[HN Gopher] We Can Terraform the American West
___________________________________________________________________
We Can Terraform the American West
Author : jasondavies
Score : 186 points
Date : 2024-10-26 00:22 UTC (22 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (caseyhandmer.wordpress.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (caseyhandmer.wordpress.com)
| OutOfHere wrote:
| 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.
| johnnyjeans wrote:
| 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.
| nine_k wrote:
| 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 :-\
| OutOfHere wrote:
| 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.
| freedomben wrote:
| That is true, but fixing that would merely reduce the
| frequency of the fires, while raising the intensity.
| rbanffy wrote:
| 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.
| seadan83 wrote:
| 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)
| margalabargala wrote:
| Sometimes electrical lines or humans cause fires, true.
|
| But usually it's just lightning. Far more fires, by
| count, are caused by lightning.
| seadan83 wrote:
| 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/cali
| for...
| OutOfHere wrote:
| 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.
| hedora wrote:
| 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.
| seadan83 wrote:
| 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.
| hedora wrote:
| Redwoods are fire resistant. Their thick bark acts as
| shielding and their canopies are way above the height
| where fires historically burnt.
| nine_k wrote:
| Forest fires may be fine, as long as they are not
| catastrophic.
|
| No need to prevent every fire. But it must be possible to
| prevent the fires from making air dangerous to breathe in
| cities, and certainly to prevent forest fires from
| burning down human settlements.
|
| No need to terraform the whole land, but culturing it a
| little bit to make more habitable should be fine.
| hedora wrote:
| 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.
| tbrownaw wrote:
| > _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?
| OutOfHere wrote:
| 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.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| > 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?
| OutOfHere wrote:
| 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.
| cle wrote:
| > 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.
| OutOfHere wrote:
| 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.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| 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?
| OutOfHere wrote:
| 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.
| luc4 wrote:
| 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.
| seadan83 wrote:
| 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).
| jamiek88 wrote:
| 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.
| c0nfused wrote:
| 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
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| 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.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| 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
| jamiek88 wrote:
| 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.
| moribvndvs wrote:
| "what the hell does my tone got to do with it?[0]"
|
| 0 - https://youtu.be/Rv71ZCd_yno?feature=shared
| TinkersW wrote:
| 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.
| pj_mukh wrote:
| 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!
| cle wrote:
| > 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.
| HelloMcFly wrote:
| 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.
| kibwen wrote:
| _> 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.
| anon84873628 wrote:
| 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.
| cle wrote:
| Of course they are, nobody's disputing that.
| cle wrote:
| I think I agree with you. Most people are not really
| arguing on those terms though.
| seadan83 wrote:
| 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.
| johnnyjeans wrote:
| 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/
| jefftk wrote:
| _> 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...
| johnnyjeans wrote:
| 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
| jefftk wrote:
| Mmm, looks like you're right. Sorry!
| johnnyjeans wrote:
| 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.
| nine_k wrote:
| > _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 +50degC is just not very
| compatible with having body temperature slightly below
| +37degC. 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.
| samatman wrote:
| 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.
| ordinaryradical wrote:
| See also: chapter one of Kim Stanley Robinson's The
| Ministry for the Future.
| relaxing wrote:
| > However, there is no historical record of the wet bulb
| temperature outdoors
|
| That's not really saying much. The historical record is
| vanishingly small.
| gaadd33 wrote:
| The current record of 36.6 seems like it would be close
| enough to cause major issues.
| tbrownaw wrote:
| > _Individual pulses of cold climate within an ice age are
| termed [...] ([...] or colloquially, ice ages),_
|
| Looks like both sides are right in this case.
| nosianu wrote:
| 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.
| alehlopeh wrote:
| The problem with South Florida is that it had too much water.
| quickthrowman wrote:
| > 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.
| kbutler wrote:
| Especially if you include refrigeration for foods.
| osigurdson wrote:
| 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.
| dartos wrote:
| 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.
| osigurdson wrote:
| 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.
| SamPatt wrote:
| 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.
| osigurdson wrote:
| 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).
| hash872 wrote:
| 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?
| dartos wrote:
| 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.
| Uehreka wrote:
| 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.
| osigurdson wrote:
| If you to choose your fridge or the internet, which one
| would you choose?
|
| I love technology but 100% in camp fridge.
| twoWhlsGud wrote:
| And the internet has been taken over by bad actors (Meta,
| Xitter, TikTok etc) with the result that the public is
| swamped by lies and thus democracy and post Cold War
| peace is being replaced by global war and dictatorship.
| So refrigerators look pretty good right now...
