Would making a shallow canal trough the Sahara as pic related be able to transform it into fertile land? Sahara is quite hot, so water from ocean would evaporate quite quickly and form fucklot of clouds which should eventually bring rain. With enough rain, sand should be in a few generations mostly washed away and some new rivers could start to flow. The immediate effects on environment might not be very good, salt doesn't help plants and organisms grow well. On other hand - those 6 cactuses and 7 scorpions which live there - to keep them is no benefit to us. To destroy them is no loss.
Terraforming earth
Easton Baker
Kayden Fisher
sounds like a good idea but africans would probably dump their trash in there and great a worse situation
Hunter Peterson
it's never gonna rain in the sahara, it's on the tropic of capricorn, and air pressure is always extremely low in the lower and middle parts of the atmosphere which means winds are constantly blowing AWAY from the sahara, preventing cloud formation. And the sahara has literally no soil, we'de have to manually import soil from other parts of the world to make it arable. And even we did do all this, the wind wouldn't fucking stop, and since most grains (wheat, corn etc) aren't exactly good at stopping errosion the soil would be blown away in a deacade entirely.
Also the amount money and labour that's required to build such an ambitios project could be spent elseswhere, like in the Sahel region to prevent further desertification, or in central and eastern europe to rebuild protective forests.
overall this seems like really misguided idea.
Leo Scott
The only really effective way that live has managed to persist in those conditions is an oasis kind of situation, the area would require massive changes in atmospheric conditions to bring it to parity with less arid environmental conditions. As such, the way to make the area less dead would be to cultivate oasises, not massively change the environment there and completely change how the weather patterns and shit function. The way oasises form is that during periods where the water table is high, plants manage to get large enough to create a slight suction effect on the water table where those plants always have access to water. The trick is, replicating that kind of suction is difficult. If you create too much suction, you end up creating detrimental effects on the water table, and too little and the plants can't survive. We would need a large-scale project that focused on incrementally raising the water table and sustaining it for a couple decades so that a semi-arid ecosystem of trees and brush can form to sustain the water table at the level that we left it at, and then enact environmental protection laws to make sure that somewhat fragile ecosystem was kept in place.
Angel Smith
You'd need to run some proper weather simulations to get a definite answer, but I suspect it wouldn't work. The surface area is just too small compared to that of the surrounding ocean. If evaporation from the ocean doesn't cause rain, adding a tiny canal won't change things.
Dominic James
Indian and further asian parts seems to be ok with that.
What happens with water? It'd just dissapear?
And what is beneath the sand? Sandstone barrier to the middle of earth? There must be mud somewhere.
Fuck grains anyway. Having weed edible by animals would be enough. Animal farms could also help to bring nutrients to the land.
I agree that those are important projects, but that won't help me run away from this heat outside.
What would help more than large source of water waiting to be cleansed just a few kilometers away?
Owen Roberts
Oil CEOs being sent to Saharan work camps to dig climate change mitigating channels and planting trees would be epic.
Desertification and combating it also about the lack of water retention capabilities in the ground not just lack of rain. the water retention can be increased by plants, but that is not going to happen without water. In china the project against the Gobi desert expansion uses straw and plants to reclaim land from the sand. Something like that could work in Sahara too. They have been doing it since the 70s and it has been successful in gaining back the lost land.
Kevin Smith
Because, a problem with any kind of agriculture on arid terrain is that the water evaporation leaves particulate matter of whatever was in the water on the soil, and larger scale projects like this mean the accumulation of various chemicals and shit on the soil with no way to get rid of it, because the sand won't absorb it. Best case scenario the wind carries it away and it drastically affects somewhere else, otherwise the accumulation would eventually poison the plants. The same is not true with water table manipulation, it is long term far more sustainable, even if it is short term more resource intensive.
Nathan Wilson
The qattara depression has more possibilities, it lies way below sea level, pretty far inland, has high evaporation. It would cause moisturelevels in the whole surrounding area to go up massively, and we wouldnt have to dig a lot.
