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I would need a study on if this would negatively impact desert ecosystems or introduce invasive species, but otherwise it sounds pretty cool if we limit the size until it's about as big as the new Panama Canal expansions.
Nevermind any communities you'd separate or destroy by dropping a big ol' river through the middle of them
Americans don't mind building highways, so it is not a concern to them.
Higheys through communities are good, then waterways are good too
It's not like the number of communities measuring a hundred miles wide are many. Also, believe it or not, the USA has bridge building technology. Shocking, I know.
Luckily this entire swath of land is completely void of human and animal life and nobody will be emminent-domained out of their homes and livelihoods with little to no reward for doing so, and bridges are notoriously so much more permeable than plain flat land. I'm such a silly goose to not have thought of those things when I wrote that very serious comment about this very serious hypothetical 🥸
Do you lack reading comprehension? I said we should make it smaller than the image, idiot.
How is it that whenever I see somebody getting shitty on Lemmy, 90% of the time it's FiniteBanjo
I'm the most honest person you'll never meet.
Or, and hear me out, just build a fucking high speed railway
High speed railway and river/canal are not in the same ballpark.
No, they aren't. One is realistic, the other isn't. I'm not going to debate which is which.
That would cause the world to freeze, I saw that documentary "snowpiecer" they built a high speed rail and it froze the world.
Would need Willy Wonka's chocolate factory to exist first for that to happen. After all, Snowpiercer is a sequel to The Great Glass Elevator. Charlie just changed his name.
Stop trolling.
Says the guy seriously considering building a canal across the U.S. .
I wouldn't tell anyone they're a troll if I were you.
Alright, I'll take you seriously, the fuel efficiency per weight is far superior over water and vastly superior per volume. Sorry if I've been a little short with people in this thread, but it's hard to take any of you seriously after that first guy suggested the canal would somehow displace millions of people as if it absolutely had to be routed in a perfectly straight line through major population centers. I wonder if the disconnect is that the European Mind cannot comprehend vast swaths of unprotected land being underutilized in the USA.
Jesus Christ dude.
First of all, I'm american, I'm a woman, and just look at our highway system. Black neighborhoods were bulldozed and paved over with highway interchanges. Cities were destroyed and continue to suffer from their existence. St. Louis, Detroit, Memphis, Cleveland, Chicago, etc., etc., didn't happen because suburbs 'won' in the free market of infrastructure or something.
Remember 8 mile, that road you don't go past in Detroit? Hmm yeah I wonder how that happened if bridges/crosswalks are such a good replacement for infrastructure that doesn't require those things in the first place. Infrastructure can facilitate national movement but it can also stand locally as an impenetrable wall. Put as many expensive "gateways" up as you want, it's still a fucking wall. There's a reason rivers are used as division lines between cities, states, and countries.
Do you really think there's going to be a perfect route through ALL of that land and that avoiding population centers wouldn't negate its usefulness?
Edit: also "underutilized" is an insane term to use for land. Just because humans aren't utilizing it, doesn't mean that land is devoid of use by other life. There is an entire ecosystem across this country that shouldn't be disturbed if we can help it, much less a river be built through it. I mean come on, we have a mass extinction event going on right now, all the way down to the fucking insects that splatter on our windshields.
Here is an idea for you: Don't build a fucking canal through Detroit?
They didn't have to bulldoze underserved and impoverished neighborhoods to build a highway, they wanted to. They could have gone around. Imagine not trusting any profession because notable examples of people in that profession in the 1980s included a really bad person.