yet you state them as fact. However, I don't want to argue that microplastics are harmless or that pollution is not an issue. Neither do I want to defend the point that doubling the population doubles the "speed of discovery". But even if all of your points are accurate, you would still have to show that these negative effects outweigh the benefit of a priori doubling productivity. In fact, you make the even stronger claim that doubling the population will actually cut the "speed of discovery" in half. None of this is substantiated by your argument.
If the Casey's interest is in terraforming the American West to support substantial population growth, I would start with the Columbia River Basin and identify the bottlenecks to growth there.
The Columbia River drainage basin is larger than the Great Basin (670k km2 [1] vs 541 km2 [3]), it's the 4th largest river in the US by flow [1], and there are already existing megaprojects like the Columbia Basin Project [2] that have unmet potential.
If the growth Casey envisions isn't happening and/or won't happen with the easy access to substantial volumes fresh water of the Columbia River then it's very unlikely to occur in the scenario they envision with desal + pumping water into the Great Basin.
Are you not seeing the progress in the articles? It went from a lab proof-of-concept to a working prototype producing in real life 5000 liters/day passively. That's impressive as hell.
Right. Remember, the issue is not whether it can be done, but how cheaply. Desalinization works fine now, but it's kind of expensive. These claimed breakthroughs are cost reductions. For that, you have to scale up to at least small production and measure costs. Only then you can boast.
Probably the place that makes the most sense would be Idaho/Oregon/Washington. The weather is relatively moderate (compared to the midwest), more water available nearby.
The weather is a bit nicer in Utah/Colorado/New Mexico - especially the lower elevations, but it’s too reliant on the Colorado/Rio Grande IMO, and has to compete with southern California and Arizona/Vegas and Texas. Western Montana is also nice but may be a bit too snowy in the winter until climate change takes hold.
One mans hubris, another mans hope for a better future.
To put this proposed project into context: humans already did something similar in scale in what is now the Amazon. We accidentally rewilded the entire area via plagues. The Sahara is also a pretty new thing, and something we could reverse.
We've long past the point of playing god or not. We now only have two options:
1. playing an incompetent god, pretending that our actions are not our fault
2. playing a competent god, taking responsibility and trying to do better
The Amazon is losing forested area, is nearly carbon positive, and was previously sparsely populated (it being a jungle and all). I have trouble squaring this understanding with the idea it was recently rewilded.
Surely you acknowledge that "taking responsibility and trying to do better" means learning from our past mistakes and not repeating them? The project in the OP is motivated by vanity, not necessity.
Wanting to make a biome more habitable is not vanity.
Is it vanity to want a park in your city or a river to be clean of pollutants?
We are scared of projects like this because the scale betrays our inability to do them or perhaps fully anticipate the consequences, which is good enough reason for caution.
But vanity? A garden is never reducible to vanity, it is the cultivation of the earth and the prosperity of living things, regardless of how vainglorious the gardener may be.
How much of that biome is the result of a previous ecological disaster? The US is covered by those from what I've understood. Vast tracts of lands are arid because beavers were hunted to extinction for example. Protecting the accident of the previous 100 years doesn't sound so compelling.
The point is that we do not need this land. There is plenty of land all around the United States that is "habitable". And given the trend of birth rates and urbanization there is virtually no reason to go destroying fragile and unique ecosystems just so people can satisfy some compulsion for a manifest destiny of occupying every available square foot of this planet.
Truly, even if we were to disregard the ecological and social impacts on existing inhabitants, the energy required would be extreme. And thankfully that alone is enough to make this simply a fantasy.
I actually quite like the arid west, if anything we should be letting it return to aridity as current water use (I.e. rerouting a lot of the Colorado River to California) is well known to be on shaky ground at the least. If you don’t like arid areas move somewhere else.
Really interesting read, and while the numbers are a little hand wavy even if they were out on the cost by an order of magnitude it would still be very cheap.
The USA has lost its appetite for these mega projects, sadly.
You're spending $16B to create $1T of real estate value.
That would pay for itself in two years at 1% R/E tax and <10% interest.
I didn't read the entire article, but the reason it won't happen at this scale is because you could never acquire the property rights to be able to do it, not because it's a bad investment.
> The USA has lost its appetite for these mega projects, sadly.
Looking around at this thread, it's easy to see why. People value ecological conservatism over economic progress.
Of course, the type of economic progress we've had over the last few decades has been a mixed bag, due to structural deficiencies. But I don't agree with throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
The general cynicism and negativity makes me really sad. Esp for a community of builders and problem solvers.
I take the entirely opposite conclusion. Seeing so many value ecological conservatism over economic progress is to me optimistic and heartening. Over the past 100 years we've seen a shift to seeing the world as a shared world vs. one that is our manifest destiny to claim. I see others beginning to see a sense of shared responsibility for the stewardship of this world for the other living creatures as well as a recognition that our fates are more intertwined with theirs than we *used to think.
It is the easy and unsustainable solution. Akin to rewriting a codebase instead of fixing an existing one. Instead of solving the problems of nitrogen pollution, CO2 pollution, plastics- just find a new greenfield instead. Of course code rewrites rarely actually replace the old code. New and shiny is just way sexier than doing things like fixing poisoned waterways.
> People value ecological conservatism over economic progress.
Phrasing such a proposal as "economic progress" is entirely irrational. This is a solution looking for a problem. We have zero, zero, zero economic need for this.
Or phrasing it as "ecological conservatism". It's not "conservative" to start accounting for the previously unrecognized or outright disregarded negative consequences of these projects. Turns out healthy ecosystems are important for humans too.
Looking past the various NIMBY challenges to this project, I'd love to find a marine-safe desalination method too.
Apparently a lot of marine life gets absolutely wrecked when you pump in water from the California coast, but I see it mostly as a unique engineering challenge.
Good? Do you understand the ecosystems and national parks that would be destroyed by this? Once those are gone they are gone. We don’t even need this nonsense, the population is contracting. We will have nothing but empty space in inhabited spaces already.
Article talks about how 90% of the land would remain as is as well as 100% of the national parks, simply restoring watersheds that are intermittent or dried up to wetlands.
I didn't use the word good anywhere or even offer a value judgement, I simply called it interesting.
Also your tone sucks and makes me not want to discuss in good faith with you.
Article assumes people want to live in cramped cities.. clearly this is not the case when we look at where Americans choose to live, so premise is flawed. In reality 300 more Americans would spread out and wreck the environment more than it already is.
There was some recent work on cheaper desalination based on cheap intermittent solar (the common reverse osmosis approach apparently doesn't work well with intermittency) that mirrors the blog writer's approach to efuels, so surprised he didn't mention it.
However, I was under the impression that for the US it's mostly a market failure and farmers are intentionally wasting scandalous amounts of water because they'd lose their water rights if they used the countries resources optimally.
Kind of reminds me of an idle thought I have every now and then. Between the sheer difficulty of establishing any kind of foothold on Mars, and the vast amount of uninhabited land, it’s curious that more thought hasn’t been given into the much easier task of making the empty parts of the planet more bearable.
Alas, the list of reasons to live in the Great Plains is very short, which is also why I’m kind of skeptical of terraforming the American West. You can make existing major cities more livable, sure, but don’t expect a surge of people moving to Montana or Wyoming.
By contrast, Los Angeles and Miami have ocean access. Terraforming coastline is a no-brainer.
Yuck, this would destroy the ecology of the area and require an insane amount of energy. If water is scarce, the most efficient thing to do is move the humans.
So if I build a plant today to produce water at 22 cents per cubic meter, somebody could come along next year and build another plant that produces water for 15 cents and put me out of business. Then the year after that, another plant produces water for 10 cents, etc. You need 20-year contracts to sell water at a fixed price to make this work.
Modern desal uses chemicals in the water to help prevent mineral buildup within the plant, and these chemicals are present in the effluent. I wonder if the author has accounted for this pollution?
It is terrifying to me that people like this author exist and are serious. Even more terrifying is the possibility that one day, someone in power will read this and think, hey, that's a good idea.
(also terrifying: who is upvoting blogs like this??? is there really a vast underground of people in favor of destruction of the [remaining] environment so we can add a trillion more acres of concrete strip-malls and Wal-Marts?)
They weren't short sighted, they expected we would continue and keep improving the infrastructure. We built some utterly incredible infrastructure in the past (Bridges, highways, dams, reservoirs, aqueducts, etc.) and then people stopped dreaming and stopped building.
As a result we have been living on the infrastructure that our parents and grandparents built while supporting 10x the population. Which is incredible but at some point something has to give.
They didn't expect us to build a solution to undo destruction of the Owen's valley or the Colorado river delta.
Maybe it hasn't continued because that type of infrastructure reached a local maximum.
If you want dreams, how about reshaping the California Central valley as an enormous management intensive agroforestry system that uses highly diverse and resilient native species to meet human calorie needs.
