17 ms·

We Can Terraform the American West

246 points by jasondavies 2y ago

OutOfHere 2y ago
No, thanks. People are destructive to the planet in every way possible, and we don't need more. It's not as if we'll solve the mysteries of existence twice as fast by having twice as many people. If anything, having double the consequential pollution will halve the speed of discovery.
- johnnyjeans 2y ago
  I agree. Megaprojects that make large changes to highly chaotic systems never end well. From Mao's Four Pests to the ongoing wildfire crises that plague the west coast thanks to all the terraforming California has undergone (exacerbated by ongoing climate change) To say nothing of the fact that this is wanton environmental destruction. Just because something is arid, it's alright to completely change it? And for what? Having lived in Dallas, which is not unlike Nevada but more humid and wet, it's not a proper place to live. People jump from pool of air conditioning to pool of air conditioning. You go outside and walk for just 5 minutes, and you're completely soaked in sweat. Shade does not help. Lack of concrete does not help, you can drive 2 hours into the middle of nowhere and it's still like being in a preheated oven. You can't really do anything fun outside for half the year because you'll get heat stroke, or generally just be extremely stinky. If you want to make use of empty land, going to the miserably cold uninhabited swaths of Canada are far wiser. You can always bundle up, but you can only take off so many layers of clothing.
  - nine_k 2y ago
    Arguably the wildfires occur due to not enough meddling by humans. That is, due to not cutting enough old and dead trees, which dry up and become easier to catch fire, and not cutting wide enough openings in the forests to stop the spread of a fire when it occurs. The current wildfire situation is what the natural order of things looks like :-\
    - OutOfHere 2y ago
      That is highly debatable. There are overhead electric cables that often cause the trees to catch fire. Installing cables underground or with stronger insulation and auto-power-shutoff could help prevent several of the fires.
      - freedomben 2y ago
        That is true, but fixing that would merely reduce the frequency of the fires, while raising the intensity.
        rbanffy 2y ago
        Fires have their own cadence - they happen when the dead leaves and plants accumulate enough there’s sufficient fuel to maintain a forest fire. When we stop all fires the fuel piles up and the next fire is much worse and harder to stop. Up to a point we simply can’t stop it and it consumes all fuel and the forest starts from scratch.
        seadan83 2y ago
        Living stuff contributes too. Anything under 20 feet tall. If it was just dead material, tree farms would not burn. (But they do, they certainly do)
      - margalabargala 2y ago
        Sometimes electrical lines or humans cause fires, true. But usually it's just lightning. Far more fires, by count, are caused by lightning.
        seadan83 2y ago
        Overall most wildfires (in at least the US west) are human caused: "People — whether purposeful, reckless or simply careless — are responsible for about 95% of California’s wildfires." https://calmatters.org/environment/wildfires/2024/07/california-wildfires-human-causes/ https://calmatters.org/environment/wildfires/2024/07/califor...
- tbrownaw 2y ago
  > People are destructive to the planet in every way possible, Are we already on track to cause our planet to no longer be a planet? > It's not as if we'll solve the mysteries of existence twice as fast by having twice as many people Imagine if the people at ASML (or your favorite other one-of-a-kind cutting edge place) had twice as many hours in their days. Or alternatively, if there were twice as many of them. Shouldn't that make them able to do more cool things?
  - OutOfHere 2y ago
    You conveniently ignored the part where I noted that having double the consequential pollution will halve the speed of discovery. And yes, the pollution will double because more humans means more pollution that accumulates without getting recycled. Plastics, PFAS, CO2, etc. are all examples of pollutants that do not get recycled. It harms brains, aging them prematurely. A cleaner environment without strong financial pressure for survival is a much better way to do more cool things. Once the CO2 exceeds 800 ppm, brains will be tired all of the time, too tired to invent anything cool.
    - AnimalMuppet 2y ago
      > You conveniently ignored the part where I noted that having double the consequential pollution will halve the speed of discovery. You claimed it, without evidence, without even argument. Given that history (as I read it) does not support your statement, and you didn't support it either, why shouldn't we ignore it?
      - OutOfHere 2y ago
        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.
jamiek88 2y ago
Wow. What a project that would be! Really interesting read, and while the numbers are a little hand wavy even if they were out on the cost by an order of magnitude it would still be very cheap. The USA has lost its appetite for these mega projects, sadly.
- c0nfused 2y ago
  I think the issue is that when you look at it from the modern perspective of profit the economics don't work out. If look at it as a way to spend huge piles of money to subsidize a lifestyle it suddenly is less charming
  - onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago
    You're spending $16B to create $1T of real estate value. That would pay for itself in two years at 1% R/E tax and <10% interest. I didn't read the entire article, but the reason it won't happen at this scale is because you could never acquire the property rights to be able to do it, not because it's a bad investment.
- Mistletoe 2y ago
  Good? Do you understand the ecosystems and national parks that would be destroyed by this? Once those are gone they are gone. We don’t even need this nonsense, the population is contracting. We will have nothing but empty space in inhabited spaces already. https://www.cbo.gov/publication/59899 https://www.cbo.gov/publication/59899
  - jamiek88 2y ago
    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.
    - 2y ago
johnnyjeans 2y ago
It wasn't the lack of water that made Florida inhospitable, it was the climate. Florida's population explosion precisely coincides with the adoption of air conditioning in American households, in the post-war period[1]. Very few people want to live in a place where it's so hot and humid all the time. > During the last ice age, only 10,000 years ago We're still in an ice age. An ice age is simply when the earth's poles have an ice cover. [1] - https://countrydigest.org/florida-population/ https://countrydigest.org/florida-population/
- jefftk 2y ago
  > An ice age is simply when the earth's poles have an ice cover. Are you sure? I'm not seeing that definition anywhere, and it looks like even in interglacial periods there's permanent ice in both hemispheres: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_age#Glacials_and_interglacials https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_age#Glacials_and_interglac...
  - johnnyjeans 2y ago
    Interglacial periods are a part of ice ages. Even tells you right at the beginning of that article. > Individual pulses of cold climate within an ice age are termed glacial periods (glacials, glaciations, glacial stages, stadials, stades, or colloquially, ice ages), and intermittent warm periods within an ice age are called interglacials or interstadials. You can actually see the definition (albeit a little verbose) as the first sentence of that article: > An ice age is a long period of reduction in the temperature of Earth's surface and atmosphere, resulting in the presence or expansion of continental and polar ice sheets and alpine glaciers. On a technicality, you can get me for not mentioning the snow capped mountains part, I'd concede on that. That part is actually news to me. All the same, the earth is colder than it usually is. [1] An interesting thing I like to bounce around in my head: Could we live in the interior of the Pangean super continent if we had to? Interesting stepping stone between Earth's current, very mild climate, and trying to live in a place like Venus. Definitely would have to live like mole people. [1] - https://www.climate.gov/media/11332 https://www.climate.gov/media/11332
    - 2y ago
hindsightbias 2y ago
The cartels should just build nukes in Mexico and pump desalinated water north. Win-win.
- downvotetruth 2y ago
  The foreign legion should just build nukes in France and transfer electricity east across the Maginot Line.
  - boxed 2y ago
    I mean.. the foreign legion didn't build them, but that's already a thing?
Bjorkbat 2y ago
Kind of reminds me of an idle thought I have every now and then. Between the sheer difficulty of establishing any kind of foothold on Mars, and the vast amount of uninhabited land, it’s curious that more thought hasn’t been given into the much easier task of making the empty parts of the planet more bearable. Alas, the list of reasons to live in the Great Plains is very short, which is also why I’m kind of skeptical of terraforming the American West. You can make existing major cities more livable, sure, but don’t expect a surge of people moving to Montana or Wyoming. By contrast, Los Angeles and Miami have ocean access. Terraforming coastline is a no-brainer.
- xnx 2y ago
  Colonizing Mars is a joke. Earth was more habitable the day after the asteroid hit that Mars is now.
- kbutler 2y ago
  More people (net, absolute numbers and percentages) move to Montana or Wyoming than California, Oregon, and Washington combined. Net migration to each of those coastal states is actually negative, so the "combined" is a bit of a red herring. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_net_migration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...
Sabinus 2y ago
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?
- navi0 2y ago
  Or the nanoplastics that commercial RO filters appear to create [0]? [0]https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2300582121 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2300582121
aporetics 2y ago
Yikes. The sheer, unacknowledged hubris of this is bewildering. Let’s just remake the arid west?
- jackyinger 2y ago
  Truly, even if we were to disregard the ecological and social impacts on existing inhabitants, the energy required would be extreme. And thankfully that alone is enough to make this simply a fantasy. I actually quite like the arid west, if anything we should be letting it return to aridity as current water use (I.e. rerouting a lot of the Colorado River to California) is well known to be on shaky ground at the least. If you don’t like arid areas move somewhere else.
- boxed 2y ago
