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Atlantropa

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170 pointsluu55 comments

When I read the first paragraph, I was immediately reminded of my feelings when watching the Star Trek:TNG episode, made in the late 80's where Picard considered quitting Star Fleet to head the Atlantis Project. When I watched that episode recently, I found the idea that future people would allow large alterations to the earth to be discordant.

It is interesting that, according to the article, Roddenberry also incorporated the idea of a dam across the Strait of Gibraltar into one of his works.

Today, I expect that terraforming Mars and mining the moon will face significant opposition. Would massive land reclamation projects like those in the Netherlands ever happen today, if a particular hyper-conservation Western mindset were in place when they commenced? We can't even let go of outdated urban streetscapes, and buildings past their useful lifespans[1], so it isn't far-fetched to think of moon miners having to recreate impact craters on the moon's surface after mining them, if mining happened in the first place.

Large segments of humanity are becoming sclerotic. Even if [2] the positive effects of damming the Mediterranean (or terraforming central Australia or Antarctica) were found to outweigh the losses, and the impacts could be mitigated, it would still be extremely unlikely to happen, for sentimental reasons.

[1] See recent news about Lloyds of London building, which has became an expensive burden, but can't be touched because of its "iconic" status

[2] yes, obviously there are risks, and they would need to be weighed carefully.

Realize you are considering completely altering the hydrology that has historically served as the cradle of humanity's longest-lived civilizations. This project would touch huge population centers, many different cultures that speak different languages. What happens when people that have lived in costal communities for generations suddenly find themselves landlocked?

There's a reason this was an undertaking contemplated in the time period that it was. Herman Sörgel could propose this and simply not care what the consequences would be for the people that were already present. The Superior Race simply needed more Lebensraum, to hell with the inferior races.

One man's sclerosis is another man's stability. This is not hyper-conservation Western mindset, this is living in a world where one remote political power can not radically alter the living conditions for millions of people that are not represented in that power.

Also once built and the sea drained, the persons in charge of the dam wield immense power over those who move in and inhabit the new lands revealed. If they see fit, or someone captures the dam, they can hold to ransom all the people living in the new periphery of the Mediterranean Sea.

As I said, there would have to be careful study and consideration of the effects, and in all likelihood, it would fail, probably for the reasons you cite.

However, I suspect the modern knee-jerk reaction would be to reject these sorts of ideas out-of-hand, not because of infeasibility, but because of the "preserve at all costs" mentality that has taken hold among many, and then to look for ways to justify the rejection.

The will of industry has such a strong influence on political outcomes that it seems rational (though perhaps unfortunate) for people to oppose big projects as early as possible.

I'm startled to see extra-Earth modifications as objectionable. The universe is an endless landscape. The idea that the nearest available resources outside our ecosphere would be off-limits would effectively end human expansion. The moon and Mars are essentially dead, dry rocks, at least compared to any ecosystem on Earth (even the Antarctic).

In my view, its all sentiment. Saving a snail darter is demonstrably not worth the effort. The so-called 'ecosystem' we live in has been completely reformatted repeatedly by human intervention. And we're all still here. So its fragility is highly overstated.

And the intrinsic value of species is also overrated. Now that we're on the cusp of reinventing creatures through direct dna programming, native species become completely devalued. What does it matter which creatures happen to be occupying our planet when we came to a level of civilization? Its a coincidence; many more came before and went extinct, and we don't cry over them.

Just look at the artificial ecosystems we create - they aren't in and danger of collapsing - urban lawns, the vast corn crops of the bread basket, Phoenix. Clearly we're capable of rebuilding our own ecosystem, at least the rudiments of one. And we'll only get better at it.

>Just look at the artificial ecosystems we create - they aren't in and danger of collapsing

Have you seen what's been happening in California?

Do you not understand that areas without a reliable supply of water are literally uninhabitable? Or that observing your neighbour's green - or brown - lawn today says nothing about water availability two decades from now?

Ecosystems work until they don't. When they stop working, you are entirely screwed.

The point of thinking long-term is to avoid that outcome.

Saying 'Well it hasn't happened yet so it can't' is unscientific and entirely unrelated to how these things actually work.

Water availability is unrelated to ecosystem, at least the animal part. And we've arguably made the largest changes there in all off history - rerouting most water sources, tapping into lakes and seas. That's in fact a good argument for what we CAN do to 'terraform' our own planet.

