Obviously this is a terrible idea, but I’m gonna answer it seriously for the sake of dunking on it.
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The amount of work. I mean, just astronomical. That’s 1,650 miles of longitude this dude is talking about filling in; the largest earth-moving project ever was the Panama Canal, and it’s only about 50 miles long. Plus, by comparison, it’s essentially a one-dimensional line! This looks like it’s probably in the ballpark of 500-ish miles from the current shore to the new shore, and two-ish miles from the surface to the floor.
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Where would we get the land from? It’s not like there’s a pile just sitting around. I guess we could dredge the Pacific and truck it across to pour into the Atlantic? Take down the Appalachians and the Rockies? Bring down an asteroid into the ocean? None of that would be enough. In fact, nothing I can think of that we have access to could even come close to providing enough dirt (remember, we need 1,650 x 500 x 2 cubic miles of it!), even if we could manage to do it without destroying ecosystems or killing billions of people.
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The people who have spent a lot of money buying homes and businesses on the current Eastern seaboard of the United States would probably have something to say about this plan. (Something loud and something very angry.) Besides, it would completely upend the shipping industry, the fishing industry, the tourism industry, and more. This would legitimately destroy multiple national economies, and that’s before you even take into account the ecological disaster.
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Sea level rise is already a major problem. So displacing a bunch of water in favor of dirt probably isn’t going to help that too terribly much.
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…why? A lot of America is sitting unused or underused. If you were to clump all of the US’s land use into discrete blocks, it would look like this:
The area labeled “LAND?” on the ocean in the OP map is, give or take, the size of the current amount of land owned by the 100 largest landowning families, private family timberland, golf, and fallow land (meaning land used for nothing). This means that the area that the person in question is asking about is already essentially or literally being used for nothing at all. Before we start undertaking an ecologically-disastrous and fundamentally impossible project, we’d probably figure out ways to use that other land.
But there’s more. The land that is being used is almost entirely being underused. For instance, take the “Cow pasture/range” section of the map; cattle account, by far, for the highest land use of any land use in the country. But the 28.2 million cows in America only need about an acre of land each; meaning that the 124.7 million acres of land they roam is about five times bigger than what they actually need. Most of the other production uses for land in the US (along with rural housing) are similarly sprawling because they can be; land is comparatively cheap, so there’s no real reason to consolidate. If that changes, land prices will rise, and the people and companies holding on to underused land will discover that it makes financial sense to sell and reconfigure their businesses to make more efficient use of the land.
So calm down, Lex Luthor. The problem isn’t that resources are actually scarce. It’s that people at the top have a financial interest in underusing their holdings so that they can keep prices artificially high.
Please, all we gotta do is create some volcanoes at strategic locations in the ocean.
The bigger the better. No time at all we’ll have new landmass.
/s
I’m glad someone in this thread is being rational.
I always wondered if I could hypothetically make a volcano by drilling a deep enough hole.
But the 28.2 million cows in America only need about an acre of land each; meaning that the 124.7 million acres of land they roam is about five times bigger than what they actually need.
Wouldn’t we want cattle using at least a bit more land than they strictly need? Overgrazing was one of the contributing factors to the Dust Bowl.
And it’s coming back!
https://wgntv.com/news/traffic/dust-storm-closes-illinois-interstate/
Don’t worry, dust storms in Illinois are perfectly normal.
My understanding is that they need an acre each specifically to prevent overgrazing, but I could be mistaken there.
Ooh cool map for visualizing land-use in the US, ty 4 sharing!
kinda crazy that on your map, airports use as much land as railways.
Fallow land is used land. It’s land that’s not currently used but its non-usage only happens its efficiency when actually used. It’s like sleeping, but for land, so it’s not free to use
I’m aware of that land use need, but actually most farmers use crop rotation to fulfill that need. You plant a crop that depletes phosphorus one year, and then one that restores it the next year. Obviously that’s oversimplified, but actually letting land lie fallow isn’t as critical anymore in a more diverse agricultural world.
Besides, letting land lie fallow is agricultural use, as you’re restoring the land for later growing seasons. That, iirc, is why the word “idle” is included on the map alongside “fallow;” true fallowing would be included in the agriculture regions.
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There are lots of reasons this wouldn’t work, but yours isn’t one of them. Plenty of coastal cities have already done this on a small scale, whole neighborhoods are built on fill- back bay in Boston, marina district in San Francisco just to name a couple. And as a bonus, a good strong earthquake turns it to soup, so every so often you can wipe the slate clean and start over.
Too much effort for these stupid “ideas”. Of it were a child, explain it like you did, but I presume it isn’t. So let me explain it: No.
Too much effort for these stupid “ideas”. Of it were a child, explain it like you did, but I presume it isn’t. So let me explain it: No.
How profoundly arrogant to presume to tell me what to do or not to do with my own time. I’ll use my time how I like, thank you very much.
And it wasn’t wasted time. I learned things, I produced something, I had fun doing it. I may have even educated others.
Get off your high horse. What you did in posting a complaint about the effort I expended was way more useless than what I did.
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Dutch be like “amateurs”
Slartibartfast*
The Dutch word for “amateurs” is actually “amateurs”, except “ama” is pronounced like it is in “Amadeus” and “eu” is pronounced like a really posh British person saying “oh”
There’s an episode of Star Trek TNG where the crew is briefly back on earth and capt Picard is enticed by the idea of taking a job where they do exactly this. They work on lifting a tectonic plate from the ocean floor to create a new continent.
Just like the Simpsons or XKCD, there’s always a relevant Star Trek episode. It’s unfortunate none of my friends have watched any.
Are those really friends?
Where do we ship the Clockwork Orange eyelid clamps?
I’ll be your friend ♥️
S4E2. After the Borg incident Picard visits his brother and childhood home. Brief discussions of alternate life and career.
I believe the project in that episode was actually Atlantropa, a dam across the strait of Gibraltar to drain the entire Mediterranean sea.
The idea was proposed in the 1920s and somewhat entertained by Adolf Hitler and the Nazis.
I have a vague memory of that and I have a feeling it would be a massive ecological catastrophe.
Then again, Earth had already gone through a nuclear war, so whatever.
I mean, two nuclear bombs were used in war and a bunch in testing, unless I’m forgetting something. I feel like tectonic activity could definitely be much worse than that, judging by the early earth environment.
Why do I have no memory of this
Because you fail as a nerd and have brought shame on your family.
Team Magma is at it again.
There is a German novel where something like this happens over night for no reason. It’s called “Miami Punk” and worth a read but I’m afraid there are no translations. It’s written by an anthropologist and he investigates the question how people would react, including people out of work, conspiracy theories, scientists, …
Why bother filling it with land when you can just find some crusty old map with some dashes on it as evidence that it belongs to you
Where would we get the land to fill it in? EASY! We’ll just pull up our old plan to blow up the moon and use the chunks to make more America!
No one’s using the north half of Canada, let’s dig it up and do it!
A guy tried that in, I think, 2006. Superman just threw his new landmass out into space.
You don’t even need to ride the bus and potentially endanger those children. You could even watch a simple 3 minute video from Tom Scott, explaining how people found out it’s a bad idea to drain large bodies of water.
Guy got baited into lecturing on a shitpost. Absolutely genius.
Thats literally what China is doing atm
I wouldn’t call creating some artificial islands with sand is ‘literally’ doubling the size of a continent into the ocean.
That was just a tiny first step … give it a few thousand years and some cement mixed in with the sand.
Of course we would need many thousand years without big wars… which is not sure, and far from it.
No way this is not a bait
It’s them dad gum democrats
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