  One mans hubris, another mans hope for a better future. To put this proposed project into context: humans already did something similar in scale in what is now the Amazon. We accidentally rewilded the entire area via plagues. The Sahara is also a pretty new thing, and something we could reverse. We've long past the point of playing god or not. We now only have two options: 1. playing an incompetent god, pretending that our actions are not our fault 2. playing a competent god, taking responsibility and trying to do better
  - kibwen 2y ago
    Surely you acknowledge that "taking responsibility and trying to do better" means learning from our past mistakes and not repeating them? The project in the OP is motivated by vanity, not necessity.
    - ordinaryradical 2y ago
      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.
kibwen 2y ago
Why? Honestly, why? There's so much uninhabited land out that isn't uninhabitable, which is already more land than we'll ever need for the sake of putting human habitats on. Go move to the great lakes if you want a combination of remote wilderness and an infinite supply of free fresh water.
- throw4950sh06 2y ago
  Where?
runako 2y ago
> We’re missing 300 million Americans I love this idea, and would be comfortable pushing the number even higher. The cool part about the US is it's relatively unpopulated as compared to European countries. We could probably fit another 200 million or so people in the eastern half of the country, just by bringing it to the level of density of, say, the UK. If we were willing to live as densely as the Dutch, perhaps we could add 300 million in the eastern half.
- akamaka 2y ago
  Your proposal is fairly modest compared to some of the ideas out there. In his wildly enthusiastic 1860 book The Central Gold Region, William Gilpin claimed that the Mississipi Basin could support at population of 1.2 billion people, and was destined to become the “world’s amphitheatre”, with all of the world’s trade running through it in a grand “Asiatic and European Railway”.
  - germinalphrase 2y ago
    How optimistic to assume we would invest in trains.
    - nradov 2y ago
      We did invest in trains. There has been an enormous increase in the amount of freight moved by rail since 1860. https://www.up.com/customers/track-record/tr120120-freight-rail-how-much-ships-by-rail.htm https://www.up.com/customers/track-record/tr120120-freight-r...
- akira2501 2y ago
  > of, say, the UK. of, say, any small island. These dynamics are unnatural modes of compensation for other inconveniences. > as densely as the Dutch or, say, people who live under the level of the sea itself.
  - runako 2y ago
    > any small island > 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.
siliconc0w 2y ago
I love Casey's stuff - just incredibly detailed, ambitious and reminds you of what the country used to do when it set its mind to it. His new company is across the street where they built the SR-71 which is fitting.
- akira2501 2y ago
  > just incredibly detailed Other than forgetting that literal drilled wells exist.
  - boxed 2y ago
    Ground water is a very limited commodity, one which we are exploiting beyond sustainability. You are just plain wrong here.
- skybrian 2y ago
  It's always an interesting read, but he should hire someone to fix his website. (For example, when I first looked at it, all the pictures were missing.)
- doug_durham 2y ago
  Casey is a person that is disconnected from reality. There is a reason that Nevada hasn't been terraformed. It isn't regulations or lack of will. It's physics. He would be better off if he spent more time building things and less time in his spreadsheets. Please read "Cadillac Desert" if you want to have more context.
  - anon84873628 2y ago
    The article refers to "Cadillac Desert" but seems to miss the part about how it was all a bad idea in the end.
jarebear6expepj 2y ago
Won’t somebody please think of the sage grouse?
Animats 2y ago
Didn't we have the super-cheap solar powered desalinization guy on HN about two months ago? Each year, MIT announces they solved solar desalination: - 2021 [1] - 2022 [2] - 2023 [3] - 2024 [4] [1] https://news.mit.edu/2020/passive-solar-powered-water-desalination-0207 https://news.mit.edu/2020/passive-solar-powered-water-desali... [2] https://news.mit.edu/2022/solar-desalination-system-inexpensive-0214 https://news.mit.edu/2022/solar-desalination-system-inexpens... [3] https://news.mit.edu/2023/desalination-system-could-produce-freshwater-cheaper-0927 https://news.mit.edu/2023/desalination-system-could-produce-... [4] https://news.mit.edu/2024/solar-powered-desalination-system-requires-no-extra-batteries-1008 https://news.mit.edu/2024/solar-powered-desalination-system-...
- Spivak 2y ago
  Are you not seeing the progress in the articles? It went from a lab proof-of-concept to a working prototype producing in real life 5000 liters/day passively. That's impressive as hell.
  - Animats 2y ago
    2021-2023 is one approach, and 2024 is something else entirely. The 2024 thing is brackish groundwater cleanup.
  - _fs 2y ago
    Colorado river averages 500,000 liters a second, and we use every drop of it. Scaling up from 0.055 liters per second is going to be expensive
    - Animats 2y ago
      Right. Remember, the issue is not whether it can be done, but how cheaply. Desalinization works fine now, but it's kind of expensive. These claimed breakthroughs are cost reductions. For that, you have to scale up to at least small production and measure costs. Only then you can boast.
fulafel 2y ago
This raises questions. What is the this desalination cost competing against, what's the alternative cost of importing water by tanker or pipeline? Also, why do you want batteries, instead of just running the osmosis when there is sunlight? Maybe the osmosis equipment is expensive enough that it pays off to keep it 100% occupied with batteries?
- baking 2y ago
  The numbers in the OP show that the RO equipment is by far the largest cost so you need to maximize its utilization. The energy is used to pump water through the RO at high pressure so another alternative would be to use solar to pump water uphill so you could run the RO at night. The design using batteries is easier to price.
  - pfdietz 2y ago
    There are energy companies like Quidnet that are commercializing geopressure storage, where water is pumped underground at pressure, then recovered and the energy extracted. This would be an ideal system to combine with solar and RO. https://www.quidnetenergy.com/ https://www.quidnetenergy.com/
TinkersW 2y ago
[flagged]
- exe34 2y ago
  > 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.
  - HelloMcFly 2y ago
    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.
    - exe34 2y ago
      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.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- nroets 2y ago
  You forgot to mention all the CO2: Building new city will take a lot of concrete. More people traveling by plane etc.
ZeroGravitas 2y ago
There was some recent work on cheaper desalination based on cheap intermittent solar (the common reverse osmosis approach apparently doesn't work well with intermittency) that mirrors the blog writer's approach to efuels, so surprised he didn't mention it. https://www.pv-magazine.com/2024/05/01/novel-pv-driven-desalination-tech-achieves-lower-levelized-cost-of-water/ https://www.pv-magazine.com/2024/05/01/novel-pv-driven-desal... However, I was under the impression that for the US it's mostly a market failure and farmers are intentionally wasting scandalous amounts of water because they'd lose their water rights if they used the countries resources optimally.
retrac 2y ago
Reminds me of one of the big open secrets of North America: northern Ontario and northwestern Quebec are fertile. There is a 250,000 sq. km clay belt that spans almost from Winnipeg to Ottawa. The growing season is short but sufficient for grains and beans and such. It's the opposite problem. Drainage is poor and there is too much rain at the wrong time, so the land needs heavy drainage. Also it's miserably cold in winter, and it's far, far from the cities. The government tried settling it but most of them moved back south. Less than 5% of the area is under till or pasture today. The whole thing could be turned into a potato belt on the scale of the Prairies. If we could find anyone willing to live there. Truth is there are other places better suited.
- whiplash451 2y ago
  Anyone… or robots?
  - ysofunny 2y ago
    [flagged]
  - ben_w 2y ago
    Depends on what counts as a robot and how far you want to take them. In the extreme case, we can do aeroponics in greenhouses anywhere on the planet. Or another planet. Or space stations. But how much does it cost compared to open-air in soil?
- fifilura 2y ago
  Att 55 degrees latitude is is comparably pretty far south in Scandinavian terms, like Denmark. And we do grow crops in Sweden. Inland climate in Canada and (for Scandinavia) the Gulf Stream could make the difference. Although I imagine the Hudson bay should give it more of seaside climate?
  - ovis 2y ago
    From a map I found[0], it looks like Sweden has an average annual temperature of around +5⁰C, and northern Ontario and Quebec are closer to -5⁰C? [0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/92/Annual_Average_Temperature_Map.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/92/Annual_A...
lmaoguy 2y ago
No. You go live in a city. Leave nature alone. Send the rest back where they came from.
chewbacha 2y ago
Yuck, this would destroy the ecology of the area and require an insane amount of energy. If water is scarce, the most efficient thing to do is move the humans.
- rbanffy 2y ago
  The article mentions solar desalination.
sizzzzlerz 2y ago
How often has mankind attempted to alter the landscape to suit his purposes and found that, instead of improving it, it is destroyed instead. Far better is learn to live in the conditions as they are and adapt the techniques to utilize the natural resources. In some cases, maybe even that simply isn't possible so we just don't live there.
- cle 2y ago
  Humans altering the landscape enables civilization. Personally I'm more biased towards that than ecological conservatism. We should maintain a balance of course. I suppose the real problem here is agreeing on what "balance" means.
  - uoaei 2y ago
    The ecosystems are where we live, what you say makes basically zero sense.
  - kibwen 2y ago
    > I suppose the real problem here is agreeing on what "balance" means. Yet I think we can hopefully all agree that expending unbelievable quantities of energy in order to desalinate seawater and pump it uphill a thousand miles in order to turn a desert canyon into a lake for absolutely no good reason whatsoever does not qualify as "balance".
    - cle 2y ago
      Well the second paragraph of the article lays out what the author thinks the "good reasons" are. I don't even know if I agree or disagree with those as "good reasons". But also, we obviously don't all agree on them. Like, at all.
    - Brian_K_White 2y ago
      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.
xhkkffbf 2y ago
