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This post is set in a beautiful, liminal place between fantasy and reality. Could we actually do all of this? Probably not. But we don’t think about the specifi

This post is set in a beautiful, liminal place between fantasy and reality. Could we actually do all of this? Probably not. But we don’t think about the specifics of things like this enough. It challenges us to think about ideas like this in ways more practical problems cannot. I read somewhere that we dream as a way for our brains, as complex predictive analytical machines, from overfitting. This kind of post feels the same, but for our collective intelligence.

kibwen 2y ago
> Could we actually do all of this? Probably not. It's the opposite. We could, probably, do all of this, given colossal will, stupefying investment, and an infinite appetite for destruction. The trick here is to exercise the wisdom to know that we should not do this, despite there being, strictly speaking, no technical reason why we could not. It's like an intrusive thought writ large: just because you have the opportunity to jump off the lip of the Grand Canyon and plunge to your death, does not mean that you should. Like, come on y'all: at least eye-popping megaprojects like the Panama Canal were economically and politically motivated. We don't need Lake Nevada.
- hughesjj 2y ago
  100%. Also the author citing California and Florida as "successful" terraforming projects is a bit ironic in 2024. Nature seems to be taking them both back... The world is already super fragile, especially in regards to climate change. I'm not convinced doubling down on a country which struggles to maintain it's existing infrastructure and is hyper divided (to my chagrin) is a wise strategy.
jazzyjackson 2y ago
That's a neat way to look at it. I've always thought of dreams as a kind of garbage collection where we produce simulated situations to test whether new information will help us or if it's irrelevant to us, and throw things out that we won't need to remember. I read that one reason we can kind of remember our dreams when we first wake up but can't 5 minutes later is because our brain has some method of forcing our interpretation of what we see into some kind of reasonable cohesion according to what we consider to be physically possible or likely - this region is inactive in our sleep so like you say, we can play in scenarios free from the constraint of what is known to be possible When we wake up, those impossible and unlikely scenarios in our dreams are still interpretable for a few minutes, but as we fully wake up we're just totally blocked from recalling that memory because what happened defies cohesive reality Anyway, I agree that not everything needs to fit into a "serious proposal | speculative fiction" dichotomy
ta_1138 2y ago
Go read Cadillac Desert: It's precisely about all the efforts, right between fantasy and reality, that have put is in the hole we are today. From straight out wishful thinking to really expensive investments that haven't ever come remotely close to paying for themselves. There's entire sections covering how we have spend very large amounts of money doing water works that just go to feed very low productivity farms. We dreamed, built, and just wasted money. It's true that as solar gets cheaper, more parts of the world become livable. Byt why should we occupy more of the US with very expensive, low productivity suburbs? Is there no opportunity costs in piling more people into Phoenix? But no, it's just more poetic to just spend billions upon billions to make the property of people living in a desert more valuable.
- mikepurvis 2y ago
  Doubling up on the CD recommendation; I saw it mentioned on HN years ago and read it and it completely changed the way I see water issues in the US, in particular the insight about how “wasted” water has a completely different meaning on the east coast vs the west. To someone who has lived most of my life in Ontario, it’s an eye opener recognizing that drinkable water is insanely plentiful here relative to most of the rest of the world.
- photonthug 2y ago
  > property value of people living in a desert more valuable People living in the desert (outside of phoenix and Vegas anyway) are probably thinking there is much more value in not being in the suburbs honestly, and I seriously doubt they want to trade this for more neighbors. They still want infrastructure investment though, because there is little appeal in their taxes funding more development in urban centers that are already rich or repairing coastal areas after the next hurricane, etc. Forward looking investments in rural areas is a great way to boost the economy generally, to curb the scary rise of populist madness, and start to fix one of the major sources of division and angst in the USA and other places. If desalination makes no sense, how about a space elevator, hyper tunnel, or you know, decent cheap old school passenger rail options? > We dreamed, built, and just wasted money. A bit more nuance than that. First, there are reasonable arguments that desert living is/can be more energy efficient than heating the great frozen north, even prior to cheap solar. Whether things happen or we give up comes down to who is politically important more often than what is physically or economically easy. And one thing that is often forgotten about such efforts is that even projects that fail can be a net positive.. that is why we don’t cancel the space program after the first rocket crashes.
TastyDucks 2y ago
For those who are interested in the concept of dreaming as a mechanism for preventing overfitting (insofar as such a term may be applied to biological processes), I myself first encountered the concept in this paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.09560 https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.09560

