Desert reclamation/terraforming

rewster

Can anyone think of a reasonable POD that would have the Sahara either being actively converted to farmland, or using solar and wind power to power some sort of industry (computers consume plenty of power... maybe someone like google {or an ATL analog} could benefit) and importing food, or both?

This region strikes me as having a lot of hidden potential...

Perhaps a solar furnace could be used to make glass out of sand, which could be used to build a solar updraft tower. The glass still being made would then go to construct greenhouse complexes, which would be climate controlled using the power from the updraft tower. Meanwhile solar desalinization plants could operate along the coastal regions of the Sahara, pumping water inland through pipelines for irrigation and drinking.

I suppose that's a pretty halfbaked scheme, but is something like that, or even just standard reclamation using windbreaks, soil retainer walls, etc. something that could have been done on a large scale, so that by 2006 the desert would have been pushed back significantly?
 

Straha

Banned
Have a 20th century without the great war and presume a sped up green revolution so earth has more people.
 

Darkest

Banned
Any area of earth has a good deal of potential. I don't see why we we haven't appled paraterraforming concepts to our own Earth. Let's create a vast elastic dome over the Sahara, with towers stretching the ceiling a mile high or more. Solar power could be gathered from this vast surface area, to power an entire infrastructure underneath. Bring in some water, start feeding nutrients back into the ground, and you have a vast new frontier.

This won't be for a while, though, and I doubt it could be done without a world government.

'Solar farming' seems an idea that can be applied to deserts without drastic changes. For example: The ideas behind nuclear energy are never discovered, instead replaced with other theories. Nuclear energy is never used as a non-pollutant alternative energy. Global warming advances much sooner, leading to a Green Revolution much sooner, with serious endeavors being made to build up alternative energy.

Solar power technology builds up, becomes cheap and efficient. Solar farmers utilise fields of solar panels out in the deserts, building up batteries, and feed the electricity into various systems for moolah. It could work.
 

rewster

Darkest said:
Any area of earth has a good deal of potential. I don't see why we we haven't appled paraterraforming concepts to our own Earth. Let's create a vast elastic dome over the Sahara, with towers stretching the ceiling a mile high or more. Solar power could be gathered from this vast surface area, to power an entire infrastructure underneath. Bring in some water, start feeding nutrients back into the ground, and you have a vast new frontier.

This won't be for a while, though, and I doubt it could be done without a world government.

'Solar farming' seems an idea that can be applied to deserts without drastic changes. For example: The ideas behind nuclear energy are never discovered, instead replaced with other theories. Nuclear energy is never used as a non-pollutant alternative energy. Global warming advances much sooner, leading to a Green Revolution much sooner, with serious endeavors being made to build up alternative energy.

Solar power technology builds up, becomes cheap and efficient. Solar farmers utilise fields of solar panels out in the deserts, building up batteries, and feed the electricity into various systems for moolah. It could work.
Click to expand...

That's a great POD... no nuclear energy (possibly due to no nukes, or greater backlash against all things nuclear after Hiroshima/Nagasaki, or simply a technological breakthrough that doesn't happen) probably would lead to a faster environmentalism movement.

I guess we could tack nuclear energy right up next to vacuum tubes as technological detours.
I'm not sure how you could make an elastic, solar power producing dome over the entire Sahara. I think you're probably better off with a very small, modular approach. Figure out a way to reclaim a small bit of the desert, even if it's just a solar collector, an air conditioner, and a greenhouse, then once you have that, use it as a template and spread across the desert. That way you don't need any intervention by the UN or any major governments or whatnot. Once you can make a little area profitable, you can use reinvenst the income in expansion.
 
TheMann

TheMann

I can see the Sahara being developed as the largest solar power station in the world, and using the Solar plants for two purposes - first being dirt-cheap electric power and the second being desalinization. Both could lead to fast development of the southern parts of the Sahara, where the sand in the northern parts would get mined for electronic components (silicon comes from sand, don't forget.)
 

Berra

The countrys in Sahara is pretty fucked up. Libiya, Algeria...

Make the saharan countrys good and Europe fucked up and you got somthing.
 

Max Sinister

Banned
I once started an Atlantropa thread.

I guess it didn't happen and won't happen, because of two reasons:

1. It's cheaper to use better fertilizers and so on (OTL Green Revolution)

2. Unless you give the people the possibility of contraception, one or two generations later it's the same situation all over again, because the population grew.
 
Anthony Appleyard

Anthony Appleyard

You would have to call in the ASB's to get rid of Tibet and the high mountains around and replace them with low land. Tibet is a 100% blockage to wet winds from the South-East Asian seas. The Middle East was much wetter when India was still an island in the Indian Ocean.
 

Straha

Banned
Darkest said:
Any area of earth has a good deal of potential. I don't see why we we haven't appled paraterraforming concepts to our own Earth. Let's create a vast elastic dome over the Sahara, with towers stretching the ceiling a mile high or more. Solar power could be gathered from this vast surface area, to power an entire infrastructure underneath. Bring in some water, start feeding nutrients back into the ground, and you have a vast new frontier.

This won't be for a while, though, and I doubt it could be done without a world government.

'Solar farming' seems an idea that can be applied to deserts without drastic changes. For example: The ideas behind nuclear energy are never discovered, instead replaced with other theories. Nuclear energy is never used as a non-pollutant alternative energy. Global warming advances much sooner, leading to a Green Revolution much sooner, with serious endeavors being made to build up alternative energy.

Solar power technology builds up, becomes cheap and efficient. Solar farmers utilise fields of solar panels out in the deserts, building up batteries, and feed the electricity into various systems for moolah. It could work.
Click to expand...

why not put this in a TL or use it as a POD?
 

jolo

One would have to start cheap and effective.