There are a number of interesting videos on YouTube about people who are adding swales and rock dams to their western land to slow down the departure of rain water. Apparently just these extra terraforming can be enough to turn barren land into a green and lush forest. Has anyone tried this on their own land? I'm tempted to try it.
- doug_durham 2y ago
  That's fantasy. If you don't live in the West it's difficult to appreciate that there simply is no water. No amount of of "swales" or rock dams change the fact that water doesn't fall from the sky in sufficient amounts to create a "lush green forest". Also every drop of water that hits the ground has been accounted for long ago and is part of some water pact. If you create a dam upstream you are guaranteed to get a visit from the water rights holders.
  - carapace 2y ago
    > Untouched and eighty years old, it was supposed to have been built by men with carts and horses during the Roosevelt years in the 1930s. > The soil was springy and spongy when you walked on it. Like an uncompacted garden bed it was full of mulch captured by rain water. Eighty years of humus was deposited here during flash floods, without any help from mankind. > The trees were all self seeded. > Geoff plunged his hands into the soil and went down 8 inches of moist, black, rich, composted soil. It was still damp. https://www.permaculturenews.org/2014/10/11/discovering-oasis-american-desert/ https://www.permaculturenews.org/2014/10/11/discovering-oasi...
  - pegas1 2y ago
    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.
  - xhkkffbf 2y ago
    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.
DubiousPusher 2y ago
As a life long resident of the American West, I can imagine few ecological crimes more horrifying. This is one of the most unique geographies on this planet. The life here is thoroughly adapted to a fragile balance of long want and occasional abundance. Everywhere you "terraform" would obliterate that balance. The application of the word itself is obtuse. How can you make more Earth like what the Earth itself made? I suggest that you take your infrastructure projects and apply them where people already live. The damage has already been done there. And those places have an elasticity of life due to the high amounts of water that let them bounce back at some point. Instead I suggest for the West we take a page out of Edward Abbey and simply marvel at its incredible uniqueness and beauty. Desert Solitaire https://a.co/d/16MZLfL https://a.co/d/16MZLfL
- anon84873628 2y ago
  People assume deserts are lifeless and useless, as opposed to the intricate thriving ecosystems they actually are. This is something "Crime Pays but Botany Doesn't" has been great at showing.
- dave333 2y ago
  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. https://youtu.be/wd-b_C7a_es?si=lLAPl4Bcii62g3Cm https://youtu.be/wd-b_C7a_es?si=lLAPl4Bcii62g3Cm
johnohara 2y ago
> Indeed, solar PV is the first mass produced product where energy is an output rather than an input. Fortunately, it takes no energy at all from inside the United States to manufacture solar panels in, you know, some place, over there, somewhere, that I have trouble pronouncing. Doesn't matter. I just order them online and they magically show up on my doorstep.
renewiltord 2y ago
The hardest part with all of these things isn’t the technology. Usually it’s the coordination. High loss aversion among certain groups causes a reflexive resistance to any large scale project. Memetic mimicry has them reach the same result without explicit coordination. Any society struggles with conservatives vs adapters. The population transition boundary is along prosperity. Until society reaches a certain degree of prosperity and prosperity alteration shows relative slowdown, adapters win. But afterwards, conservatives will fear movement downward. It takes substantial adapter power to attempt transformative change. Once the transition boundary is hit, it doesn’t matter how much prosperity gain will be achieved. The key element is adapter power. In a democracy, especially, conservatism dominates past the prosperity boundary. The shape of bureaucracy will impede executive adapters. America is mostly past the boundary and high-value change only occurs in fields where adapter power exists: opposition to BEVs, space technologies, AVs, chip fabrication, biotechnology, and land modification is strong. Adapter actions occur only through the use of executive power and memetic warfare: using conservatism language to promote subsidies for BEVs and permit AVs, military use for space launches, defence rationale for chips, and hiding biotechnology research until it’s ready. Terraforming is too high-profile and easily fought. To succeed we need to transform it into using the language of conservatism (“restoring habitat”, e.g.), apply executive power (do so under military research auspices), or make it less valuable for conservatism to fight (many smaller projects rather than one big one). We’ll get there, though. We’ll make the world better despite conservatism fighting us at every turn. Everything is good. Everything could be better.
- doug_durham 2y ago
  Please do more research since it seems you are interested in this. The reason we haven't terraformed Nevada isn't lack of will, or coordination. It's physics and economics. If the technologies listed by the author existed they would be being exploited extensively today. Lack of water is too much of an issue. Billions if not trillions of dollars would flow to it, and any small regulatory issues would be knocked down instantly. This entire article is fantasy.
- kibwen 2y ago
  > Everything could be better. There is no rationale contained in the proposal for why this would make anything better, or even if it did, why it would be a more desirable approach than any other proposal that does not involve fantasy engineering.
devin 2y ago
As I understand it, desalination produces brine, and that needs to be disposed of. Where does all of that go?
- emtel 2y ago
  Aside from fossil water, all of our fresh water comes from desalinated sea water, transported inland by clouds - which shows that there is no brine problem as long as the brine is dispersed widely enough in the sea. “How widely” is enough is something I wish OP discussed.
carapace 2y ago
I thought this was a good idea too but then a scientist pointed out that those areas radiate heat into space at night and the last thing we want right now is less of that. It's a little like a bald person putting on a wool hat: great if you're cold, but counter-productive if you're already too hot. - - - - In the next twenty years we will build as much city as we have so far. In other words in the next twenty years the amount of urban area will double. We've gotta design and build these new cities to be in harmony with the global ecosystem that maintains life support for everybody. "Building cities with ecological harmony" | Dror Benshetrit | TEDxAmazônia https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OrRCGY_lkk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OrRCGY_lkk
iluvcommunism 2y ago
I’d like to see the Colorado river less used. The author has a lot of good ideas.
hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
The great question is why. That is, if we build a ton of solar and storage capacity, wouldn't it actually make a ton more sense to use that to decarbonize the rest of our energy infrastructure, rather than going into a giant desalinization project? I'm not arguing that what TFA proposes is technically impossible, I'm just arguing that it makes 0 sense from an economic or societal perspective. For all the advancements the world has made in renewable energy, we still pump out a record (or near record) amount of greenhouse gases every year: https://ourworldindata.org/greenhouse-gas-emissions https://ourworldindata.org/greenhouse-gas-emissions
- Log_out_ 2y ago
  ? Its more a pump it already desalinated from up north rowards the south?
- reducesuffering 2y ago
  > wouldn't it actually make a ton more sense to use that to decarbonize the rest of our energy infrastructure Some portion of electricity is lost in transmission the longer the distances no? At some point it makes more sense for solar panels in San Diego to desalinize right next to them then try to get that energy to Maine.
  - hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
    High voltage transmission lines are remarkably efficient, with losses of 2-3% per 1000km. And while I assume you were using hyperbole, nobody needs to get power from San Diego to Maine in the first place.
    - reducesuffering 2y ago
      It's hyperbolic, but isn't the result the same if San Diego gives solar power to Utah, and then Utah gives power to Kansas, then Pennsylvania, then Maine? But if that's only ~10% (4,500km across the US) that's not bad.
- oceanplexian 2y ago
baking 2y ago
So if I build a plant today to produce water at 22 cents per cubic meter, somebody could come along next year and build another plant that produces water for 15 cents and put me out of business. Then the year after that, another plant produces water for 10 cents, etc. You need 20-year contracts to sell water at a fixed price to make this work.
dimal 2y ago
Holding up Florida and Los Angeles as models for development doesn’t seem like a good argument to me. No thanks.
doug_durham 2y ago
At first I thought that this was a satire, but then the joke never landed. The author cites "Cadillac Desert" but then ignores everything in the book. This posting is fantasy in the same vein as "we can build a space habitat at L5 by 1995". There is a lot of money to be made in water. If desalination was cost effective it would be being done today at scale. It isn't a regulatory issue, it is strictly economics. If someone could demonstrate the technology the author describes indefinite amounts of money would flow to them. It hasn't happened. It's not happening anywhere in the world. Finally the author talks about pumping water up hill as though it is a trivial thing. 20% of all of the electricity generated in California goes to pumping water today. The author conveniently side steps the issue of building out the vast electrical grid needed just to pump the water. What was this even posted to hacker news?
- seizethecheese 2y ago
  > What was this even posted to hacker news? This involves hacking geography, as such it is quite interesting for the general hacker reader.
- rnrn 2y ago
  > 20% of all of the electricity generated in California goes to pumping water today. Hi, this is wrong. The 20% figure includes all electricity for water-related uses, not just pumping. Most of that (80-90%) is heating and other end uses, not pumping and transport.
  - boringg 2y ago
    It is true that end-use heating takes a lions share of the energy from the water-energy nexus in California. That said conveyance and pumping water over the Tehachapi takes a pretty impressive workload. Water is lifted 1,926 feet by fourteen 80,000 horsepower pumps. OP comment is that the article is flippant on pumping water. OP is correct that they shouldn't be and it is energy intensive. Correct quote is "Water conveyance, treatment, delivery, heating, and sewage treatment account for about 20% of California's electricity and 30% of natural gas use."
