No, thanks. People are destructive to the planet in every way possible, and we don't need more. It's not as if we'll solve the mysteries of existence twice as fast by having twice as many people. If anything, having double the consequential pollution will halve the speed of discovery.
I agree. Megaprojects that make large changes to highly chaotic systems never end well. From Mao's Four Pests to the ongoing wildfire crises that plague the west coast thanks to all the terraforming California has undergone (exacerbated by ongoing climate change)
To say nothing of the fact that this is wanton environmental destruction. Just because something is arid, it's alright to completely change it? And for what? Having lived in Dallas, which is not unlike Nevada but more humid and wet, it's not a proper place to live. People jump from pool of air conditioning to pool of air conditioning. You go outside and walk for just 5 minutes, and you're completely soaked in sweat. Shade does not help. Lack of concrete does not help, you can drive 2 hours into the middle of nowhere and it's still like being in a preheated oven. You can't really do anything fun outside for half the year because you'll get heat stroke, or generally just be extremely stinky.
If you want to make use of empty land, going to the miserably cold uninhabited swaths of Canada are far wiser. You can always bundle up, but you can only take off so many layers of clothing.
Arguably the wildfires occur due to not enough meddling by humans. That is, due to not cutting enough old and dead trees, which dry up and become easier to catch fire, and not cutting wide enough openings in the forests to stop the spread of a fire when it occurs. The current wildfire situation is what the natural order of things looks like :-\",
That is highly debatable. There are overhead electric cables that often cause the trees to catch fire. Installing cables underground or with stronger insulation and auto-power-shutoff could help prevent several of the fires.
Fires have their own cadence - they happen when the dead leaves and plants accumulate enough there’s sufficient fuel to maintain a forest fire. When we stop all fires the fuel piles up and the next fire is much worse and harder to stop. Up to a point we simply can’t stop it and it consumes all fuel and the forest starts from scratch.
I live in Oregon, another fire-prone state. While all human causes cause more fires than lightning, lightning causes more fires than any individual human cause.
I'll grant that having looked at the numbers, my earlier statement of "Far more fires, by count, are caused by lightning" is untrue. It's only slightly more.
I'm unable to open your link (phone issue perhaps). I've heard that in WA state most fires (over 80%) are human caused. Given CA is at 95%, why is oregon so different? Are we talking different measures somehow? I'm wondering where the discrepancy is - I doubt that OR would be that unique of a situation.
As to your question, Oregon has just over half the population of Washington (4.2M vs 7.8M) but almost 50% more land area (96k sqmi vs 66.5k sqmi), leading to Washington having close to 3x the population density of Oregon (44 vs 118 people/sqmi). California has more than twice the population density of Oregon.
This feels sufficient to account for the discrepancy.
Thank you for adding the numbers (pretty sure the pdf issue is just me, old ass phone)
The population density explanation makes sense. Though, that density is very unequally distributed. Factors like square area with fewer than X people (how much total low density area exists), miles of forest access roads/rec sites - perhaps those numbers might give a very strong correlation. I wonder if you took just northern california, if the causes would even out to OR. (I agree pop density is likely a good correlating measure, just wonder if there is another that is even stronger)
Though, we were comparing apples and oranges! If we compare natural vs all human causes - assuming misc is human caused, then 70% of fires in OR are human caused. The percentage range for human caused fires being between 70% and 90% between different states makes sense.
There is also a second way of stopping fires, which is to create 10x more man-made lakes, ponds, and streams everywhere in the region. It will increase the local humidity, which will in turn diminish the risk of fires. The approach is to maximize the surface of the volume of water exposed to the air. This works because fires require dryness, which will be impossible with sufficient water evaporation and humidity in the area. It is a superior form of terraforming than controlled fires.
That’s probably a losing battle. The coast is already extremely humid due to fog drip.
The problem is that we get crazy weather patterns now due to global warming. For instance, it was ~100F for about a week a few weeks ago, which made everything nice and crispy.
Then, when it cooled off, we got hit with a long windstorm and 15-20% humidity. If that storm had brought lightning, there would have been widespread uncontrollable fires (too windy for helicopters).
It’s not just California. This sort of thing has happened repeatedly in the last few years in most states in the western US.
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.
Indeed - the fact they were cut down nearly to the point of extinction is something of a tragedy. The trees that replaced them are not fire resistant. Thus is counter evidence for the idea that humans need to be cutting down anything to improve the fire resistant of forests.
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.
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.
> People are destructive to the planet in every way possible,
Are we already on track to cause our planet to no longer be a planet?
> It's not as if we'll solve the mysteries of existence twice as fast by having twice as many people
Imagine if the people at ASML (or your favorite other one-of-a-kind cutting edge place) had twice as many hours in their days. Or alternatively, if there were twice as many of them. Shouldn't that make them able to do more cool things?
You conveniently ignored the part where I noted that having double the consequential pollution will halve the speed of discovery. And yes, the pollution will double because more humans means more pollution that accumulates without getting recycled. Plastics, PFAS, CO2, etc. are all examples of pollutants that do not get recycled. It harms brains, aging them prematurely. A cleaner environment without strong financial pressure for survival is a much better way to do more cool things. Once the CO2 exceeds 800 ppm, brains will be tired all of the time, too tired to invent anything cool.
Have you traveled to third world countries with very high population densities? Have you breathed the air on their streets? Travel to China, India, parts of the Middle East, other parts of Asia, and realize just how foul the air there is to breathe. That's what you want for the US? The evidence is already strong that plastics, PFAS, and CO2 are not recycled; they just keep piling on in the environment and in the human body. You can literally smell plastic burning in the air in those countries and regions, and the immune system reacts very strongly to it in a negative way. Developing anything cool will be the last thing on the mind at that time.
> Travel to China, India, parts of the Middle East, other parts of Asia, and realize just how foul the air there is to breathe. That's what you want for the US?
I'll go out on a limb and predict that their answer to that would be "no". I don't think you're assuming good faith here.