This isn't an engineering challenge, it's a social, cultural, and political one.
What is the this desalination cost competing against, what's the alternative cost of importing water by tanker or pipeline?
Also, why do you want batteries, instead of just running the osmosis when there is sunlight? Maybe the osmosis equipment is expensive enough that it pays off to keep it 100% occupied with batteries?
The numbers in the OP show that the RO equipment is by far the largest cost so you need to maximize its utilization. The energy is used to pump water through the RO at high pressure so another alternative would be to use solar to pump water uphill so you could run the RO at night. The design using batteries is easier to price.
There are energy companies like Quidnet that are commercializing geopressure storage, where water is pumped underground at pressure, then recovered and the energy extracted. This would be an ideal system to combine with solar and RO.
Aside from fossil water, all of our fresh water comes from desalinated sea water, transported inland by clouds - which shows that there is no brine problem as long as the brine is dispersed widely enough in the sea. “How widely” is enough is something I wish OP discussed.
I love this idea, and would be comfortable pushing the number even higher. The cool part about the US is it's relatively unpopulated as compared to European countries.
We could probably fit another 200 million or so people in the eastern half of the country, just by bringing it to the level of density of, say, the UK. If we were willing to live as densely as the Dutch, perhaps we could add 300 million in the eastern half.
Your proposal is fairly modest compared to some of the ideas out there.
In his wildly enthusiastic 1860 book The Central Gold Region, William Gilpin claimed that the Mississipi Basin could support at population of 1.2 billion people, and was destined to become the “world’s amphitheatre”, with all of the world’s trade running through it in a grand “Asiatic and European Railway”.
As a life long resident of the American West, I can imagine few ecological crimes more horrifying. This is one of the most unique geographies on this planet. The life here is thoroughly adapted to a fragile balance of long want and occasional abundance. Everywhere you "terraform" would obliterate that balance. The application of the word itself is obtuse. How can you make more Earth like what the Earth itself made? I suggest that you take your infrastructure projects and apply them where people already live. The damage has already been done there. And those places have an elasticity of life due to the high amounts of water that let them bounce back at some point. Instead I suggest for the West we take a page out of Edward Abbey and simply marvel at its incredible uniqueness and beauty.
There are a number of interesting videos on YouTube about people who are adding swales and rock dams to their western land to slow down the departure of rain water. Apparently just these extra terraforming can be enough to turn barren land into a green and lush forest.
Has anyone tried this on their own land? I'm tempted to try it.
That's fantasy. If you don't live in the West it's difficult to appreciate that there simply is no water. No amount of of "swales" or rock dams change the fact that water doesn't fall from the sky in sufficient amounts to create a "lush green forest". Also every drop of water that hits the ground has been accounted for long ago and is part of some water pact. If you create a dam upstream you are guaranteed to get a visit from the water rights holders.
Actually, most of these regions have rain. (The Atacama does not!) And you do not need lush green forests right away, prairie grasses are a good start. Well-applied rain retention measures do work.
> Untouched and eighty years old, it was supposed to have been built by men with carts and horses during the Roosevelt years in the 1930s.
> The soil was springy and spongy when you walked on it. Like an uncompacted garden bed it was full of mulch captured by rain water. Eighty years of humus was deposited here during flash floods, without any help from mankind.
> The trees were all self seeded.
> Geoff plunged his hands into the soil and went down 8 inches of moist, black, rich, composted soil. It was still damp.
Why? Honestly, why? There's so much uninhabited land out that isn't uninhabitable, which is already more land than we'll ever need for the sake of putting human habitats on. Go move to the great lakes if you want a combination of remote wilderness and an infinite supply of free fresh water.
I love Casey's stuff - just incredibly detailed, ambitious and reminds you of what the country used to do when it set its mind to it. His new company is across the street where they built the SR-71 which is fitting.
Casey is a person that is disconnected from reality. There is a reason that Nevada hasn't been terraformed. It isn't regulations or lack of will. It's physics. He would be better off if he spent more time building things and less time in his spreadsheets. Please read "Cadillac Desert" if you want to have more context.
It's always an interesting read, but he should hire someone to fix his website. (For example, when I first looked at it, all the pictures were missing.)
I thought this was a good idea too but then a scientist pointed out that those areas radiate heat into space at night and the last thing we want right now is less of that.
It's a little like a bald person putting on a wool hat: great if you're cold, but counter-productive if you're already too hot.
- - - -
In the next twenty years we will build as much city as we have so far. In other words in the next twenty years the amount of urban area will double. We've gotta design and build these new cities to be in harmony with the global ecosystem that maintains life support for everybody.
> Indeed, solar PV is the first mass produced product where energy is an output rather than an input.
Fortunately, it takes no energy at all from inside the United States to manufacture solar panels in, you know, some place, over there, somewhere, that I have trouble pronouncing.
Doesn't matter. I just order them online and they magically show up on my doorstep.
It is not really.. there is massive polutionnof waterways. Iowa is one off the worst states for nitrogen pollution. In that state "just 24% of stream segments and 30% of lakes that were sampled were deemed healthy." [1]
I was traveling through iowa recently. There were ducks floating face down dead in polluted waterways. Algae so thick it looks like you could walk on it. It is quite bad..
The hardest part with all of these things isn’t the technology. Usually it’s the coordination. High loss aversion among certain groups causes a reflexive resistance to any large scale project. Memetic mimicry has them reach the same result without explicit coordination.
Any society struggles with conservatives vs adapters. The population transition boundary is along prosperity. Until society reaches a certain degree of prosperity and prosperity alteration shows relative slowdown, adapters win. But afterwards, conservatives will fear movement downward.
It takes substantial adapter power to attempt transformative change. Once the transition boundary is hit, it doesn’t matter how much prosperity gain will be achieved. The key element is adapter power. In a democracy, especially, conservatism dominates past the prosperity boundary. The shape of bureaucracy will impede executive adapters.
America is mostly past the boundary and high-value change only occurs in fields where adapter power exists: opposition to BEVs, space technologies, AVs, chip fabrication, biotechnology, and land modification is strong. Adapter actions occur only through the use of executive power and memetic warfare: using conservatism language to promote subsidies for BEVs and permit AVs, military use for space launches, defence rationale for chips, and hiding biotechnology research until it’s ready.
Terraforming is too high-profile and easily fought. To succeed we need to transform it into using the language of conservatism (“restoring habitat”, e.g.), apply executive power (do so under military research auspices), or make it less valuable for conservatism to fight (many smaller projects rather than one big one).
We’ll get there, though. We’ll make the world better despite conservatism fighting us at every turn. Everything is good. Everything could be better.
Please do more research since it seems you are interested in this. The reason we haven't terraformed Nevada isn't lack of will, or coordination. It's physics and economics. If the technologies listed by the author existed they would be being exploited extensively today. Lack of water is too much of an issue. Billions if not trillions of dollars would flow to it, and any small regulatory issues would be knocked down instantly. This entire article is fantasy.
There is no rationale contained in the proposal for why this would make anything better, or even if it did, why it would be a more desirable approach than any other proposal that does not involve fantasy engineering.
At first I thought that this was a satire, but then the joke never landed. The author cites "Cadillac Desert" but then ignores everything in the book. This posting is fantasy in the same vein as "we can build a space habitat at L5 by 1995".
There is a lot of money to be made in water. If desalination was cost effective it would be being done today at scale. It isn't a regulatory issue, it is strictly economics. If someone could demonstrate the technology the author describes indefinite amounts of money would flow to them. It hasn't happened. It's not happening anywhere in the world.
Finally the author talks about pumping water up hill as though it is a trivial thing. 20% of all of the electricity generated in California goes to pumping water today. The author conveniently side steps the issue of building out the vast electrical grid needed just to pump the water. What was this even posted to hacker news?
> 20% of all of the electricity generated in California goes to pumping water today.
Hi, this is wrong. The 20% figure includes all electricity for water-related uses, not just pumping. Most of that (80-90%) is heating and other end uses, not pumping and transport.
>If desalination was cost effective it would be being done today at scale
An official from Irish Water (national water management agency) was being interviewed a while ago explaining that even if desalination was cost effective it has to be cut with fresh water at a ratio of 2:1 (I may be misremembering the exact ratio) because fully desalinated water leeches metal from the pipes.
It’s possible to treat high purity water other ways. Essentially just adding in some minerals.
But my grandma ALWAYS put a pan of water in the oven when she cooked.
Our of curiosity, is there any way to line the pipes with PVC or similar? Like a large scale version of those "pipe fixers" they pump up with air/water that lines existing pipes and hardens in place?
I could see problems with that, and of course cost is always one of the biggest, possibly health too, it's just weird to me that we don't seem to have a solution for this
RO water can strip chemicals from PVC, so it would be substituting one poison for another. Treating the water with minerals seems a much more practical way to go.
There are many solutions to this, and I would not consider it to be one of the foremost complications in a de salinization project.