nyrikki 2y ago
I don't know if invoking the Salton Sea, which is probably the canonical example of the risks of creating endorheic lakes by introducing water into an endorheic basin is really a good argument. The Great Basin is North America's largest endorheic basin, and the one large natural endorheic lake, the Great Salt Lake is currently drying up. Those of us who live down wind of it are already suffering the effects of it drying, and if it continues to dry. Millions will be displaced due to the health effects of Arsenic in the dust etc.. This also ignores other parts or hand waves away difficult problems. Brine from continental scale desalination as hazardous waist can be understood by the challenging problems with data center scale problems as an example. Also water from Lake Meed and Powell would require serious treatment to move anywhere due to Quagga muscles etc. Also large amounts of currently productive farmland are already at risk due to the Colorado being oversubscribed and declining aquifers. Heck, just stopping at the dry lake bed at Xyyzyy would show the issue with trying to use the Mojave river. While I am glad the author had fun with this thought experiment, the idea is simply not realistic in its current form.
- rnrn 2y ago
  > Those of us who live down wind of it are already suffering the effects of it drying, and if it continues to dry. Millions will be displaced due to the health effects of Arsenic in the dust etc.. It sounds like you agree with the author that refilling the salton sea and the great salt lake would be a big win… I don’t understand this line as a counterargument.
  - nyrikki 2y ago
    Refilling the salt lake should be a goal to protect existing populations, that is not the same as creating new population centers that we have even greater challenges. Unfortunately curbing growth and shifting agriculture needs to other locations is probably the only practical way. The Bear River divide is next to the Green River drainage, as that is already in a state of overallocation to support SW desert populations, that isn't practical. Pumping water into death valley wouldn't be the way to get water into the the Salt Lake either, and would still have to deal with disposing of the brine in scales gar larger than any municipal supply.
einpoklum 2y ago
Why don't you guys (= US'ers) start by not spilling that much crude oil and toxins into your existing potable water sources? :-(
- pfdietz 2y ago
  I think that problem is greatly exaggerated by those with certain motivations.
  - seadan83 2y ago
    It is not really.. there is massive polutionnof waterways. Iowa is one off the worst states for nitrogen pollution. In that state "just 24% of stream segments and 30% of lakes that were sampled were deemed healthy." [1] I was traveling through iowa recently. There were ducks floating face down dead in polluted waterways. Algae so thick it looks like you could walk on it. It is quite bad.. [1] https://iowacapitaldispatch.com/2024/03/15/more-than-half-of-iowas-tested-streams-and-lakes-are-impaired/ https://iowacapitaldispatch.com/2024/03/15/more-than-half-of...
    - pfdietz 2y ago
      That has nothing to do with crude oil. Nor toxins, really. Eutrophication of waterways occurs because of addition of nutrients that encourages growth, not toxins that prevent it.
      - seadan83 2y ago
        I agree not pertinent to crude oil. Toxin is a broad term. It is anything that when added at a sufficient quantity to create a toxic environment. The waterways I refer to are poisoned by nitrogen. The overall discussion was about focusing on keeping existing environments clean as opposed to jumping to new (relatively) pristine environments. It is the idea 'if you can't take care of your existing toys, you don't get new ones.'
anon84873628 2y ago
I guess one man's economic miracle is another man's environmental disaster. The western water projects were an engineering marvel, but short sighted. And Florida? Gee, how long can it stand against the rising seas?
- oceanplexian 2y ago
  They weren't short sighted, they expected we would continue and keep improving the infrastructure. We built some utterly incredible infrastructure in the past (Bridges, highways, dams, reservoirs, aqueducts, etc.) and then people stopped dreaming and stopped building. As a result we have been living on the infrastructure that our parents and grandparents built while supporting 10x the population. Which is incredible but at some point something has to give.
  - anon84873628 2y ago
    They didn't expect us to build a solution to undo destruction of the Owen's valley or the Colorado river delta. Maybe it hasn't continued because that type of infrastructure reached a local maximum. If you want dreams, how about reshaping the California Central valley as an enormous management intensive agroforestry system that uses highly diverse and resilient native species to meet human calorie needs. This isn't an engineering challenge, it's a social, cultural, and political one.
slipperybeluga 2y ago
[dead]
closetkantian 2y ago
If only Saudi Arabia had spent their money on this stuff instead of NEOM.
zft 2y ago
great opportunity for hashicorp
composter 2y ago
If the Casey's interest is in terraforming the American West to support substantial population growth, I would start with the Columbia River Basin and identify the bottlenecks to growth there. The Columbia River drainage basin is larger than the Great Basin (670k km2 [1] vs 541 km2 [3]), it's the 4th largest river in the US by flow [1], and there are already existing megaprojects like the Columbia Basin Project [2] that have unmet potential. If the growth Casey envisions isn't happening and/or won't happen with the easy access to substantial volumes fresh water of the Columbia River then it's very unlikely to occur in the scenario they envision with desal + pumping water into the Great Basin. - [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia_River https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia_River - [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia_Basin_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia_Basin_Project - [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Basin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Basin
- prpl 2y ago
  Yeah this is the place to do it. Much less competition with established places. I think Bend and Boise are likely to experience rapid expansion in the next 20 years on the west coast, especially as winters grow milder.
prpl 2y ago
Probably the place that makes the most sense would be Idaho/Oregon/Washington. The weather is relatively moderate (compared to the midwest), more water available nearby. The weather is a bit nicer in Utah/Colorado/New Mexico - especially the lower elevations, but it’s too reliant on the Colorado/Rio Grande IMO, and has to compete with southern California and Arizona/Vegas and Texas. Western Montana is also nice but may be a bit too snowy in the winter until climate change takes hold.
0xbadcafebee 2y ago
It is terrifying to me that people like this author exist and are serious. Even more terrifying is the possibility that one day, someone in power will read this and think, hey, that's a good idea. (also terrifying: who is upvoting blogs like this??? is there really a vast underground of people in favor of destruction of the [remaining] environment so we can add a trillion more acres of concrete strip-malls and Wal-Marts?)
pegas1 2y ago
Before we try to bring water to a desert, we should stop turning livable places into deserts. If you take a ride on the I-20 or I-30, you will see a lot of harmful engineering and inconsiderate land use, both causing regions will lose the rain. You see, the annual average total rain is not given, it can change with the land use and rain handling. Gorchkov and Makarieva put it in good math and named one of these processes a biotic pump. Generally, we need to stop treating the rainwater as an obnoxious waste and we need to stop greedy water management practices and start sharing the water with nature. BTW: just in case you need to know, I am not a dreamer, but I do have a good education in Hydrology. Currently, I am doing an experiment that will revive a couple of springs with very cheap and simple measures. Everything is measured and documented.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- jacobolus 2y ago
  For some inspirational promotion of building local-scale water harvesting structures (swales, check dams, ponds, ...) for improving individual watersheds, I've enjoyed the YouTube videos of Oregon State horticulturalist Andrew Millison https://www.youtube.com/@amillison/videos https://www.youtube.com/@amillison/videos for instance https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXqkSh7P7Lc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXqkSh7P7Lc
  - gaudystead 2y ago
    That was a fascinating video to watch. Thank you for the share! :)
- triyambakam 2y ago
  Are you sharing your work anywhere? Sounds really interesting
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
lazystar 2y ago
terraforming articles always remind me of my favorite "what if" plan - what if australia used nukes to create a canal right down the middle of the outback?
nathanasmith 2y ago
Leave it alone. It's fine the way it is.
dave333 2y ago
The vision of big lakes in NV valleys is way more water than is needed for viable habitation. See for example the permaculture project in Jordan "Greening The Dessert" https://youtu.be/MAousRO0e3g?si=wsCNQwQrH8Z8yfyn https://youtu.be/MAousRO0e3g?si=wsCNQwQrH8Z8yfyn
WalterBright 2y ago
California can't seem to build its high speed rail. How is it going to build all this water infrastructure?
EGreg 2y ago
Let them try it in Australia first. The whole continent is mostly desert (hi Mad Max!) and just a few cities on the coast. Or at least if they can't terraform the desert, let them terraform "the bushland" first: https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_bush#/media/File:View_from_connors_hill_panorama.jpg https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_bush#/media/File:View_... This is egregious considering that humans have actually terraformed forests into farms [1], and now 1/3 of the arable land is desertified [2]. How about terraforming it back into arable land by regenerative permaculture [3]? Start there first! 1. https://ourworldindata.org/global-land-for-agriculture https://ourworldindata.org/global-land-for-agriculture 2. https://www.theworldcounts.com/challenges/planet-earth/forests-and-deserts/global-land-degradation https://www.theworldcounts.com/challenges/planet-earth/fores... 3. https://www.princeton.edu/news/2017/08/22/orange-new-green-how-orange-peels-revived-costa-rican-forest https://www.princeton.edu/news/2017/08/22/orange-new-green-h...