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| and even more, the generalization of "air conditioning" and
| "refrigeration" into "heat pumps" ...
| quickthrowman wrote:
| 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.
| nradov wrote:
| 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.
| skybrian wrote:
| 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.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| Coming from that part of the world, I'm relatively certain the
| elimination of malaria was the cause.
| hindsightbias wrote:
| The cartels should just build nukes in Mexico and pump
| desalinated water north. Win-win.
| downvotetruth wrote:
| The foreign legion should just build nukes in France and
| transfer electricity east across the Maginot Line.
| boxed wrote:
| I mean.. the foreign legion didn't build them, but that's
| already a thing?
| Bjorkbat wrote:
| 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.
| xnx wrote:
| Colonizing Mars is a joke. Earth was more habitable the day
| after the asteroid hit that Mars is now.
| kbutler wrote:
| 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...
| Sabinus wrote:
| 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?
| aporetics wrote:
| Yikes. The sheer, unacknowledged hubris of this is bewildering.
| Let's just remake the arid west?
| jackyinger wrote:
| 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.
| boxed wrote:
| 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
| kibwen wrote:
| 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.
| ordinaryradical wrote:
| 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.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| 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.
| chewbacha wrote:
| 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.
| boxed wrote:
| 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.
| chewbacha wrote:
| The west is not arid due to beaver hunting. It's been
| arid for thousands of years due to tectonic plate
| activity and a cold deep ocean that flows clockwise
| bringing colder water down from the north. The cold water
| and tall mountains produce arid inland conditions. This
| happened so long ago that the ecology evolved to the arid
| land.
| DubiousPusher wrote:
| 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.
| TinkersW wrote:
| 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.
| seadan83 wrote:
| 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.
| kibwen wrote:
| 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.
| throw4950sh06 wrote:
| Where?
| runako wrote:
| > 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.
| akamaka wrote:
| 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".
| germinalphrase wrote:
| How optimistic to assume we would invest in trains.
| nradov wrote:
| 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...
| akira2501 wrote:
| > 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.
| siliconc0w wrote:
| 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.
| akira2501 wrote:
| > just incredibly detailed
|
| Other than forgetting that literal drilled wells exist.
| boxed wrote:
| Ground water is a very limited commodity, one which we are
| exploiting beyond sustainability. You are just plain wrong
| here.
| skybrian wrote:
| 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.)
| doug_durham wrote:
| 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.
| anon84873628 wrote:
| The article refers to "Cadillac Desert" but seems to miss the
| part about how it was all a bad idea in the end.
| jarebear6expepj wrote:
| Won't somebody please think of the sage grouse?
| Animats wrote:
| 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-...
| Spivak wrote:
| 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.
| Animats wrote:
| 2021-2023 is one approach, and 2024 is something else
| entirely. The 2024 thing is brackish groundwater cleanup.
| _fs wrote:
| 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
| Animats wrote:
| 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.
| fulafel wrote:
| 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?
| baking wrote:
| 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.
| pfdietz wrote:
| 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/
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| 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.
| retrac wrote:
| 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.
| whiplash451 wrote:
| Anyone... or robots?
| ben_w wrote:
| 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?
| fifilura wrote:
| 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?
| ovis wrote:
| 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/Annua
| l_A...
| fifilura wrote:
| 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.
| jhide wrote:
| The Laurentide ice sheet over North America was similar
| depth and receded 15000 years ago. A blink in geologic
| time
| jseutter wrote:
| 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.
| lmaoguy wrote:
| No.
|
| You go live in a city. Leave nature alone. Send the rest back
| where they came from.
| chewbacha wrote:
| 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.
| rbanffy wrote:
| The article mentions solar desalination.
| sizzzzlerz wrote:
| 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.
| cle wrote:
| 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.
| uoaei wrote:
| The ecosystems are where we live, what you say makes
| basically zero sense.
| kibwen wrote:
| _> 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".
| cle wrote:
| 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.