Very large format, plastic water, main pipes exist… As do concrete pipes, etc.
A sacrificial metal bed could work as a solution.
This post is set in a beautiful, liminal place between fantasy and reality. Could we actually do all of this? Probably not. But we don’t think about the specifics of things like this enough. It challenges us to think about ideas like this in ways more practical problems cannot.
I read somewhere that we dream as a way for our brains, as complex predictive analytical machines, from overfitting. This kind of post feels the same, but for our collective intelligence.
That's a neat way to look at it. I've always thought of dreams as a kind of garbage collection where we produce simulated situations to test whether new information will help us or if it's irrelevant to us, and throw things out that we won't need to remember. I read that one reason we can kind of remember our dreams when we first wake up but can't 5 minutes later is because our brain has some method of forcing our interpretation of what we see into some kind of reasonable cohesion according to what we consider to be physically possible or likely - this region is inactive in our sleep so like you say, we can play in scenarios free from the constraint of what is known to be possible
When we wake up, those impossible and unlikely scenarios in our dreams are still interpretable for a few minutes, but as we fully wake up we're just totally blocked from recalling that memory because what happened defies cohesive reality
Anyway, I agree that not everything needs to fit into a "serious proposal | speculative fiction" dichotomy
> Could we actually do all of this? Probably not.
It's the opposite. We could, probably, do all of this, given colossal will, stupefying investment, and an infinite appetite for destruction. The trick here is to exercise the wisdom to know that we should not do this, despite there being, strictly speaking, no technical reason why we could not. It's like an intrusive thought writ large: just because you have the opportunity to jump off the lip of the Grand Canyon and plunge to your death, does not mean that you should.
Like, come on y'all: at least eye-popping megaprojects like the Panama Canal were economically and politically motivated. We don't need Lake Nevada.
100%. Also the author citing California and Florida as "successful" terraforming projects is a bit ironic in 2024. Nature seems to be taking them both back... The world is already super fragile, especially in regards to climate change. I'm not convinced doubling down on a country which struggles to maintain it's existing infrastructure and is hyper divided (to my chagrin) is a wise strategy.
The entire body of technological progress stands as a counter-argument to “if it was possible someone would be doing it”. Things are only impossible until they aren’t.
And the "until the aren't" part importantly involves a feasible plan to actually get there.
This article is just an art project. There are tons of easily identified questions that would need to be answered to make a project like this feasible. The author conveniently answers none of them because it would show how unrealistic this whole thing would be.
> If desalination was cost effective it would be being done today at scale.
It is being done at scale in places like Israel. It doesn't even need base load power, you could run it with the infinite amount of cheap solar energy available in the Southwest. The only reason it isn't being done is places like California is entirely regulatory. In fact Arizona might get there first, there has been recent progress between them and Mexico to do desalination in the Sea of Cortez, which is only 60 miles from the Arizona boarder.
According to the article, intermittent operation is assuming new desalinization technology that needs to be invented:
> Current RO plants cost more like $2000/kW, so they’re both financially and technically unsuited to intermittent operation, which fatigues their membranes. Thermal desalination could achieve radically lower cost, albeit at lower energy efficiencies, so there’s work to be done here designing new, low cost desalination machines that fully exploit the upside of cheap solar PV.
And that’s largely the point of the article. It’s not being done yet, but he thinks it’s technically feasible and could be a game-changer. Big if true.
It’s not something we should plan on until the technology is further developed, but seems like worthwhile R&D to fund.
Sounds like a great way to destroy one of the most diverse and unique marine ecosystems on the planet, thanks to the brine waste.
Couldn’t you pump the brine waste into evaporation ponds and extract lithium and other materials from it?
It's a funny problem. Too expensive to pump it WAY out to sea, but too salty to be of any use?
> What was this even posted to hacker news?
This involves hacking geography, as such it is quite interesting for the general hacker reader.
At first, I thought this was satire, but then the joke never landed. The author cites "Modern Physics, 8th ed." but then ignores everything in the book. This posting is fantasy in the same vein as "we can have personal jetpacks for everyone by 1995."
There is a lot of money to be made in air travel. If commercial flights were cost-effective, they would be operating today at scale. It isn't a regulatory issue; it's strictly economics. If someone could demonstrate the technology the author describes, indefinite amounts of money would flow to them. It hasn't happened. It's not happening anywhere in the world.
Finally, the author talks about building massive fleets of airplanes as though it is a trivial thing. A significant portion of global fuel consumption goes to aviation today. The author conveniently sidesteps the issue of producing enough fuel and managing the environmental impact just to keep these planes in the air. Why was this even posted to Hacker News?
Before we try to bring water to a desert, we should stop turning livable places into deserts. If you take a ride on the I-20 or I-30, you will see a lot of harmful engineering and inconsiderate land use, both causing regions will lose the rain. You see, the annual average total rain is not given, it can change with the land use and rain handling. Gorchkov and Makarieva put it in good math and named one of these processes a biotic pump. Generally, we need to stop treating the rainwater as an obnoxious waste and we need to stop greedy water management practices and start sharing the water with nature.
BTW: just in case you need to know, I am not a dreamer, but I do have a good education in Hydrology. Currently, I am doing an experiment that will revive a couple of springs with very cheap and simple measures. Everything is measured and documented.
I don't know if invoking the Salton Sea, which is probably the canonical example of the risks of creating endorheic lakes by introducing water into an endorheic basin is really a good argument.
The Great Basin is North America's largest endorheic basin, and the one large natural endorheic lake, the Great Salt Lake is currently drying up.
Those of us who live down wind of it are already suffering the effects of it drying, and if it continues to dry. Millions will be displaced due to the health effects of Arsenic in the dust etc..
This also ignores other parts or hand waves away difficult problems. Brine from continental scale desalination as hazardous waist can be understood by the challenging problems with data center scale problems as an example.
Also water from Lake Meed and Powell would require serious treatment to move anywhere due to Quagga muscles etc.
Also large amounts of currently productive farmland are already at risk due to the Colorado being oversubscribed and declining aquifers.
Heck, just stopping at the dry lake bed at Xyyzyy would show the issue with trying to use the Mojave river.
While I am glad the author had fun with this thought experiment, the idea is simply not realistic in its current form.
> Those of us who live down wind of it are already suffering the effects of it drying, and if it continues to dry. Millions will be displaced due to the health effects of Arsenic in the dust etc..
It sounds like you agree with the author that refilling the salton sea and the great salt lake would be a big win… I don’t understand this line as a counterargument.
Refilling the salt lake should be a goal to protect existing populations, that is not the same as creating new population centers that we have even greater challenges.
Unfortunately curbing growth and shifting agriculture needs to other locations is probably the only practical way.
The Bear River divide is next to the Green River drainage, as that is already in a state of overallocation to support SW desert populations, that isn't practical.
Pumping water into death valley wouldn't be the way to get water into the the Salt Lake either, and would still have to deal with disposing of the brine in scales gar larger than any municipal supply.
Why should the rest of us subsidize the people who want to live in a place that is so inimical to human life?
Are you talking about the article or section 8 housing?
Reminds me of one of the big open secrets of North America: northern Ontario and northwestern Quebec are fertile. There is a 250,000 sq. km clay belt that spans almost from Winnipeg to Ottawa. The growing season is short but sufficient for grains and beans and such.
It's the opposite problem. Drainage is poor and there is too much rain at the wrong time, so the land needs heavy drainage. Also it's miserably cold in winter, and it's far, far from the cities. The government tried settling it but most of them moved back south. Less than 5% of the area is under till or pasture today. The whole thing could be turned into a potato belt on the scale of the Prairies. If we could find anyone willing to live there. Truth is there are other places better suited.
Att 55 degrees latitude is is comparably pretty far south in Scandinavian terms, like Denmark. And we do grow crops in Sweden.
Inland climate in Canada and (for Scandinavia) the Gulf Stream could make the difference. Although I imagine the Hudson bay should give it more of seaside climate?
From a map I found[0], it looks like Sweden has an average annual temperature of around +5⁰C, and northern Ontario and Quebec are closer to -5⁰C?
[0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/92/Annual_A...
Thanks. Must be the Gulf stream and general seaside climate. We have it better than we deserve.
But only 20000 years ago Sweden was covered in 3km of ice.
The Laurentide ice sheet over North America was similar depth and receded 15000 years ago. A blink in geologic time
I just looked up Cochrane ON because I hadn't heard of it before and yeah, it seems a bit of a mystery to me why it isn't more settled. I live around Edmonton where farming is a major industry, and just for comparison:
Mean daily temperature range (min to max): Cochrane -19c to +24c, Edmonton -15 to +23
Growing season: Cochrane 155 days, Edmonton 123 days
Frost free days: Cochrane 99 days, Edmonton 135 days
Precipitation: Cochrane 90cm, Edmonton 42cm
Around the first world war when the area was being settled, wikipedia quotes "7 months of snow, two months of rain, and the rest black flies and mosquitos. If I had to describe Edmonton, it would be 6 months of winter, one month of rain (June), 2 months of mosquitos, and 10 months of sun.