The doomsday Armageddon argument about ecosystem collapse is bankrupt, principally because we have made such massive changes to the landscape and gotten away with it. We know more than we've ever known about waterway management, desalinization etc. There's no going back.

Imposing large scale engineering projects of this nature will probably have to wait until after production and point control of self-replicating nanorobots, organic or otherwise, is fairly mature. At that point the cost reduces down to design and raw materials and looks feasible when compared to simply going to other worlds in search of additional space, or building arcologies, or other methods.

Sadly much vision has been lost somewhere in the last century. People are much more conservative about preserving the present state of whatever exists, and have lost the sense of wonder and ambition that characterized the opening of the modern age of machinery.

Well, he did think it would take over a century. It would be nice if this could be completed in our lifetime, but that was never part of the plan (at least not the original plan)

Can you say more about this ambition we've lost? In my eyes that ambition is more arrogance that we can control the forces of nature around us without consequence.

One man's engineering visionary is another man's environmental disaster.

Just an observation.

It is the peculiar human genius that we adapt our environment to ourselves, as well as the converse; we're not the only species on Earth which does so, but we're the only one for which adapting our environment is the keystone of a species survival strategy so successful that we have made ourselves, and for the foreseeable future will remain, the entire planet's apex predator.

Lately, we hear much of how this strategy is doomed to failure, of how such failure will come sooner rather than later, and of how anything less than its immediate and radical replacement will surely doom our species. I don't buy it for a second. That the developed world has some rough times ahead, I don't doubt. But we're smart apes, and mean, and tough to kill, and there are an almighty lot of us. Perhaps we're due a new dark age, and perhaps not. But if so, we'll come out of it eventually, and we'll be better and smarter still for it, just like we were last time.

Be it ever so popular of late, the belief otherwise is, in my considered opinion, born entirely of arrogance, in two parts: first, that even we have the capability to so radically reëngineer this planet as to no longer support our species, and second, that our species is somehow apart from nature, such that the axiom that all species not killed outright by them eventually adapt to changes of environment, somehow does not apply to us. That humanity is special, I happily agree, but we are not gods.

The Atlantropa movement, through its several decades, was characterised by four constants:
- ...
- Pan-European sentiment, seeing the project as a way to unite a war-torn Europe;
- White-centric superiority (and even racist) attitudes to Africa

- ...

It interests me how such a positive sentiment (Pan-Europanism) can be combined with a very negative sentiment (white supremacism) without any trouble.

I'm not sure we can play the "they were different times" card so easily. Currently, the EU has open borders, so the Pan-Europanism part worked out quite well, actually. As a consequence, the outer borders of the EU have become rock hard, because once you made it to Spain or Italy, you made it to most of Europe. We treat Africans who try to make it across like animals - not out of some white supremacist sense, admittedly, but the effect is the same.

Brings to mind Aral Sea where the diversion of rivers for irrigation projects have led to the shrinking of the sea area with disastrous consequences for local ecosystems and communities. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aral_Sea

EDIT: There must be better ways to become a Type I civilization http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale

If you like this, you should get yourself a copy of "Engineer's Dreams" by Ley. It is fairly old and full of such grand projects. One of them, the Channel Tunnel, is no longer a dream.

any other book recommendations?

It's fiction, but still a fun read: Harry Harrison's A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah!

In Which Our Hero, A Descendent of the Traitorous George Washington, Builds a Railway Under The Sea, Wherein Passengers Travel To The Court of Her Britannic Majesty In Atomic Powered Comfort.

http://www.amazon.com/Transatlantic-Tunnel-Hurrah-Harry-Harr...

I also enjoyed "Project Orion: The True Story of the Atomic Spaceship" by Dyson. It's about another grand engineering project at the edge of possibility: Building spaceships powered by nuclear bombs that theoretically could lift whole cities to the stars and accelerate to 3% of the speed of light.

Hilarious that the first two comments are diametrically opposed: "Wow that's pretty fucked" versus "Sadly much vision has been lost somewhere in the last century"

I'm going to tread a line between the two and say that I miss the visionary engineering works of old but that I am not completely heedless of the Law of Unintended Consequences. I do think that the Straits of Gilbraltar should be either bridged or dammed. (I'm assuming damming means bridging.) Too good an economic opportunity to pass up.

