41–50 of 54 posts
Love the vision. Feels like something that can’t get done and isn’t proposed as viable - if a RE developer tried to do it for profit, they’d get shut down - ironically probably by environmental groups - govt doesn’t actually build anything audacious anymore Unless I’m missing something?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This gives Southern California including LA a listing as a single supercity population 24.4 million which is close but not quite there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_megalopolises
That’s a goddamned stretch if ever there was one. SoCal is more or less a recognizable region in California, and does indeed have almost 24M people, but nobody sane would call it a megalopolis without some weird agenda I can’t quite figure out. Los Angeles is a city of about 3.9M. LA County is well, apparently experiencing some population decline because last I checked this was a little over 11M, but apparently as of…
The Los Angeles Conurbation is about to swallow the northern Imperial Valley as well, because the I-10 corridor is made up of flat sandy dirt that could be a suburban back yard.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah I don't think you can just dump it in the top end of the gulf of california, especially if that's where you're sourcing feedwater.
Why not? Existing ocean currents in the Gulf of California driven by wind, tides, and thermohaline circulation are on the order of 10cm/s, tens of kilometers wide, hundreds of meters deep. Very little of that is associated with local rivers, which are relatively tiny because the whole region is extremely arid. Are you going to be desalinating 0.1 km^2 of water per second? The Sun pumps a thousand watts a square meter…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why not? Existing ocean currents in the Gulf of California driven by wind, tides, and thermohaline circulation are on the order of 10cm/s, tens of kilometers wide, hundreds of meters deep. Very little of that is associated with local rivers, which are relatively tiny because the whole region is extremely arid. Are you going to be desalinating 0.1 km^2 of water per second? The Sun pumps a thousand watts a square meter…
The brine doesn’t spread out automatically, it sinks, and it’s deadly to aquatic life.
Diffusion can also be assisted with very modest power requirements.
Love the vision. Feels like something that can’t get done and isn’t proposed as viable - if a RE developer tried to do it for profit, they’d get shut down - ironically probably by environmental groups - govt doesn’t actually build anything audacious anymore Unless I’m missing something?
Perhaps I missed a zero somewhere, but 5MAF/yr would require pumping 6,900cfs of water to/from the gulf with 230+ft of head. We're going to need a bigger boat.
> Last year, the world installed about 437 GW of solar electricity, or roughly one acre of panels every 10 seconds How can that be true. That's over three million acres. Really?
It's about equivalent to a single larger US county (but well down the list from largest).
Sacramento, a virtual desert, is surrounded by rice fields, with huge exports to Japan.
Effectively California’s farmers are selling its water to other places in the form of produce.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This gives Southern California including LA a listing as a single supercity population 24.4 million which is close but not quite there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_megalopolises
That’s a goddamned stretch if ever there was one. SoCal is more or less a recognizable region in California, and does indeed have almost 24M people, but nobody sane would call it a megalopolis without some weird agenda I can’t quite figure out. Los Angeles is a city of about 3.9M. LA County is well, apparently experiencing some population decline because last I checked this was a little over 11M, but apparently as of…
Love the vision. Feels like something that can’t get done and isn’t proposed as viable - if a RE developer tried to do it for profit, they’d get shut down - ironically probably by environmental groups - govt doesn’t actually build anything audacious anymore Unless I’m missing something?