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Atlantropa

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94 pointstosh62 comments

I can see a new grand purpose to this plan. To protect the mediterranean coast from the RAISING sea caused by global warming. Rather than each town and country trying to protect itself.

As we are finding out, power is getting cheaper and cheaper all the time, and North Africa is a great source of sun power. So the need to generate power is reduced. This would eliminate many of the objections to the plan.

I really hope you're being sarcastic. Building dams are environmentally devastating. Dams created a multi-billion dollar fertilizer industry in Egypt where none existed before adding them to the Nile. They blocks sediment on rivers, inhibits salmon from returning to their spawning grounds (even with the help of fish ladders).

Any type of geoengineering at this type of scale would have some very large unintended blowback.

I am not. Lets look at the trade offs. Each city doing a huge construction project to protect them selves from raising sea levels, or one huge dam.

What you say about all of those side effects are true. But what are the effects of not doing anything?

Indeed cities of mediterranean and baltic seas are luck to be able to escape raising sea levels by building on dam.

But the sea level doesn't rise fast enough to motivate enough people to build a dam, so people will end up slowly leaving places that get inundated.

But there is another way to prevent raising sea levels, which is moving that water into aquifers and lakes in places that are currently deserts. Huge deserts in Sahara Iran and Middle Asia can easily take the large chunk of water that is currently stored in polar caps. We just need to invest more in building large scale climate modifying structures, like solar towers, solar power plants, dams and canals.

Love the idea, but isn't it the same problem of boiling the frog?

Hmmmm. Solar piping that gently draws water out over long distances?

> Each city doing a huge construction project to protect them selves from raising sea levels, or one huge dam.

That is most certainly not a thorough look at the trade offs, if that's what you were going for.

If you were trying to be rhetorical and win the argument through the use of emotions, instead of reaching the truth through the use of reason, then you could have disguised it a little better.

Would probably only need 1 dam at Gibraltar. I wonder if the Mediterranean has a net info or outflow of water?

As others have pointed out the Mediterranean Sea loses water and needs an inflow to compensate. In the case of a dam at Gibraltar it should be easy to let some water in. I wonder if we are able to build such a gigantic dam even if we wanted to.

We probably need another one at Suez. According to Google Maps the elevation of the channel is always less than 100 m, which is the worst case figure for sea rise if all the ice of the world melts. Water would come in from the Red Sea.

Btw, not all terrains are suitable for building dams.

There are already locks on the Suez I believe.

I would think that the Rock of Gibraltar would give the damn a decent base rock formation underneath, but you have a good point.

No locks. You can check at https://www.google.com/maps/@31.1497898,32.3699699,12z/data=...

Furthermore all the area of the channel is low elevation. It will go under water when the sea level raises. Ships will just sail over it.

No, the Suez Canal does not have locks.

Net outflow, hence the Messinian Salinity Crises that happened whenever the outflow at Gibraltar was blocked.

After looking at the Messinian Salinity Crises it tells me that without water from the Atlantic the Mediterranean would dry up. Therefore there is a net inflow into the Mediterranean, right?

Having spent much of my youth waking up and staring across the Straits every day, I question your use of 'only' in this thought.

They may 'only' be 12 or so miles across, but the amount of concrete and fill that would be needed to dam the straits would dwarf anything even the Chinese could manage up with for another couple of hundred years, I imagine.

This idea looks a lot more plausible on paper than it would in person.

I was always under the impression that evaporation would have threatened its existence if not for the in flow from the Atlantic

On average, the Mediterranean basin shows an excess of evaporation over freshwater inputs and a heat loss through air-sea interaction. It has an overall freshwater deficit, as the loss to the atmosphere by evaporation is larger than the gains by precipitation and runoff from the main rivers and input from the Black Sea. The total heat budget is negative, that is, the Mediterranean Sea loses more energy than it gains. These losses of freshwater and heat are compensated by the two-layer exchange at the Strait of Gibraltar comprising a relatively warm and fresh (15.4°C, 36.2 psu) upper water inflow and a relatively cooler and saltier (13°C, 38.4 psu) outflow to the Atlantic (Bryden et al. 1994; Tsimplis and Bryden 2000). On long timescales, the losses of freshwater and heat from the surface are compensated and the net salt flux is close to zero.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00382-011-1012-6

>The Utopian goal was to solve all the major problems of European civilisation by the creation of a new continent, "Atlantropa", consisting of Europe and Africa and to be inhabited by Europeans

I think I can spot a flaw in the plan

The interesting thing to note is that the plan "reached great popularity".