If I had to guess, the frost free days is a big factor. Even though Edmonton is further north, we benefit from the jet stream coming over the mountains and largely keeping the arctic air mass away from us. The jet stream tilts further south into the US by the time you get over to Ontario so Manitoba and Northern Ontario can get some bitterly cold winds.
Anyone… or robots?
Depends on what counts as a robot and how far you want to take them.
In the extreme case, we can do aeroponics in greenhouses anywhere on the planet. Or another planet. Or space stations.
But how much does it cost compared to open-air in soil?
The great question is why.
That is, if we build a ton of solar and storage capacity, wouldn't it actually make a ton more sense to use that to decarbonize the rest of our energy infrastructure, rather than going into a giant desalinization project? I'm not arguing that what TFA proposes is technically impossible, I'm just arguing that it makes 0 sense from an economic or societal perspective. For all the advancements the world has made in renewable energy, we still pump out a record (or near record) amount of greenhouse gases every year: https://ourworldindata.org/greenhouse-gas-emissions
It makes a lot of sense for the same reason California is the most productive agricultural region in the world. The arid climate is optimal for consistently growing crops with low risk of disease year-round. Instead of having to import winter crops from overseas we could instead grow them in Arizona, and transport them on rail across the United States vs. importing them on ships from around the world. That also would have a huge impact on greenhouse emissions, and farmland really does "Terraform" the desert and make it more livable by lowering temperatures and helping to keep down dust.
I obviously have no idea how the math works out in detail, but I'd be pretty surprised if the economics of this were feasible. That is, spend a ton of money (and energy) to terraform sizable swaths of the Arizona desert just to avoid transporting in crops from Mexico right across the boarder? I'd be skeptical that even a back-of-the-napkin estimate would consider this possible. Relevant example: there are a bunch of rice farmers near Houston that are dependent on the Colorado River for irrigation (note, this is the Colorado River in Texas that runs through downtown Austin - completely different river from the Colorado River that goes through the Hoover Dam and supplies a ton of the Western US with water). Given how we've been getting drier over the past decades, the rice farmers are now frequently cut off from water because that water is deemed more important for city dwellers upstream where the economic return on that water usage is much greater.
If we can't even get enough water to these rice farmers (where it's actually relatively swampy, and note TX is a leader in renewable energy generation in the US), it seems like a silly pipe dream to talk about growing kale in the Arizona desert.
> wouldn't it actually make a ton more sense to use that to decarbonize the rest of our energy infrastructure
Some portion of electricity is lost in transmission the longer the distances no? At some point it makes more sense for solar panels in San Diego to desalinize right next to them then try to get that energy to Maine.
High voltage transmission lines are remarkably efficient, with losses of 2-3% per 1000km. And while I assume you were using hyperbole, nobody needs to get power from San Diego to Maine in the first place.
? Its more a pump it already desalinated from up north rowards the south?
How often has mankind attempted to alter the landscape to suit his purposes and found that, instead of improving it, it is destroyed instead. Far better is learn to live in the conditions as they are and adapt the techniques to utilize the natural resources. In some cases, maybe even that simply isn't possible so we just don't live there.
Probably 99% of us are alive because our ancestors altered the landscape to provide food and shelter.
Yes, it goes wrong sometimes, but on balance it's a great, even essential thing.
Don’t misinterpret what I wrote to think we should leave it alone! Obviously, we’ve been doing it for millennia but we’ve only had the tools and machinery to massively change things for 200 years, or so. A farmer digging ditches to route water to his fields using a shovel, plow, and some mules is hardly equivalent to something like Three Gorges dam, the LA aquaduct, or the deforestation of the Amazon basin on a massive scale.
The human lifetime and memory are short. Don't neglect that much forest (in at least the US) has been chopped down multiple times over. The effects of that are still playing out, similar that we have carved up animal habitat with a dense road grid, and have done things like remove the buffalo.
Yes don't get me started on this path. Draining marshes, improving soil, air conditioning and heat, levelling grades, dredging rivers.
All capital and labor intensive.
We can manage without destruction and it's enabled exponential population and economic growth in a virtuous cycle.
Humans altering the landscape enables civilization. Personally I'm more biased towards that than ecological conservatism.
We should maintain a balance of course. I suppose the real problem here is agreeing on what "balance" means.
> I suppose the real problem here is agreeing on what "balance" means.
Yet I think we can hopefully all agree that expending unbelievable quantities of energy in order to desalinate seawater and pump it uphill a thousand miles in order to turn a desert canyon into a lake for absolutely no good reason whatsoever does not qualify as "balance".
I don't understand "expending" energy in this case. Obviously a key part of the plan would be to use the unbelievable quantities of solar energy currently just going to waste.
It doesn't even require high tech pv, just plain mirrors to make just plain heat for a large portion of the work.
And pumping water is not just a cost, it's also a battery, a hugely valuable thing we don't have enough of yet, which would enable more of the grid to live on renewables.
It's not all magic but it's not all impossible nor pointless either.
Well the second paragraph of the article lays out what the author thinks the "good reasons" are.
I don't even know if I agree or disagree with those as "good reasons". But also, we obviously don't all agree on them. Like, at all.
To me things are in balance if they're long term sustainable.
The ecosystems are where we live, what you say makes basically zero sense.
Landscapes are altered by all life forms, including plants, animals and believe it or not humans.
We are part of the ecosystem. We shape it too.
As plants animals evolved over millions of years to change their landscape, the rest of nature evolved to follow suit.
Not so when humans drastically alter the environment in short periods.
There's a difference between clearing a few trees for a cabin vs desalinating and pumping millions of gallons of water and transforming the ecology of a state.
Yes. Indeed there is a difference between a philosophical consideration and a practical one.
Of course we're part of nature and whatever we do will not "destroy" the world like the world was not "destroyed" when algae pumped toxic oxygen in the atmosphere.
But for all intents and purposes we're able to "destroy" the things we care about the world and turn it into a place we would quite hate to live in (while cockroaches and rates may have no problems with it)
Check pictures from before 1920 - note that all the trees are cleared from around towns and buildings. The cumulative scale is immense when everyone had a cabin and used wood for heating. I think you're understating the impact of "a cabin." European style living is not very sustainable, compared to those that lived in NA for many thousands of years prior.
Ah, the "private citizens owning nukes is covered under the 2nd Amendment" take.
Flattening ontologies doesn't do anything useful.
Virtually all of Europe used to just be forest. Large swathes of East England used to be uninhabitable swamp, much of the Netherlands used to be underwater.
Partly proves the point of the OP: cutting out the forests and draining the swamps led to soil erosion, massive floods, and loss of biodiversity.
I'm not saying it had no reason or benefit, obviously it was for economic reasons (extra land for agriculture and human settlements), just that it is not something that should "obviously" be done.
GPs point makes it sound as though the destructive parts were unintended and a surprise. They often weren’t, and they very rarely are these days when it comes to “landscaping” (sorry if that’s the incorrect terminology in English).
We know perfectly well how to alter the land we live on. At least in the EU we’ve been turning fields into swamps or forests and back again for various reasons since we industrialised farming. Basically all of the effects are known. While we can agree or disagree with a lot of the choices that are made in terms of economic growth, it’s not like what happens is surprising or unintended.
If you think this is a convincing counterpoint, I assure you it is not.
I agree with you: swamps and forests do a lot of work to make this planet habitable.
I find it convincing
It’s only not a convincing counter point if you’re a fantasist thinking we should be living in a Bronze Age utopia.
I suspect if pressed this would turn out to be Motte and Bailey argument where:
Motte: deforestation and draining wet lands is bad
Bailey: we should reduce the global population by 95% so we can live without modern agriculture
> if you’re a fantasist thinking we should be living in a Bronze Age utopia.
Bronze Age people were smart enough to live in places with easy access to fresh water, so they're demonstrably wiser than whoever came up with this proposal.
> Bronze Age people were smart enough to live in places with easy access to fresh water
But not wise enough to invent antibiotics so it’s a head-scratcher; am I willing to put up with pumped water to avoid dying of cholera and lockjaw?
Also probably about 1 out of 16 of us would be living at all.
Pretty often. The article's title is a bit misleading to it's own detriment; "terraforming" brings to mind images of using massive furnaces to burn mass to release CO2 on a barren planet. What the author of this article is proposing is pretty routine relative to human societal needs, which is shifting the flow of bodies of water to get water to Nevada. I'm not a geology expert so I don't know the viability of this proposal, but it seems the author is proposing to bring flow back to rivers that have dried up at some point in the past.
