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".<p>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.<p>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?
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.<p>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.<p>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..<p>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.<p>Also water from Lake Meed and Powell would require serious treatment to move anywhere due to Quagga muscles etc.<p>Also large amounts of currently productive farmland are already at risk due to the Colorado being oversubscribed and declining aquifers.<p>Heck, just stopping at the dry lake bed at Xyyzyy would show the issue with trying to use the Mojave river.<p>While I am glad the author had fun with this thought experiment, the idea is simply not realistic in its current form.
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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.
The great question is <i>why</i>.<p>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 <i>still</i> pump out a record (or near record) amount of greenhouse gases every year: <a href="https://ourworldindata.org/greenhouse-gas-emissions">https://ourworldindata.org/greenhouse-gas-emissions</a>
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.<p>> During the last ice age, only 10,000 years ago<p>We're still in an ice age. An ice age is simply when the earth's poles have an ice cover.<p>[1] - <a href="https://countrydigest.org/florida-population/" rel="nofollow">https://countrydigest.org/florida-population/</a>
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.
Didn't we have the super-cheap solar powered desalinization guy on HN about two months ago?<p>Each year, MIT announces they solved solar desalination:<p>- 2021 [1]<p>- 2022 [2]<p>- 2023 [3]<p>- 2024 [4]<p>[1] <a href="https://news.mit.edu/2020/passive-solar-powered-water-desalination-0207" rel="nofollow">https://news.mit.edu/2020/passive-solar-powered-water-desali...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://news.mit.edu/2022/solar-desalination-system-inexpensive-0214" rel="nofollow">https://news.mit.edu/2022/solar-desalination-system-inexpens...</a><p>[3] <a href="https://news.mit.edu/2023/desalination-system-could-produce-freshwater-cheaper-0927" rel="nofollow">https://news.mit.edu/2023/desalination-system-could-produce-...</a><p>[4] <a href="https://news.mit.edu/2024/solar-powered-desalination-system-requires-no-extra-batteries-1008" rel="nofollow">https://news.mit.edu/2024/solar-powered-desalination-system-...</a>
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.
Wow. What a project that would be!<p>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.<p>The USA has lost its appetite for these mega projects, sadly.
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.<p>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.<p>By contrast, Los Angeles and Miami have ocean access. Terraforming coastline is a no-brainer.
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.<p>Desert Solitaire <a href="https://a.co/d/16MZLfL" rel="nofollow">https://a.co/d/16MZLfL</a>
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.<p>Has anyone tried this on their own land? I'm tempted to try it.
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?
I thought this was a good idea too but then a scientist pointed out that those areas <i>radiate heat into space at night</i> and the last thing we want right now is less of that.<p>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.<p>- - - -<p>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.<p>"Building cities with ecological harmony" | Dror Benshetrit | TEDxAmazônia
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OrRCGY_lkk" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OrRCGY_lkk</a>
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.<p><a href="https://www.pv-magazine.com/2024/05/01/novel-pv-driven-desalination-tech-achieves-lower-levelized-cost-of-water/" rel="nofollow">https://www.pv-magazine.com/2024/05/01/novel-pv-driven-desal...</a><p>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.
Let them try it in Australia first. The whole continent is mostly desert (hi Mad Max!) and just a few cities on the coast.<p>Or at least if they can't terraform the desert, let them terraform "the bushland" first: <a href="https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_bush#/media/File:View_from_connors_hill_panorama.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_bush#/media/File:View_...</a><p>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!<p>1. <a href="https://ourworldindata.org/global-land-for-agriculture">https://ourworldindata.org/global-land-for-agriculture</a><p>2. <a href="https://www.theworldcounts.com/challenges/planet-earth/forests-and-deserts/global-land-degradation" rel="nofollow">https://www.theworldcounts.com/challenges/planet-earth/fores...</a><p>3. <a href="https://www.princeton.edu/news/2017/08/22/orange-new-green-how-orange-peels-revived-costa-rican-forest" rel="nofollow">https://www.princeton.edu/news/2017/08/22/orange-new-green-h...</a>
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>- [1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia_River" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia_River</a>
- [2] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia_Basin_Project" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia_Basin_Project</a>
- [3] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Basin" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Basin</a>
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.
This raises questions.<p>What is the this desalination cost competing against, what's the alternative cost of importing water by tanker or pipeline?<p>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?
Why? Honestly, why? There's so much uninhabited land out that <i>isn't</i> 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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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).<p>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.
I guess one man's economic miracle is another man's environmental disaster.<p>The western water projects were an engineering marvel, but short sighted. And Florida? Gee, how long can it stand against the rising seas?
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.<p>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.
> We’re missing 300 million Americans<p>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.<p>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.
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" <a href="https://youtu.be/MAousRO0e3g?si=wsCNQwQrH8Z8yfyn" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/MAousRO0e3g?si=wsCNQwQrH8Z8yfyn</a>
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.
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.
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?
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.<p>(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?)
> Indeed, solar PV is the first mass produced product where energy is an output rather than an input.<p>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.<p>Doesn't matter. I just order them online and they magically show up on my doorstep.