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Atlantropa
- paulhilbert 7y agoSeems like something there should be a 99pi episode about (maybe there is?)...
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- chr1 7y agoThe congo-chad canal part of the project could be built independently from the rest http://www.globalconstructionreview.com/news/italy-china-ponder-2400km-canal-save-lake-chad/ http://www.globalconstructionreview.com/news/italy-china-pon... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Chad_replenishment_project https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Chad_replenishment_proj...
- thefounder 7y agoThe author seems to have assumed that Europe will be a united country which is a major oversight. Even if the UK lost its empire it didn't loose its desire to be "great again". France and Italy seem to lean on the same side.
- billpg 7y agoThe UK is on the verge of getting a dose of reality in that regard.
- navaati 7y agoI don't know, that could go (for France at least, but prob Italy as well ?) in one or two generation. A growing number of kids feel European and feel that being part of Europe is great enough (esp. compared to the US and China, national pride is still here of course, just shifted). EDIT: more and more kids -> a growing number of kids
- TomMarius 7y agoWhat about eastern EU?
- rimliu 7y agoSupport for EU is very high there. There are some voices, usually with nationalistic tendencies crying about te loss of sovereignty to the "new evil union", but they are mostly ignored.
- TomMarius 7y agoComing from that part, I wouldn't say that. Definitely nothing about "feeling European".
- martin_a 7y agoThat's sad. Why not?
- TomMarius 7y agoWe still feel like the EU is a close cooperation of countries, not a federation. Our ideas about social system are different, our economies are at a different state of development and have contrasting needs. We fear that with federalization, we might become locked in being suppliers of low-tech parts etc for the more developed regions. It is important to know that almost all big corporations and crucial infrastructure (water supply, etc) are owned by foreign parties from these more developed countries.
- thefounder 7y ago>> We still feel like the EU is a close cooperation of countries, not a federation. That's because EU is exactly that at this time: a close cooperation of countries and a bit more(i.e the cohesion policy). Without a fiscal union and a common army you cannot talk about a federalisation. Just look how the Greek financial crisis was handled. Greece was pretty much regarded as a stand alone country that needs to pay alone for its mistakes or leave the union. In a federalisation the burden would be shared like it happened in the U.S. We would talk about european citizens not greek citizens. The pros and cons of federalisation can be debated but I'm not sure if the poor states of the US would do better on their own.
- helb 7y ago> that Europe will be a united country which is a major oversight It might not look like an oversight in 1930s Germany… > Sörgel's 1938 book Die Drei Grossen A has a quote from Hitler on the flyleaf, demonstrating that the concept was not inconsistent with Nazi ideology. (from the Wikipedia article)
- kypro 7y agoUnless they have very limited power, political unions which seek to unify peoples with significant cultural differences, such as the people of Europe, will always fail.
- PhasmaFelis 7y agoHow about the United States of America?
- trhway 7y agoexcluding #44, do you see much cultural differences here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Presidents_of_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Presidents_of_the_Unit... ?
- PhasmaFelis 7y agoThey're about as similar as the majority of recent European heads of state, so I don't think that by itself proves that the US is more culturally homogeneous.
- Sharlin 7y agoEh, whatever ambitions for greatness France has, they are in the context of the hypothetical European Federation. The same goes for Germany.
- PhasmaFelis 7y agoIt wasn't an assumption, it was a goal. The project was supposed to encourage peaceful cooperation by giving everyone more land and a constructive project to cooperate on. Which is naive, yeah, but he wasn't unaware of the current political situation.
- dr_dshiv 7y agoSimilar to the Reber plan to get more land in SF by filling in the bay https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reber_Plan https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reber_Plan
- fnord123 7y agoLooks like the biggest soft target in the world and destroying the dam would make it possible to wipe out millions upon millions of lives in a single action.
- vincnetas 7y agowas thinking the same. would need to build a redundant second dam.
- rtkwe 7y agoNot really. This project kind of happened naturally millions of years ago and when it refilled it's estimated it took on the order of 10000 years [0] to refill. The Straight isn't big enough to get the giant wave of water it'd be more like a long slow flood for most of the people living along the new shoreline. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zanclean_flood https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zanclean_flood edit: added link for [0] I missed initially.
- Razengan 7y agoIt's a shame we cannot consider megaprojects like these because of concerns like that.
- jetrink 7y agoThe Mediterranean Sea has a surface area of 2.5 million sqkm, while the Strait of Gibraltar is only 14 km wide. If the Med were an Olympic-sized swimming pool, the strait would be hose 4cm in diameter[1]. Even if the dam were built such that the entire structure could be destroyed at once in a terrorist attack, the flooding would be gradual and there would be time for people to evacuate to higher ground. 1. Assuming 200m elevation difference between the two bodies of water
- fnord123 7y agoGiven these calculations, I guess you're right. The surface area facing the Atlantic with air on other side would be 200m x 14000m which would probably require such a width of concrete to be structurally sound that only the largest payloads would make so much as a relative dent in it.
