4 ms·
It sounds like a neat idea from the point of view of the sort of person who thinks it might be cool to use nukes to excavate mountain passes, or do large scale
by perl4ever 7y ago
It sounds like a neat idea from the point of view of the sort of person who thinks it might be cool to use nukes to excavate mountain passes, or do large scale geo-engineering of the oceans to stop global warming, but...if you don't like habitat destruction and climate change I don't think you're going to get behind this plan.
- BurningFrog 7y agoThat's mostly a question about your values, and not much to argue about. On the factual level, there is very little habitat to destroy there. It's about as lifeless an area as there is on Earth.
- perl4ever 7y agoI'm not expressing an opinion, I'm just saying people who care about the environment would not be happy. It's not the moon. Even deserts have ecosystems. See the section on flora and fauna in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atacama_Desert https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atacama_Desert which in parts has been used for a stand-in for Mars. The Qattara depression doesn't seem to be in the same league as the Atacama, as far as lifelessness goes. I mean, gazelles, cheetahs, vast wetlands?
- sjwright 7y agoWe've devastated absurd quantities of woodland, marshland, plains, rainforest, river, beach and ocean ecosystems. Devastating a few microscopic specks of desert ecosystem seems like the least of our worries.
- killjoywashere 7y agoThe people worried about the desert are going to be worried about the Moon too.
- BurningFrog 7y agoWell, the current ecosystem would be destroyed, but it would be replaced with one a 1000 times richer. It would also give millions of people in one of the most densely populated poor countries in the world a new place to live. To me, that's an easy tradeoff. But I can see the other side of the argument.