How about starting with solar furnaces producing lots of glass, which is also sold on the market. Should be much cheaper than glass from conventionally heated glass factories. Once the market for glass is more or less in the hands of the desert countries, it should be extremely cheap there. The area should also expand into closely related markets - silicon products, ceramics, and so on.

Parallel to that, but taking off once glass is cheap enough, are solar driven desalination plants. Made like salt generating basins with glass roofs, they are on sea level and make the water hot and move the vapors into the water distribution system. On the way, the wator vapors may be used to power a sterling engine (instead of expanding, the water will be contracting in the cooling process - the power should be the same), which again drives electric generators, pumps, or whatever. The desalination plants could have different designs - some allow salt production, others are cleaned of salt and refilled automatically by the tides, and so on.

Solar power plants of different designs should become feasible by then, too - anyways whether updraft, furnace, collector, or other designs. The most efficient will win.

Once there's enough power, more professional desalination plants become normal. Water will be pumped from the sea with a sterling engine which is driven by the water vapors. The water is heated in solar collectors, the wapor is automatically separated from the brine, the vapors go through the sterling engine and into the water distribution system, the brine is either turned into salt or discarded into the ocean. The plants could be mass produced from cheaply available locally produced materials (ceramics, glass...).

Pretty quickly after that, lots of water should be available for greening the deserts. It may start with private homes and tourist resorts, where efficiency isn't an important factor, it would continue into public parks, company estate, and the likes, and only when water is abundant and cheap will the farmers start using it.
 

Berra

Noone seams to adress tha fact that we are placing a enormus investment in some pretty unstable contries.
 

rewster

I don't know... Libya seems to be turning around in the past couple of years, Algeria is not too bad ... overall there are worse places in the world to be. And I was imagining something like a homegrown solution here... say the Algerian government does what Jolo suggests... starting small and staying profitable, producing cheap glass and later salt, electricity, and water. Huge economic investment would be if we did that "giant elastic dome" idea of Darkest's which to me is ASB anyway.
 

NapoleonXIV

Banned
I'm not sure about the glass. The sand may not be suitable, in Saudi, (which is far sandier, the sandiest in the world, in fact) the sand is not suitable for concrete, which means they must import it, also sand is actually very rare over vast areas of the Sahara.

Why would you desalinate? salt has been mined in the lower Sahara for millenia, but the price of salt has been falling throughout much of the 20thc.

I've always thought electricity would be good, what with all the sunlight every day, but there are problems with storage and transmission over long distances.

I have heard that desert soil is generally very fertile, given sufficient water, though why that should be the case is unspecified.
 

rewster

NapoleonXIV said:
I'm not sure about the glass. The sand may not be suitable, in Saudi, (which is far sandier, the sandiest in the world, in fact) the sand is not suitable for concrete, which means they must import it, also sand is actually very rare over vast areas of the Sahara.

Why would you desalinate? salt has been mined in the lower Sahara for millenia, but the price of salt has been falling throughout much of the 20thc.

I've always thought electricity would be good, what with all the sunlight every day, but there are problems with storage and transmission over long distances.

I have heard that desert soil is generally very fertile, given sufficient water, though why that should be the case is unspecified.
Click to expand...
Well, concrete and glass are two different things... I believe for concrete the size of the grain is very important, but I can't imagine it is as important for sand that is going to be melted into an amorphous solid. And certainly much of the Sahara is not sand, but there is still plenty of it overall... obviously you'd have to be in one of the areas where the sand is in order to use it.

You sort of answered your own question about why you would desalinate... salt may be plentiful in the desert, but fresh water is not. Selling the salt from desalinization would just be a way to make use of the byproduct. What little rainwater there is can't be harvested very readily in the Sahara, as it is often too hot for the rain to stay liquid, and it evaporates before it hits the ground.
 
TheMann

TheMann

With regards to desert terraforming, not all deserts are wide open piles of sand. Many are ust very hot areas with little rainfall, but in a number of cases (South Africa's Great Karroo, Australian Outback, the Sahel, Southern Argentina, most of Namibia, Southwestern USA, most of the Horn of Africa) they were once areas which were essentially rainforests and therefore nutrients are abundant in the soil. Of course, the issue again is water.

My solution there would be a massive transport network for water and the aforementioned solar power plants. Producing glass is an interesting idea but it also has the issues of how much market can there be for glass worldwide? Solar power and solar desalinization are good ideas, so is the sterling engines for power idea. The biggest focus should be producing fresh water in mass quantities, the quantities needed for farming.

To apply this to the modern world, one could easily build such facilties in relatively stable desert regions (South Africa, Argentina, Australia, Mexico or the US would apply) and at the same time, train people to farm this land. Imagine the ghettoes in Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo, Rio de Janiero, Johannesburg, Cape Town being abandoned by people heading into the Karroo or the Chaco to make a living farming. You could accelerate the process on a temporary basis by bringing fresh water from areas where it is abundant - Canada, Northwestern US, Siberia, Bangladesh, Northern Europe - to these areas to get started on the farming aspect before the desalinization projects come online.

The added bonus is such food would make sure that hunger would be history, create untold wealth in these nations and help sustain our world. Make the US' new farmland grow sugarcane or corn for alcohol fuel and reduce their dependancy on oil.

Possibilites are endless. Expensive to do for sure, but the benefits are surely there.
 

Berra

Im not saying that it cant happen in the future. Im pointing out what political framework that is nesesary.
 

Jbenuniv

Banned
Who has the money or the will? Except the Federation. They did it in the first Star trek Movie, or the book, I think.
 
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