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.
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.
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.
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.
Is there some compelling analysis, theoretical proof, etc…?
If your position is that it’s better to do absolutely nothing, then it’s on you to show that railroads, dams, and interstates are useless and that the New Deal, the Hoover dam, the Ccc, etc were a net negative for society. Maybe you know of countries that were destroyed by good employment numbers or infrastructure investment?
Eagerly awaiting your own proofs and analysis.
Are you confusing me with the other user?
"Strong Towns" does exist as something of an antidote to mindless "it doesn't matter" infrastructure spending, and has pointed out various problems of popping up yet more suburbs that lack the tax revenue for maintenance. Or perhaps civilizations, like flowers, are all about short term gain before they fade away?
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
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.