Henry Moore
Juan Edwards
Lamo, Eisenhower wanted to give Nasser support to do it so they could settle Palestinians there. I mean that's certainly something…
Brayden Thomas
How about we just not do that? There's no need to terraform the Earth away from how it was before the industrial revolution, we should just be trying to return to that state. Deserts are important ecological zones, it's like bulldozing a rainforest. Sure it's not a great place for humans to live but there are enough of those.
It would be much more sensible to just cover a tiny part of the Sahara in solar panels and power half the world that way.
Liam Hall
it'll be a interesting experiment, dont knock it till you try it.
Jason Fisher
You literally can't, tho. The only way forward is creating a new nature or going to hell.
Hunter Ross
wrong, it is possible to grow some kinds of moss, fungus, and trees, and to reduce wind on the dunes by setting up tiny bamboo/straw fences everywhere. Look up China's comparable efforts to re-forest the Gobi desert. We can use ecological science to literally re-build the soil out of the sands.
Oliver Gomez
Why can't we? We can geoengineer the world to be whatever we want, eventually. But we shouldn't be trying to make huge changes, IMO. The preindustrial world was the cradle of mankind, the animals that existed then grew up with us. It's the perfect place for man. I agree it's a bit spooky but trying to greenify the whole Earth is equally spooky if not more so. We should be trying to impact nature less, not more.
We should reverse the effects of climate change, regrow the amazon, et cetera, and not go crazy all over the map. All life should be sacred. We should just leave nature alone as much as possible, other than fixing our own mistakes.
James Ramirez
A single canal would be tough to make, a better idea would be to make a canal going out and then following the coast (say 200km in) and then have parts branching out.
Jordan Williams
It's a big assumption to make, that we may be able to just do whatever we want with the earth before our extinction, rather than striving to continue to exist within a certain series of parameters that permits our existence, maybe altering our requirements slightly, just like we have been doing since entering the 'cradle of mankind'. The biggest problem with nature and the reproduction of our existence is that the latter presupposes the consumption and therefore the irreparable destruction/transformation/alteration/whatever you wanna call it of individual regions and eventually of the larger global ecosystem. I believe this is the case even if you remove humans from the equation, even if the process would be vastly decelerated, the attempts of individual animals to reproduce their own existence might eventually, after several millions of years, impact the state of nature that allows them to exist negatively and prevent their own reproduction as well. The project to put back all that we use into nature, 'leaving it alone' and allowing it to perpetuate our existence, is in itself a project against nature. To try to stop it's movement is going to impact it more and take more energy than letting it annihilate everything will. Rather than feeling some form of guilt at being the prime influence in Earth, only openly accepting and maneuvering through that position allows for any protection of life.
Josiah Allen
The Sahara has actually been green at many times in the past. It alternates between grassy and savanna on a 40,000 year interval because of cyclical changes in the Earth's axial precession. In about 15,000 years after humanity is extinct the African monsoon will shift north again and bring rains to the Sahara. Until then, have a look at Egypt to see how well surrounding water actually affects the climate. Everything several kilometers away from the Nile remains arid desert.
Christian Foster
What?
Brandon Peterson
Nuclear desalination is the way to go.
Cogeneration results in high thermal efficiency in conventional plants and nuclear should be the same. Steam turbines directly drive pumps for reverse osmosis and waste heat is used to produce a small amount of fresh water through distillation.
The town of Aktau in Kazakhstan had a BN-350 reactor providing most of their fresh water for years.
Jose Cruz
yes but the sahara is growing far faster than it should be because of climate change. letting it be is not an option because right now all efforts should be put to counter the effects of human damage and stabilizing the global environments
Soviet attempts at peaceful nuclear explosions like Lake Chagan actually result in viable reservoirs.
An H-bomb with a total yield of 140 kilotons of TNT was detonated underground and an artificial lake was created as a result. To showcase the success of the project and the safety of the test, the Minister of Atomic Energy (I think the official name for this ministry was something like “Medium Machine Building”) E. P. Slavsky (Славский, Ефим Павлович), in his 60s at that time, before anyone else, jumped into the lake and swam. The guy seemed to have lived a healthy life after that and died on Nov. 28, 1991 at the age of 93 in Moscow.
