Mega Engineering Projects

just imagine what something like that could do if it was in space

design me a Dyson "cap" for harvesting quasars from above the poles, Veeky Forums

The land area gained would just be a lot of salt desert.

Mars colonies

You are so fucking full of shit. It is high order fantasy magic.

>When the project was canceled, 22.5 km (14.0 mi) of tunnel and 17 shafts to the surface were already dug, and nearly two billion dollars had already been spent on the massive facility.[22]

It was never meant to be a super collider. It was just a coverup for another off the books secret project.

why couldn't they just keep going with the project and use it to fund other off the books projects
it's not like there's ever an end to those

If you want people to forget about it later you don't keep it active.

no, why not continue constructing the first project while siphoning money away for dark projects
the first can be finished as well as the shadowy ones, and people will consider the inflated price as the inefficiencies of government projects

get returns on both sides, instead of just one

A space tower or launch loop would be nice to have
would assist in making other projects too, or just stand as a massive fuck off dickwaving object

Because the first project doesn't exist and takes up the space for the off the books project.

Attached: oh boy more brainlets posting.png (260x17, 795)

Nuking a strait across the entire sahara.

>current tech

Sending telescopes to the gravitational lense focus of the sun. Would basically allows us to image the surface of exoplanets. To be fair, this is very borderline in terms of feasibility, but nothing out of reach. Would be possible if enough money was invested.

Not really. Only if it was flat. If you have any kind of declivity, the water would just drain away, and inland water would push the salty water that remained in the soil. With that said, this would obviously have all kind of serious environmental problems, and it would take way too long to actually be worth it.

Launch Loops are perfectly possible since 50 years and would put the cost of space travel in the same range as the cost of intercontinental travel.

Building gigantic telescopes that are capable of watching earth-sized exoplanets hundreds of light years away directly.

Thing is, even a gigantic telescope, way beyond what we are technically capable would still not be able to resolve more than one pixel of the planet's light. We would still be able to do some clever things to figure out more about it's surface features (basically by observing it at different positions.

To actually observe an exoplanet surface, we would need mirror with killometers of radius, which would only be possible in space and using thousands of small satellites, which is way beyond what we could do today.

Sun gravitational lensing is a bit more feasible, but still hard.

worlds largest pyramid, cut in granite, 1000 tonnes (+/- 1 yoctogram) a block, irregular shapes with molecular precision.

Africa could be conquered and turned into a giant battle royal game.

Hole drilled to the center of the earth. Furthest they got was something like 10km deep in Russia. Abandoned decades ago. Would be cool as fuck

impossible, the best you could do is drill until reaching the outer mantle and accidentally a volcano

Solar updraft towers could be pretty neat

Attached: Captura-de-pantalla-2013-04-25-a-las-14.46.52.jpg (900x570, 70K)

Just looked that up, what a fucking great idea. Cool how it doubles as a bigass greenhouse too.

use nuclear water pumps to irrigate dry land with desalinated sea water. build aqueducts from the sea t the headwaters of river basins that flow through dry lands. use more nuclear water pumps to irrigate more dry land.
>fertile soil=money

Attached: hardy1.png (544x494, 226K)

What if you inserted a shell made of that material they wanted to use for space elevator

Until you accidentally destabilize the geologic features by pumping shit loads of water into the water table that weren't meant o be there

How so? What fantasy materials does it require?

How about your GTFO if you don't know shit about the topic at hand

Flooding the Qattara Basin in Egypt seems like an interesting project; the below sea level land is empty desert right now, and the project would both a ton of hydropower plus add a bunch of coastline with a pleasant Mediterranean climate.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qattara_Depression_Project

Attached: 1280px-All_proposed_routes.png (1280x885, 511K)

How do they mitigate it becoming another Salton sea?

>Building gigantic telescopes that are capable of watching earth-sized exoplanets hundreds of light years away directly.
There is some ayylmaos out there watching the Romans as we speak.

even if it doesn't melt, the pressure is absurd down there

start building O'Neil cylinders, and you'll eventually end up with a Dyson swarm

good thread boss

Best one.

Attached: stifling a giggul.gif (286x258, 2.51M)

thorium power, helium collection, ocean exploration, nuclear fusion, automated asteroid mining, lunar base to "catch" large asteroids, space elevators or equator based launch stations, telescopes and satelites.
TOP TIER:
>eugenics
>pollution prevention
>scientific organic farming

What about planets in neighbouring solar systems?

I'm talking about systems within 20 ly, which is extremely close. It's just way too hard to image exoplanets. Using the sun's lensing is our best bet.

This would wreak Havoc on European and African climate. Also on their shipping, tourism, etc.

>because because, obviously

half that shit requires new inventions.

That would be a security nightmare. Imagine nuking the dam.

