We Can Terraform the American West

Truly, even if we were to disregard the ecological and social impacts on existing inhabitants, the energy required would be extreme. And thankfully that alone is enough to make this simply a fantasy.

I actually quite like the arid west, if anything we should be letting it return to aridity as current water use (I.e. rerouting a lot of the Colorado River to California) is well known to be on shaky ground at the least. If you don’t like arid areas move somewhere else.

> An ice age is simply when the earth's poles have an ice cover.

Are you sure? I'm not seeing that definition anywhere, and it looks like even in interglacial periods there's permanent ice in both hemispheres: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_age#Glacials_and_interglac...

The problem with South Florida is that it had too much water.

> Florida's population explosion precisely coincides with the adoption of air conditioning in American households

This is also the case for Arizona, Phoenix in particular.

Air conditioning is one of the great inventions of the 20th century, it’s up there with the airplane, antibiotics, transistor, and shipping container.

I agree. Megaprojects that make large changes to highly chaotic systems never end well. From Mao's Four Pests to the ongoing wildfire crises that plague the west coast thanks to all the terraforming California has undergone (exacerbated by ongoing climate change)

To say nothing of the fact that this is wanton environmental destruction. Just because something is arid, it's alright to completely change it? And for what? Having lived in Dallas, which is not unlike Nevada but more humid and wet, it's not a proper place to live. People jump from pool of air conditioning to pool of air conditioning. You go outside and walk for just 5 minutes, and you're completely soaked in sweat. Shade does not help. Lack of concrete does not help, you can drive 2 hours into the middle of nowhere and it's still like being in a preheated oven. You can't really do anything fun outside for half the year because you'll get heat stroke, or generally just be extremely stinky.

If you want to make use of empty land, going to the miserably cold uninhabited swaths of Canada are far wiser. You can always bundle up, but you can only take off so many layers of clothing.

Colonizing Mars is a joke. Earth was more habitable the day after the asteroid hit that Mars is now.

I think the issue is that when you look at it from the modern perspective of profit the economics don't work out.

If look at it as a way to spend huge piles of money to subsidize a lifestyle it suddenly is less charming

Good? Do you understand the ecosystems and national parks that would be destroyed by this? Once those are gone they are gone. We don’t even need this nonsense, the population is contracting. We will have nothing but empty space in inhabited spaces already.

https://www.cbo.gov/publication/59899

> of, say, the UK.

of, say, any small island. These dynamics are unnatural modes of compensation for other inconveniences.

> as densely as the Dutch

or, say, people who live under the level of the sea itself.

Your proposal is fairly modest compared to some of the ideas out there.

In his wildly enthusiastic 1860 book The Central Gold Region, William Gilpin claimed that the Mississipi Basin could support at population of 1.2 billion people, and was destined to become the “world’s amphitheatre”, with all of the world’s trade running through it in a grand “Asiatic and European Railway”.

The foreign legion should just build nukes in France and transfer electricity east across the Maginot Line.