There are a number of large predatory fish like Atlantic bluefin that migrate from the western Atlantic to the Eastern Mediterranean and a damn would likely disrupt their spawning cycle. That isn't the only trans-atlantic species, and you only have to remove 1 or 2 apex predators to disrupt whole ecosystems. The dam is a terrible idea.

I don't know. Many people repeat this mantra and fear disruption of ecosystems, presumably because they like nature and want to keep it safe.

I also like nature, but in another way: it is a formidable survival machine, and whatever happens to it, be it a comet or the regrettable loss of one fish, it will survive and flourish again, with even more diversity and colors.

No, not with more diversity and colors. The general idea is that when the balance is disturbed a whole range of specialist species will die and only generalist species remain. It can take millennia before specialist species reemerge.

You'll end up with more rats and jellyfish, and less whales and elephants.

But meanwhile these generalist species have specialized, so it is just a regeneration cycle.

Moreover I kind of agree with Taleb on the Black Swan / Antifragile theories: the more we protect something (our kids, world finance, ecosystems) the more fragile they become, and the more dangerously they fail when they fail (because they will fail, it's just a matter of time).

I think this is well understood for startups and projects: fail early, often, learn from mistakes, what do not kill us makes us stronger, etc.

This is obvioulsy the same when growing kids, and I personally take care that my 1.5 daughter is falling enough on the safe floor of our house and eat enough dirt in our courtyard, so she will not be fragile when going to kindergarten, where she will catch viruses anyway.

I think this applies equally well or better on natural environment: if we protect an ecosystem in order to prevent it from disappearing, maybe we are just prevent a new, more solid and more adapted ecosystem to appear there.

I know, this is pure heresy. I think we need more heresy.

But I assume you are not mixing Ebola through your daughters sand? It is not so much about protection as it is about trying to not flat out destroy.

You can come back from a small virus, your family might even become stronger after losing your first daughter as she wasn't strong enough, but when your house is bombed and you all die, your family won't be coming back.

Your "meanwhile" is on the order of hundreds of thousands of years, at a bare minimum, whereas the extinction of specialists can easily happen over the course of a single human lifespan.

It's not thinking critically about the issues in play or how they would affect the lives of millions or billions of people, let alone the animals, plants, and microorganisms involved. It's not heresy, it's just hubris.

How would the loss of one specie of fish affect the "lives of millions or billions of people"? I know the thing with the top predators, but I think nature has many other ways to regulate population of animals, and if some ecosystem relies on one single weak link for its survival, it means this ecosystem is weak and will be replaced anyway. It doesn't mean we should destroy things without consideration of the consequences, but I think that if we always consider the worst case as the most likely we will never do anything interesting anymore.

Do you know that in France many industrial projects are stopped because of such reasoning? For instance, a guy has a factory there, and it's working well, and he wants to expand to the neibouring wasteland, which is conveniently placed. Then some guys come and say that some specie of triton is living there and might be disturbed, and the project is cancelled, and the factory guy must build another factory far away, and it's an headache, and he gets some "compensation" from the local administration, which is just people's tax money. All of this because maybe, just maybe, a triton will be disturbed, which will break the natural cycle, which will create an invasion of cricket, which will kill us all, but just maybe... (All of this come from a stupid misunderstanding of the butterfly effect)

Also, can't we think a bit out of the party line there? I am a nature lover as much as anyone, but I think we currently do not trust its resilience enough, and it is dangerous. Am I allowed to share these thoughts? Am I rude or something? Could there still be some topics that we cannot question? Then why? Maybe these topics are weak too, and will break if we question them. Which means they will break anyway, and will break much harder if we protect them from criticism. That's dangerous.

The triton factory issue here is a strawman. None of us are talking about those types of species. We were talking about apex species in marine ecosystems. When you lose apex species, the species in the middle of the ecosystem start to disappear. Billions of people rely on the ecosystems for food. So, not intentionally killing off these key species is in our own best long term interest.

Sometimes what doesn't kill us, maims us leading to a shorter more painful life.

The hairy part is the millennia between crashing the ecosystem and its renewed flourishing. During that time it might become much harder to sustain seven billion humans.

I'm not convinced the economic opportunity is that enormous, or even enough to pay back the costs of a relatively trivial bridge over a long time period, at least until there are some very radical changes to the political and economic stability in North Africa. At the moment vast sums are being spent on trying to prevent North Africans getting into mainland Europe (the Spanish enclaves in Morocco have barbed wire fences and military patrols on either side).