246 points by jasondavies 2y ago

No, thanks. People are destructive to the planet in every way possible, and we don't need more. It's not as if we'll solve the mysteries of existence twice as fast by having twice as many people. If anything, having double the consequential pollution will halve the speed of discovery.

johnnyjeans 2y ago
I agree. Megaprojects that make large changes to highly chaotic systems never end well. From Mao's Four Pests to the ongoing wildfire crises that plague the west coast thanks to all the terraforming California has undergone (exacerbated by ongoing climate change) To say nothing of the fact that this is wanton environmental destruction. Just because something is arid, it's alright to completely change it? And for what? Having lived in Dallas, which is not unlike Nevada but more humid and wet, it's not a proper place to live. People jump from pool of air conditioning to pool of air conditioning. You go outside and walk for just 5 minutes, and you're completely soaked in sweat. Shade does not help. Lack of concrete does not help, you can drive 2 hours into the middle of nowhere and it's still like being in a preheated oven. You can't really do anything fun outside for half the year because you'll get heat stroke, or generally just be extremely stinky. If you want to make use of empty land, going to the miserably cold uninhabited swaths of Canada are far wiser. You can always bundle up, but you can only take off so many layers of clothing.
- nine_k 2y ago
  Arguably the wildfires occur due to not enough meddling by humans. That is, due to not cutting enough old and dead trees, which dry up and become easier to catch fire, and not cutting wide enough openings in the forests to stop the spread of a fire when it occurs. The current wildfire situation is what the natural order of things looks like :-\
  - OutOfHere 2y ago
    That is highly debatable. There are overhead electric cables that often cause the trees to catch fire. Installing cables underground or with stronger insulation and auto-power-shutoff could help prevent several of the fires.
    - freedomben 2y ago
      That is true, but fixing that would merely reduce the frequency of the fires, while raising the intensity.
      - rbanffy 2y ago
        Fires have their own cadence - they happen when the dead leaves and plants accumulate enough there’s sufficient fuel to maintain a forest fire. When we stop all fires the fuel piles up and the next fire is much worse and harder to stop. Up to a point we simply can’t stop it and it consumes all fuel and the forest starts from scratch.
        seadan83 2y ago
        Living stuff contributes too. Anything under 20 feet tall. If it was just dead material, tree farms would not burn. (But they do, they certainly do)
    - margalabargala 2y ago
      Sometimes electrical lines or humans cause fires, true. But usually it's just lightning. Far more fires, by count, are caused by lightning.
      - seadan83 2y ago
        Overall most wildfires (in at least the US west) are human caused: "People — whether purposeful, reckless or simply careless — are responsible for about 95% of California’s wildfires." https://calmatters.org/environment/wildfires/2024/07/california-wildfires-human-causes/ https://calmatters.org/environment/wildfires/2024/07/califor...
tbrownaw 2y ago
> People are destructive to the planet in every way possible, Are we already on track to cause our planet to no longer be a planet? > It's not as if we'll solve the mysteries of existence twice as fast by having twice as many people Imagine if the people at ASML (or your favorite other one-of-a-kind cutting edge place) had twice as many hours in their days. Or alternatively, if there were twice as many of them. Shouldn't that make them able to do more cool things?
- OutOfHere 2y ago
  You conveniently ignored the part where I noted that having double the consequential pollution will halve the speed of discovery. And yes, the pollution will double because more humans means more pollution that accumulates without getting recycled. Plastics, PFAS, CO2, etc. are all examples of pollutants that do not get recycled. It harms brains, aging them prematurely. A cleaner environment without strong financial pressure for survival is a much better way to do more cool things. Once the CO2 exceeds 800 ppm, brains will be tired all of the time, too tired to invent anything cool.
  - AnimalMuppet 2y ago
    > You conveniently ignored the part where I noted that having double the consequential pollution will halve the speed of discovery. You claimed it, without evidence, without even argument. Given that history (as I read it) does not support your statement, and you didn't support it either, why shouldn't we ignore it?
    - OutOfHere 2y ago
      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.

jamiek88 2y ago

Wow. What a project that would be! Really interesting read, and while the numbers are a little hand wavy even if they were out on the cost by an order of magnitude it would still be very cheap. The USA has lost its appetite for these mega projects, sadly.

c0nfused 2y ago
I think the issue is that when you look at it from the modern perspective of profit the economics don't work out. If look at it as a way to spend huge piles of money to subsidize a lifestyle it suddenly is less charming
- onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago
  You're spending $16B to create $1T of real estate value. That would pay for itself in two years at 1% R/E tax and <10% interest. I didn't read the entire article, but the reason it won't happen at this scale is because you could never acquire the property rights to be able to do it, not because it's a bad investment.
Mistletoe 2y ago
Good? Do you understand the ecosystems and national parks that would be destroyed by this? Once those are gone they are gone. We don’t even need this nonsense, the population is contracting. We will have nothing but empty space in inhabited spaces already. https://www.cbo.gov/publication/59899 https://www.cbo.gov/publication/59899
- jamiek88 2y ago
  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.
  - 2y ago

johnnyjeans 2y ago

It wasn't the lack of water that made Florida inhospitable, it was the climate. Florida's population explosion precisely coincides with the adoption of air conditioning in American households, in the post-war period[1]. Very few people want to live in a place where it's so hot and humid all the time. > During the last ice age, only 10,000 years ago We're still in an ice age. An ice age is simply when the earth's poles have an ice cover. [1] - https://countrydigest.org/florida-population/ https://countrydigest.org/florida-population/

jefftk 2y ago
> An ice age is simply when the earth's poles have an ice cover. Are you sure? I'm not seeing that definition anywhere, and it looks like even in interglacial periods there's permanent ice in both hemispheres: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_age#Glacials_and_interglacials https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_age#Glacials_and_interglac...
- johnnyjeans 2y ago
  Interglacial periods are a part of ice ages. Even tells you right at the beginning of that article. > Individual pulses of cold climate within an ice age are termed glacial periods (glacials, glaciations, glacial stages, stadials, stades, or colloquially, ice ages), and intermittent warm periods within an ice age are called interglacials or interstadials. You can actually see the definition (albeit a little verbose) as the first sentence of that article: > An ice age is a long period of reduction in the temperature of Earth's surface and atmosphere, resulting in the presence or expansion of continental and polar ice sheets and alpine glaciers. On a technicality, you can get me for not mentioning the snow capped mountains part, I'd concede on that. That part is actually news to me. All the same, the earth is colder than it usually is. [1] An interesting thing I like to bounce around in my head: Could we live in the interior of the Pangean super continent if we had to? Interesting stepping stone between Earth's current, very mild climate, and trying to live in a place like Venus. Definitely would have to live like mole people. [1] - https://www.climate.gov/media/11332 https://www.climate.gov/media/11332
  - 2y ago

hindsightbias 2y ago

The cartels should just build nukes in Mexico and pump desalinated water north. Win-win.

downvotetruth 2y ago
The foreign legion should just build nukes in France and transfer electricity east across the Maginot Line.
- boxed 2y ago
  I mean.. the foreign legion didn't build them, but that's already a thing?

Bjorkbat 2y ago

Kind of reminds me of an idle thought I have every now and then. Between the sheer difficulty of establishing any kind of foothold on Mars, and the vast amount of uninhabited land, it’s curious that more thought hasn’t been given into the much easier task of making the empty parts of the planet more bearable. Alas, the list of reasons to live in the Great Plains is very short, which is also why I’m kind of skeptical of terraforming the American West. You can make existing major cities more livable, sure, but don’t expect a surge of people moving to Montana or Wyoming. By contrast, Los Angeles and Miami have ocean access. Terraforming coastline is a no-brainer.

xnx 2y ago
Colonizing Mars is a joke. Earth was more habitable the day after the asteroid hit that Mars is now.
kbutler 2y ago
More people (net, absolute numbers and percentages) move to Montana or Wyoming than California, Oregon, and Washington combined. Net migration to each of those coastal states is actually negative, so the "combined" is a bit of a red herring. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_net_migration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...