I am assuming bad faith for a good reason, which is that the parent comment failed to acknowledge the obvious, which is that the listed pollutants keep accumulating in the environment, proportional to the number of people that exist. In fact, the parent comment even rejected this established knowledge, thereby proving its bad faith.
You are assuming bad faith because you are reading things into my words that are not there.
I do not deny that (some) pollutants accumulate. I also do not deny that pollution is quite bad in some places.
I am specifically questioning your claim that doubling pollution would specifically halve the rate of innovation. I was pointing out that you have not supported that statement. You claimed it twice, you still haven't supported it, and I'm pretty sure that you can't support it.
Stop trying to read into my statement wild claims that aren't there. Can you support your claim?
Yes, microplastics accumulate in the brain over the years [PMID: 38765967]. They cause anxiety [PMID: 37269995] and brain inflammation [DOI: 10.3390/ijms241512308]. There is a lot more research on them than I am quoting here.
When someone is suffering from crippling anxiety, if you have ever suffered from it, the last thing on their mind will be to develop anything cool.
Moreover, microplastics accumulate and harm various organs, not only the brain. They also cause generational infertility due to the pervasive co-presence of toxins like phthalate in them [PMID: 39446714].
Similarly, higher CO2 levels are detrimental to cognition. This has been known for years and is established knowledge.
First, these studies merely suggest that microplastics have these effects in humans, yet you state them as fact. However, I don't want to argue that microplastics are harmless or that pollution is not an issue. Neither do I want to defend the point that doubling the population doubles the "speed of discovery". But even if all of your points are accurate, you would still have to show that these negative effects outweigh the benefit of a priori doubling productivity. In fact, you make the even stronger claim that doubling the population will actually cut the "speed of discovery" in half. None of this is substantiated by your argument.
How is it that despite the vast population, we no longer have geniuses like Newton, Leibnitz, Gauss, Maxwell, Einstein, etc.? If they existed today, they would just be selling ads and stocks.
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).
Really interesting read, and while the numbers are a little hand wavy even if they were out on the cost by an order of magnitude it would still be very cheap.
The USA has lost its appetite for these mega projects, sadly.
You're spending $16B to create $1T of real estate value.
That would pay for itself in two years at 1% R/E tax and <10% interest.
I didn't read the entire article, but the reason it won't happen at this scale is because you could never acquire the property rights to be able to do it, not because it's a bad investment.
Good? Do you understand the ecosystems and national parks that would be destroyed by this? Once those are gone they are gone. We don’t even need this nonsense, the population is contracting. We will have nothing but empty space in inhabited spaces already.
Article talks about how 90% of the land would remain as is as well as 100% of the national parks, simply restoring watersheds that are intermittent or dried up to wetlands.
I didn't use the word good anywhere or even offer a value judgement, I simply called it interesting.
Also your tone sucks and makes me not want to discuss in good faith with you.
Article assumes people want to live in cramped cities.. clearly this is not the case when we look at where Americans choose to live, so premise is flawed. In reality 300 more Americans would spread out and wreck the environment more than it already is.
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.
> The USA has lost its appetite for these mega projects, sadly.
Looking around at this thread, it's easy to see why. People value ecological conservatism over economic progress.
Of course, the type of economic progress we've had over the last few decades has been a mixed bag, due to structural deficiencies. But I don't agree with throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
The general cynicism and negativity makes me really sad. Esp for a community of builders and problem solvers.
I take the entirely opposite conclusion. Seeing so many value ecological conservatism over economic progress is to me optimistic and heartening. Over the past 100 years we've seen a shift to seeing the world as a shared world vs. one that is our manifest destiny to claim. I see others beginning to see a sense of shared responsibility for the stewardship of this world for the other living creatures as well as a recognition that our fates are more intertwined with theirs than we *used to think.
I agree that it’s a positive development. Working together/recognizing our shared fate isn’t mutually exclusive with progress (it’s generally a prerequisite!).
> People value ecological conservatism over economic progress.
Phrasing such a proposal as "economic progress" is entirely irrational. This is a solution looking for a problem. We have zero, zero, zero economic need for this.
Or phrasing it as "ecological conservatism". It's not "conservative" to start accounting for the previously unrecognized or outright disregarded negative consequences of these projects. Turns out healthy ecosystems are important for humans too.
> zero… economic need for this
Meanwhile: a crappy house in parts of California that aren’t even economically vibrant (that is to say: no particularly promising high-paying jobs in the area) costs $300k (a good house costs a lot more of course, and a good house in a desirable area costs over $1M) and something like 3 million people crossed the southern border into the US last year, all of whom need a place to live.
We have a tremendous amount of empty space, and while I know a desert isn’t technically lifeless, I suspect hypothetical supporters would be willing to accept (or even would prefer to establish) enormous swaths of the almost unfathomably large uninhabited West being made into new National Parks and wildlife reserves so that the desert animals and plants could be preserved. I know I would want that.
I would argue that there’s nothing immoral about expanding our population from 8 billion to 10 billion, any more than there was going from 500,000 to 1,000,000 centuries ago. Both were done at the expense of altering and ultimately domesticating land once used for other animals and plants.
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.
Nitrogen pollution is poisoning waterways. In Iowa, where the problem is the worst, only 25% of waterways are healthy [1]. I travelled through there recently and anecdotally counted 4 out of 5 lakes as poisoned, with 2 of 5 completely poisoned (so green with algae - it looked like grass you could walk on. There were dead ducks floating in them).
CO2 drives greenhouse effect. To my knowledge, C02 eeenrichment of plants does not come close to offsetting the overall addition of CO2. If it did, why are atmospheric CO2 ppm counts going up?
What did you mean by "just find a new greenfield instead"? I assumed you were saying that nitrogen and carbon dioxide pollution impaired the fertility of fields, which is obviously untrue. Suppose you're suffering from nitrogen pollution, giving you increased crop yields. Why would you switch to a new, lower-yield field?
'Greenfield' as in the programmer terminology. Essentially a new location, untouched virgin land. Sorry to mix terminologies, that would have been ambiguous.