Connor Cooper
I do understand that any vegetation within hundreds of kilometers could be destroyed by this invasive method. But what do we gain from bunch of oasis? Could they bring enough water to eventually provide enough food for bigger and farmable animals? I do admit that I din't see biology book since high school, but since there are plants in countries like spain or morocco, I do not think seawater is a poison.
found Varg
Kayden Murphy
I'm not sure if islandization of Africa would be very tolerable by population living there, but it certainly would make technocrat's wet dream of energy efficient transportation real possibility.
Jace Phillips
Aparently that lake is unsafe and is radioactive. Idk about using nukes even in that manner.
Andrew Davis
Get rid of shitskins first, then make use of land that people who cannot into agriculture don't
Aaron Sullivan
Face it, The global economy is going through a collapse and the environment is past saving. Medicine, food, and rare earth metals will be in shorter and shorter supply as the decades go on. No country will attempt to fix the environment because it simply isn't profitable. The American empire is exhibiting all the warning signs of a collapsing empire: its infrastructure is decaying, decreasing standard of living, mass immigration, resurgence of diseases, mineral exhaustion, and sub-replacement fertility rates. America will also drag the rest of the world down with it, due to the nature of the global economy. The entire world relies on specific countries to produce specific goods and services, they cannot rely on themselves. Countries like Japan and cities like Hong Kong will face mass starvation and revert to medieval levels of technology. Oil is becoming harder and harder to extract, and modern trade requires fuel, as does travel.
The changing sea levels will cause mass migration, will probably will end up in war and extreme nationalism. The destruction of top soil by modern agriculture will damage the world's food supply, even if we have the oil to transport food across the sea. Ocean acidification and overfishing are destroying the ocean as a biome, thus reducing the food supply even further. Potable water is increasingly becoming harder and harder to obtain, look at Flynt, Michigan. The richest 1st world country can't fucking provide its citizens with clean drinking water or roads. Aquifers are also being depleted. Pollution is destroying water supplies as well. Tap water does not filter out microplastics or hormones, which can cause prostate cancer, breast cancer, hair loss, infertility, etc. Unless you know how to filter your own water, you're drinking poison.
As for the collapse of the empire, war bands will start popping up. The human trafficking and drug cartels are just the start. There are many young men with no other skills than violence, and so the gang uses them to tear up aging empires. The german barbarians sacked Rome, and latin american drug cartels will eat away at the US. Countries like Mexico already barely rule themselves, many districts in Mexico are ran by the drug cartels, and politicians have no power over them. In America, gangs already are at war with police, and often times FBI/CIA types are in on the game and help facilitate narcotic sales. The future of the US looks like survivalist groups using stockpiled weapons to fight off war bands. Anyone with delusions of space travel of transhumanist catgirl is living in an anime. It's fun and romantic but entirely fictional.
This will not occur all at once. It will take decades if not centuries and will happen slowly. Preventative measures can be taken, but that only delays the process.
Asher Morris
Well realistically you can't make the Sahara human friendly without massively changing things like weather patterns and what have you, so the best thing to do in that scenario is to just make it the healthiest and most productive kind of environment possible while also not altering the ecological balance so much so as to actually change the wider patterns of the natural processes of the region. Hence, why we are just expanding a natural occurrence in the oasises.
Ethan Turner
Well there's always the nuclear tunnel melting mashine, if you want to revive 70's atomic age techno futurism.
Angel Rodriguez
the sahara was a rain forest about 10000-5000 years ago during the ice age and it will become a rain forest again in about 15000 years because of the north African weather cycle.
the question is how will terraforming the sahara affect the climate after 15000 years? will there be a more extreme ice age that wipes all wh*tes?.
in all seriousness terraforming the sahara and reverting all climate change without a significant change to people's lives is possible because we have enough resources, knowledge and labor force to do so but those are controlled by money which is controlled by porky and porky wouldn't profit from this project so no
youtube.com
Jose Sullivan
Dude, your a fuckining idiot, collapse of capitalism doesn’t mean collapse of civilization.