Sabinus 2y ago

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?

navi0 2y ago
Or the nanoplastics that commercial RO filters appear to create [0]? [0]https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2300582121 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2300582121

aporetics 2y ago

Yikes. The sheer, unacknowledged hubris of this is bewildering. Let’s just remake the arid west?

jackyinger 2y ago
Truly, even if we were to disregard the ecological and social impacts on existing inhabitants, the energy required would be extreme. And thankfully that alone is enough to make this simply a fantasy. I actually quite like the arid west, if anything we should be letting it return to aridity as current water use (I.e. rerouting a lot of the Colorado River to California) is well known to be on shaky ground at the least. If you don’t like arid areas move somewhere else.
boxed 2y ago
One mans hubris, another mans hope for a better future. To put this proposed project into context: humans already did something similar in scale in what is now the Amazon. We accidentally rewilded the entire area via plagues. The Sahara is also a pretty new thing, and something we could reverse. We've long past the point of playing god or not. We now only have two options: 1. playing an incompetent god, pretending that our actions are not our fault 2. playing a competent god, taking responsibility and trying to do better
- kibwen 2y ago
  Surely you acknowledge that "taking responsibility and trying to do better" means learning from our past mistakes and not repeating them? The project in the OP is motivated by vanity, not necessity.
  - ordinaryradical 2y ago
    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.

kibwen 2y ago

Why? Honestly, why? There's so much uninhabited land out that isn't uninhabitable, which is already more land than we'll ever need for the sake of putting human habitats on. Go move to the great lakes if you want a combination of remote wilderness and an infinite supply of free fresh water.

throw4950sh06 2y ago
Where?

runako 2y ago

> We’re missing 300 million Americans I love this idea, and would be comfortable pushing the number even higher. The cool part about the US is it's relatively unpopulated as compared to European countries. We could probably fit another 200 million or so people in the eastern half of the country, just by bringing it to the level of density of, say, the UK. If we were willing to live as densely as the Dutch, perhaps we could add 300 million in the eastern half.

akamaka 2y ago
Your proposal is fairly modest compared to some of the ideas out there. In his wildly enthusiastic 1860 book The Central Gold Region, William Gilpin claimed that the Mississipi Basin could support at population of 1.2 billion people, and was destined to become the “world’s amphitheatre”, with all of the world’s trade running through it in a grand “Asiatic and European Railway”.
- germinalphrase 2y ago
  How optimistic to assume we would invest in trains.
  - nradov 2y ago
    We did invest in trains. There has been an enormous increase in the amount of freight moved by rail since 1860. https://www.up.com/customers/track-record/tr120120-freight-rail-how-much-ships-by-rail.htm https://www.up.com/customers/track-record/tr120120-freight-r...
akira2501 2y ago
> of, say, the UK. of, say, any small island. These dynamics are unnatural modes of compensation for other inconveniences. > as densely as the Dutch or, say, people who live under the level of the sea itself.
- runako 2y ago
  > any small island > 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.

siliconc0w 2y ago

I love Casey's stuff - just incredibly detailed, ambitious and reminds you of what the country used to do when it set its mind to it. His new company is across the street where they built the SR-71 which is fitting.

akira2501 2y ago
> just incredibly detailed Other than forgetting that literal drilled wells exist.
- boxed 2y ago
  Ground water is a very limited commodity, one which we are exploiting beyond sustainability. You are just plain wrong here.
skybrian 2y ago
It's always an interesting read, but he should hire someone to fix his website. (For example, when I first looked at it, all the pictures were missing.)
doug_durham 2y ago
Casey is a person that is disconnected from reality. There is a reason that Nevada hasn't been terraformed. It isn't regulations or lack of will. It's physics. He would be better off if he spent more time building things and less time in his spreadsheets. Please read "Cadillac Desert" if you want to have more context.
- anon84873628 2y ago
  The article refers to "Cadillac Desert" but seems to miss the part about how it was all a bad idea in the end.

jarebear6expepj 2y ago

Won’t somebody please think of the sage grouse?

Animats 2y ago

Didn't we have the super-cheap solar powered desalinization guy on HN about two months ago? Each year, MIT announces they solved solar desalination: - 2021 [1] - 2022 [2] - 2023 [3] - 2024 [4] [1] https://news.mit.edu/2020/passive-solar-powered-water-desalination-0207 https://news.mit.edu/2020/passive-solar-powered-water-desali... [2] https://news.mit.edu/2022/solar-desalination-system-inexpensive-0214 https://news.mit.edu/2022/solar-desalination-system-inexpens... [3] https://news.mit.edu/2023/desalination-system-could-produce-freshwater-cheaper-0927 https://news.mit.edu/2023/desalination-system-could-produce-... [4] https://news.mit.edu/2024/solar-powered-desalination-system-requires-no-extra-batteries-1008 https://news.mit.edu/2024/solar-powered-desalination-system-...

Spivak 2y ago
Are you not seeing the progress in the articles? It went from a lab proof-of-concept to a working prototype producing in real life 5000 liters/day passively. That's impressive as hell.
- Animats 2y ago
  2021-2023 is one approach, and 2024 is something else entirely. The 2024 thing is brackish groundwater cleanup.
- _fs 2y ago
  Colorado river averages 500,000 liters a second, and we use every drop of it. Scaling up from 0.055 liters per second is going to be expensive
  - Animats 2y ago
    Right. Remember, the issue is not whether it can be done, but how cheaply. Desalinization works fine now, but it's kind of expensive. These claimed breakthroughs are cost reductions. For that, you have to scale up to at least small production and measure costs. Only then you can boast.

fulafel 2y ago

This raises questions. What is the this desalination cost competing against, what's the alternative cost of importing water by tanker or pipeline? Also, why do you want batteries, instead of just running the osmosis when there is sunlight? Maybe the osmosis equipment is expensive enough that it pays off to keep it 100% occupied with batteries?

baking 2y ago
The numbers in the OP show that the RO equipment is by far the largest cost so you need to maximize its utilization. The energy is used to pump water through the RO at high pressure so another alternative would be to use solar to pump water uphill so you could run the RO at night. The design using batteries is easier to price.
- pfdietz 2y ago
  There are energy companies like Quidnet that are commercializing geopressure storage, where water is pumped underground at pressure, then recovered and the energy extracted. This would be an ideal system to combine with solar and RO. https://www.quidnetenergy.com/ https://www.quidnetenergy.com/

TinkersW 2y ago

[flagged]

exe34 2y ago
> 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.
- HelloMcFly 2y ago
  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.
  - exe34 2y ago
    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.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
nroets 2y ago
You forgot to mention all the CO2: Building new city will take a lot of concrete. More people traveling by plane etc.

ZeroGravitas 2y ago

There was some recent work on cheaper desalination based on cheap intermittent solar (the common reverse osmosis approach apparently doesn't work well with intermittency) that mirrors the blog writer's approach to efuels, so surprised he didn't mention it. https://www.pv-magazine.com/2024/05/01/novel-pv-driven-desalination-tech-achieves-lower-levelized-cost-of-water/ https://www.pv-magazine.com/2024/05/01/novel-pv-driven-desal... However, I was under the impression that for the US it's mostly a market failure and farmers are intentionally wasting scandalous amounts of water because they'd lose their water rights if they used the countries resources optimally.

retrac 2y ago

Reminds me of one of the big open secrets of North America: northern Ontario and northwestern Quebec are fertile. There is a 250,000 sq. km clay belt that spans almost from Winnipeg to Ottawa. The growing season is short but sufficient for grains and beans and such. It's the opposite problem. Drainage is poor and there is too much rain at the wrong time, so the land needs heavy drainage. Also it's miserably cold in winter, and it's far, far from the cities. The government tried settling it but most of them moved back south. Less than 5% of the area is under till or pasture today. The whole thing could be turned into a potato belt on the scale of the Prairies. If we could find anyone willing to live there. Truth is there are other places better suited.

whiplash451 2y ago
Anyone… or robots?
- ysofunny 2y ago
  [flagged]
- ben_w 2y ago
  Depends on what counts as a robot and how far you want to take them. In the extreme case, we can do aeroponics in greenhouses anywhere on the planet. Or another planet. Or space stations. But how much does it cost compared to open-air in soil?
fifilura 2y ago
Att 55 degrees latitude is is comparably pretty far south in Scandinavian terms, like Denmark. And we do grow crops in Sweden. Inland climate in Canada and (for Scandinavia) the Gulf Stream could make the difference. Although I imagine the Hudson bay should give it more of seaside climate?
- ovis 2y ago
  From a map I found[0], it looks like Sweden has an average annual temperature of around +5⁰C, and northern Ontario and Quebec are closer to -5⁰C? [0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/92/Annual_Average_Temperature_Map.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/92/Annual_A...

lmaoguy 2y ago

No. You go live in a city. Leave nature alone. Send the rest back where they came from.

chewbacha 2y ago

Yuck, this would destroy the ecology of the area and require an insane amount of energy. If water is scarce, the most efficient thing to do is move the humans.

rbanffy 2y ago
The article mentions solar desalination.

sizzzzlerz 2y ago

How often has mankind attempted to alter the landscape to suit his purposes and found that, instead of improving it, it is destroyed instead. Far better is learn to live in the conditions as they are and adapt the techniques to utilize the natural resources. In some cases, maybe even that simply isn't possible so we just don't live there.

cle 2y ago
Humans altering the landscape enables civilization. Personally I'm more biased towards that than ecological conservatism. We should maintain a balance of course. I suppose the real problem here is agreeing on what "balance" means.
- uoaei 2y ago
  The ecosystems are where we live, what you say makes basically zero sense.
- kibwen 2y ago
  > I suppose the real problem here is agreeing on what "balance" means. Yet I think we can hopefully all agree that expending unbelievable quantities of energy in order to desalinate seawater and pump it uphill a thousand miles in order to turn a desert canyon into a lake for absolutely no good reason whatsoever does not qualify as "balance".
  - cle 2y ago
    Well the second paragraph of the article lays out what the author thinks the "good reasons" are. I don't even know if I agree or disagree with those as "good reasons". But also, we obviously don't all agree on them. Like, at all.
  - Brian_K_White 2y ago
    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.