In other words, when Europe has problems, when it needs lebensraum, it's a great idea to migrate to another continent and even change its landscape to accommodate our people. But, when Africans migrate to Europe, that's not so popular.

I wonder what the population of Africa was in 1920-1950, specifically North Africa, the area that was intended to be affected by this.

I also wonder if the cultural divide between Europe and North Africa was less pronounced when most/all of those areas were under some level of European control.

From what I can tell, the project would result in the majority of Greek islands sort of "fusing" together in one big landmass- and a good few of them becoming part of mainland Turky.

As a Greek woman, I am very certain that my fellow Greeks would be very excited about this project.

... though, perhaps not in a good way?

Why would they become parts of mainland turkey? The land around islands would become part of Greece.

Actually, I think it would just be hotly contested between the two loving neighbours, Greece and Turkey.

We have history in that neck of the woods. Too much of it, if you ask me.

This reminds me of Peter Thiel's point that the engineering proposals of the past were more frequently ambitious (and also taken more seriously) than they are today.

That's just what I was thinking. I was reminded that when watching a commercial for a company that solved the earth shattering problem of getting contact lenses. So many companies doing such trivial (well maybe not trivial but not hugely consequential) things. We've experienced a communications revolution but we are missing some of the cool things we thought we'd see back in the 50s. I think that's why Musk and company are so beloved. We are dying for someone to do something big!

We can't get any major engineering projects done in the West anymore because any idea will be held up indefinitely by the need to deliver thousands of pages of environmental assessments, archaeological reports, traffic impact reports, fish habitat studies, soil and erosion studies, pollution and economic impact reports. Plus the hundreds of permits required, mandatory consulting with native tribes, town hall meetings and public comment periods. And then you'll be sued by everyone, so you can't so much as pick up a shovel until each of the lawsuits and appeals have run their course...

Meanwhile, if China wants a city in that spot right there, they go and build a city right there.

So we should all be more like China with regards to our consideration of environmental issues, the rights of indigenous people, pollution, etc etc?

And also with regards to the democratic nature of our decision making?

The problem (if you want to call it that) with democracy is that it reflects societal problems at the government level.

I think that's actually a feature, not a problem. A representative government will be, well, representative, of the people who elected it into power. The various social currents in beliefs and morals will find an expression in the persons of elected leaders.

What is really a problem, I think, is the lack of responsible and well-informed citizens as well as competent and altruistic leaders. This seems to be the case in modern, western-type democracies: we vote incompetent idiots in power, because there's no good alternatives and we wouldn't know one if it hit us in the head with a bundle of fasces.

The idea that you can replace responsible citizens and competent leaders with a ruling elite of (more or less) enlightened individuals given catholic powers for life is an idea at least as long as democracy itself (possibly discoursed over even earlier than Plato's The Republic). Personally, I'm not sympathetic to it.

There are other altneratives. Many of my friends and some intellectuals I love to listen to facour anarchy, but I dont' think that sort of thing really works for any length of time.

And, if we could solve the big problem of how to govern ourselves, we would probably soon afterwards find solutions to the bigger problems that confront us as a species: climate change, nuclear proliferation, poverty etc.

I think what you said is actually an excellent argument against a major feature of modern liberalism: namely, seeking to fix society’s problems (and not problems caused by government’s failure to do it’s own job) with government-based solutions.

If the government will necessarily reflect societal problems, how can it hope to be the solution to them? To think it could do so without ceasing to be a true democracy invokes a paradox of sorts.

In other words, your vote can only go so far. If you want to make an even bigger difference, go love your neighbor as yourself also.

> The idea that you can replace responsible citizens and competent leaders with a ruling elite of (more or less) enlightened individuals given catholic powers for life is an idea at least as long as democracy itself (possibly discoursed over even earlier than Plato's The Republic). Personally, I'm not sympathetic to it.

Isn't this just royalty, and the concept of noblesse oblige? One of the very things that the United States was formed as an antithesis to?

Only if you conveniently ignore the word "enlightened," which also happens to be the most important word there.

More like a meritocratic oligarchy?

You think the monarchs and nobility didn't think they were enlightened?

Or do you just mean enlightened by your standards?

I did say "a ruling elite of (more or less) enlightened individuals" :)

> mandatory consulting with native tribes, town hall meetings and public comment periods

Isn't that a good thing? Don't we want to consult with local people before starting a huge project that'll impact their lives?

You are missing the forest for the trees. You've described <i>how</i> such a project would be held up, not <i>why</i>. As a society, we here in the United States (and very broadly speaking, The West) have made the decision that such mega projects are seldom, if ever, worth doing.

You may agree or not (I'm conflicted myself), but at least see clearly. The situation isn't going to change unless society's mind changes.

