h a l f b a k e r ySugar and spice and unfettered insensibility.
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Flying?! Why burn up all that energy to fly them when ice floats? |
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I suppose you would have to get them high first? |
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changed my vote because of his view on showers/stoves |
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This is brilliant! Why the hell
didn't we all think to use magic to
move glaciers. The mechanical
means is inefficient by
comparison. Hold on there, they
do move on their own, are you
perhaps not patient? Maybe one
of them will settle down in the
sahara. - |
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It strikes me that several people in the bakery/2 have been worrying about how to get water to the Sahara. Some seem to have been losing sleep about the situation. Although several valiant suggestions have been put forward, including flying glaciers, and digging tunnels through the earth's core, I think we can do this a different way.
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I propose that everyone should holiday to the Sahara next year, and bring back a suitcase of sand. Leave the sand on your local beach, and nobody will be any the wiser. Within weeks I believe that we can disperse the Sahara all together, and our problem will be solved. It's my belief that there is lush grassland and rainforest growing underneath that pesky sand, anyway. |
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Why do we want to bring water to the Sahara? Nobody lives there anyhow. |
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Tonic, no. Gin, yes. Vermouth, yes. Martini, dry. |
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(sings)
Hello mudda, hello fadda
need more watta
in the sahara.... |
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Well if people do live in the Sahara, then the absence of water can't be a problem, can it? |
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What do you need all the water for? Are you planning to open a dolphinarium? You'd need a lot more than just water if you were actually planning on significant farming. Why not send the water somewhere it's actually needed, like California? |
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It would be much more cost effective for joint world
governments to manipulate atmospheric particles in a
weather modification project that would, albeit against
Mother nature's intentions, deliver sky baths to all of
Earth's desert-dwellers. (That is, rather than train 600,000
military pilots to simultaneously fly trillion horsepower
cargo aircraft that will never exist in steady formation
while the multi-billion dollar massive ice net attachment is
carefully hoisted below the glacier's base AFTER the deep
sea cutter has sliced through the nevermind, watch a
hungry 3rd world child infommercial, neogy, and
substitute your 50 cents a day for an overnight shipment
of bottled Fiji so little Kwazani can feel hydrated as the
realistic interpretation of your idea catches on. |
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Can fish live in camel spit? |
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None. I'm no camel trader. I can't even hawk a decent
loogie. |
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isn't global warming taking care of this already? |
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Why not get the iceberg into orbit first? Maybe chunck by chunck. Then after some time, when the touareg decide its time for some rain, just ask nasa to dump some chuncks towards the sahara. |
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Obviously the chuncks need to be big enough, so that its not all evaporated before it hits the surface. |
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You need a biological solution to the problem. Filling up camels at the coast, taking them to the middle of the desert, and emptying them would be one solution. But it should be possible to find better organisms for the job. Perhaps you could grow very long vines. |
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// Filling up camels at the coast, taking them to the
middle of the desert, and emptying them would be one
solution.// |
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What would you fill up the camels with? Camel food? |
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The idea of using tug boats to move glacier chunks to arid areas has been around for about 100 years. These chunks of ice are heavy. Flying is out of the question, even using the most efficient flying device (Zeppelin). Icebergs are 90% below the surface of the water, which creates tremendous drag (momentum) to being moved anywhere by where the currents take it. |
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You'd be better off asking people to vacation in the sahara, and leave a tear or two... |
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The best solution would be pump salt water from the nearest ocean/sea into a giant lake covered by a clear plastic up side down funnel. The clear plastic will act like a greenhouse magnifying the effect of the sun, and the funnel shape will prevent the evaporated water from precipitaing back into the lake ( which will end up being very salty). |
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Maybe you could even use the force of the escapeing humidity to power some of the pumps. |
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At the end you'll wind up with giant piles of salt which can be used to provide the world with tasty salt n' vinegar chips. |
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Ironically, it has recently been discovered that the Sahara is sitting on top of one of the world's largest known freshwater aquifers. The water flows into the dry Qattarah depression and evaporates. Wells placed here could capture up to 2 billion cubic metres a year. So all you need to sort out the problem is a spade, actually. (Source: New Scientist magazine) |
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Fly hundreds of unused zepplins filled with hydrogen over the Sahara. Then ignite them all. Burning hydrogen turns into water vapour. Once it cools off, you have rain. |
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Did you not listen? A spade is all you need, man, a spade. |
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(I do like GenYus's idea though. I wonder how the energy required for electrolysis compares with the energy for transporting water.) |
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You could employ the technique described in "Lake Death Valley" to fill the Qattarah depression with fresh water, at the expense of increased salinity in the Mediterranean. |
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//all you need to sort out the problem// |
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The problem I have here is that the dryness of the sahara is not, in fact, a problem. Bone for trying to kill off an entire ecological region. |
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Why not have a string of trebuchets running from the polar regions to the Sahara? You could relay the ice in a reasonably short period of time. Each trebuchet would have a large tarp that would catch incoming chunks of ice and would let it slide down into the launch receiver and then on to the next trebuchet. |
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Of course, each trebuchet would need to be fine-tuned to the lighter weights as it approached the Sahara. I imagine it would employ lots of folks, but unemployment would be almost nil. |
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And, it is hard to be a religious fanatic when you are working full-time. do away with wars in the process too. |
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I think the problem is how to attenuate the growth of the Sahara; we should study the whole mechanism first, especially the ocean salt and currents. |
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How about something more practical to bring more water to the Sahara? Tributaries of the Niger and Congo Rivers (which are mostly in rainforests and prone to flooding) could be diverted to refill the shrinking Lake Chad and to fill up the dusty hellhole known as the Bodele Depression. The people in the region are starving and need the water. |
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The insurmountable problems here are money and politics. The region is dirt poor, and getting at least a half dozen corrupt african governments to cooperate is probably impossible. |
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One possible silver lining to these dark clouds: French vanity and desire for influence. Except for Nigeria, all the countries involved are former French colonies, and the French would love to have the influence there that they once had (especially if French companies got the work). |
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Aha, now someone can tow a recently available berg to where it's needed [linky]. |
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I wonder, if a portion of your country breaks off and floats away is it still yours? |
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Was that you hanging around the Kerch Bridge with a masonry saw, [whatrock]? |
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That was merely a trial run. |
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