Nitrogen pollution is from the nitrogen that blows and runs off of farms. It is a staggering amount: "globally farmers apply around 115 million tonnes of nitrogen to our crops every year. Only around 35% of this is used by them, meaning 75 million tonnes of nitrogen runs off into our rivers, lakes and natural environments. This is our “excess nitrogen”. It is quite staggering that almost two-thirds of our applied nitrogen becomes an environmental pollutant." [1]
I talked to a compost expert recently. He claimed if the nitrogen were fermented first to be bio available, it would require less and no longer be a pollutant. There are solutions, but until then farmers just accept that one third of nitrogen applied actually makes it into the farm soil
It wasn't the lack of water that made Florida inhospitable, it was the climate. Florida's population explosion precisely coincides with the adoption of air conditioning in American households, in the post-war period[1]. Very few people want to live in a place where it's so hot and humid all the time.
> During the last ice age, only 10,000 years ago
We're still in an ice age. An ice age is simply when the earth's poles have an ice cover.
Interglacial periods are a part of ice ages. Even tells you right at the beginning of that article.
> Individual pulses of cold climate within an ice age are termed glacial periods (glacials, glaciations, glacial stages, stadials, stades, or colloquially, ice ages), and intermittent warm periods within an ice age are called interglacials or interstadials.
You can actually see the definition (albeit a little verbose) as the first sentence of that article:
> An ice age is a long period of reduction in the temperature of Earth's surface and atmosphere, resulting in the presence or expansion of continental and polar ice sheets and alpine glaciers.
On a technicality, you can get me for not mentioning the snow capped mountains part, I'd concede on that. That part is actually news to me. All the same, the earth is colder than it usually is. [1]
An interesting thing I like to bounce around in my head: Could we live in the interior of the Pangean super continent if we had to? Interesting stepping stone between Earth's current, very mild climate, and trying to live in a place like Venus. Definitely would have to live like mole people.
> Could we live in the interior of the Pangean super continent
We already avoid living in the interior of Australia, because living at temperatures of +50°C is just not very compatible with having body temperature slightly below +37°C. Same applies to the middle of Sahara desert. It's not impossible though, because the humidity is very low there, so, given a supply of water, you can cool by evaporation. At high humidity. you'd just die; such things happen during heat waves on the Indian subcontinent, for example.
> ...humans evolved during the coldest epoch of the Phanerozoic [the time period from 540 million years ago to the present], when global average temperatures were as low as 51.8 F (11 C).
> “We built our civilization around those geologic landscapes of an icehouse,” Judd [one of the study's authors] said.
Absolutely agree. So far, the transistor (i.e. computation, internet, mobile, AI) has been less transformative than earlier breakthroughs like refrigeration, the automobile and the airplane.
In my view politics is largely a sideshow compared to technological advancement as it is mostly about how to divide up the pie as opposed to growing it. While people can communicate various political ideas more freely, it actually doesn't matter than much unless the political situation gets bad enough that it leads to a dark age. Therefore technologies that merely make it easier to communicate political ideas are less impactful than technologies that directly improve life (e.g. most people would not trade their fridge for a Twitter account). Of course, I am glad that both exist.
I agree with your overall point, but I would add that technology has significantly increased leisure time, and the fact that communication platforms are how many people use that extra leisure time proves their value beyond what you might expect just looking at a hierarchy of needs.
I'm not sure that it has. The workweek remains at 40 hours and most people still work about 40 years. Furthermore, in advanced economies the per household cumulative hours worked has roughly doubled since the transistor was invented. The dishwasher and washer/dryer are the last technologies that actually increased leisure time and predated the transistor.
I'm hopeful that AI + robotics will improve the situation but so far there have been very little quality of life improvements due to the transistor (coding is very fun however).
I don't hate your argument, but the Arab Spring citation is some idealism from over a decade ago. The Arab Spring mostly failed and almost all of those countries remained autocracies?
True, but the fact that a revolutionary social movement was organized across an entire global region was enabled because of the internet was what I was trying to highlight.
Oh come on, that take is too cute by three halves. The internet was the biggest change in human society of the 20th Century, if not the millennium. And while you’re peeling that one apart, the transistor also laid the bedrock for GPS, modern medical devices like pacemakers and insulin dispensers, mass-communication/mass-media with live broadcast capable of reaching billions of people, and like 10 even bigger things my brunch-addled mind isn’t thinking of at the moment.
I know it’s a cool thought exercise to go “what if the things I like/care about actually aren’t that important in the grand scheme of things?” But at the end of that exercise you’ve got to come back to reality.
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...
I don't think technology is really making things worse. The free flow of information comes with pros and cons. It is hard to imagine that unidirectional communication is net better in the final analysis.
Air conditioning was huge, but surely mosquito control and the elimination of malaria also played a major role in making Florida habitable. People drained the swamps and sprayed enough poison to kill off at least most of the mosquitos.
> In Florida, a combination of development, drainage, and air conditioning created one of the most desirable cities on Earth from a previously pestilential swamp.
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.
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?
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.
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
Surely you acknowledge that "taking responsibility and trying to do better" means learning from our past mistakes and not repeating them? The project in the OP is motivated by vanity, not necessity.
Wanting to make a biome more habitable is not vanity.
Is it vanity to want a park in your city or a river to be clean of pollutants?
We are scared of projects like this because the scale betrays our inability to do them or perhaps fully anticipate the consequences, which is good enough reason for caution.
But vanity? A garden is never reducible to vanity, it is the cultivation of the earth and the prosperity of living things, regardless of how vainglorious the gardener may be.
The whole world has been formed already by our presence and will continue to be. Humans modify our environment, for good and ill, and this is happening in all cultures and at all scales of civilization. Gardening proves microscopically what happens on the macro scale. To presuppose that is hubris is one way of looking at it, but a very narrow one.
The real fault in your reply, besides missing the substance of mine, is that framing such things as “hubris” doesn’t really help us weigh the value of the idea. At most it’s a critique of ambition, but an idea’s ambition isn’t related to its validity.