I took enough geology in college to understand that humans have been shifting riverflows since at least the Ancient Egyptians (with the Nile river), and Los Angeles' vitality is a product of artificial waterflow shift (the movie Chinatown touches on this at least tangentially). If I'm not mistaken, even Hoover Dam diverts a significant amount of water that once flowed elsewhere, though many environmentalists would tell you today that dams are horribly harmful to local ecosystems.
My guess is that with climate change causing significant changes to multiple regions via weather and climate, causing massive upheavals for large swaths of populations, it might be in America's interest to consider where it could create new population centers again by shifting waterflow.
> relative to human societal needs, which is shifting the flow of bodies of water to get water to Nevada
This is not a societal need. If you want access to fresh water, do not choose to live in a desert.
It wasn't the lack of water that made Florida inhospitable, it was the climate. Florida's population explosion precisely coincides with the adoption of air conditioning in American households, in the post-war period[1]. Very few people want to live in a place where it's so hot and humid all the time.
> During the last ice age, only 10,000 years ago
We're still in an ice age. An ice age is simply when the earth's poles have an ice cover.
[1] - https://countrydigest.org/florida-population/
> An ice age is simply when the earth's poles have an ice cover.
Are you sure? I'm not seeing that definition anywhere, and it looks like even in interglacial periods there's permanent ice in both hemispheres: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_age#Glacials_and_interglac...
Interglacial periods are a part of ice ages. Even tells you right at the beginning of that article.
> Individual pulses of cold climate within an ice age are termed glacial periods (glacials, glaciations, glacial stages, stadials, stades, or colloquially, ice ages), and intermittent warm periods within an ice age are called interglacials or interstadials.
You can actually see the definition (albeit a little verbose) as the first sentence of that article:
> An ice age is a long period of reduction in the temperature of Earth's surface and atmosphere, resulting in the presence or expansion of continental and polar ice sheets and alpine glaciers.
On a technicality, you can get me for not mentioning the snow capped mountains part, I'd concede on that. That part is actually news to me. All the same, the earth is colder than it usually is. [1]
An interesting thing I like to bounce around in my head: Could we live in the interior of the Pangean super continent if we had to? Interesting stepping stone between Earth's current, very mild climate, and trying to live in a place like Venus. Definitely would have to live like mole people.
[1] - https://www.climate.gov/media/11332
> Could we live in the interior of the Pangean super continent
We already avoid living in the interior of Australia, because living at temperatures of +50°C is just not very compatible with having body temperature slightly below +37°C. Same applies to the middle of Sahara desert. It's not impossible though, because the humidity is very low there, so, given a supply of water, you can cool by evaporation. At high humidity. you'd just die; such things happen during heat waves on the Indian subcontinent, for example.
People certainly die during heat waves, on the Subcontinent and elsewhere. High heat at high humidity is dangerous to endure.
However, there is no historical record of the wet bulb temperature outdoors exceeding human body temperature, anywhere, ever. So far.
Which is what it would take for the human body to be unable to remove excess heat in any fashion.
The current record of 36.6 seems like it would be close enough to cause major issues.
> However, there is no historical record of the wet bulb temperature outdoors
That’s not really saying much. The historical record is vanishingly small.
See also: chapter one of Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future.
> Individual pulses of cold climate within an ice age are termed [...] ([...] or colloquially, ice ages),
Looks like both sides are right in this case.
Mmm, looks like you're right. Sorry!
No worries. It's not commonly known! For as important as it's become to talk about the climate, the brass tacks remain pretty esoteric.
I will not argue about definitions of terms, but there was a recent study that I found linked on washingtonpost.com I believe (Edit: found, added).
WP article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/09/1... (https://archive.md/RM8ez)
> ...humans evolved during the coldest epoch of the Phanerozoic [the time period from 540 million years ago to the present], when global average temperatures were as low as 51.8 F (11 C).
> “We built our civilization around those geologic landscapes of an icehouse,” Judd [one of the study's authors] said.
Study (restricted): "A 485-million-year history of Earth’s surface temperature" -- https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adk3705
> Partitioning the reconstruction into climate states indicates that more time was spent in warmer rather than colder climates
Look at the graph - our time is on the very right. We humans developed and are still living in unusually cold times for this planet, historically.
Coming from that part of the world, I'm relatively certain the elimination of malaria was the cause.
> Florida's population explosion precisely coincides with the adoption of air conditioning in American households
This is also the case for Arizona, Phoenix in particular.
Air conditioning is one of the great inventions of the 20th century, it’s up there with the airplane, antibiotics, transistor, and shipping container.
Especially if you include refrigeration for foods.
Absolutely agree. So far, the transistor (i.e. computation, internet, mobile, AI) has been less transformative than earlier breakthroughs like refrigeration, the automobile and the airplane.
Hard disagree. The internet has been WILDLY transformative.
I mean look at what we’re doing right now on HN.
IIRC Twitter was a big part of the Arab spring.
Politics have been warped around it as most political discourse now takes place online.
There are so many examples of society all over the world warping and changing due to comparatively unfettered access to global information.
It’s crazy to say the internet wasn’t at least as transformative as automobiles or planes.
Just because it didn’t directly change the physical world doesn’t mean is wasn’t transformative.
In my view politics is largely a sideshow compared to technological advancement as it is mostly about how to divide up the pie as opposed to growing it. While people can communicate various political ideas more freely, it actually doesn't matter than much unless the political situation gets bad enough that it leads to a dark age. Therefore technologies that merely make it easier to communicate political ideas are less impactful than technologies that directly improve life (e.g. most people would not trade their fridge for a Twitter account). Of course, I am glad that both exist.
I agree with your overall point, but I would add that technology has significantly increased leisure time, and the fact that communication platforms are how many people use that extra leisure time proves their value beyond what you might expect just looking at a hierarchy of needs.
I'm not sure that it has. The workweek remains at 40 hours and most people still work about 40 years. Furthermore, in advanced economies the per household cumulative hours worked has roughly doubled since the transistor was invented. The dishwasher and washer/dryer are the last technologies that actually increased leisure time and predated the transistor.
I'm hopeful that AI + robotics will improve the situation but so far there have been very little quality of life improvements due to the transistor (coding is very fun however).
I don't hate your argument, but the Arab Spring citation is some idealism from over a decade ago. The Arab Spring mostly failed and almost all of those countries remained autocracies?
True, but the fact that a revolutionary social movement was organized across an entire global region was enabled because of the internet was what I was trying to highlight.
Oh come on, that take is too cute by three halves. The internet was the biggest change in human society of the 20th Century, if not the millennium. And while you’re peeling that one apart, the transistor also laid the bedrock for GPS, modern medical devices like pacemakers and insulin dispensers, mass-communication/mass-media with live broadcast capable of reaching billions of people, and like 10 even bigger things my brunch-addled mind isn’t thinking of at the moment.
I know it’s a cool thought exercise to go “what if the things I like/care about actually aren’t that important in the grand scheme of things?” But at the end of that exercise you’ve got to come back to reality.
If you to choose your fridge or the internet, which one would you choose?
I love technology but 100% in camp fridge.
and even more, the generalization of "air conditioning" and "refrigeration" into "heat pumps" ...
Good point, I do a lot of work with HVAC contractors and implicitly include refrigeration in my ‘air conditioning’ mental model but not everyone does.
Air conditioning was huge, but surely mosquito control and the elimination of malaria also played a major role in making Florida habitable. People drained the swamps and sprayed enough poison to kill off at least most of the mosquitos.
He does mention that:
> In Florida, a combination of development, drainage, and air conditioning created one of the most desirable cities on Earth from a previously pestilential swamp.
The problem with South Florida is that it had too much water.
Holding up Florida and Los Angeles as models for development doesn’t seem like a good argument to me. No thanks.
No, thanks. People are destructive to the planet in every way possible, and we don't need more. It's not as if we'll solve the mysteries of existence twice as fast by having twice as many people. If anything, having double the consequential pollution will halve the speed of discovery.
I agree. Megaprojects that make large changes to highly chaotic systems never end well. From Mao's Four Pests to the ongoing wildfire crises that plague the west coast thanks to all the terraforming California has undergone (exacerbated by ongoing climate change)
To say nothing of the fact that this is wanton environmental destruction. Just because something is arid, it's alright to completely change it? And for what? Having lived in Dallas, which is not unlike Nevada but more humid and wet, it's not a proper place to live. People jump from pool of air conditioning to pool of air conditioning. You go outside and walk for just 5 minutes, and you're completely soaked in sweat. Shade does not help. Lack of concrete does not help, you can drive 2 hours into the middle of nowhere and it's still like being in a preheated oven. You can't really do anything fun outside for half the year because you'll get heat stroke, or generally just be extremely stinky.
If you want to make use of empty land, going to the miserably cold uninhabited swaths of Canada are far wiser. You can always bundle up, but you can only take off so many layers of clothing.
