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Americans will literally do anything except build trains
4 kms across the ocean:
now that we have this river across the whole country, we can finally introduce swimming cars!
You mean plastic bubbles?
or normal cars in bubble wrap… see we’re already brainstorming like it’s a Tesla project
Oh no
You can create this strait and then have a train which runs along it, like the train from Spirited Away
What if we made some sort of floating train?
They’re nowhere near the top if you relate it to size though (and also next to none of it is electrified, which is a pretty good indicator of it being mostly old - after all, rail is what even allowrd the country to be built).
But also it’s a joke
I object to electrification being used to judge a country’s railway age and quality. A lot of countries transition into electric trains over a century ago especially in Europe and surprisingly the US. I could talk for hours about the US’s history with electric trains and how short sided business practices combined with the government’s attempt to sorta nationalize the rail industry crippled it’s electrification progress. Not to get too far off topic though there’s only three metrics you can really grade the quality and age of a nation’s rail infrastructure with. That is size, volume, and average speed. In my opinion though avarage speed is the best indicator for a country’s railway age and quality because it gets rid of a lot of the problems other definitions bring up. For example both of the internationally recognized definitions for high speed rail uses a different speed depending if the line was new (155mph) or upgraded (125mph). This causes all sorts of issues because under those definitions Amtrak’s northeast regional train counts as high speed rail as it runs on an upgraded line with a top speed of 125mph even though the northeast corridor has an average speed of 86mph.
Well, the Panama Canal is exactly that, built mostly that way.
Panama Canal is the biggest NIMBY project ever
Because it was built at the thinnest part of the content and used existing lakes?
Pretty sure Omaha would have loved an East\West canal across the continent.
Because it wasn’t done for or with the approval of locals
But it was done, which is kind of the opposite of NIMBY. Also it’s not a project that could go anywhere, except that no one wants it.
Closing Guantanamo was a NIMBY thing because, while everyone agrees it should happen, no one wanted the detainees in their backyard. (As ridiculous as that is.)
The Panama canal was a US NIMBY project I’d argue. Give us the canal but without impacting our territory.
Your comment is actually insane.
There is no way the US would not have preferred the canal to be in their backyard.
We didn’t maintain administration of the canal for just over a century for no reason. We would have put that shit in the Rio Grande, if we could have. Unfortunately that river runs dry for several months a year.
Especially since that particular area of the world is some of the least developed.
It connected several lakes in the narrowest part of the continent. Not ‘exactly that’ at all
I love the 1950s, the solution to any problem was just “idk, have you tried nuking it?”
Definitely. And just like today with ‘ai’
This might also make it really easy to hit the 2 degree climate target.
More like the -2 degree Celcius average World temperature target.
Can’t just let them go to waste!
About 36 feet above sea level though. How are we gonna clear a waterway from coast to coast, though? C’mon, boffins, let’s sort this out!
Locks and dams. Thousands of miles of locks and dams.
Nah, I vote canel tunnel!
SHOVEL!
“I get my kicks… on Canal 66.”
You might need to account for an extra day or two to dig down low enough in the rocky mountains. Unless you’re working with a friend and they brought their own shovel.
Just get some pickaxes and dig a tunnel
This would also allow for a super cool water park. I’m all for it.
My first thought was if this was remotely possible on this scale, how many things would be disrupted and changed from the water movement alone. The Panama canal has to have locks because of the ocean differences, but no way would you have locks spanning a few hundred miles across. This thing would have tides back and forth.
Panama canal has to have locks because of the ocean differences
It’s actually mostly due to the landscape of Panama, including the lake it uses to traverse and the mountains. The Pacific and Atlantic oceans don’t different that much, maybe a few feet. And mostly due to tidal differences.
Oh, so it’s like an escalator for ships up and down.
Essentially yeah. Or a bunch of elevators up then down. Both descriptions work.
Plus literally chopping down a large stretch of both the Appalachians and the Sierra Nevada would be insane.
Just made the entire river underground! A big underground river spanning thousands of miles. It’d require a hell of a lot more work but it wouldn’t disrupt things on the surface as much.
Imagine getting Ever Givened under Kansas.
Or could just go over tbh
You ever take your boat off any sweet water ramps?
My first thought too. This needs a Randall Monroe ‘What If?’ explanation.
There’s a sea level canal in Greece, the Corinth canal. And it has pretty strong tidal currents.
I wonder if, hypothetically, we could use such currents for more efficient power generation compared to the current tidal power generation.
Goodbye, Kentucky
I feel like there has to be an easier way to solve the homeless problem in San Francisco.
This will require more bridges, which creates more jobs. It’s genius!
Do it small scale first and turn Florida into an island.
Then push it away
The Caribbean has suffered enough
In which direction would it flow?
From the center to the borders, due to rain.
It’d probably depend on the tide.
With the low resolution I can’t quite tell if I would suddenly live on the beach or underwater
Depends on if you can outrun a shovel.
From the people who brought you Sharknado: Shovelanche.
A lot of the canals in the world (the majority I think, but please fact check that) were built in the 19th century. So yeah… with shovels.
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.