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| 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.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| To me things are in balance if they're long term sustainable.
| petesergeant wrote:
| 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.
| DubiousPusher wrote:
| If you think this is a convincing counterpoint, I assure you
| it is not.
| petesergeant wrote:
| 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
| sokoloff wrote:
| Also probably about 1 out of 16 of us would be living at
| all.
| kibwen wrote:
| _> 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.
| petesergeant wrote:
| > 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?
| failrate wrote:
| I agree with you: swamps and forests do a lot of work to
| make this planet habitable.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I find it convincing
| throw_pm23 wrote:
| 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.
| devjab wrote:
| 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.
| baxtr wrote:
| 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.
| camgunz wrote:
| 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.
| ithkuil wrote:
| 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)
| seadan83 wrote:
| 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.
| camgunz wrote:
| Yeah I admit when I was writing this little comparison I
| was trying to guess how many trees it would take to build
| the typical cabin and I was like "woof that's a lot of
| trees". So, yeah fair.
| relaxing wrote:
| 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.
| uoaei wrote:
| Ah, the "private citizens owning nukes is covered under the
| 2nd Amendment" take.
|
| Flattening ontologies doesn't do anything useful.
| 7speter wrote:
| 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.
| kibwen wrote:
| _> 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_.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| 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.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| 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.
| sizzzzlerz wrote:
| 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.
| seadan83 wrote:
| 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.
| xhkkffbf wrote:
| 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.
| doug_durham wrote:
| 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.
| carapace wrote:
| > 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...
| pegas1 wrote:
| 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.
| DubiousPusher wrote:
| 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
| anon84873628 wrote:
| 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.
| johnohara wrote:
| > 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.
| renewiltord wrote:
| 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.
| doug_durham wrote:
| 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.
| kibwen wrote:
| _> 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.
| devin wrote:
| As I understand it, desalination produces brine, and that needs
| to be disposed of. Where does all of that go?
| emtel wrote:
| 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.
| carapace wrote:
| 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 |
| TEDxAmazonia https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OrRCGY_lkk
| iluvcommunism wrote:
| I'd like to see the Colorado river less used. The author has a
| lot of good ideas.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| 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
| Log_out_ wrote:
| ? Its more a pump it already desalinated from up north rowards
| the south?
| reducesuffering wrote:
| > 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.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| 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.
| reducesuffering wrote:
| It's hyperbolic, but isn't the result the same if San Diego
| gives solar power to Utah, and then Utah gives power to
| Kansas, then Pennsylvania, then Maine? But if that's only
| ~10% (4,500km across the US) that's not bad.
| oceanplexian wrote:
| 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.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| 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.
| photonthug wrote:
| > I'm just arguing that it makes 0 sense from an economic or
| societal perspective
|
| Arguments like this might be true, but will always feel
| incomplete if you don't explain why the situation now is so
| different from the 1930s. The Hoover dam enabling the city of
| Las Vegas, and the new deal employing millions to drag the US
| out of the depression is usually regarded as a success story.
| There must have been status quo naysayers at the time too, but
| they look wrongheaded today.
|
| Environmental arguments about carbon or greenhouse gases add
| color but also can't make the case completely. Before you can
| really argue against anything new on the basis of carbon, you
| kind of need to show that _not_ doing the thing is actually
| significantly improving things and also that this is low
| hanging fruit compared to, say, enforcing existing regulations
| that companies or countries are ignoring.
| baking wrote:
| 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.
| dimal wrote:
| Holding up Florida and Los Angeles as models for development
| doesn't seem like a good argument to me. No thanks.
| doug_durham wrote:
| 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?
| seizethecheese wrote:
| > What was this even posted to hacker news?
|
| This involves hacking geography, as such it is quite
| interesting for the general hacker reader.
| rnrn wrote:
| > 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.
| oceanplexian wrote:
| > 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.
| anon84873628 wrote:
| Sounds like a great way to destroy one of the most diverse
| and unique marine ecosystems on the planet, thanks to the
| brine waste.
| kylebenzle wrote:
| It's a funny problem. Too expensive to pump it WAY out to
| sea, but too salty to be of any use?
| linotype wrote:
| Couldn't you pump the brine waste into evaporation ponds
| and extract lithium and other materials from it?
| cpeterso wrote:
| Could we convert the brine waste to building materials?
| Truck it out to the desert and build a giant salt
| pyramid.
| skybrian wrote:
| 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.
| teucris wrote:
| 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.
| kibwen wrote:
| _> 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.
| hughesjj wrote:
| 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.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| 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
| ta_1138 wrote:
| Go read Cadillac Desert: It's precisely about all the
| efforts, right between fantasy and reality, that have put is
| in the hole we are today. From straight out wishful thinking
| to really expensive investments that haven't ever come
| remotely close to paying for themselves. There's entire
| sections covering how we have spend very large amounts of
| money doing water works that just go to feed very low
| productivity farms. We dreamed, built, and just wasted money.