Arguably the wildfires occur due to not enough meddling by humans. That is, due to not cutting enough old and dead trees, which dry up and become easier to catch fire, and not cutting wide enough openings in the forests to stop the spread of a fire when it occurs. The current wildfire situation is what the natural order of things looks like :-\
There used to be redwoods all over california. Hardy fire resistant trees, now they are relatively scarce. Second,wood is heavy. The economics to remove dead trees is not there, does not get done for reasons. Next, the area of the land is immense. Cutting fird brakes through it us tens of millions of acres. Further, fire breaks do little in high wind situations. What does move the needle are forest fires. Letting them burn. We've been practicing industrial scale fire suppression since the 50s. Next, immense areas of tree farms, second and third growth forests.
Best thing, get the hell out of the forests and let them all burn on a regular basis.
Redwoods are fire resistant. Their thick bark acts as shielding and their canopies are way above the height where fires historically burnt.
Previously, people raked the forest, and that worked OK for 1000’s of years. Before that, fires burned uncontrolled, which also cleared out the underbrush.
The problem we have now is due to almost a century of fire suppression. We stopped raking the forest and also stopped letting small fires clear out the accumulated fuel.
Of course, global warming doesn’t help. Neither does PG&E’s historic lack of line maintenance.
There is also a second way of stopping fires, which is to create 10x more man-made lakes, ponds, and streams everywhere in the region. It will increase the local humidity, which will in turn diminish the risk of fires. The approach is to maximize the surface of the volume of water exposed to the air. This works because fires require dryness, which will be impossible with sufficient water evaporation and humidity in the area. It is a superior form of terraforming than controlled fires.
That’s probably a losing battle. The coast is already extremely humid due to fog drip.
The problem is that we get crazy weather patterns now due to global warming. For instance, it was ~100F for about a week a few weeks ago, which made everything nice and crispy.
Then, when it cooled off, we got hit with a long windstorm and 15-20% humidity. If that storm had brought lightning, there would have been widespread uncontrollable fires (too windy for helicopters).
It’s not just California. This sort of thing has happened repeatedly in the last few years in most states in the western US.
That is highly debatable. There are overhead electric cables that often cause the trees to catch fire. Installing cables underground or with stronger insulation and auto-power-shutoff could help prevent several of the fires.
Sometimes electrical lines or humans cause fires, true.
But usually it's just lightning. Far more fires, by count, are caused by lightning.
Overall most wildfires (in at least the US west) are human caused:
"People — whether purposeful, reckless or simply careless — are responsible for about 95% of California’s wildfires."
https://calmatters.org/environment/wildfires/2024/07/califor...
That is true, but fixing that would merely reduce the frequency of the fires, while raising the intensity.
Fires have their own cadence - they happen when the dead leaves and plants accumulate enough there’s sufficient fuel to maintain a forest fire. When we stop all fires the fuel piles up and the next fire is much worse and harder to stop. Up to a point we simply can’t stop it and it consumes all fuel and the forest starts from scratch.
Living stuff contributes too. Anything under 20 feet tall. If it was just dead material, tree farms would not burn. (But they do, they certainly do)
> People are destructive to the planet in every way possible,
Are we already on track to cause our planet to no longer be a planet?
> It's not as if we'll solve the mysteries of existence twice as fast by having twice as many people
Imagine if the people at ASML (or your favorite other one-of-a-kind cutting edge place) had twice as many hours in their days. Or alternatively, if there were twice as many of them. Shouldn't that make them able to do more cool things?
You conveniently ignored the part where I noted that having double the consequential pollution will halve the speed of discovery. And yes, the pollution will double because more humans means more pollution that accumulates without getting recycled. Plastics, PFAS, CO2, etc. are all examples of pollutants that do not get recycled. It harms brains, aging them prematurely. A cleaner environment without strong financial pressure for survival is a much better way to do more cool things. Once the CO2 exceeds 800 ppm, brains will be tired all of the time, too tired to invent anything cool.
> You conveniently ignored the part where I noted that having double the consequential pollution will halve the speed of discovery.
You claimed it, without evidence, without even argument.
Given that history (as I read it) does not support your statement, and you didn't support it either, why shouldn't we ignore it?
Have you traveled to third world countries with very high population densities? Have you breathed the air on their streets? Travel to China, India, parts of the Middle East, other parts of Asia, and realize just how foul the air there is to breathe. That's what you want for the US? The evidence is already strong that plastics, PFAS, and CO2 are not recycled; they just keep piling on in the environment and in the human body. You can literally smell plastic burning in the air in those countries and regions, and the immune system reacts very strongly to it in a negative way. Developing anything cool will be the last thing on the mind at that time.
You don't even have to travel that far. The air between middle of nowhere US and everywhere else USA is very different. It is amazing how quickly we get used to our local environments (order days/weeks).
> Travel to China, India, parts of the Middle East, other parts of Asia, and realize just how foul the air there is to breathe. That's what you want for the US?
I'll go out on a limb and predict that their answer to that would be "no". I don't think you're assuming good faith here.
I am assuming bad faith for a good reason, which is that the parent comment failed to acknowledge the obvious, which is that the listed pollutants keep accumulating in the environment, proportional to the number of people that exist. In fact, the parent comment even rejected this established knowledge, thereby proving its bad faith.
You are assuming bad faith because you are reading things into my words that are not there.
I do not deny that (some) pollutants accumulate. I also do not deny that pollution is quite bad in some places.
I am specifically questioning your claim that doubling pollution would specifically halve the rate of innovation. I was pointing out that you have not supported that statement. You claimed it twice, you still haven't supported it, and I'm pretty sure that you can't support it.
Stop trying to read into my statement wild claims that aren't there. Can you support your claim?
Yes, microplastics accumulate in the brain over the years [PMID: 38765967]. They cause anxiety [PMID: 37269995] and brain inflammation [DOI: 10.3390/ijms241512308]. There is a lot more research on them than I am quoting here.
When someone is suffering from crippling anxiety, if you have ever suffered from it, the last thing on their mind will be to develop anything cool.
Moreover, microplastics accumulate and harm various organs, not only the brain. They also cause generational infertility due to the pervasive co-presence of toxins like phthalate in them [PMID: 39446714].
Similarly, higher CO2 levels are detrimental to cognition. This has been known for years and is established knowledge.
First, these studies merely suggest that microplastics have these effects in humans, yet you state them as fact. However, I don't want to argue that microplastics are harmless or that pollution is not an issue. Neither do I want to defend the point that doubling the population doubles the "speed of discovery". But even if all of your points are accurate, you would still have to show that these negative effects outweigh the benefit of a priori doubling productivity. In fact, you make the even stronger claim that doubling the population will actually cut the "speed of discovery" in half. None of this is substantiated by your argument.
If the Casey's interest is in terraforming the American West to support substantial population growth, I would start with the Columbia River Basin and identify the bottlenecks to growth there.
The Columbia River drainage basin is larger than the Great Basin (670k km2 [1] vs 541 km2 [3]), it's the 4th largest river in the US by flow [1], and there are already existing megaprojects like the Columbia Basin Project [2] that have unmet potential.
If the growth Casey envisions isn't happening and/or won't happen with the easy access to substantial volumes fresh water of the Columbia River then it's very unlikely to occur in the scenario they envision with desal + pumping water into the Great Basin.
- [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia_River - [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia_Basin_Project - [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Basin
Yeah this is the place to do it. Much less competition with established places.
I think Bend and Boise are likely to experience rapid expansion in the next 20 years on the west coast, especially as winters grow milder.
Didn't we have the super-cheap solar powered desalinization guy on HN about two months ago?
Each year, MIT announces they solved solar desalination:
- 2021 [1]
- 2022 [2]
- 2023 [3]
- 2024 [4]
[1] https://news.mit.edu/2020/passive-solar-powered-water-desali...
[2] https://news.mit.edu/2022/solar-desalination-system-inexpens...
[3] https://news.mit.edu/2023/desalination-system-could-produce-...
[4] https://news.mit.edu/2024/solar-powered-desalination-system-...
Are you not seeing the progress in the articles? It went from a lab proof-of-concept to a working prototype producing in real life 5000 liters/day passively. That's impressive as hell.
Colorado river averages 500,000 liters a second, and we use every drop of it. Scaling up from 0.055 liters per second is going to be expensive
Right. Remember, the issue is not whether it can be done, but how cheaply. Desalinization works fine now, but it's kind of expensive. These claimed breakthroughs are cost reductions. For that, you have to scale up to at least small production and measure costs. Only then you can boast.
2021-2023 is one approach, and 2024 is something else entirely. The 2024 thing is brackish groundwater cleanup.
Probably the place that makes the most sense would be Idaho/Oregon/Washington. The weather is relatively moderate (compared to the midwest), more water available nearby.
The weather is a bit nicer in Utah/Colorado/New Mexico - especially the lower elevations, but it’s too reliant on the Colorado/Rio Grande IMO, and has to compete with southern California and Arizona/Vegas and Texas. Western Montana is also nice but may be a bit too snowy in the winter until climate change takes hold.