Also, wanting other humans to flourish is nearly the opposite of vanity.
How much of that biome is the result of a previous ecological disaster? The US is covered by those from what I've understood. Vast tracts of lands are arid because beavers were hunted to extinction for example. Protecting the accident of the previous 100 years doesn't sound so compelling.
The 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.
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.
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.
Why? Honestly, why? There's so much uninhabited land out that isn't uninhabitable, which is already more land than we'll ever need for the sake of putting human habitats on. Go move to the great lakes if you want a combination of remote wilderness and an infinite supply of free fresh water.
I love this idea, and would be comfortable pushing the number even higher. The cool part about the US is it's relatively unpopulated as compared to European countries.
We could probably fit another 200 million or so people in the eastern half of the country, just by bringing it to the level of density of, say, the UK. If we were willing to live as densely as the Dutch, perhaps we could add 300 million in the eastern half.
Your proposal is fairly modest compared to some of the ideas out there.
In his wildly enthusiastic 1860 book The Central Gold Region, William Gilpin claimed that the Mississipi Basin could support at population of 1.2 billion people, and was destined to become the “world’s amphitheatre”, with all of the world’s trade running through it in a grand “Asiatic and European Railway”.
> people who live under the level of the sea itself
Your responses read as facetious. I chose two relatively large & wealthy European countries for comparison. But the US ranks 186/249 for population density; there is a lot of room for increased density if it is desired.
If you don't like those, here are some alternate compares you can sub into my post if it helps you engage with the concept:
- Belgium
- India
- China
- Vietnam
- Germany
- Italy
- South Korea
- Nigeria
- Spain
If the US were as dense as the EU, there would be ~1 billion Americans now.
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.
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.)
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.
Are you not seeing the progress in the articles? It went from a lab proof-of-concept to a working prototype producing in real life 5000 liters/day passively. That's impressive as hell.
Right. Remember, the issue is not whether it can be done, but how cheaply. Desalinization works fine now, but it's kind of expensive. These claimed breakthroughs are cost reductions. For that, you have to scale up to at least small production and measure costs. Only then you can boast.
What is the this desalination cost competing against, what's the alternative cost of importing water by tanker or pipeline?
Also, why do you want batteries, instead of just running the osmosis when there is sunlight? Maybe the osmosis equipment is expensive enough that it pays off to keep it 100% occupied with batteries?
The numbers in the OP show that the RO equipment is by far the largest cost so you need to maximize its utilization. The energy is used to pump water through the RO at high pressure so another alternative would be to use solar to pump water uphill so you could run the RO at night. The design using batteries is easier to price.
There are energy companies like Quidnet that are commercializing geopressure storage, where water is pumped underground at pressure, then recovered and the energy extracted. This would be an ideal system to combine with solar and RO.
There was some recent work on cheaper desalination based on cheap intermittent solar (the common reverse osmosis approach apparently doesn't work well with intermittency) that mirrors the blog writer's approach to efuels, so surprised he didn't mention it.
However, I was under the impression that for the US it's mostly a market failure and farmers are intentionally wasting scandalous amounts of water because they'd lose their water rights if they used the countries resources optimally.
> I'd like to see the population trending downward,
oh that wish has already been granted. the world fertility rate is 2.3, and it has been falling precipitously for decades. once it gets to 2.1 we start depopulating
an ageing population without a growing workforce (assuming no AI takeoff in the next decade) is going to be a lot of fun. you saved in your pension fund? too bad you can't eat numbers on a computer.
We either have to learn to have a society that doesn't depend on ponzi-scheme style constant population growth or we just keep pursuing unfettered growth that [increasingly less slowly] destroys the ecosystems we ultimately depend on for survival, to say nothing of natural beauty.
I guess space colonization is a third variable here, but the feedback loop on that is likely to not materially affect our trajectory in either direction.
the problem is that we seem to have sleepwalked into depopulation. we had decades to plan ahead and automate our means of production and distribution but chose to keep the same economic system based on infinite growth going.
it's possible that a lot of the loss in working age people won't be that bad - "bullshit jobs" (Taleb) do make up a lot of the existing jobs, so perhaps it's only the economic system that needs to change and the underlying population and means of production will be enough to work with.
If the US had a population of 1 billion it would still be half the population density of Germany. I do not share your goal of leaving half of our continent sparsely populated for the sake of 'conservation'
Reminds me of one of the big open secrets of North America: northern Ontario and northwestern Quebec are fertile. There is a 250,000 sq. km clay belt that spans almost from Winnipeg to Ottawa. The growing season is short but sufficient for grains and beans and such.
It's the opposite problem. Drainage is poor and there is too much rain at the wrong time, so the land needs heavy drainage. Also it's miserably cold in winter, and it's far, far from the cities. The government tried settling it but most of them moved back south. Less than 5% of the area is under till or pasture today. The whole thing could be turned into a potato belt on the scale of the Prairies. If we could find anyone willing to live there. Truth is there are other places better suited.
Att 55 degrees latitude is is comparably pretty far south in Scandinavian terms, like Denmark. And we do grow crops in Sweden.
Inland climate in Canada and (for Scandinavia) the Gulf Stream could make the difference. Although I imagine the Hudson bay should give it more of seaside climate?
I just looked up Cochrane ON because I hadn't heard of it before and yeah, it seems a bit of a mystery to me why it isn't more settled. I live around Edmonton where farming is a major industry, and just for comparison:
Mean daily temperature range (min to max): Cochrane -19c to +24c, Edmonton -15 to +23
Growing season: Cochrane 155 days, Edmonton 123 days
Frost free days: Cochrane 99 days, Edmonton 135 days
Precipitation: Cochrane 90cm, Edmonton 42cm
Around the first world war when the area was being settled, wikipedia quotes "7 months of snow, two months of rain, and the rest black flies and mosquitos. If I had to describe Edmonton, it would be 6 months of winter, one month of rain (June), 2 months of mosquitos, and 10 months of sun.