Lincoln Rivera
Give user a break, the phrase attributed to Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek, that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism describes a pervasive sentiment. This should be met with explanation not aggression. Maybe Recommend Capitalist realism by Mark Fisher, which among other things explores how the failure to imagine anything beyond capitalism comes about
As for this user it's a the same theme, inability to imagine anything beyond capitalism, obviously by imagining a future it's not reasonable assume that, the point of this thread obviously is about contemplating the transformation of the Sahara , if capitalism can't do that, then obviously capitalism isn't part of the future where people are transforming the Sahara. If you imagine the transformation of the Sahara how ever briefly and shallow in detail, then in fact you already caught a glimpse of the world beyond capitalism, a world where porky and the profits don't matter. It might be helpful to perhaps think beyond a mere prestige project of defeating a desert but rather a more about reasons why people would want to do that. Maybe climate change is a driver for this but quite possible that there would be more than that.
Blake Watson
No, it’s just a statement about people who haven’t really thought about economics.
Do you have anything useful to say, or is your brain bogged down in useless metaphysics?
Benjamin Collins
Dude, you're so retarded it hurts
Kevin Bailey
We don't in fact have the ability to move contents or affect the Earth's axial precession yet.
Oliver Wilson
*continents
Sebastian Moore
You know, there's a lot more to sea water than the water itself. If you're just gonna have water flow in from the sea and evaporate, it's gonna leave quite a bit of salt and other shit behind. And you don't want that stuff building up.
Austin Howard
As long as the canal is significantly below sea leval their will be continues water flow. And besides evaporation is the gaol as it will allow for rain in the Sahara.
Adrian Young
Well the salt concentration would increase if the canal just ends in a large lake, but then again, it's probably difficult to predict whether water will flow through the canal where it enters at one end and exists at another, it might just become a elongated saltwater lake with 2 inflow connections to the ocean and evaporation in the middle. there also is the thing with invasive migrating species, that would be blocked if salt concentrations became very high enough, so a super salty biologically dead water canal might have some ecological upsides as well. High salt concentrations also opens the possibility for osmosis power-plants.
Oliver Young
Bullshit bourgeois propaganda
John Perry
Let's just, for the sake of the debate, assume that someone would build build this canal. What is the worst that could happen? Destruction of sahara's fauna and flora - meaningless problem. Nothing I can find there can feed me properly and just wants to kill me. Could, however, this transformation bring climatic britification of europe? It would take lot's of decades before proper storm above the sahara, but that water would need to go somewhere.
Christian Campbell
Yeah, the water would fall down on the Sahara as rain. That’s the fucking point of the project.
Brandon Collins
But isn't it that the air blows away from the sahara?
I mean, if we were to make the qattara project, for example, where would the vaporized water go? To greece, the middle east and Italy?
Leo Taylor
Some of it would go to Europe, but some of it would fall immediately. A lot of it would go to North Africa.
Bentley Collins
Have you heard a thing called the butterfly effect?
Chaos theory postulates that changing nature will thange nature in other ways.
Change the land and you change the sky and sea.
I don't think the weather patterns in the Sahara will always be constant and ineffectual. The Sahara wasn't always a desert, nor was the South western united
States.
Juan Bailey
bump
Carter Young
Turning a literal desert into a salt lake isnt a bad deal mate. Salt lakes are great economic assets.
Gavin Perry
How?
Wyatt Garcia
This is the kind of shit that only someone who could fall for Marx's bullshit would ever be able to come up with….what utter nonsense.
Aaron Barnes
Stay mad
Adrian Gomez
There is no state of nature. There is no place on earth humans live adjacent to that hasnt been shaped and reshaped or at least somehow effected by our presence. The "natural balance" is ideology, we need ambitious but responsible environmental engineering on a large scale to counteract climate change, that's the only way you're going to reduce the effects, you can't just reverse the process.
Elijah Sullivan
you need to go learn literally anything about this subject and then come back
Wyatt Adams
Leo Harris
tumblr-tier response