As far as transport links for those fortunate enough not to be fleeing abject poverty and brutal regional conflicts goes, the fast ferry ride is less than 40 minutes between the Spanish mainland and Morocco/Ceuta, flights to major Moroccan cities are very cheap from most European cities and Libyan oil is piped direct to Italy.

The upside of a bridge isn't passenger transport, it's freight. There's an awful lot of trade between Africa and Europe, e.g. for agriculture.

Does anything come closer to this than Flevoland?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flevoland

Slightly related: "a narrow body of water was preserved along the old coast to stabilise the water table and to prevent coastal towns from losing their access to the sea."

There's a documentary about the project here: http://vimeo.com/92381391. Fascinating watch.

Nice, this was interesting. Thanks for sharing; I never really see good documentaries on vimeo, but I don't go looking often.

I don't think big projects are intrinsically bad because they are big, but it's probably true that something of this scale would have drastic, wide-ranging effects on climate, geological characteristics, rainfall, and many other aspects that might adversely affect millions of people. Due diligence would require us to study and characterize these effects before spending trillions of dollars on such a project.

In fact, the formation of the Mediterranean is mentioned in Episode 9 of Cosmos (2014), in the context of climate change affecting evolution.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lost_Worlds_of_Planet_Earth

This is not mentioned in the article, but plate tectonics actually closed the straight of Gibraltar and caused the Mediterranean to completely dry out for a period of hundreds of thousands of years. It eventually reopened with what may have been the largest waterfall ever.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messinian_salinity_crisis

Awesome, in the more formal sense.

Reading about the intended colonization of Africa puts me in mind of something I read about Moroccan phosphate reserves [1] a while back.

1: http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/essential-element-...

"Most proposals to dam the Strait of Gibraltar since that time have focused on the hydroelectric potential of such a project, and do not envisage any substantial lowering of the Mediterranean sea level."

This sounds a tiny bit more sane.

What would be the capacity of such a gigantic hydroelectric dam?

Note also what I consider a spamming by "Cathcart, R.B." who probably added to the article himself the big list of his texts as relevant for the subject and even a clumsy attempt to the citation.

Is there an explanation for how adding these dams lowers water levels?

The Mediterranean loses more water to evaporation than it gains from rivers and rainfall. It's only at sea level because it's connected to the Atlantic at the Strait Of Gibraltar. Dam the Strait, and the Mediterranean goes down.

That isn't just speculation, the Mediterranean actually was a dry sea, when the Strait closed 5.9 million years ago: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_Sea#Geology

A better question is "how quickly would the Mediterranean dry up if you dam Gibraltar?" A thousand years? More? Would you have to dam every river that drains into the Mediterranean?

If the dam's levees were closed, the water in the mediteranian would evaporate like it always does, but no new water would flow in from the Atlantic.

This has happened before. From 5.9 to 5.33 million years ago, the strait was closed and the entire sea evaporated. It will happen again, when the northward moving African plate collides with Europe.

Wow that's pretty fucked. No one would even dream of anything so crazy these days. The world certainly has improved in the past 90 years.

What is "pretty fucked" about this?

Dude, it's totally fucked. Like removing the sea from seaside towns. i'm sure if you're a mediterranean fisherman you would not be happy having the sea forcibly moved away from your home... The environmental impact is probably immeasurable.

How is this any worse than normal dam construction, apart from scale?

Scale.

How is a flood worse than a drop of water, apart from scale?

Wise words.

There would be some pretty vast ecological repercussions. Fish habitats and coastal ecosystems, would be immediately affected. Then, connecting rivers will cut deeper, unforeseeably altering each and every environment they affect.

If the engineering effort fails, an incalculable amount of life and property would be destroyed. Even if it succeeds, a huge amount of costly adjustment would be required by a very, very large number of people.

Ceasing to dream big isn't an improvement. But ya... it's probably for the best the project didn't happen (yet:).

No wonder they are digging out this Nazi projects now when they occupied us on Balkans. But as before, we will rise again and free ourselves.

Not that everything Nazis did was bad, but this is classic megalomanic project, which honestly doesn't sound completely bad, but it is like those Chinese 3 gorges dam, huge and rife with potential problems.

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