xhkkffbf 2y ago

There are a number of interesting videos on YouTube about people who are adding swales and rock dams to their western land to slow down the departure of rain water. Apparently just these extra terraforming can be enough to turn barren land into a green and lush forest. Has anyone tried this on their own land? I'm tempted to try it.

doug_durham 2y ago
That's fantasy. If you don't live in the West it's difficult to appreciate that there simply is no water. No amount of of "swales" or rock dams change the fact that water doesn't fall from the sky in sufficient amounts to create a "lush green forest". Also every drop of water that hits the ground has been accounted for long ago and is part of some water pact. If you create a dam upstream you are guaranteed to get a visit from the water rights holders.
- carapace 2y ago
  > Untouched and eighty years old, it was supposed to have been built by men with carts and horses during the Roosevelt years in the 1930s. > The soil was springy and spongy when you walked on it. Like an uncompacted garden bed it was full of mulch captured by rain water. Eighty years of humus was deposited here during flash floods, without any help from mankind. > The trees were all self seeded. > Geoff plunged his hands into the soil and went down 8 inches of moist, black, rich, composted soil. It was still damp. https://www.permaculturenews.org/2014/10/11/discovering-oasis-american-desert/ https://www.permaculturenews.org/2014/10/11/discovering-oasi...
- pegas1 2y ago
  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.
- xhkkffbf 2y ago
  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.

DubiousPusher 2y ago

As a life long resident of the American West, I can imagine few ecological crimes more horrifying. This is one of the most unique geographies on this planet. The life here is thoroughly adapted to a fragile balance of long want and occasional abundance. Everywhere you "terraform" would obliterate that balance. The application of the word itself is obtuse. How can you make more Earth like what the Earth itself made? I suggest that you take your infrastructure projects and apply them where people already live. The damage has already been done there. And those places have an elasticity of life due to the high amounts of water that let them bounce back at some point. Instead I suggest for the West we take a page out of Edward Abbey and simply marvel at its incredible uniqueness and beauty. Desert Solitaire https://a.co/d/16MZLfL https://a.co/d/16MZLfL

anon84873628 2y ago
People assume deserts are lifeless and useless, as opposed to the intricate thriving ecosystems they actually are. This is something "Crime Pays but Botany Doesn't" has been great at showing.
dave333 2y ago
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. https://youtu.be/wd-b_C7a_es?si=lLAPl4Bcii62g3Cm https://youtu.be/wd-b_C7a_es?si=lLAPl4Bcii62g3Cm

johnohara 2y ago

> Indeed, solar PV is the first mass produced product where energy is an output rather than an input. Fortunately, it takes no energy at all from inside the United States to manufacture solar panels in, you know, some place, over there, somewhere, that I have trouble pronouncing. Doesn't matter. I just order them online and they magically show up on my doorstep.

renewiltord 2y ago

The hardest part with all of these things isn’t the technology. Usually it’s the coordination. High loss aversion among certain groups causes a reflexive resistance to any large scale project. Memetic mimicry has them reach the same result without explicit coordination. Any society struggles with conservatives vs adapters. The population transition boundary is along prosperity. Until society reaches a certain degree of prosperity and prosperity alteration shows relative slowdown, adapters win. But afterwards, conservatives will fear movement downward. It takes substantial adapter power to attempt transformative change. Once the transition boundary is hit, it doesn’t matter how much prosperity gain will be achieved. The key element is adapter power. In a democracy, especially, conservatism dominates past the prosperity boundary. The shape of bureaucracy will impede executive adapters. America is mostly past the boundary and high-value change only occurs in fields where adapter power exists: opposition to BEVs, space technologies, AVs, chip fabrication, biotechnology, and land modification is strong. Adapter actions occur only through the use of executive power and memetic warfare: using conservatism language to promote subsidies for BEVs and permit AVs, military use for space launches, defence rationale for chips, and hiding biotechnology research until it’s ready. Terraforming is too high-profile and easily fought. To succeed we need to transform it into using the language of conservatism (“restoring habitat”, e.g.), apply executive power (do so under military research auspices), or make it less valuable for conservatism to fight (many smaller projects rather than one big one). We’ll get there, though. We’ll make the world better despite conservatism fighting us at every turn. Everything is good. Everything could be better.

doug_durham 2y ago
Please do more research since it seems you are interested in this. The reason we haven't terraformed Nevada isn't lack of will, or coordination. It's physics and economics. If the technologies listed by the author existed they would be being exploited extensively today. Lack of water is too much of an issue. Billions if not trillions of dollars would flow to it, and any small regulatory issues would be knocked down instantly. This entire article is fantasy.
kibwen 2y ago
> Everything could be better. There is no rationale contained in the proposal for why this would make anything better, or even if it did, why it would be a more desirable approach than any other proposal that does not involve fantasy engineering.

devin 2y ago

As I understand it, desalination produces brine, and that needs to be disposed of. Where does all of that go?

emtel 2y ago
Aside from fossil water, all of our fresh water comes from desalinated sea water, transported inland by clouds - which shows that there is no brine problem as long as the brine is dispersed widely enough in the sea. “How widely” is enough is something I wish OP discussed.

carapace 2y ago

I thought this was a good idea too but then a scientist pointed out that those areas radiate heat into space at night and the last thing we want right now is less of that. It's a little like a bald person putting on a wool hat: great if you're cold, but counter-productive if you're already too hot. - - - - In the next twenty years we will build as much city as we have so far. In other words in the next twenty years the amount of urban area will double. We've gotta design and build these new cities to be in harmony with the global ecosystem that maintains life support for everybody. "Building cities with ecological harmony" | Dror Benshetrit | TEDxAmazônia https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OrRCGY_lkk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OrRCGY_lkk

iluvcommunism 2y ago

I’d like to see the Colorado river less used. The author has a lot of good ideas.

hn_throwaway_99 2y ago

The great question is why. That is, if we build a ton of solar and storage capacity, wouldn't it actually make a ton more sense to use that to decarbonize the rest of our energy infrastructure, rather than going into a giant desalinization project? I'm not arguing that what TFA proposes is technically impossible, I'm just arguing that it makes 0 sense from an economic or societal perspective. For all the advancements the world has made in renewable energy, we still pump out a record (or near record) amount of greenhouse gases every year: https://ourworldindata.org/greenhouse-gas-emissions https://ourworldindata.org/greenhouse-gas-emissions

Log_out_ 2y ago
? Its more a pump it already desalinated from up north rowards the south?
reducesuffering 2y ago
> wouldn't it actually make a ton more sense to use that to decarbonize the rest of our energy infrastructure Some portion of electricity is lost in transmission the longer the distances no? At some point it makes more sense for solar panels in San Diego to desalinize right next to them then try to get that energy to Maine.
- hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
  High voltage transmission lines are remarkably efficient, with losses of 2-3% per 1000km. And while I assume you were using hyperbole, nobody needs to get power from San Diego to Maine in the first place.
  - reducesuffering 2y ago
    It's hyperbolic, but isn't the result the same if San Diego gives solar power to Utah, and then Utah gives power to Kansas, then Pennsylvania, then Maine? But if that's only ~10% (4,500km across the US) that's not bad.
oceanplexian 2y ago

baking 2y ago

So if I build a plant today to produce water at 22 cents per cubic meter, somebody could come along next year and build another plant that produces water for 15 cents and put me out of business. Then the year after that, another plant produces water for 10 cents, etc. You need 20-year contracts to sell water at a fixed price to make this work.

dimal 2y ago

Holding up Florida and Los Angeles as models for development doesn’t seem like a good argument to me. No thanks.

doug_durham 2y ago

At first I thought that this was a satire, but then the joke never landed. The author cites "Cadillac Desert" but then ignores everything in the book. This posting is fantasy in the same vein as "we can build a space habitat at L5 by 1995". There is a lot of money to be made in water. If desalination was cost effective it would be being done today at scale. It isn't a regulatory issue, it is strictly economics. If someone could demonstrate the technology the author describes indefinite amounts of money would flow to them. It hasn't happened. It's not happening anywhere in the world. Finally the author talks about pumping water up hill as though it is a trivial thing. 20% of all of the electricity generated in California goes to pumping water today. The author conveniently side steps the issue of building out the vast electrical grid needed just to pump the water. What was this even posted to hacker news?

seizethecheese 2y ago
> What was this even posted to hacker news? This involves hacking geography, as such it is quite interesting for the general hacker reader.
rnrn 2y ago
> 20% of all of the electricity generated in California goes to pumping water today. Hi, this is wrong. The 20% figure includes all electricity for water-related uses, not just pumping. Most of that (80-90%) is heating and other end uses, not pumping and transport.
- boringg 2y ago
  It is true that end-use heating takes a lions share of the energy from the water-energy nexus in California. That said conveyance and pumping water over the Tehachapi takes a pretty impressive workload. Water is lifted 1,926 feet by fourteen 80,000 horsepower pumps. OP comment is that the article is flippant on pumping water. OP is correct that they shouldn't be and it is energy intensive. Correct quote is "Water conveyance, treatment, delivery, heating, and sewage treatment account for about 20% of California's electricity and 30% of natural gas use."