If I had to guess, the frost free days is a big factor. Even though Edmonton is further north, we benefit from the jet stream coming over the mountains and largely keeping the arctic air mass away from us. The jet stream tilts further south into the US by the time you get over to Ontario so Manitoba and Northern Ontario can get some bitterly cold winds.
No, northern Canada is just really cold. The Gulf Stream makes a difference in Europe in general, not just the seaside.
Eg, Lillehammer, Norway is around the same latitude as Whitehorse, Canada but the average December high/low is a balmy -3°/°-8 compared to -10°/-18°. And Bergen is at the same latitude as those places but is even warmer, with a climate similar to Vancouver! That always amazes me.
As far as Hudson’s Bay being “seaside”, Churchill, Manitoba is on the southwest shore and is a great place to go and see polar bears.
If climate change does end up affecting the Gulf Stream, northern Europe is in for a tremendous cold shock.
Also, generally, the Great Lakes region. I've been thinking for decades now that when the big water fights get underway in the Southwest, the late-21st century megalopoleis of North America are going to be Chicago, Toronto, Milwaukee, Detroit... between "access to fresh water" and "cold in winter, but rarely subjected to catastrophic weather", the whole region is vastly better suited to large-scale settlement than, say, Phoenix or Las Vegas.
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.
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.
> I suppose the real problem here is agreeing on what "balance" means.
Yet I think we can hopefully all agree that expending unbelievable quantities of energy in order to desalinate seawater and pump it uphill a thousand miles in order to turn a desert canyon into a lake for absolutely no good reason whatsoever does not qualify as "balance".
I don't understand "expending" energy in this case. Obviously a key part of the plan would be to use the unbelievable quantities of solar energy currently just going to waste.
It doesn't even require high tech pv, just plain mirrors to make just plain heat for a large portion of the work.
And pumping water is not just a cost, it's also a battery, a hugely valuable thing we don't have enough of yet, which would enable more of the grid to live on renewables.
It's not all magic but it's not all impossible nor pointless either.
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.
> 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.
This is a false dichotomy. The choice isn't between total exploitation of the biosphere and poverty. Nowhere did I say that European development should have been minimized. I simply said the example of European development was not a good argument for attempting to transform the environment of the American West.
Let's look at the chain of argument. The poster was countering an assertion that humans have created massive ecological turmoil by seeking to fundamentally reshape the Earth. Their counter was that Europe was once forest and swamp. I can only assume they meant that we take for granted that the present condition of Europe is good and because it was once mostly "just" forest and swamp that Europe demonstrates that these transformations are acceptable or even preferable and therefore we should do them.
I think this is a bad argument because it contains many assumptions and implications which I think are false.
Assumptions:
#1 The magnitude of exploitation of Europe was necessary to achieve modern life.
#2 The development of modern European life occurred on an ideal or preferable timeline and things would not be better if this process had been gentler to the environment and taken an additional 1,000 years.
#3 The ecosystems of the American West are not more unique or prized than the temperate forests of Europe and their loss represents a similar loss therefore justifying the trade off.
#4 Wilderness, despite its increasing scarcity is not more valuable today than it was 1,000 years ago.
#5 Exploitation of the American West would have a similar economic and developmental impact as the exploitation of primeval Europe and therefore represents a worthwhile trade off.
I don't think any of the above should be taken for granted.
Partly proves the point of the OP: cutting out the forests and draining the swamps led to soil erosion, massive floods, and loss of biodiversity.
I'm not saying it had no reason or benefit, obviously it was for economic reasons (extra land for agriculture and human settlements), just that it is not something that should "obviously" be done.
GPs point makes it sound as though the destructive parts were unintended and a surprise. They often weren’t, and they very rarely are these days when it comes to “landscaping” (sorry if that’s the incorrect terminology in English).
We know perfectly well how to alter the land we live on. At least in the EU we’ve been turning fields into swamps or forests and back again for various reasons since we industrialised farming. Basically all of the effects are known. While we can agree or disagree with a lot of the choices that are made in terms of economic growth, it’s not like what happens is surprising or unintended.
There's a difference between clearing a few trees for a cabin vs desalinating and pumping millions of gallons of water and transforming the ecology of a state.
Yes. Indeed there is a difference between a philosophical consideration and a practical one.
Of course we're part of nature and whatever we do will not "destroy" the world like the world was not "destroyed" when algae pumped toxic oxygen in the atmosphere.
But for all intents and purposes we're able to "destroy" the things we care about the world and turn it into a place we would quite hate to live in (while cockroaches and rates may have no problems with it)
Check pictures from before 1920 - note that all the trees are cleared from around towns and buildings. The cumulative scale is immense when everyone had a cabin and used wood for heating. I think you're understating the impact of "a cabin." European style living is not very sustainable, compared to those that lived in NA for many thousands of years prior.
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.
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.
The immediate counterargument is that we already tried pumping water into a desert basin so we know perfectly well what will happen. You end up with the Salton Sea. A notoriously toxic and unpleasant body of water. Irrigating water across a small area is one thing, what this article proposes is a whole other thing.
Lakes that have no outflow, like the Salton Sea, and the Great Salt Lake, end up being collectors for pollutants.They also aren't exactly major attractants for population. Most of the great salt lake shoreline is uninhabited, and most of the development on the East side hugs the mountains rather than the lake. Both lakes have pretty serious issues regarding pollution that will need to be solved. I'm not sure why we would ever want to make another one of those.
There are plenty of places in North America that have plenty of room and resources for people. Coastal sections of the Pacific Northwest are pretty empty still despite ideal climate, water, arable land, etc...
I grew up in Florida. It was mostly a giant swamp. It has been turned into the world's largest concrete strip-mall. There's literally nothing natural left to see in Florida except a beach, and the small part of the Everglades they carved out as protected before it too got "developed".
This result came about from initially using African slaves to work plantations and build wealth. That wealth (and labor) was then turned into political capital to create the state itself. Then the state was used to develop a real estate market to create/centralize more wealth. WWII created even more development, bringing in the core of engineers to 'terraform' the land further.
