Frontiers

The world is far more interesting than many people realize. Most people. after all, live in cities. They rarely leave except to go to other cities. Most of them either fly or roar through on highways, not stopping to look around, sleeping until they reach the city where all the Stuff Is. So they largely miss what they pass through.

People have to have water to live. Fresh water. This usually requires either rain or rivers or both. Places with wells supplied by fossil water, such as Libya, eventually run those wells dry and you get revolution when the population crashes. Like Libya. Expect famine and further war there. Qadafi gave them agriculture from a finite water supply. Now that the water is gone, Libya is screwed.

This is why so many deserts are empty places with no people. This will not always be true. Modern terrestrial terraforming is possible. Las Vegas is a very good example. Dam the river, provide water and electricity, use fossil fuels to subsidize air travel so people can come to a remote and warm desert location to gamble and party, even in the middle of winter, for the weekend. That's terraforming. Without the water supply and free power, Vegas would be just another desert valley. Nevada is full of those. Apply the same reasoning to the currently empty desert coasts and see where it takes you.

Cheap Desalination, paired with cheap solar to run it and the pumps to move the water, is the future. Human beings like making babies, so there's always more mouths to feed, meaning we always need more food, thus more land. Cheap Desalination is necessary to avoid water wars. We have had lots of those already. Currently, there's a number of places on earth which are largely empty due to lack of water for irrigation.

Baja California. Part of Mexico, this peninsula extends a thousand miles south of San Diego, divided from mainland Mexico by the narrow Sea Of Cortez whose floor contains a spreading center and black smokers. Much like the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Most of the region is dry desert despite having sea on either side, due to being in the wrong place for consistent rainfall. They do get hurricanes and associated hurricane spinoff flooding, but this isn't the kind of water supply to grow food. Its great for sudden erosion damage though. Desalination and pumping would allow for serious irrigation projects and food production using all that abundant sunlight. It would be like LA without the crowd hassles and traffic and taxes. It's like 200 LA's, each with their own king, all in a row. Transport goods via ship and sometimes rail, and you've got a good choice for development. The mainland Mexican coast on the eastern shore of the Sea of Cortez would likely want this too. This region has real potential.

West coast of Africa. Between Morocco and Senegal, theres a lot of territory where it rarely rains. Much like Baja, the sea is there so it would benefit from cheap desalination and irrigation powered by cheap solar power. And additional feature is the upwelling currents make for highly fertile seas so the fishing is extremely good there. This is also where hurricanes start, and fertile dust storms sweep across the Sahara before spawning those hurricanes and eventually ending up providing nutrients to Brazil, allegedly. This is an enormous swath of land, all potentially irrigatable, and all with lots of sunlight so ideal growing conditions. Like California, only much bigger. As a century project, I can see a huge future for the place, however the Africans living there can't seem to get past the warfare stage of their culture, and AIDS may end their people entirely.

The Namibian Coast, in southern Africa, is being toyed with by the Chinese, building towns and such nobody can afford to live in because there are no jobs. Mind your contracts with the Chinese. They're very strict about them. They love abusing them. It gives them the giggles to cheap people. Once again, CNC will save us from Chinese Manufacturing.

The entire continent of Australia has water problems. Cheap desalination and pumping will fix that. Its going to be huge, but they'll make gains everywhere they put it in, so it can be gradual. When they figure out Australia, they can figure out the Sahara, which contains no rivers and its fossil water was wasted by Qadafi. Even small increases in rain make it bloom like mad. The soil there is fertile. It used to be giant grassland plains, full of herd animals. Since then its dried out and most of the animals either migrated away or died out. Giant Auroch Bulls are long gone. Solving those places' water supply issues leads to eventually solving Russia's water problems. Russia is surprisingly dry. Most of the good rain is caught by Europe, and it gets drier the further east you go across Asia. Think Great Plains dry. 10-12 inches a year isn't enough for growing wheat and having big populations. They need irrigation.

Eventually the continents will have sufficient irrigation that everywhere that's dry will be planted with crops and populated with people. Figure human population will be around 40 billion. Seven times what it is now. Or plagues will kill us back and mechanization will handle the crops and we'll just have more parks with the water. Depends on many factors. Its the downside of certain technologies: the potential for abuse can lead to Very Bad Things.

The flipside of deserts is cold places. Like Siberia, most of British Columbia, Patagonia, Scotland and Norway. They often have lots of rain, but the snow in the winter kills deciduous trees so its mostly taiga pines. These have poison fluids to survive the winter so animals only live there when the plants between them are growing tasty foliage. This is why the birds and beasts are mostly migratory.

Fixing the trees is a genetic engineering project rather than a water project. Engineer fruit trees to be resistant to cold, such that their limbs don't burst in subzero temperatures, yet their fruits remain safe and edible with a stem membrane that won't pass the frost resistance fluid through it. This would allow the pines, which are useless except as ground cover and wind breaks, being too small and short for lumber, to be gradually replaced with ever growing orchards. Add more species of fruits with the same trick, and add frost resistance genetics to plant crops so a sudden July snowstorm won't kill the crop and starve the region's inhabitants. It needs to be regulated and ethical and limited so it can't go out of control, but it can be done. And that would open up central and northern Canada, all of Siberia, much of the Tibetan Plateau and Mongolia to farming and agriculture and eventually settlement. Room for a few billion more people.

Eastern Siberia is an interesting place, actually. Very much a frontier with good ideas about problem solving. You come into one of those towns with a broken truck or motorcycle, they can machine the part for you, quick. They're used to it, and they're doing it manually not via CNC. Give those people better tools and they'd amaze us. Considering they make brutal and efficient repairable technology I'd rather buy a Siberian motorcycle than a Chinese one. I really think we should be doing more business with Siberia. They are strong, and not beaten. I respect them. I think they're a new frontier.

Ural, 2WD sidecar motorcycle, adapted from captured Nazi BMW. Easy to fix, with basic tools.

Siberia, especially eastern Siberia, is all about the ports. Rail West into Russia is a very long journey to markets. Most of the rivers inland don't have bridges, so if you want to move goods in and out of there, you get a big 6 or 8 wheel drive truck. Not a silly American truck, but a serious Russian Truck. Brutal, overbuilt, and not fragile. Russians can't afford to just replace entire vehicles when they break. They need the parts. And if the parts can't be had, to make them on site. This is why there are so many machine shops in Siberia. It's the rational response.

Killing babies isn't the rational response to limited land and limited food. Making more land to grow crops through irrigation by using technology to make more drinking water, that's rational. Cheap solar provides for cheap desalination. It will be a huge effort doing all these construction projects, but its better than war. War is giving up. Really that's childish. If we're going to be an adult and mature species we need to see the bigger picture and put in the effort.