China’s Plan to Keep Sand from Swallowing the World
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China’s Plan to Keep Sand from Swallowing the World
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Re: China’s Plan to Keep Sand from Swallowing the World
#2I wonder how we plan to terraform Mars if we can't even deal with a desert or two.
Re: China’s Plan to Keep Sand from Swallowing the World
#3Maybe synergies can be used here! On HN 1 month ago: The World Is Running Out of Sand: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15739917
Re: China’s Plan to Keep Sand from Swallowing the World
#4I remember learning The Man Who Planted Trees (L'homme qui plantait des arbres) [1] in French class in primary school.
Even though many of the trees aren't surviving, I'm cautiously optimistic about the Green Great Wall project. I think that trees breaking the wind can stop more air pollution than grass. They will use more water, but when the wind is blocked, the humidity can stay local, so even rotting dead trees can fertilise the next generation of plants.
There's some skepticism about corruption and incompetence of government planning, which is probably true. But has the American government put so much effort and money into an environmental project?
Re: China’s Plan to Keep Sand from Swallowing the World
#5Maybe synergies can be used here! On HN 1 month ago: The World Is Running Out of Sand: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15739917
As noted in that discussion, there are different types of sand – (ironically?) the growing desert is not usable as a construction material; the individual grains are too small and spherical, in construction sand the grains are coarser and larger. Why is why we have the situation where Gulf states import some of the sand for their construction boom even though a huge proportion of their land is desert (that is to say – sand).
edit: so no synergies unfortunately!
Re: China’s Plan to Keep Sand from Swallowing the World
#6Israel has had a lot of success with their desert agriculture, even on soils that are predominantly salty in composition. While there is no significant precipitation, some of the water is captured from fog, through nets.
Re: China’s Plan to Keep Sand from Swallowing the World
#7I wonder how we plan to terraform Mars if we can't even deal with a desert or two.
Well we know how to deal with a desert - don't overfarm, don't deforest, and if that's already happened, build walls and protected national parks. It's just that it's too little, too late, and restoring a forest + the damage done by lost land and productivity from desert growth far outweights the money earned by overfarming / deforestation. Short-term gains with long-term cost.
Re: China’s Plan to Keep Sand from Swallowing the World
#8Maybe synergies can be used here! On HN 1 month ago: The World Is Running Out of Sand: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15739917
As noted in that discussion, there are different types of sand – (ironically?) the growing desert is not usable as a construction material; the individual grains are too small and spherical, in construction sand the grains are coarser and larger. Why is why we have the situation where Gulf states import some of the sand for their construction boom even though a huge proportion of their land is desert (that is to say…
So what you're saying is someone needs to invent a cryptocurrency where the proof of work is measured by the number of spherical grains of sand you coarsen?
Re: China’s Plan to Keep Sand from Swallowing the World
#986% or 60% dying is really not a big deal if the remaining surviving 14% or 40% are, in absolute numerical terms, greater than the amount it takes to transform the desert.
The article unfortunately doesn't talk about what we think the latter is.
edit: explain the down vote. you think planting trees to die is immoral, or something?
Re: China’s Plan to Keep Sand from Swallowing the World
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
As noted in that discussion, there are different types of sand – (ironically?) the growing desert is not usable as a construction material; the individual grains are too small and spherical, in construction sand the grains are coarser and larger. Why is why we have the situation where Gulf states import some of the sand for their construction boom even though a huge proportion of their land is desert (that is to say…
So what you're saying is someone needs to invent a cryptocurrency where the proof of work is measured by the number of spherical grains of sand you coarsen?
We need to launch an ICO here. The Internet of Sand (IoS) is the future. Every coarse grain will have its IPv6 address which is retained in a blockchain for tracking, making "intelligent concrete" the very fabric of architecture 4.0.