At each stage of increased development, a different natural habitat was destroyed in order to create an artificial one to enable generating wealth for a select few. Native people were killed or driven off the land. Wetlands were destroyed, habitats and native species were razed and paved over, waterways were poisoned, and agricultural runoff created environmental disasters in the rivers, bays, and ocean. A vast number of invasive species were introduced which out-competed and eliminated many native species, and we are still battling to keep them under control. There are many superfund and other sites of long-term ecological damage. Drinking water is quickly becoming scarce due to the lowering of the water table. Mining pools are still infiltrating environments causing more damage. And of course, global climate change is exacerbating every single problem, plus adding erosion and elimination of land used for housing.
But hey, it's a virtuous cycle, right? We can manage without destruction, right? Just keep growing exponentially.
At some point we'll clean up all those superfund sites, and figure out how to stop the red tides, and giant heat-sinks of concrete and asphalt that create microclimates that eliminate native species, and figure out where to put trash once all the landfill sites are gone soon, and somehow rid the Everglades of all the boa constrictors and invasive plants, and somehow we'll catch all the green parrots out-competing native birds. And we will have to use this author's idea of desalination, since the fresh water table will be gone by then.
It'll all be fine. Once we figure out how to stop killing everything. Sometime in the future. Let's just not worry about that though. Onward and upward.
Don’t misinterpret what I wrote to think we should leave it alone! Obviously, we’ve been doing it for millennia but we’ve only had the tools and machinery to massively change things for 200 years, or so. A farmer digging ditches to route water to his fields using a shovel, plow, and some mules is hardly equivalent to something like Three Gorges dam, the LA aquaduct, or the deforestation of the Amazon basin on a massive scale.
The human lifetime and memory are short. Don't neglect that much forest (in at least the US) has been chopped down multiple times over. The effects of that are still playing out, similar that we have carved up animal habitat with a dense road grid, and have done things like remove the buffalo.
There are a number of interesting videos on YouTube about people who are adding swales and rock dams to their western land to slow down the departure of rain water. Apparently just these extra terraforming can be enough to turn barren land into a green and lush forest.
Has anyone tried this on their own land? I'm tempted to try it.
That's fantasy. If you don't live in the West it's difficult to appreciate that there simply is no water. No amount of of "swales" or rock dams change the fact that water doesn't fall from the sky in sufficient amounts to create a "lush green forest". Also every drop of water that hits the ground has been accounted for long ago and is part of some water pact. If you create a dam upstream you are guaranteed to get a visit from the water rights holders.
> 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.
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.
That was what I thought too. But there are videos from people who are doing it successfully in the American west -- and in the edge areas around the Sahara.
It's worth poking around YouTube to see just what people are saying they've achieved. It changed my mind.
As a life long resident of the American West, I can imagine few ecological crimes more horrifying. This is one of the most unique geographies on this planet. The life here is thoroughly adapted to a fragile balance of long want and occasional abundance. Everywhere you "terraform" would obliterate that balance. The application of the word itself is obtuse. How can you make more Earth like what the Earth itself made? I suggest that you take your infrastructure projects and apply them where people already live. The damage has already been done there. And those places have an elasticity of life due to the high amounts of water that let them bounce back at some point. Instead I suggest for the West we take a page out of Edward Abbey and simply marvel at its incredible uniqueness and beauty.
There are bad examples of land use like agricultural monoculture and suburban lawns but if you compromise with nature it can be a thriving ecosystem albeit one designed to benefit humans.
> 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.
The hardest part with all of these things isn’t the technology. Usually it’s the coordination. High loss aversion among certain groups causes a reflexive resistance to any large scale project. Memetic mimicry has them reach the same result without explicit coordination.
Any society struggles with conservatives vs adapters. The population transition boundary is along prosperity. Until society reaches a certain degree of prosperity and prosperity alteration shows relative slowdown, adapters win. But afterwards, conservatives will fear movement downward.
It takes substantial adapter power to attempt transformative change. Once the transition boundary is hit, it doesn’t matter how much prosperity gain will be achieved. The key element is adapter power. In a democracy, especially, conservatism dominates past the prosperity boundary. The shape of bureaucracy will impede executive adapters.
America is mostly past the boundary and high-value change only occurs in fields where adapter power exists: opposition to BEVs, space technologies, AVs, chip fabrication, biotechnology, and land modification is strong. Adapter actions occur only through the use of executive power and memetic warfare: using conservatism language to promote subsidies for BEVs and permit AVs, military use for space launches, defence rationale for chips, and hiding biotechnology research until it’s ready.
Terraforming is too high-profile and easily fought. To succeed we need to transform it into using the language of conservatism (“restoring habitat”, e.g.), apply executive power (do so under military research auspices), or make it less valuable for conservatism to fight (many smaller projects rather than one big one).
We’ll get there, though. We’ll make the world better despite conservatism fighting us at every turn. Everything is good. Everything could be better.
Please do more research since it seems you are interested in this. The reason we haven't terraformed Nevada isn't lack of will, or coordination. It's physics and economics. If the technologies listed by the author existed they would be being exploited extensively today. Lack of water is too much of an issue. Billions if not trillions of dollars would flow to it, and any small regulatory issues would be knocked down instantly. This entire article is fantasy.
There is no rationale contained in the proposal for why this would make anything better, or even if it did, why it would be a more desirable approach than any other proposal that does not involve fantasy engineering.
Aside from fossil water, all of our fresh water comes from desalinated sea water, transported inland by clouds - which shows that there is no brine problem as long as the brine is dispersed widely enough in the sea. “How widely” is enough is something I wish OP discussed.
I 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.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 361 ms ] threadTo 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.
But usually it's just lightning. Far more fires, by count, are caused by lightning.
"People — whether purposeful, reckless or simply careless — are responsible for about 95% of California’s wildfires."
https://calmatters.org/environment/wildfires/2024/07/califor...
https://www.oregon.gov/odf/fire/documents/odf-fires-by-gener...
I'll grant that having looked at the numbers, my earlier statement of "Far more fires, by count, are caused by lightning" is untrue. It's only slightly more.
