Hacker News Reader

Comment by gaiagraphia | Hacker News Reader

Always wondered why the coast of the Red Sea isn't littered with channels which get flooded with seawater, which then evpporate into glassed ceilings; creating freshwater, and leaving behind salts for mining.

Sand -> Glass -> heated saltwater -> freshwater + minerals -> ??? -> profit?

Combined with some mangrove farms, surely desert coasts are able to support more life.

Wonder if this is scalable tech, and how quickly it can 'process' water. I guess if they're combined with transparent solar panels, it could be quite an epic tech.

View on HN

Slightly different idea to take Red Sea water, concentrate it, and flow into the Dead Sea to stabilize the water level in the Dead Sea which is a big problem. A billion or so was spent but the project is on hold for some combination of financial, political and environmental issues.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Sea%E2%80%93Dead_Sea_Water...

I love projects like this. A shame the west has handed over the baton to the Chinese and Saudis when it comes to actually being daring with megaprojects.

Some over stuff whhich are cool to read about:

Redirecting Siberian rivers into Central Asia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_river_reversal

Redirecting Congo basin rivers to replenish Lake Chad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Chad_replenishment_projec...

Filling in a depression in Egyptian Sahara desert and fllooding it with Mediterrraanean water to generate huuuuuuuuuuuuge hydro https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qattara_Depression_Project

(Similar ideas proposed for Lake Eyre, the lakes in Tunisia, and the Afar Depression in Djibouti, too).

The Saudis aren't "daring" with megaprojects. They're fucking[1] stupid[2]. Saying their megaprojects are "daring" is like saying I'm "daring" for claiming I'm going to build a catapult that will launch me to the moon.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojena

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Line,_Saudi_Arabia

A comparison that only works if you say it and sink a few billion into foundations for said catapult.

That’s what daring means. You try things that do not guarantee success. I remember a decade of people shitting on Dubai for all of the crazy projects it was building. It really paid off for them (pre Iran war). They made something out of nothing and still are. What’s stupid about a kilometer high tower? It’s fucking awesome.

Speaking of shitting on Dubai have they built any plumbing yet or are they still trucking their sewage out of town?

Still trucking but that’s another attempt at diminishing some pretty great achievements. Turning a sterile, hot piece of sand into a “destination” isn’t easy but they managed to do it. Do you bring up lead pipes and police violence every time someone talks about the US?

I wonder how many times the UK and USA had to 'be stupid' to achieve some of their best achievements?

When curiosity gets replaced by bureaucracy and regs, you know a civ is dead..

If you've ever been to the beach, you can smell the salt air and rotting seaweed and hear the birds.

It's all gonna get on the glass (from above and below), and eventually the salt left behind is going to build up. The salt left behind is very hard on any structure or machinery used to move it which makes repairing the large glass enclosure a pain. All this for a slow trickle of water is generally not worth it.

The Saudis were fucking around with the idea of solar domes at one point. Haven't heard anything about it for a while though (probably due to maths, lol). A shame, I've always been fascinated by Egypt and the empty expanses of nothingness. On long bus journeys around the country, the imagination can run wild.

https://www.solarwaterplc.com/featured-news/whats-inside-thi...

The issue with that idea is very simple - creating those inlets into the desert would risk soil erosion - in the desert. If your objective was to desalinate water, you're much better off using conventional desalination (there's still way more room to work around here first, like better and sustainable membranes, etc.) and offsetting your emissions by locking carbon away in mangrove reserves, which are native to those desert coasts.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com