Don't know if this counts as a "mega project", but just investing in building a big nuclear energy infrastructure.

Cat girls

nuking africa :)

>not carpet bombing the northern african and middle eastern border with dirty bombs

There's a huge shallow area of the Pacific between Thailand and Indonesia, or the Timor Sea north of Australia that's very shallow. A dike of a few hundred feet height could reclaim a large area of land from the ocean, like Holland

>weren't meant o be there
hey water
get lost
you don't belong here

I think when you do new irrigation, the roots of the plants (trees) that grow in the newly irrigated soil will strongly stabilize the formerly dry soil. also, what about the new equilibrium after and potential geological destabilization? I don't think were going to sink any tectonic plates with a volume of water that is small compared to the volume of the plate and much less dense. Pic related, look how the headwaters of the Niger River basin are to the ocean. That's about 200 miles and not too far uphill.
>silviculture

Attached: TRINITY____+___mocdowhfde7d687tyodmeo35.png (2000x1258, 314K)

but you'd need to pump that water out of the hole you built

Don't cut it off from in-flowing water supply. Ideally the Qattara Basin would have water flow in from the Mediterranean but also have water flowing back out again, so that constant salty inflow and evaporation wouldn't turn it into a supersized Dead Sea.

Telescopes on the far side of the Moon

Why would it wreck the climate? The Mediterranean would shrink a little but it wouldn't vanish. Get a little more land. Build beachfront resorts.
Yes, it would cut off shipping past Gibraltar but the advantages would be tremendous.

Certainly. Ley said the projects were feasible from an engineering standpoint but there were political difficulties.
The old colonial system is largely gone but now we have all sorts of terrorists and fanatics.

Another idea was to pump water from the Mediterranean, run it across Israel and drop it into the Dead Sea. The power gained by letting the water fall through turbines would vastly exceed the energy to lift it in the first place. The Dead Sea has rather gradually sloped shorelines. The level of the sea would rise a little bit and then the expanded surface area would increase the evaporation rate and come to a new equilibrium. Even today, the Sea has no outlet and evaporation is the only reason it doesn't fill up. ALL surrounding countries. including the Palestinians, would benefit from cheap energy and the industry it would attract.

Of course, there are the "We don't care if we're shooting ourselves in the foot" types who'd blow up the project in a minute it they thought it would hurt Israel.

too late 56%

lens is 550 AU from the sun, Voyager I is 141 AU away after 4 decades. The grav-lens telescope can't be aimed, so you can only see what happens to be in the right spot

If the Mediterranean would drop a foot per year from evaporation in spite of inflow from the Nile etc, wouldn't this suffer greater net evaporation?

I don't see where the water would be outflowing from that Basin, unless you burn a lot of your power by pumping it back out
wouldn't pumping in water so it could evaporate make the place an even saltier wasteland?

Sahara hydroelectric powerplant.

Most of the Sahara desert is below sea level. So we dig a canal to the Atlantic. At a certain width, water will flow into the canal at the same rate that it evaporates from the basin, meaning we get a huge in-land sea in the Sahara and a huge amount of electricity from the turbines we placed on the Atlantic end of the canal.

just let the sun dry it up

and accumulate a lot of salt brine from the evaporation. there's a reason why they call it the "dead" sea.

Sure. But it's ALREADY dead. Nothing lives in it. Nothing we can do to lower the salinity.
On the plus side, the high concentration of minerals makes it economically feasible to extract certain minerals.
>miningweekly.com/article/extracting-minerals-and-metals-from-the-sea-2016-04-01
and cheap power would allow additional processes.

I'm not sure. The Dead Sea is ALREADY dead. Nothing lives in it. But the water from the Mediterranean is LESS salty that what's already there. Wouldn't that lower the salinity -- at least a little and in the short term? Regardless of what we do or don't do, the sea will continue to get saltier indefinitely.

On the plus side, the high concentration of minerals makes it economically feasible to extract certain minerals.
>miningweekly.com/article/extracting-minerals-and-metals-from-the-sea-2016-04-01
and cheap power would allow additional industries.

I think the telescope can be aimed. But not just simply by re-orienting it with inertia wheels.
You have to move the scope -- and move it quite a long distance -- to watch another star. At 550 AU a 1 degree shift means 9.6 AU of travel; about the radius of Saturn's orbit.

at what speed something that far is orbiting the sun, considering a circular orbit at 550 AU?

Or in units that are of interest, 0.27 AU per year.

Just read the beginning of the wp article. They won't.
>water flows in
>gather hydropower
>water dries up
>water leaves salt behind
>more water flows in
>carries in more salt
Soon it would become hypersaline and in the end they'd just leave a dry mass of salt a few dozen meters thick

the idea is to change the local meteorology so it becomes a subtropical zone like the atlantic and pacific basins, iirc

How about some hardcore interferometry? We already do this with radiotelescopes and with the Keck telescope, right? Would we really not be able to set it up in space with something like two adjusted JWSTs?