kibwen 2y ago

> Could we actually do all of this? Probably not. It's the opposite. We could, probably, do all of this, given colossal will, stupefying investment, and an infinite appetite for destruction. The trick here is to exercise the wisdom to know that we should not do this, despite there being, strictly speaking, no technical reason why we could not. It's like an intrusive thought writ large: just because you have the opportunity to jump off the lip of the Grand Canyon and plunge to your death, does not mean that you should. Like, come on y'all: at least eye-popping megaprojects like the Panama Canal were economically and politically motivated. We don't need Lake Nevada.

hughesjj 2y ago
100%. Also the author citing California and Florida as "successful" terraforming projects is a bit ironic in 2024. Nature seems to be taking them both back... The world is already super fragile, especially in regards to climate change. I'm not convinced doubling down on a country which struggles to maintain it's existing infrastructure and is hyper divided (to my chagrin) is a wise strategy.

jazzyjackson 2y ago

That's a neat way to look at it. I've always thought of dreams as a kind of garbage collection where we produce simulated situations to test whether new information will help us or if it's irrelevant to us, and throw things out that we won't need to remember. I read that one reason we can kind of remember our dreams when we first wake up but can't 5 minutes later is because our brain has some method of forcing our interpretation of what we see into some kind of reasonable cohesion according to what we consider to be physically possible or likely - this region is inactive in our sleep so like you say, we can play in scenarios free from the constraint of what is known to be possible When we wake up, those impossible and unlikely scenarios in our dreams are still interpretable for a few minutes, but as we fully wake up we're just totally blocked from recalling that memory because what happened defies cohesive reality Anyway, I agree that not everything needs to fit into a "serious proposal | speculative fiction" dichotomy

ta_1138 2y ago

Go read Cadillac Desert: It's precisely about all the efforts, right between fantasy and reality, that have put is in the hole we are today. From straight out wishful thinking to really expensive investments that haven't ever come remotely close to paying for themselves. There's entire sections covering how we have spend very large amounts of money doing water works that just go to feed very low productivity farms. We dreamed, built, and just wasted money. It's true that as solar gets cheaper, more parts of the world become livable. Byt why should we occupy more of the US with very expensive, low productivity suburbs? Is there no opportunity costs in piling more people into Phoenix? But no, it's just more poetic to just spend billions upon billions to make the property of people living in a desert more valuable.

mikepurvis 2y ago
Doubling up on the CD recommendation; I saw it mentioned on HN years ago and read it and it completely changed the way I see water issues in the US, in particular the insight about how “wasted” water has a completely different meaning on the east coast vs the west. To someone who has lived most of my life in Ontario, it’s an eye opener recognizing that drinkable water is insanely plentiful here relative to most of the rest of the world.
photonthug 2y ago
> property value of people living in a desert more valuable People living in the desert (outside of phoenix and Vegas anyway) are probably thinking there is much more value in not being in the suburbs honestly, and I seriously doubt they want to trade this for more neighbors. They still want infrastructure investment though, because there is little appeal in their taxes funding more development in urban centers that are already rich or repairing coastal areas after the next hurricane, etc. Forward looking investments in rural areas is a great way to boost the economy generally, to curb the scary rise of populist madness, and start to fix one of the major sources of division and angst in the USA and other places. If desalination makes no sense, how about a space elevator, hyper tunnel, or you know, decent cheap old school passenger rail options? > We dreamed, built, and just wasted money. A bit more nuance than that. First, there are reasonable arguments that desert living is/can be more energy efficient than heating the great frozen north, even prior to cheap solar. Whether things happen or we give up comes down to who is politically important more often than what is physically or economically easy. And one thing that is often forgotten about such efforts is that even projects that fail can be a net positive.. that is why we don’t cancel the space program after the first rocket crashes.

TastyDucks 2y ago

For those who are interested in the concept of dreaming as a mechanism for preventing overfitting (insofar as such a term may be applied to biological processes), I myself first encountered the concept in this paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.09560 https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.09560