I read plenty of articles on how advanced our technology is, how we can work wonders, control the fate of this that and the other… But I wonder if we (humanity as one big whole) are up to challenges on a global scale.
For example:
Could ‘we’ build a water-tight dam across the mouth of the Mediterranean sea, and pump it dry?
Could ‘we’ remove (vacuum away?) all the sand from the Sahara dessert down to bedrock?
Could ‘we’ fill in the Grand Canyon back to level ground? (Hey, the Rockies are there to plunder for fill…)
Or, alternately, shave those mountains flat…
How about building an island in the middle of the ocean of your choice? Not a floater, a genuine island of solid rock (old cars etc allowed) that reaches from the ocean floor high enough to have at least a ten square mile area of surface safely dry above the water line?
Say you’d get five years to plan, do any construction, and carry out any of those tasks – or your choice of something else on the scale – coopting all six plus billion of us if needed, no need to worry about war or Green Peace activists interfering.
Could humanity actually carry out tasks on that level?
It would be much easier to paint it pink and erect a Somebody Else’s Problem field around it. Most of the tasks you suggest–save perhaps for filling the Grand Canyon (which can probably be done with cast-off free AOL disks) are beyond any current technological and logistical means.
We couldn’t pump the Med dry - there are lots of rivers flowing into it - but we could dam it. The Med would then largely evaporate over the next thousand years or so. Salt deposits indicate that this has happenned many times in the past naturally.
Just because we can’t do everything we can imagine to this planet doesn’t mean we don’t do some pretty damned impressive things.
Look at all the electrical/communications infrastructure laid down.
Or all the roads we’ve built up over the last half century.
Hell, look at what we do to places like Iowa every spring and fall… 95% of the land area in the state is plowed, planted, sprayed, and harvested.
Oh, and if nukes aren’t a problem, we could fill in the grand canyon easy enough.
Given enough nukes, we could definitely manage to level the Rockies. But you’ll need kajillions of high-yield devices, and that’ll have the effect of coating the planet in a miles-thick layer of fallout and raising atmospheric temperatures high enough to basically blast-furnace anything organic out of existence and flash-boil the seas.
I think it’s also well within our engineering and logistical capabilities to dam the Mediterranean, but it’d take decades or centuries to accomplish and would require a drastic restructuring of the concrete, steel and civil engineering industries. Demand would skyrocket, and prices would go up, and construction firms will fall dead and twitching by the roadside, because that dam is eating up all the building materials and tying up all the engineers. It’d bankrupt any country, or consortium of countries foolish enough to attempt it. And like Quartz pointed out, we probably couldn’t pump it dry, but we could let it evaporate dry on its own.
The Sahara and the mid-Atlantic island you propose is not so possible. You’d need God-like control over the crust’s tectonics for the latter, and the former? Pshaw. Where would you put all that sand? How would you transport it all? That’s a lot of sand, and the only ones who’ll benefit from this project are the manufacturers of plastic beach buckets.
It’s a bit arbitrary, but I’d say you could use the Kardashev scale to determine ‘mastership’ of the earth, or at least, its resources – a type I civilization is defined as using the full energy output of its planet, and we’re currently at a Kardashev factor of about 0.7, so we’re getting there.
The OP is provocatively phrased, but I doubt if anyone who knows technology really has illusions about how long it would take to perform many large engineering tasks, or how pointless many of them would be. Why dam up Gibraltar and pump out the Mediterranean? It’d take too long and wouldn’t be worth the effort. In fact, it’s been argued that it would make sens to extend the Mediterranean by flooding portions of the Sahara. This idea was seriouasly proposed by French engineers in the late 19th century, and is the basis for Jules Verne’s novel The Invasion of the Sea (which was published in English for the first time just a couple of years ago).
Vacuum the sand out of the Sahara? Fill in the Grand Canyon? Why?
There are plenty of monumental engineering problems that are already at the limits of our capability that are much more worthwhile. See John McPhee’s book The Control of Nature for treatments of three of these – Control of Volcanic Eruptions (in places like Hawaii and Iceland), Control of Mississippi River levels and flooding (The book came out long before Katrina and its ills, but it applies there. Arguably scarier, there are other places in potential danger from a flooding Mississippi); and the Earthquake-Forest Fire-Mudslide cycle in the Los Angeles Area (If you’ve ever wondered why LA always seems to have problems with these, read this section. Until I did, I didn’t realize they were interconnected. Or why LA has those huge concrete conduits all over the place. They’re there for a reason beyond being the backdrops for movie chase scenes)
This is pretty much what happened to the Aral Sea in Central Asia. Soviet-era irrigation projects diverted the rivers feeding it, resulting in it (mostly) evaporating away in a decade or two. So large-scale removal of inland seas is possible with current technology, providing you’re allowed to let natural evaporation help you out.
I’d say for “Create a non-floating island in the middle of the ocean” the answer is absolutely. For the others, I doubt it because the numbers are astronomical, and five years is nothing in construction terms, but note that a combined worldwide effort is something far, far removed from anything we’ve seen to date.
If we broaden the question to, say, 50 years and assuming every person on earth behaves peacefully and cooperatively (yeah I know, but it’s a hypothetical) and everyone works towards those roles required for the task at hand (so you could be an engineer, a farmer, a scientist, say, but not a lawyer, and the numbers of all roles are controlled via aptitude)…I’m not sure that we couldn’t do something even as far-fetched as sweep the sahara.
No-one can say with confidence though, because it would require a lot of scientific, technological and engineering breakthroughs.
We are not nor never have been the masters of the earth. That title has always been held by the insects.
If you just want something very difficult but probably possible, we could build something like an interstate highway system for the whole world. You can drive from the U.S. to South America except for one little jungle piece between Panama and Colombia. Driving from Alaska to Asia is harder but could probably be done. Unfortunately, there isn’t anything on that part of Siberia for thousands of miles so a lot of road needs to be laid and probably some really tacky tourist attractions as well. Things are getting home free from here. Just blanket Asia with interconnected high speed roads and then do the same for all of Europe. Driving to Africa from Europe can be done through the Middle East but you need some good roads there as well. Once again, Africa is going to get its own tourist stop showing a stuffed mutant animal along with dashikis made in China for sale. You have to blanket Africa with these types of roads as well (lifestock traffic please keep right).
The U.S. did the same thing in just a few decades. Wouldn’t it be cool to load up the kids in the back of the Family Truckster and head out on a driving tour from Chicago to China and then Lebanon continuing on to Somalia? I think it would be a great boon to international relations.
Right. To compare: the volume of earth moved to build the Panama canal was about 260 million cubic yards. The Grand Canyon has a volume of about 52 billion cubic yards. And that’s the smallest volume of the things mentioned in the OP. The volume of sand in the Sahara is on the order of 1.8 x 10[sup]15[/sup] cubic yards! I don’t know how to go about working out how much material is in the Rockies, but it’s gotta be staggeringly huge.
OK, I finally got around to reading that Wiki article about the Kardashev scale. The bit about the time-travelling vampires was particularly intriguing.