- drinfinity 7y agoGood idea.
- puranjay 7y agoWhat's caused the death of the megaproject in the last 50 years? Even if they weren't realized (and most weren't), all these megaprojects were fascinating exercises in creativity and sheer ambition.
- mhh__ 7y agoIs the ISS not a megaproject?
- thefounder 7y agoNot really. It's a difficult project though. A mega project would be a self sustained colony on a bigger ISS. Something like Elysium.
- lifeformed 7y agoThe ISS is the most expensive project ever, it surely qualifies. A space colony would be more like a gigaproject.
- flohofwoe 7y agoUnintended ecological catastrophes like the disappearing of the Aral Sea? The Soviets were really big into mega-projects (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_river_reversal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_river_reversal, they actual wanted to reverse the Aral Sea shrinking with that too). Thankfully they came to their senses (and probably also ran out of money anyway).
- UweSchmidt 7y agoI guess megaprojects need a strong economy, a high birth rate and low wages. This provides an environment and culture where many people will work for cheap under often tough and dangerous circumstances, for a long period of time. These days labour is expensive and the stock market needs success every quarter, so products are rushed to the market and everything is leveraged through mass production, outsourcing and automation. Our economies are not able to do megaprojects anymore.
- mrfusion 7y agoWould there be locks on the main dam? A 600 ft drop seems like a lot for a lock to handle.
- ben_w 7y agoI imagine you go for something more like the Falkirk wheel: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falkirk_Wheel https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falkirk_Wheel
- mrfusion 7y agoYou’re effectively turning the entire meditatarian (sp) into a giant solar panel. The sun evaporating all that water makes way for new water to flow through the dams turbines.
- phreeza 7y agoThat is a neat way of looking at it. I wonder what the efficiency of this would be compared to photovoltaics.
- api 7y agoVery poor. The collector surface is just free.
- mkl 7y ago"Mediterranean": "Medi" = middle, "terra" = land/earth. It's the sea in the middle of the land.
- chr1 7y agoA smaller version of the same idea was Qattara Depression Project which has more chances of being built https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qattara_Depression_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qattara_Depression_Project
- denzil_correa 7y ago> Asia would forever remain a mystery to Europeans, and the British would not be able to maintain their global empire in the long run—hence a common European effort to colonise Africa was necessary. This seems to be an outcome of "Scramble for Africa" to colonize and divide Africa to avoid intra-European wars [0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scramble_for_Africa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scramble_for_Africa
- thefounder 7y agoAfrica was already divided by that time maybe even more divided than it is now.
- mikeash 7y agoDifferent meaning of “divide.”
- your-nanny 7y agoor a way for Germany to eliminate British sea power in Mediterranean, and provide convenient German land route to Africa
- tyho 7y agoThe water wouldn't just disappear though, how much global sea level rise would this cause? The salt would not evaporate, how much would this affect the salinity of the Med? What would be the impact on wildlife? Every costal city in the Med would no longer be a costal city. I wonder how the population would feel about that. The dam across the Gibraltar strait would be the mother of all single points of failure and a breach, through human error, natural disaster, terrorism or war would presumably kill millions if not tens of millions. How would that risk be addressed? This is just off the top of my head, has there been any serious analysis of these concerns? It would be interesting to read about how they would play out!
- jtms 7y agoI doubt it would hypothetically kill many at all. The refilling of a body of water that huge would take days even weeks given the size of the strait. Likely a child could crawl out of the danger zone faster than the water would rise.
- tyho 7y agoGood point! Sounds like it took months to fill originally. It would be no Mosul Dam. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zanclean_flood https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zanclean_flood
- vilhelm_s 7y agoXkcd made a comic/animation about this scenario! https://xkcd.com/1190/ https://xkcd.com/1190/
- hutzlibu 7y agoThat link alone only help insiders ... As it is a static image. There used to be a player to play it like a movie, I just found this: http://geekwagon.net/projects/xkcd1190/mobile/ http://geekwagon.net/projects/xkcd1190/mobile/
- LeifCarrotson 7y ago
- TadaScientist 7y agoI was very excited about this project when I was a teenager - another was a "simple" dam just at Marmara/Black sea / Istanbul. However, as any adult can see the financial impact vastly supersedes the potential benefits. Besides the obvious impact to the local seaside communities in Southern Europe, you would have to deal with unstable regimes in northern Africa and Turkey and the geopolitical side of things. Wars have been fought for much less important things than land and resources. Moreover the ecological effects would be impossible to calculate. There are other seemingly less important issues such as immigration. So, in all, ok - the central planning from a German scientist does get some creativity points, but we are not in Mars, trying to terraform it; we are in a heavily populated part of Earth which has civilisations at its shores for the last 4000 years.
