Hacker News Reader

Comment by jvanderbot | Hacker News Reader

This is the worst take that I can't avoid hearing about.

How does one build a canal that moves water uphill for 1500 miles across the continental divide in these quantities? If not a canal, then how do we do it? Pipes?

We're talking a million cubic feet per second in the Colorado river during high times, which has been completely drained and diverted by communities downstream.

The keystone pipeline carries 50 cubic feet per second. The largest pipeline in the world carries 1.5x that. Nowhere close to what a functional river provides.

So, either antigravity so the Mississippi flows uphill, or 20,000 keystone pipelines.

Desalination plus local pumping is much, much less science fiction.

View on HN

How? You investigate and research!

Tunnels, alternate locations,using solar and wind to generate pump power and once operational, using a dam to supplement the pump with hydroelectric power.

I mean, this is one challenging area where the best and brightest should be well funded to come up with a solution instead of writing them off.

Desalination is not a dream either.

People are fine to talk about colonizing other planets but are so dismissive of acheivable goals like this.

Trillions are spent on wars, a fraction of that can be used to desalinate water or create artificial rivers and tunnels to fill up artificial lakes.

My idea personally has been to build in parallel to the interstar highways and complement it with high speed railways and artificial rivers. The resulting econominc boom will pay for the cost and you don't need to print money, it can be bonded because you charge for the infrasteucture usage (train,power,car charger and water fees).

Bonds are a way of printing money, debt in general is how money is printed weirdly enough. And look, maybe our big ideas could focus on something that isn't solvable by just not trying to grow food in the desert or if we absolutely must doing it in a place that doesn't have plenty of land that isn't desert

The problem is places that aren't deserts are national parks, what you call the deserts are multiple entire states! I keep hearing your argument, what is this place that isn't a desert people should be farming and building on? Any place west if the missisipi that hasn't already been incorporated, what is it?

Why do you insist it isn't solvable?the tech is there, the money is there, the will is there. Do you have a better solution that acheives the dam goal or is your idea "someone else should figure it out?" Not being dismissive, I would like to know what it is. Population will grow and areas that are already occupied will become less and less habitable. Where else should people live in Nevada? In California, it is already filled with people to the brim in and out of the dessert.

Nothing here isn't solvable, but we have a lot of problems and is this the best use of our limited resources? There are places in the continental us with plenty of water and land that could be used for agriculture. Lots of states like Ohio have returned to forests and probably many other states as well. I like forests, they're cool, but we could totally have less of them. It's also not like we'd need to move all the farms. The west does have water, just not quite enough.

I'm also just very unimpressed by this particular letter to the editor. Maybe it's a good idea, but it definitely doesn't sell it

The problem is with forests you destroy existing wildlife and climate change is a big deal. You want more trees not less. Transofrming the west adds more trees (good for climate), economic growth, less food shortage, homelessness and indirectly less social unrest and instability as well. It will solve many problems because it addresses a root cause of many problems: lack of resources and opportunity. Water+Space+renewable power is the answer.

The root cause of homelessness in the west is lack of dense housing construction. Water is overwhelmingly used by agriculture. I'm not going to say it will never make sense to launch a massive project like this, but certainly it wouldn't be free of ecological impacts either

People don't want to live in apartments and the agriculture not only feeds the whole country by a non-negligible amount but also powers the local economy. You are right about ecological impact, would you rather cut down more trees or grow new ones though?

Well yeah, but we don’t let apartments get built across huge swaths of cities, that might be contributing. If apartments were nice, new, and cheap people might feel differently, or maybe not idk. And yeah trees are great, but we’ve used most of that land for agriculture before, we just stopped because it was slightly cheaper in the west when we pretended that there was enough water out there. Where as, idk that there is any clear idea what turning Arizona green would do to the rest of the climate of the US

s/dam/same*

Research isn't magic. The first step of research for problem solving is to establish a trade space and go with the most viable route first.

If you want research into how to divert the Mississippi River to Arizona, you've started off backwards.

The problem is lack of renewable water in socal, AZ, CO, Las Vegas, etc, and the solution might be just to reduce demand, increase reclamation, and add in some new renewable water sources like desalination. That seems insanely more viable. Let's see that study first.

You are trying to solve the problem of lack of water to existing people who live there. The problem at the core is the area is arid and infertile. You are trying to solve the immediate problem instead of the root cause.

Fundamentally altering these areas will not only solve the immediate problem but cause economic growth and solve a myriad of other problems like food shortages, homelessness,etc... you are talking about the equivalent of repairing roads, I am suggesting building the equivalent of the interstate highways which were until recently the biggest spending ever and resulted in the biggest economic growth ever.

> Yes, this would require massive pumping stations to lift the water up the Continental Divide at some point (the lowest lift would be 4,000 feet in Campbell, New Mexico, close to Albuquerque), but then it would be all downhill using gravity to Lake Powell or somewhere else on the Colorado above the Glen Canyon Dam.

Pumping water 4000 ft would use as much energy as desalinating seawater.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com