Yikes. The sheer, unacknowledged hubris of this is bewildering. Let’s just remake the arid west?
One mans hubris, another mans hope for a better future.
To put this proposed project into context: humans already did something similar in scale in what is now the Amazon. We accidentally rewilded the entire area via plagues. The Sahara is also a pretty new thing, and something we could reverse.
We've long past the point of playing god or not. We now only have two options:
1. playing an incompetent god, pretending that our actions are not our fault
2. playing a competent god, taking responsibility and trying to do better
The Amazon is losing forested area, is nearly carbon positive, and was previously sparsely populated (it being a jungle and all). I have trouble squaring this understanding with the idea it was recently rewilded.
Surely you acknowledge that "taking responsibility and trying to do better" means learning from our past mistakes and not repeating them? The project in the OP is motivated by vanity, not necessity.
Wanting to make a biome more habitable is not vanity.
Is it vanity to want a park in your city or a river to be clean of pollutants?
We are scared of projects like this because the scale betrays our inability to do them or perhaps fully anticipate the consequences, which is good enough reason for caution.
But vanity? A garden is never reducible to vanity, it is the cultivation of the earth and the prosperity of living things, regardless of how vainglorious the gardener may be.
This might shock you, but we aren't the only species on the planet.
We cannot consume every piece of the planet and leave nothing for other species, and there are already far more of us than necessary.
There is already a biome living in the arid west. It’s hubris and vanity to remove and destroy that biome and replace it with our own.
How much of that biome is the result of a previous ecological disaster? The US is covered by those from what I've understood. Vast tracts of lands are arid because beavers were hunted to extinction for example. Protecting the accident of the previous 100 years doesn't sound so compelling.
A measurable ratio of a continent is not a garden or a city park. Even just using this metaphor seriously is, yes, straightforward hubris and vanity.
More habitable for whom?
The point is that we do not need this land. There is plenty of land all around the United States that is "habitable". And given the trend of birth rates and urbanization there is virtually no reason to go destroying fragile and unique ecosystems just so people can satisfy some compulsion for a manifest destiny of occupying every available square foot of this planet.
Truly, even if we were to disregard the ecological and social impacts on existing inhabitants, the energy required would be extreme. And thankfully that alone is enough to make this simply a fantasy.
I actually quite like the arid west, if anything we should be letting it return to aridity as current water use (I.e. rerouting a lot of the Colorado River to California) is well known to be on shaky ground at the least. If you don’t like arid areas move somewhere else.
Wow. What a project that would be!
Really interesting read, and while the numbers are a little hand wavy even if they were out on the cost by an order of magnitude it would still be very cheap.
The USA has lost its appetite for these mega projects, sadly.
I think the issue is that when you look at it from the modern perspective of profit the economics don't work out.
If look at it as a way to spend huge piles of money to subsidize a lifestyle it suddenly is less charming
You're spending $16B to create $1T of real estate value.
That would pay for itself in two years at 1% R/E tax and <10% interest.
I didn't read the entire article, but the reason it won't happen at this scale is because you could never acquire the property rights to be able to do it, not because it's a bad investment.
> The USA has lost its appetite for these mega projects, sadly.
Looking around at this thread, it's easy to see why. People value ecological conservatism over economic progress.
Of course, the type of economic progress we've had over the last few decades has been a mixed bag, due to structural deficiencies. But I don't agree with throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
The general cynicism and negativity makes me really sad. Esp for a community of builders and problem solvers.
I take the entirely opposite conclusion. Seeing so many value ecological conservatism over economic progress is to me optimistic and heartening. Over the past 100 years we've seen a shift to seeing the world as a shared world vs. one that is our manifest destiny to claim. I see others beginning to see a sense of shared responsibility for the stewardship of this world for the other living creatures as well as a recognition that our fates are more intertwined with theirs than we *used to think.
It is the easy and unsustainable solution. Akin to rewriting a codebase instead of fixing an existing one. Instead of solving the problems of nitrogen pollution, CO2 pollution, plastics- just find a new greenfield instead. Of course code rewrites rarely actually replace the old code. New and shiny is just way sexier than doing things like fixing poisoned waterways.
> People value ecological conservatism over economic progress.
Phrasing such a proposal as "economic progress" is entirely irrational. This is a solution looking for a problem. We have zero, zero, zero economic need for this.
Or phrasing it as "ecological conservatism". It's not "conservative" to start accounting for the previously unrecognized or outright disregarded negative consequences of these projects. Turns out healthy ecosystems are important for humans too.
Of course they are, nobody's disputing that.
I think I agree with you. Most people are not really arguing on those terms though.
Looking past the various NIMBY challenges to this project, I'd love to find a marine-safe desalination method too.
Apparently a lot of marine life gets absolutely wrecked when you pump in water from the California coast, but I see it mostly as a unique engineering challenge.
This should be possible!
Good? Do you understand the ecosystems and national parks that would be destroyed by this? Once those are gone they are gone. We don’t even need this nonsense, the population is contracting. We will have nothing but empty space in inhabited spaces already.
https://www.cbo.gov/publication/59899
Article talks about how 90% of the land would remain as is as well as 100% of the national parks, simply restoring watersheds that are intermittent or dried up to wetlands.
I didn't use the word good anywhere or even offer a value judgement, I simply called it interesting.
Also your tone sucks and makes me not want to discuss in good faith with you.
Article assumes people want to live in cramped cities.. clearly this is not the case when we look at where Americans choose to live, so premise is flawed. In reality 300 more Americans would spread out and wreck the environment more than it already is.
“what the hell does my tone got to do with it?[0]”
0 - https://youtu.be/Rv71ZCd_yno?feature=shared
There was some recent work on cheaper desalination based on cheap intermittent solar (the common reverse osmosis approach apparently doesn't work well with intermittency) that mirrors the blog writer's approach to efuels, so surprised he didn't mention it.
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2024/05/01/novel-pv-driven-desal...
However, I was under the impression that for the US it's mostly a market failure and farmers are intentionally wasting scandalous amounts of water because they'd lose their water rights if they used the countries resources optimally.
Kind of reminds me of an idle thought I have every now and then. Between the sheer difficulty of establishing any kind of foothold on Mars, and the vast amount of uninhabited land, it’s curious that more thought hasn’t been given into the much easier task of making the empty parts of the planet more bearable.
Alas, the list of reasons to live in the Great Plains is very short, which is also why I’m kind of skeptical of terraforming the American West. You can make existing major cities more livable, sure, but don’t expect a surge of people moving to Montana or Wyoming.
By contrast, Los Angeles and Miami have ocean access. Terraforming coastline is a no-brainer.
Colonizing Mars is a joke. Earth was more habitable the day after the asteroid hit that Mars is now.
More people (net, absolute numbers and percentages) move to Montana or Wyoming than California, Oregon, and Washington combined.
Net migration to each of those coastal states is actually negative, so the "combined" is a bit of a red herring.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...
Yuck, this would destroy the ecology of the area and require an insane amount of energy. If water is scarce, the most efficient thing to do is move the humans.
The article mentions solar desalination.
So if I build a plant today to produce water at 22 cents per cubic meter, somebody could come along next year and build another plant that produces water for 15 cents and put me out of business. Then the year after that, another plant produces water for 10 cents, etc. You need 20-year contracts to sell water at a fixed price to make this work.
Modern desal uses chemicals in the water to help prevent mineral buildup within the plant, and these chemicals are present in the effluent. I wonder if the author has accounted for this pollution?
It is terrifying to me that people like this author exist and are serious. Even more terrifying is the possibility that one day, someone in power will read this and think, hey, that's a good idea.
(also terrifying: who is upvoting blogs like this??? is there really a vast underground of people in favor of destruction of the [remaining] environment so we can add a trillion more acres of concrete strip-malls and Wal-Marts?)
I guess one man's economic miracle is another man's environmental disaster.
The western water projects were an engineering marvel, but short sighted. And Florida? Gee, how long can it stand against the rising seas?
They weren't short sighted, they expected we would continue and keep improving the infrastructure. We built some utterly incredible infrastructure in the past (Bridges, highways, dams, reservoirs, aqueducts, etc.) and then people stopped dreaming and stopped building.
As a result we have been living on the infrastructure that our parents and grandparents built while supporting 10x the population. Which is incredible but at some point something has to give.
They didn't expect us to build a solution to undo destruction of the Owen's valley or the Colorado river delta.
Maybe it hasn't continued because that type of infrastructure reached a local maximum.
If you want dreams, how about reshaping the California Central valley as an enormous management intensive agroforestry system that uses highly diverse and resilient native species to meet human calorie needs.
This isn't an engineering challenge, it's a social, cultural, and political one.
If only Saudi Arabia had spent their money on this stuff instead of NEOM.
This raises questions.
What is the this desalination cost competing against, what's the alternative cost of importing water by tanker or pipeline?