It's a pie chart by the Oregon Department of Forestry. I'll give the top few causes here:
26% Lightning 22% Equipment Use 20% Debris Burning 12% Recreation 11% Miscellaneous 4% Smoking 3% Arson
As to your question, Oregon has just over half the population of Washington (4.2M vs 7.8M) but almost 50% more land area (96k sqmi vs 66.5k sqmi), leading to Washington having close to 3x the population density of Oregon (44 vs 118 people/sqmi). California has more than twice the population density of Oregon.
This feels sufficient to account for the discrepancy.
The population density explanation makes sense. Though, that density is very unequally distributed. Factors like square area with fewer than X people (how much total low density area exists), miles of forest access roads/rec sites - perhaps those numbers might give a very strong correlation. I wonder if you took just northern california, if the causes would even out to OR. (I agree pop density is likely a good correlating measure, just wonder if there is another that is even stronger)
Though, we were comparing apples and oranges! If we compare natural vs all human causes - assuming misc is human caused, then 70% of fires in OR are human caused. The percentage range for human caused fires being between 70% and 90% between different states makes sense.
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.
Best thing, get the hell out of the forests and let them all burn on a regular basis.
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.
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.
Are we already on track to cause our planet to no longer be a planet?
> It's not as if we'll solve the mysteries of existence twice as fast by having twice as many people
Imagine if the people at ASML (or your favorite other one-of-a-kind cutting edge place) had twice as many hours in their days. Or alternatively, if there were twice as many of them. Shouldn't that make them able to do more cool things?
You 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?
I'll go out on a limb and predict that their answer to that would be "no". I don't think you're assuming good faith here.
I 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?
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.
I hope you're not thinking of Hong Kong, Japan and South Korea because the air is fine there and we live the longest:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expe...
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.
If look at it as a way to spend huge piles of money to subsidize a lifestyle it suddenly is less charming
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.
https://www.cbo.gov/publication/59899
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.
0 - https://youtu.be/Rv71ZCd_yno?feature=shared
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!
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.
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.
We have a tremendous amount of empty space, and while I know a desert isn’t technically lifeless, I suspect hypothetical supporters would be willing to accept (or even would prefer to establish) enormous swaths of the almost unfathomably large uninhabited West being made into new National Parks and wildlife reserves so that the desert animals and plants could be preserved. I know I would want that.
I would argue that there’s nothing immoral about expanding our population from 8 billion to 10 billion, any more than there was going from 500,000 to 1,000,000 centuries ago. Both were done at the expense of altering and ultimately domesticating land once used for other animals and plants.
What are the problems of nitrogen pollution and CO₂ pollution? Both of those significantly promote the growth of plants.
CO2 drives greenhouse effect. To my knowledge, C02 eeenrichment of plants does not come close to offsetting the overall addition of CO2. If it did, why are atmospheric CO2 ppm counts going up?
[1] https://iowacapitaldispatch.com/2024/03/15/more-than-half-of...
Nitrogen pollution is from the nitrogen that blows and runs off of farms. It is a staggering amount: "globally farmers apply around 115 million tonnes of nitrogen to our crops every year. Only around 35% of this is used by them, meaning 75 million tonnes of nitrogen runs off into our rivers, lakes and natural environments. This is our “excess nitrogen”. It is quite staggering that almost two-thirds of our applied nitrogen becomes an environmental pollutant." [1]
I talked to a compost expert recently. He claimed if the nitrogen were fermented first to be bio available, it would require less and no longer be a pollutant. There are solutions, but until then farmers just accept that one third of nitrogen applied actually makes it into the farm soil
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/excess-fertilizer
> 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/
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...
> 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
We already avoid living in the interior of Australia, because living at temperatures of +50°C is just not very compatible with having body temperature slightly below +37°C. Same applies to the middle of Sahara desert. It's not impossible though, because the humidity is very low there, so, given a supply of water, you can cool by evaporation. At high humidity. you'd just die; such things happen during heat waves on the Indian subcontinent, for example.
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.
That’s not really saying much. The historical record is vanishingly small.
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.
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.
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.
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).
If the world economies did not need to keep growing, we’d have much more leisure time and much less productivity.
That extra time just gets gobbled up by the wheel of growth.
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.
I love technology but 100% in camp fridge.
> In Florida, a combination of development, drainage, and air conditioning created one of the most desirable cities on Earth from a previously pestilential swamp.
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.
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...
[0]https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2300582121
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.
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
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.
The real fault in your reply, besides missing the substance of mine, is that framing such things as “hubris” doesn’t really help us weigh the value of the idea. At most it’s a critique of ambition, but an idea’s ambition isn’t related to its validity.
Also, wanting other humans to flourish is nearly the opposite of vanity.
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.
We cannot consume every piece of the planet and leave nothing for other species, and there are already far more of us than necessary.
Really??? I expect more of HN than snark like this.
Argue in good faith and assume good faith, please.
> and there are already far more of us than necessary.
I think trying to argue how many humans should exist based on something like “necessity” is pretty weird. Who gets to decide our necessity?
Humans aren’t “necessary” in some way that transcends philosophical argument and neither should we preserve other species according to such a metric.
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.
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”.
https://www.up.com/customers/track-record/tr120120-freight-r...
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.
> people who live under the level of the sea itself
Your responses read as facetious. I chose two relatively large & wealthy European countries for comparison. But the US ranks 186/249 for population density; there is a lot of room for increased density if it is desired.
If you don't like those, here are some alternate compares you can sub into my post if it helps you engage with the concept:
- Belgium
- India
- China
- Vietnam
- Germany
- Italy
- South Korea
- Nigeria
- Spain
If the US were as dense as the EU, there would be ~1 billion Americans now.
Other than forgetting that literal drilled wells exist.
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-...
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?
https://www.quidnetenergy.com/
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.
oh that wish has already been granted. the world fertility rate is 2.3, and it has been falling precipitously for decades. once it gets to 2.1 we start depopulating an ageing population without a growing workforce (assuming no AI takeoff in the next decade) is going to be a lot of fun. you saved in your pension fund? too bad you can't eat numbers on a computer.