- franknine 7y agoSomething similar has been done. The Three Gorges Dam in China. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Gorges_Dam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Gorges_Dam It caused huge ecological change and Chinese government force relocated numerous residents.
- 99052882514569 7y agoThere are 3 huge dams like that on the Dnieper river in Ukraine, with similar ecological and population displacement impacts. Gotta tame that nature, comrade.
- jessriedel 7y agoBecoming an adult doesn't give you the power to do a cost-benefit analysis for a continent-wide megascale project in your head. You can reject this proposal out of hand for rights-based reasons, but you have no idea whether the costs outweigh the benefits.
- TadaScientist 7y agoOuch! Unsurprisingly I agree with your first sentence. But, I do disagree on your second: I, and others, can see the costs, and I am not referring solely to the financial costs: It absolutely means risk of war in the Balkans, Greece/Turkey, N Africa. Elimination of most of the tourist income on the Med coasts Endangerment of the biodiversity and ecological balance of the sea Cause for droughts/flooding seen with other dams https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aswan_Dam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aswan_Dam Massive population dislocation in the region of tens of millions I can go on but the point is what would the benefit need to be to consider this project as net positive?
- tobr 7y agoAs so often, there’s a related XKCD, but not of the usual type: Time[1]. It’s probably the most ambitious XKCD project so far, with thousands of thoroughly researched panels.[2] 1: https://xkcd.com/1190/ https://xkcd.com/1190/ and http://geekwagon.net/projects/xkcd1190/mobile/ http://geekwagon.net/projects/xkcd1190/mobile/ 2: https://blog.xkcd.com/2013/07/29/1190-time/ https://blog.xkcd.com/2013/07/29/1190-time/
- failrate 7y agoBad idea for a geoengineering project (due to the potential for harm at scale), great idea for a simulation game about geoengineering.
- jedimastert 7y agoTom Scott has a great video[0] about a similar attempt to dam the San Francisco Bay that got a lot closer to actually happening. So see if it was practical, the US Army Corps of Engineering built a giant scale model of the SF bay and put a dam on it to see what would happen. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i70wkxmumAw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i70wkxmumAw
- perchard 7y agoAwesome. It looks like the scale model discussed in the video is free to visit at the Bay Model Visitor Center in Sausilito.
- userulluipeste 7y agoHmm... So we're talking about a dam to close the Black Sea, which is collecting the water of Europe's the biggest two rivers. Where all that cumulated water is supposed to go?
- fhars 7y agoThe level of the Black Sea is determined by the water flowing in from the Mediterranean through the Dardanelles and the Bosporus which replaces the evaporated water. A few rivers do not make much of a difference.
- chaostheory 7y agoCould be wrong, but I first learned of this from watching Amazon's Man in High Castle TV series.
- js2 7y agoIt's discussed, but not by name, in the book.
- scythe 7y agoForgive me if I’m mistaken, but wouldn’t shrinking the Mediterranean decrease (possibly a lot) the amount of evapotranspiration, drying out the climate of Southern Europe and North Africa? I can’t imagine how any amount of energy and waterfront property justifies this. Drought causes war. As they say, we owe our existence to a six-inch layer of topsoil and the fact it rains. I am in favor of rain.
- mcguire 7y agoWell, you wouldn't have to worry about Venice flooding...it'd be a couple of hundred miles from the sea.
- adolph 7y agoPart of the plan was to connect Venice to the remaining Mediterranean via a canal.
- elif 7y agoI... Would not move into a house that depends upon 4 separate dams to not be a death trap. I have some faith in humanity and engineering, but not that much.
- TimTheTinker 7y agoAs a software developer, this looks to me like multiple single points of failure, thus a very bad idea -- if any of the dams fails, all development on reclaimed land will be flooded.
- jodrellblank 7y agoYoutube channel RealLifeLore has a video on it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQh0CPNzSmY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQh0CPNzSmY They suggest that the climate change effects would be awful - the evaporated water from the Med would raise global sea levels by ~10 metres, the Med sea floor would be uninhabitable, a salt covered death valley temperature desert. The rain fall in nearby regions like Balkans would ruin them and affect agriculture all over Europe. The coastal cities on the edge of the Med. would become cliff-top cities with their views and trade options ruined. Plus there isn't enough concrete on the planet to build the damn to do it.
- julienreszka 7y agoYet another progressive Utopia that would result yet again in millions of deaths.