You ever hear of Gower's Gulch in Death Valley? en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gower_Gulch_(Death_Valley)
>In 1941 a 5-foot-deep (1.5 m) Furnace Creek-Gower Gulch Flood diversion channel was blasted upstream from Zabriskie Point to divert flood waters from the Furnace Creek Wash and the resorts into Gower Gulch. The diversion increased the size of Gower Gulch's drainage basin from 2.77 km2 to 455.63 km2, an increase of 16,348%. As a result, massive erosion of the channel took place as debris from Furnace Creek were channeled into Gower Gulch. Today the diversion has sunk to over 20 feet deep with two dry falls, one three feet and another ten feet high.
"Hmm, we want to build a road here, but there's a river that occasionally forms when it rains. Instead of building a bridge, let's save some money and just divert the river and have it flow this way!"
That way the land wasn't used to having water flowing over it. It was very easy to erode away. Huge mudslides, covering up California freeways that need to get cleared out every time it rains (once or twice per year). Back erosion has the original (Nevada) freeway in danger of getting swept away.
Should have built the bridge, and we learned that increasing the amount of water flowing through a dry area can have massive geological impacts.

Oh, and the water that would have normally gone down Furnace creek? Turns out that quite a few towns and farms in California needed that water. Now they have to get it shipped/piped in.

It'd kill a shitload of people close to it, but the med would take so long to fill back up that it wouldn't kill everyone who moved into the basin

Orbital velocity varies as the inverse square root of the radius vector, so at 550 AU it'd be about 1.27 km/sec.
It's "year" would be 12,899 Earth-years, so the "focus" would move 0.028 degrees/year or about 2 arc-seconds per week.
To study a particular star for an extended period would demand periodic orbital corrections.

Fuuuck, I forgot the image because it was 3 AM
Used the formula v = s/t and Kepler's Third Law

Attached: Screenshot_20180322-032024.png (1080x1920, 177K)

Same thing should be done with the Afar depression too.

Attached: structure-map-dem[1].jpg (502x562, 104K)

BRING BACK OPERATION PLOWSHARE AND NUKE THE FUCK OUT OF PANAMA

LOCK-FREE CANAL WHOOOOOOO

all these things would significantly benefit non-whites
while own countries & nations are declining

Salting wouldn't be an issue since the locals already mine there anyway, from past time the basin was flooded.

Allow the Mississippi river to finally fully divert down the Atchafalaya River like it's wanted to for the past several decades. There's like a 30' head between the two rivers at Old River, where there's lock and a hydro dam that divert 30% of the Mississippi's flow.

Attached: basemapdetailsVENICE[1].jpg (584x824, 181K)

Daily reminder that we could have given every family in new Orleans $200,000 to move out instead of rebuilding the city and it would have been cheaper

Attached: ORCS-Annotated[1].jpg (1338x957, 687K)

At the least there should be a bridge there, along with the Bering Strait bridge(and the several thousand miles of road/rail to link it on both sides), a Long Island Sound bridge, the Messina Strait bridge.

the salinity comes from salt and impurity left behind by evaporating water. If you bring in extra water, even if it's lower in salinity, you're bringing in more salts, which will be left behind when the water evaporates. The temporary increase in water volume only delays the inevitable. Like scratching a bee sting to relieve the pain. as described here the description was a mirror having a diameter many km's across. moving such a mirror across multiple AU's of distance would take a long time, and would be difficult to do without damaging it. Would it be disassembled for transit?

What would the TLEP or something similar discover?

it would discover how much the worlds most expensive liquid helium leak costs

Reminder they would have spent it on ugly cars with big shiny wheels and KFC, and been homeless again 2 years later.

Truly the american dream

But we in south europe could build a wall.

Attached: young males from african states not at war.jpg (900x366, 465K)

The orbiting rainbow telescope
>launch several hundred tons of metallic powder into solar orbit
>disperse powder
>metal particles refract light just like raindrops in a rainbow do
>satellites with lasers on-board use lasers to shape the metal cloud into a lens
>you now have a telescope with a 50km aperture
>can now read alien newspapers

>Also, Kessler syndrome out the ass

Space elevator. Always gets shit on in /sci but there’s more than a few published papers out there proving it’s viability.
If any physicists here are interested, check out Paul Birches Paper: orionsarm.com/fm_store/OrbitalRings-III.pdf

1) It's in solar orbit, not Earth orbit.

2) The particles are too small to cause real damage. They're as small as, or even smaller than the particles that cause meteor showers. Like grains of sand.

>orbital rings
man of taste

Attached: 5.jpg (546x527, 57K)