I guess space colonization is a third variable here, but the feedback loop on that is likely to not materially affect our trajectory in either direction.
it's possible that a lot of the loss in working age people won't be that bad - "bullshit jobs" (Taleb) do make up a lot of the existing jobs, so perhaps it's only the economic system that needs to change and the underlying population and means of production will be enough to work with.
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.
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?
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?
[0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/92/Annual_A...
But only 20000 years ago Sweden was covered in 3km of ice.
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.
Eg, Lillehammer, Norway is around the same latitude as Whitehorse, Canada but the average December high/low is a balmy -3°/°-8 compared to -10°/-18°. And Bergen is at the same latitude as those places but is even warmer, with a climate similar to Vancouver! That always amazes me.
As far as Hudson’s Bay being “seaside”, Churchill, Manitoba is on the southwest shore and is a great place to go and see polar bears.
If climate change does end up affecting the Gulf Stream, northern Europe is in for a tremendous cold shock.
You go live in a city. Leave nature alone. Send the rest back where they came from.
We should maintain a balance of course. I suppose the real problem here is agreeing on what "balance" means.
Yet I think we can hopefully all agree that expending unbelievable quantities of energy in order to desalinate seawater and pump it uphill a thousand miles in order to turn a desert canyon into a lake for absolutely no good reason whatsoever does not qualify as "balance".
I don't 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.
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.
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
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.
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?
Let's look at the chain of argument. The poster was countering an assertion that humans have created massive ecological turmoil by seeking to fundamentally reshape the Earth. Their counter was that Europe was once forest and swamp. I can only assume they meant that we take for granted that the present condition of Europe is good and because it was once mostly "just" forest and swamp that Europe demonstrates that these transformations are acceptable or even preferable and therefore we should do them.
I think this is a bad argument because it contains many assumptions and implications which I think are false.
Assumptions: #1 The magnitude of exploitation of Europe was necessary to achieve modern life.
#2 The development of modern European life occurred on an ideal or preferable timeline and things would not be better if this process had been gentler to the environment and taken an additional 1,000 years.
#3 The ecosystems of the American West are not more unique or prized than the temperate forests of Europe and their loss represents a similar loss therefore justifying the trade off.
#4 Wilderness, despite its increasing scarcity is not more valuable today than it was 1,000 years ago.
#5 Exploitation of the American West would have a similar economic and developmental impact as the exploitation of primeval Europe and therefore represents a worthwhile trade off.
I don't think any of the above should be taken for granted.
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.
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.
We are part of the ecosystem. We shape it too.
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)
Not so when humans drastically alter the environment in short periods.
Flattening ontologies doesn't do anything useful.
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.
This is not a societal need. If you want access to fresh water, do not choose to live in a desert.
Lakes that have no outflow, like the Salton Sea, and the Great Salt Lake, end up being collectors for pollutants.They also aren't exactly major attractants for population. Most of the great salt lake shoreline is uninhabited, and most of the development on the East side hugs the mountains rather than the lake. Both lakes have pretty serious issues regarding pollution that will need to be solved. I'm not sure why we would ever want to make another one of those.
There are plenty of places in North America that have plenty of room and resources for people. Coastal sections of the Pacific Northwest are pretty empty still despite ideal climate, water, arable land, etc...
Yes, it goes wrong sometimes, but on balance it's a great, even essential thing.
All capital and labor intensive.
We can manage without destruction and it's enabled exponential population and economic growth in a virtuous cycle.
This result came about from initially using African slaves to work plantations and build wealth. That wealth (and labor) was then turned into political capital to create the state itself. Then the state was used to develop a real estate market to create/centralize more wealth. WWII created even more development, bringing in the core of engineers to 'terraform' the land further.
At each stage of increased development, a different natural habitat was destroyed in order to create an artificial one to enable generating wealth for a select few. Native people were killed or driven off the land. Wetlands were destroyed, habitats and native species were razed and paved over, waterways were poisoned, and agricultural runoff created environmental disasters in the rivers, bays, and ocean. A vast number of invasive species were introduced which out-competed and eliminated many native species, and we are still battling to keep them under control. There are many superfund and other sites of long-term ecological damage. Drinking water is quickly becoming scarce due to the lowering of the water table. Mining pools are still infiltrating environments causing more damage. And of course, global climate change is exacerbating every single problem, plus adding erosion and elimination of land used for housing.
But hey, it's a virtuous cycle, right? We can manage without destruction, right? Just keep growing exponentially.
At some point we'll clean up all those superfund sites, and figure out how to stop the red tides, and giant heat-sinks of concrete and asphalt that create microclimates that eliminate native species, and figure out where to put trash once all the landfill sites are gone soon, and somehow rid the Everglades of all the boa constrictors and invasive plants, and somehow we'll catch all the green parrots out-competing native birds. And we will have to use this author's idea of desalination, since the fresh water table will be gone by then.
It'll all be fine. Once we figure out how to stop killing everything. Sometime in the future. Let's just not worry about that though. Onward and upward.
We shouldn't abandon civic projects and land development just because it was poorly done. It can be done well and it should.
Has anyone tried this on their own land? I'm tempted to try it.
> 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...
It's worth poking around YouTube to see just what people are saying they've achieved. It changed my mind.
Desert Solitaire https://a.co/d/16MZLfL
This is something "Crime Pays but Botany Doesn't" has been great at showing.
https://youtu.be/wd-b_C7a_es?si=lLAPl4Bcii62g3Cm
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.
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.
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.
It's a little like a bald person putting on a wool hat: great if you're cold, but counter-productive if you're already too hot.
- - - -
In the next twenty years we will build as much city as we have so far. In other words in the next twenty years the amount of urban area will double. We've gotta design and build these new cities to be in harmony with the global ecosystem that maintains life support for everybody.
"Building cities with ecological harmony" | Dror Benshetrit | TEDxAmazônia https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OrRCGY_lkk