Look up digital reconstructions of pre-colonial Tenochtitlan and the huge lago de Texcoco that surrounded it. The colossal metropolis of Greater Mexico City, wi

Look up digital reconstructions of pre-colonial Tenochtitlan and the huge lago de Texcoco that surrounded it. The colossal metropolis of Greater Mexico City, with its roughly 23 million people, was started over a series of swampy islands that were barely fit for 250,000 people and then grew to consume the entire lake that used to fill the Valle de Mexico. Doing that is bound to have repercussions that stretch across centuries, particularly as the city in question grows to megalopolis proportions. Today's Mexico City is a water distribution and ground water control disaster that only keeps getting worse. For many people who don't know its geographical history, it's hard to believe that the city periodically floods catastrophically. After all it's in the middle of a broad high mountain valley with generally dry conditions surrounding it, but flood it does, and sometimes terribly during the annual rain seasons, causing incredible levels of gridlock for a place with already bad general traffic problems. One curious lesson from this is about how adaptable humans are even in especially disastrous situations once they've already invested in maintaining their place there. Mexico city continues to be a desirable living destination and through a mix of improvisations, new technologies and creative uses of established engineering methods, the city's residents and government keep finding ways to mediate against their problems. You could extrapolate this to many human-caused problems that people think insurmountable.