reclaim the desert, multifaceted program to preserve and establish fresh water reservoirs, plant life, create topsoil and renew the land. Techniques including massive desalination should be in implemented, goal is to turn the desert into an oasis…develop the technologies and techniques required to sustain life and terraform other planets (if we can’t green our desert how can we live on another planet??)
Turn organic trash into topsoil…this can be done.
Secure fresh water for centuries to come…:move from scarcity to abundance…and invent technology for real “green power”…(gravity battery for example…you use water pressure to move massive weights storing (potential energy) then convert that potential into electricity. In the meantime use small efficient new nuclear power.
Dream of the future, make it a reality. Elon can help lead the way!!
If you’d like to make the desert bloom, there was an idea I was kicking around about 20 years ago, in which that would be a side effect.
Our processed recycled water is getting dumped into the ocean because, of course, though it’s “clean”, understandably no one wants to drink it. But after years of this, it leads to desalinating the ocean, which can slow the Atlantic conveyor belt, and given our rate of water use, can have the effect of draining the lakes and aquifers faster than the rain fills them again.
So, pump that purified wastewater to the desert instead (more practical in California and Nevada, etc.) and concentrate the sun to boil the water in tubes, using the steam to generate power as the steam escapes. The steam then can rise, purified a second time, and as it cools, falls to earth where it can be allowed to leach into the soil as natural rain does. It won’t go as high or as far as natural rain, I’m sure, but it would in time leach into the aquafers, helping to refill them faster than natural rain alone. And the desert would bloom. Might make it a nicer place to live and increase land values, while we’re at it. I don’t know how far the steam would go before it falls back to earth.
A few years later, I saw a news article of someone doing a similar thing though not using the wastewater. I think it was a power plant out in the desert concentrating sunlight into steam to generate power. Apparently, they found that concentrating the sunlight onto tubes of oil and then using the heated oil to boil vats of water was more efficient, but it was the same thing. Once the energy plant was made it was free energy. No wonder I’ve not seen it mentioned since.
So, adjust the idea to heat oil to heat the water, for more efficiency.
You know, I was thinking… It does make sense to practice terraforming here on earth in general and in the case of hoping to terraform on some other planet. Practice at home first, of course.
So out in the Pacific Northwest, anyways, the Native American reservations are on the worst land we’ve got. The soil is unusable, pancake flour I think it’s called. The only thing that will grow there, really, are scrub pines. They make the soil even more acidic, I gather, and make the issue worse, reinforcing that nothing will grow there.
We could do the people there some good while accomplishing this terraforming practice.
IF the people of the reservation are willing, we could try terraforming there, renting the land from them, and hiring local Native Americans wherever possible. Then leave them the improved land when we’re done. And really leave it don’t try to leave some display etc. Get out of the way and let them use their finally useable land, or not, as they wish.
Just an idea.