Also, why do you want batteries, instead of just running the osmosis when there is sunlight? Maybe the osmosis equipment is expensive enough that it pays off to keep it 100% occupied with batteries?
The numbers in the OP show that the RO equipment is by far the largest cost so you need to maximize its utilization. The energy is used to pump water through the RO at high pressure so another alternative would be to use solar to pump water uphill so you could run the RO at night. The design using batteries is easier to price.
There are energy companies like Quidnet that are commercializing geopressure storage, where water is pumped underground at pressure, then recovered and the energy extracted. This would be an ideal system to combine with solar and RO.
https://www.quidnetenergy.com/
As I understand it, desalination produces brine, and that needs to be disposed of. Where does all of that go?
Aside from fossil water, all of our fresh water comes from desalinated sea water, transported inland by clouds - which shows that there is no brine problem as long as the brine is dispersed widely enough in the sea. “How widely” is enough is something I wish OP discussed.
I’d like to see the Colorado river less used. The author has a lot of good ideas.
> We’re missing 300 million Americans
I love this idea, and would be comfortable pushing the number even higher. The cool part about the US is it's relatively unpopulated as compared to European countries.
We could probably fit another 200 million or so people in the eastern half of the country, just by bringing it to the level of density of, say, the UK. If we were willing to live as densely as the Dutch, perhaps we could add 300 million in the eastern half.
Your proposal is fairly modest compared to some of the ideas out there.
In his wildly enthusiastic 1860 book The Central Gold Region, William Gilpin claimed that the Mississipi Basin could support at population of 1.2 billion people, and was destined to become the “world’s amphitheatre”, with all of the world’s trade running through it in a grand “Asiatic and European Railway”.
How optimistic to assume we would invest in trains.
We did invest in trains. There has been an enormous increase in the amount of freight moved by rail since 1860.
https://www.up.com/customers/track-record/tr120120-freight-r...
> of, say, the UK.
of, say, any small island. These dynamics are unnatural modes of compensation for other inconveniences.
> as densely as the Dutch
or, say, people who live under the level of the sea itself.
As a life long resident of the American West, I can imagine few ecological crimes more horrifying. This is one of the most unique geographies on this planet. The life here is thoroughly adapted to a fragile balance of long want and occasional abundance. Everywhere you "terraform" would obliterate that balance. The application of the word itself is obtuse. How can you make more Earth like what the Earth itself made? I suggest that you take your infrastructure projects and apply them where people already live. The damage has already been done there. And those places have an elasticity of life due to the high amounts of water that let them bounce back at some point. Instead I suggest for the West we take a page out of Edward Abbey and simply marvel at its incredible uniqueness and beauty.
Desert Solitaire https://a.co/d/16MZLfL
People assume deserts are lifeless and useless, as opposed to the intricate thriving ecosystems they actually are.
This is something "Crime Pays but Botany Doesn't" has been great at showing.
There are a number of interesting videos on YouTube about people who are adding swales and rock dams to their western land to slow down the departure of rain water. Apparently just these extra terraforming can be enough to turn barren land into a green and lush forest.
Has anyone tried this on their own land? I'm tempted to try it.
That's fantasy. If you don't live in the West it's difficult to appreciate that there simply is no water. No amount of of "swales" or rock dams change the fact that water doesn't fall from the sky in sufficient amounts to create a "lush green forest". Also every drop of water that hits the ground has been accounted for long ago and is part of some water pact. If you create a dam upstream you are guaranteed to get a visit from the water rights holders.
Actually, most of these regions have rain. (The Atacama does not!) And you do not need lush green forests right away, prairie grasses are a good start. Well-applied rain retention measures do work.
> Untouched and eighty years old, it was supposed to have been built by men with carts and horses during the Roosevelt years in the 1930s.
> The soil was springy and spongy when you walked on it. Like an uncompacted garden bed it was full of mulch captured by rain water. Eighty years of humus was deposited here during flash floods, without any help from mankind.
> The trees were all self seeded.
> Geoff plunged his hands into the soil and went down 8 inches of moist, black, rich, composted soil. It was still damp.
https://www.permaculturenews.org/2014/10/11/discovering-oasi...
Why? Honestly, why? There's so much uninhabited land out that isn't uninhabitable, which is already more land than we'll ever need for the sake of putting human habitats on. Go move to the great lakes if you want a combination of remote wilderness and an infinite supply of free fresh water.
Where?
I love Casey's stuff - just incredibly detailed, ambitious and reminds you of what the country used to do when it set its mind to it. His new company is across the street where they built the SR-71 which is fitting.
Casey is a person that is disconnected from reality. There is a reason that Nevada hasn't been terraformed. It isn't regulations or lack of will. It's physics. He would be better off if he spent more time building things and less time in his spreadsheets. Please read "Cadillac Desert" if you want to have more context.
The article refers to "Cadillac Desert" but seems to miss the part about how it was all a bad idea in the end.
It's always an interesting read, but he should hire someone to fix his website. (For example, when I first looked at it, all the pictures were missing.)
> just incredibly detailed
Other than forgetting that literal drilled wells exist.
Ground water is a very limited commodity, one which we are exploiting beyond sustainability. You are just plain wrong here.
I thought this was a good idea too but then a scientist pointed out that those areas radiate heat into space at night and the last thing we want right now is less of that.
It's a little like a bald person putting on a wool hat: great if you're cold, but counter-productive if you're already too hot.
- - - -
In the next twenty years we will build as much city as we have so far. In other words in the next twenty years the amount of urban area will double. We've gotta design and build these new cities to be in harmony with the global ecosystem that maintains life support for everybody.
"Building cities with ecological harmony" | Dror Benshetrit | TEDxAmazônia https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OrRCGY_lkk
> Indeed, solar PV is the first mass produced product where energy is an output rather than an input.
Fortunately, it takes no energy at all from inside the United States to manufacture solar panels in, you know, some place, over there, somewhere, that I have trouble pronouncing.
Doesn't matter. I just order them online and they magically show up on my doorstep.
Why don't you guys (= US'ers) start by not spilling that much crude oil and toxins into your existing potable water sources? :-(
I think that problem is greatly exaggerated by those with certain motivations.
It is not really.. there is massive polutionnof waterways. Iowa is one off the worst states for nitrogen pollution. In that state "just 24% of stream segments and 30% of lakes that were sampled were deemed healthy." [1]
I was traveling through iowa recently. There were ducks floating face down dead in polluted waterways. Algae so thick it looks like you could walk on it. It is quite bad..
[1] https://iowacapitaldispatch.com/2024/03/15/more-than-half-of...
great opportunity for hashicorp
No.
You go live in a city. Leave nature alone. Send the rest back where they came from.
The cartels should just build nukes in Mexico and pump desalinated water north. Win-win.
The foreign legion should just build nukes in France and transfer electricity east across the Maginot Line.
I mean.. the foreign legion didn't build them, but that's already a thing?
The hardest part with all of these things isn’t the technology. Usually it’s the coordination. High loss aversion among certain groups causes a reflexive resistance to any large scale project. Memetic mimicry has them reach the same result without explicit coordination.
Any society struggles with conservatives vs adapters. The population transition boundary is along prosperity. Until society reaches a certain degree of prosperity and prosperity alteration shows relative slowdown, adapters win. But afterwards, conservatives will fear movement downward.
It takes substantial adapter power to attempt transformative change. Once the transition boundary is hit, it doesn’t matter how much prosperity gain will be achieved. The key element is adapter power. In a democracy, especially, conservatism dominates past the prosperity boundary. The shape of bureaucracy will impede executive adapters.
America is mostly past the boundary and high-value change only occurs in fields where adapter power exists: opposition to BEVs, space technologies, AVs, chip fabrication, biotechnology, and land modification is strong. Adapter actions occur only through the use of executive power and memetic warfare: using conservatism language to promote subsidies for BEVs and permit AVs, military use for space launches, defence rationale for chips, and hiding biotechnology research until it’s ready.
Terraforming is too high-profile and easily fought. To succeed we need to transform it into using the language of conservatism (“restoring habitat”, e.g.), apply executive power (do so under military research auspices), or make it less valuable for conservatism to fight (many smaller projects rather than one big one).
We’ll get there, though. We’ll make the world better despite conservatism fighting us at every turn. Everything is good. Everything could be better.
Please do more research since it seems you are interested in this. The reason we haven't terraformed Nevada isn't lack of will, or coordination. It's physics and economics. If the technologies listed by the author existed they would be being exploited extensively today. Lack of water is too much of an issue. Billions if not trillions of dollars would flow to it, and any small regulatory issues would be knocked down instantly. This entire article is fantasy.
> Everything could be better.
There is no rationale contained in the proposal for why this would make anything better, or even if it did, why it would be a more desirable approach than any other proposal that does not involve fantasy engineering.
Won’t somebody please think of the sage grouse?