|
| It's true that as solar gets cheaper, more parts of the world
| become livable. Byt why should we occupy more of the US with
| very expensive, low productivity suburbs? Is there no
| opportunity costs in piling more people into Phoenix?
|
| But no, it's just more poetic to just spend billions upon
| billions to make the property of people living in a desert
| more valuable.
| rgblambda wrote:
| >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.
| elcritch wrote:
| It's possible to treat high purity water other ways.
| Essentially just adding in some minerals.
| kylebenzle wrote:
| But my grandma ALWAYS put a pan of water in the oven when
| she cooked.
| hughesjj wrote:
| 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
| noduerme wrote:
| 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.
| 3eb7988a1663 wrote:
| I am finding numbers that US tap water has on the order
| of ~10mgs minerals/L water. Doping water with some
| combination of calcium/potassium/magnesium/whatever
| certainly sounds easier than alternatives.
| rsync wrote:
| 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.
| wbl wrote:
| A sacrificial metal bed could work as a solution.
| mrthrowaway999 wrote:
| 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?
| mulmen wrote:
| 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.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| 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.
| mulmen wrote:
| You're responding to an argument I didn't make. The lack of
| an economically feasible implementation today does not
| prove that one will never exist.
| x3n0ph3n3 wrote:
| > It isn't a regulatory issue, it is strictly economics.
|
| I guess you haven't heard about the desalination plant proposed
| in Huntington Beach. [1]
|
| > In May 2022, the commissioners of the California Coastal
| Commission voted unanimously against the plan in agreement with
| the staff report that recommended denying approval of the
| project.
|
| 1.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huntington_Beach_Desalination_...
| fhars wrote:
| It is posted for the same reason people sometimes post about
| Atlantropa:https://hn.algolia.com/?q=atlantropa
| Dig1t wrote:
| Israel gets most of its water from desalination.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_supply_and_sanitation_...
|
| California is discussing rationing water.
|
| Nevada is a dry empty expanse, Arizona is pulling the dregs out
| of their aquifer.
|
| Cheap energy + desalination is the answer, but we need more
| energy. Nuclear and other renewables are the obvious answer.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _It isn 't a regulatory issue, it is strictly economics_
|
| We pillage our natural water sheds so the Central Valley can
| grow almonds. The underpricing of water is absolutely a
| regulatory issue.
| nyrikki wrote:
| 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.
| rnrn wrote:
| > 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.
| nyrikki wrote:
| 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.
| kibwen wrote:
| Why should the rest of us subsidize the people who want to
| live in a place that is so inimical to human life?
| dgfitz wrote:
| Are you talking about the article or section 8 housing?
| downrightmike wrote:
| The only thing I can think of that might be a net plus for the
| west if if we start pumping water from the ocean to the Salton
| and allowing that to evaporate and creating more greenery where
| it creates rain shadows.
| einpoklum wrote:
| Why don't you guys (= US'ers) start by not spilling that much
| crude oil and toxins into your existing potable water sources?
| :-(
| pfdietz wrote:
| I think that problem is greatly exaggerated by those with
| certain motivations.
| seadan83 wrote:
| 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...
| pfdietz wrote:
| That has nothing to do with crude oil. Nor toxins, really.
| Eutrophication of waterways occurs because of addition of
| nutrients that encourages growth, not toxins that prevent
| it.
| anon84873628 wrote:
| 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?
| oceanplexian wrote:
| 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.
| anon84873628 wrote:
| 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.
| closetkantian wrote:
| If only Saudi Arabia had spent their money on this stuff instead
| of NEOM.
| zft wrote:
| great opportunity for hashicorp
| composter wrote:
| 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
| prpl wrote:
| 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.
| prpl wrote:
| 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.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| 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?)
| pegas1 wrote:
| 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.
| jacobolus wrote:
| For some inspirational promotion of building local-scale water
| harvesting structures (swales, check dams, ponds, ...) for
| improving individual watersheds, I've enjoyed the YouTube
| videos of Oregon State horticulturalist Andrew Millison
| https://www.youtube.com/@amillison/videos for instance
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXqkSh7P7Lc
| lazystar wrote:
| terraforming articles always remind me of my favorite "what if"
| plan - what if australia used nukes to create a canal right down
| the middle of the outback?
| nathanasmith wrote:
| Leave it alone. It's fine the way it is.
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