Neat to think about, but a bit arrogant regarding our abilities. Each of those dams would have been a single point of failure, the failure of which would have meant utter devastation of a scale probably not seen... ever.

> the failure of which would have meant utter devastation of a scale probably not seen... ever

Well, actually:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zanclean_flood

Glad I'm not one of the millions who live below the Three Gorges Dam.

It would make Banqiao dam failure minor:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam#1975_Banqiao_Dam_F...

In Star Trek TNG, when Picard is resting on Earth after having been abducted and assimilated by the Borg, he is offered the opportunity to lead this project in the 24th century.

He doesn’t take the job (sorry if this information spoils TNG seasons 4-7 for you).

I find this fascinating, even if it does seem unrealistic.

Even if this were achievable, I'm curious to know what the environmental impacts of displacing such a massive body of water would be to aquatic life in the mediterranean.

It does seem like something that could have become more realistic after the EU got off the ground had there still have been someone to push for the idea.

For aquatic life of mediterranean this will mean an end since salinity of the see would keep growing.

More realistic approach is restoring lakes of Sahara [1] by combination of desalination plants, solar towers, and huge solar battery installation to cool down the region and get more rain.

It is going to require rather large investment, but it would pay off, by providing place for projected 4 billion Africans to live, and providing a way to slow down the rise of the sea level.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chad_Basin#/media/File:Megatsc...

Isn't a big part of that area below sea level? So for a start you'd just need to dig a channel to the Mediterranean or Nile and wait. No extra energy required at that step--you could even harness some from the flow.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sahara_Sea and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qattara_Depression

Yes a big part is under the sea level, and would be a good first step. But the most of the potential for storing water is in higher level lakes and aquifer.

It would completely destroy the whole ecosystem. Building a dam would drastically limit the amount of sediment travelling out into the sea to a tiny fraction of its normal flow, thus eliminating a large portion of aquatic life.

yup, nuking migratory species like thon or whales and also the fisheries that feed millions of european and african people, (would be changed for big chunks of land soaked in marine salt and unable for agricultural purposes). Fully exposing Europe to african viruses and diseases dangerous for cattle...

If their goal is to exponentially increase famine in the world until the boiling point of an endless war, looks like a good plan.

They wanted to basically create more heartland at the cost of coasts.

Problem being, in XXI century nobody wants the heartland. Nobody wants "land" to settle on anymore. Land is a liability where farmers who demand subsidies and channel them to Monsanto live. Everybody want coast to settle near. So it's not so much geoengineering as geoterrorism.

It's not about people wanting to live near the coast. Living on the coast with a view commands a significant premium, but as a luxury, not because it's productive.

Land simply isn't the constraining factor for economic growth any more. Not because people do or don't want to live on it, but because we don't need (very much of) it for farming. These days, the economic centres are cities -- coastal or otherwise, although often coastal, but for redundant historical reasons.

wow - biased much ? personally, having lived near the coast and now living in an inland desert - I can say I vastly prefer the desert. 'everybody' indeed...

And is your rent higher or lower in the desert?

I agree that more people want to live on the coasts, but this is not a valid metric, given there is much more inland real-estate than coastal real-estate.

Why isn't it a valid metric for a project that wanted to turn coasts to inland? Isn't it basically the only one? Under this project, several countries would have lost their coasts for good.

It would seem since there is already more supply, increasing inland supply even more won't increase its desirability..

Are you saying coastal property is only desirable because it is rare?

If it's only desirable because it is rare, still the project would destroy all the existing coastal supply making what's left grotesquely overpriced. Also all the people of cities on coasts currently will be virtually expropriated.

Tom Scott has a video about it if you prefer video content https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TEdsQmjLMKs

The Wikipedia article mentioned Willy Ley's "Engineers' Dreams" which I remember from my youth (in the Pleistocene, apparently) as being really interesting.

https://www.amazon.com/Engineers-Dreams-Willy-Ley/dp/9997483...

The successor of this project is basically https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desertec .

I cannot see how the dams would be able to generate electricity. The water has to flow somewhere and obviously there is no sea to dump it into which is under the sea level.

The dam would still allow some water into the Mediterranean, which is why it's "only" a drop of 100m-200m in mean sea level in the Mediterranean.

Well, still the remaining water in new lower mediterranean has to go somewhere for this to be sustainable and I don't believe that just evaporation would be enough for any significant power generation capacity.

If the only outflow was was from evaporation, the salinity would keep increasing. Eventually the salt would have to be removed somehow. Perhaps some of the energy harvested at the Straits of Gibraltar could be used to exchange some of the water to keep the salinity down.

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