nyrikki 2y ago

I don't know if invoking the Salton Sea, which is probably the canonical example of the risks of creating endorheic lakes by introducing water into an endorheic basin is really a good argument. The Great Basin is North America's largest endorheic basin, and the one large natural endorheic lake, the Great Salt Lake is currently drying up. Those of us who live down wind of it are already suffering the effects of it drying, and if it continues to dry. Millions will be displaced due to the health effects of Arsenic in the dust etc.. This also ignores other parts or hand waves away difficult problems. Brine from continental scale desalination as hazardous waist can be understood by the challenging problems with data center scale problems as an example. Also water from Lake Meed and Powell would require serious treatment to move anywhere due to Quagga muscles etc. Also large amounts of currently productive farmland are already at risk due to the Colorado being oversubscribed and declining aquifers. Heck, just stopping at the dry lake bed at Xyyzyy would show the issue with trying to use the Mojave river. While I am glad the author had fun with this thought experiment, the idea is simply not realistic in its current form.

rnrn 2y ago
> Those of us who live down wind of it are already suffering the effects of it drying, and if it continues to dry. Millions will be displaced due to the health effects of Arsenic in the dust etc.. It sounds like you agree with the author that refilling the salton sea and the great salt lake would be a big win… I don’t understand this line as a counterargument.
- nyrikki 2y ago
  Refilling the salt lake should be a goal to protect existing populations, that is not the same as creating new population centers that we have even greater challenges. Unfortunately curbing growth and shifting agriculture needs to other locations is probably the only practical way. The Bear River divide is next to the Green River drainage, as that is already in a state of overallocation to support SW desert populations, that isn't practical. Pumping water into death valley wouldn't be the way to get water into the the Salt Lake either, and would still have to deal with disposing of the brine in scales gar larger than any municipal supply.

einpoklum 2y ago

Why don't you guys (= US'ers) start by not spilling that much crude oil and toxins into your existing potable water sources? :-(

pfdietz 2y ago
I think that problem is greatly exaggerated by those with certain motivations.
- seadan83 2y ago
  It is not really.. there is massive polutionnof waterways. Iowa is one off the worst states for nitrogen pollution. In that state "just 24% of stream segments and 30% of lakes that were sampled were deemed healthy." [1] I was traveling through iowa recently. There were ducks floating face down dead in polluted waterways. Algae so thick it looks like you could walk on it. It is quite bad.. [1] https://iowacapitaldispatch.com/2024/03/15/more-than-half-of-iowas-tested-streams-and-lakes-are-impaired/ https://iowacapitaldispatch.com/2024/03/15/more-than-half-of...
  - pfdietz 2y ago
    That has nothing to do with crude oil. Nor toxins, really. Eutrophication of waterways occurs because of addition of nutrients that encourages growth, not toxins that prevent it.
    - seadan83 2y ago
      I agree not pertinent to crude oil. Toxin is a broad term. It is anything that when added at a sufficient quantity to create a toxic environment. The waterways I refer to are poisoned by nitrogen. The overall discussion was about focusing on keeping existing environments clean as opposed to jumping to new (relatively) pristine environments. It is the idea 'if you can't take care of your existing toys, you don't get new ones.'

anon84873628 2y ago

I guess one man's economic miracle is another man's environmental disaster. The western water projects were an engineering marvel, but short sighted. And Florida? Gee, how long can it stand against the rising seas?

oceanplexian 2y ago
They weren't short sighted, they expected we would continue and keep improving the infrastructure. We built some utterly incredible infrastructure in the past (Bridges, highways, dams, reservoirs, aqueducts, etc.) and then people stopped dreaming and stopped building. As a result we have been living on the infrastructure that our parents and grandparents built while supporting 10x the population. Which is incredible but at some point something has to give.
- anon84873628 2y ago
  They didn't expect us to build a solution to undo destruction of the Owen's valley or the Colorado river delta. Maybe it hasn't continued because that type of infrastructure reached a local maximum. If you want dreams, how about reshaping the California Central valley as an enormous management intensive agroforestry system that uses highly diverse and resilient native species to meet human calorie needs. This isn't an engineering challenge, it's a social, cultural, and political one.

slipperybeluga 2y ago

[dead]

closetkantian 2y ago

If only Saudi Arabia had spent their money on this stuff instead of NEOM.

zft 2y ago

great opportunity for hashicorp

composter 2y ago

If the Casey's interest is in terraforming the American West to support substantial population growth, I would start with the Columbia River Basin and identify the bottlenecks to growth there. The Columbia River drainage basin is larger than the Great Basin (670k km2 [1] vs 541 km2 [3]), it's the 4th largest river in the US by flow [1], and there are already existing megaprojects like the Columbia Basin Project [2] that have unmet potential. If the growth Casey envisions isn't happening and/or won't happen with the easy access to substantial volumes fresh water of the Columbia River then it's very unlikely to occur in the scenario they envision with desal + pumping water into the Great Basin. - [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia_River https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia_River - [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia_Basin_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia_Basin_Project - [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Basin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Basin

prpl 2y ago
Yeah this is the place to do it. Much less competition with established places. I think Bend and Boise are likely to experience rapid expansion in the next 20 years on the west coast, especially as winters grow milder.

prpl 2y ago

Probably the place that makes the most sense would be Idaho/Oregon/Washington. The weather is relatively moderate (compared to the midwest), more water available nearby. The weather is a bit nicer in Utah/Colorado/New Mexico - especially the lower elevations, but it’s too reliant on the Colorado/Rio Grande IMO, and has to compete with southern California and Arizona/Vegas and Texas. Western Montana is also nice but may be a bit too snowy in the winter until climate change takes hold.

0xbadcafebee 2y ago

It is terrifying to me that people like this author exist and are serious. Even more terrifying is the possibility that one day, someone in power will read this and think, hey, that's a good idea. (also terrifying: who is upvoting blogs like this??? is there really a vast underground of people in favor of destruction of the [remaining] environment so we can add a trillion more acres of concrete strip-malls and Wal-Marts?)

pegas1 2y ago

Before we try to bring water to a desert, we should stop turning livable places into deserts. If you take a ride on the I-20 or I-30, you will see a lot of harmful engineering and inconsiderate land use, both causing regions will lose the rain. You see, the annual average total rain is not given, it can change with the land use and rain handling. Gorchkov and Makarieva put it in good math and named one of these processes a biotic pump. Generally, we need to stop treating the rainwater as an obnoxious waste and we need to stop greedy water management practices and start sharing the water with nature. BTW: just in case you need to know, I am not a dreamer, but I do have a good education in Hydrology. Currently, I am doing an experiment that will revive a couple of springs with very cheap and simple measures. Everything is measured and documented.

deleted 2y ago
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jacobolus 2y ago
For some inspirational promotion of building local-scale water harvesting structures (swales, check dams, ponds, ...) for improving individual watersheds, I've enjoyed the YouTube videos of Oregon State horticulturalist Andrew Millison https://www.youtube.com/@amillison/videos https://www.youtube.com/@amillison/videos for instance https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXqkSh7P7Lc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXqkSh7P7Lc
- gaudystead 2y ago
  That was a fascinating video to watch. Thank you for the share! :)
triyambakam 2y ago
Are you sharing your work anywhere? Sounds really interesting

deleted 2y ago

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lazystar 2y ago

terraforming articles always remind me of my favorite "what if" plan - what if australia used nukes to create a canal right down the middle of the outback?

nathanasmith 2y ago

Leave it alone. It's fine the way it is.

dave333 2y ago

The vision of big lakes in NV valleys is way more water than is needed for viable habitation. See for example the permaculture project in Jordan "Greening The Dessert" https://youtu.be/MAousRO0e3g?si=wsCNQwQrH8Z8yfyn https://youtu.be/MAousRO0e3g?si=wsCNQwQrH8Z8yfyn

WalterBright 2y ago

California can't seem to build its high speed rail. How is it going to build all this water infrastructure?

EGreg 2y ago

Let them try it in Australia first. The whole continent is mostly desert (hi Mad Max!) and just a few cities on the coast. Or at least if they can't terraform the desert, let them terraform "the bushland" first: https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_bush#/media/File:View_from_connors_hill_panorama.jpg https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_bush#/media/File:View_... This is egregious considering that humans have actually terraformed forests into farms [1], and now 1/3 of the arable land is desertified [2]. How about terraforming it back into arable land by regenerative permaculture [3]? Start there first! 1. https://ourworldindata.org/global-land-for-agriculture https://ourworldindata.org/global-land-for-agriculture 2. https://www.theworldcounts.com/challenges/planet-earth/forests-and-deserts/global-land-degradation https://www.theworldcounts.com/challenges/planet-earth/fores... 3. https://www.princeton.edu/news/2017/08/22/orange-new-green-how-orange-peels-revived-costa-rican-forest https://www.princeton.edu/news/2017/08/22/orange-new-green-h...