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NancyLebovitz comments on Crazy Ideas Thread, Aug. 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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We need to create more rivers! Water transport is still cheap and important for development, but sub-Saharan Africa and the middle of Asia are sadly deficient in rivers.
River creation is an interesting example of something which isn't forbidden by the laws of physics, but seems utterly unfeasible. Is there any imaginable technology for making rivers?
Canal creation was the infrastructure boom at the start of the industrial revolution, before railroads. One particularly impressive work is the Barton Aqueduct.
Ancient idea, actually.
Edited to add: Current proposals.
Use clean (mostly fusion) nuclear weapons to blast a channel through the landscape.
Could we do this to dig holes for geothermal power?
Apparently this possibility has been considered, but never got off the drawing board.
The obstacle to making a river is usually getting the water uphill to begin with. Regular cloud seeding of moist air currents that would otherwise head out to sea? Modifying land albedo to change airflow patterns? That's all dubious, but I can't think of any other ideas for starting a new river with new water.
If you've got a situation where the water you want to flow is already "uphill", then the technology is simply digging, and if you wanted to do enough of it you could make whole new seas.
Careful, as new seas can sometimes backfire horribly or change rapidly depending on local hydrologic, agricultural, or geological conditions - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salton_Sea
Fair point-- I was thinking in terms of something more dramatic involving tectonics.
Rivers, even underground ones, never run deep enough for tectonics to be involved. The scenario is terrifying.
Tectonics create features of above-ground landscape which determine the flow (or even existence) of rivers.
Perhaps if you replace the word "river" with the word "canal"..?
Canals are smaller, though I grant there may be a canal which is longer than the shortest rivers.
Still, I haven't seen proposals for canals which would be comparable to the Mississippi or the Amazon.
A quick Google, and...
I am also not sure why you think the technology is difficult. You just dig. The traditional "technology" is slave labour.
Not only the rivers. But also huge tunnels from the sea to the interior cities. like Denver or Munich.
Large container ships may bring goodies deep inside the continents. A whole network of such underground channels would be nice.
Why tunnels, not canals? Particularly in the case of Denver, you've got a huge elevation gain, so you'd need the locks anyway, and digging tunnels is expensive (and buying farmland to put your canal through is relatively cheap).
To avoid the elevation to say Denver, you have to have a "basement" about 1600 meters down. And the port in the basement.
No such a big problem, you have some deeper mines in the world.
You save energy not lifting a cargo ship 1600 meters, but you spend energy lifting the cargo itself. If there are rivers that can be turned into systems of locks it may be cheaper to let water flowing downhill do the lifting for you. Denver is an extreme example, perhaps.
If Denver ships out as much as it imports, weight-wise, pulleys could do much of the work of lifting. If there is a deficit in export weight, you could use the same water you were going to use as downhill flow to weigh down the counterweight.
According to Wikipedia:
You already have to elevate each of those containers (with the train or truck from the coast). An electric elevator would be much more energy efficient than the current solutions are. A litter or so of diesel fuel of electricity per container. Less than 100 kilometers of shipping. Much less than 1000 kilometers of trucking.
Tentatively-- in hot dry country, a tunnel loses less water to evaporation.
Airship transport is even cheaper and more energy-efficient.
I don't think that's true, see the graph from this article: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/helium-hokum-why-airships-will-never-be-part-of-our-transportation-infrastructure/
I wonder how many canals are being built these days. That used to be a big thing. Maybe all the low hanging fruit got done long ago.
On river making technology, there must be something. Just read an article that the Danube had been straightened out in a section between Croatia and Serbia in the 19th century.