Monday, December 07, 2009

To compensate for overpopulation, how about we lower the seas by 100 feet?

This would be made possible by teleportation. Once we learn to teleport anything, we'll have a while until we can compensate for the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle that would prevent us from safely teleporting any living being. In the meantime, we could teleport cargo, including h2o.

Where would that excess water go, you ask? We can water the deserts until they turn fertile. (We ought to leave 1% of the current desert land area for wildlife preserves though. Or how about 0.1? We can still fit all the desert wildlife into that little land.)

The rest would go to colonies on other planets in the Solar System - the Moon and Mars.

Then once we've lowered sea levels by 100 feet, we'll have made available more land for more human development, therefore, spread thin the overcrowding that's already an issue in many areas today.

This would be a gradual process - maybe 1 foot a month, which should give the sea life enough time to migrate to deeper waters before they find themselves washed ashore.

Moreover, this will counteract the trend of Global Warming, and prevent sea-level rise from drowning and disrupting our coastal developments.

If you wonder where we'll put the salt, the teleporters should dump them on retired quarries and strip mines while simultaneously teleporting the water where it needs to go. By the time we decide to teleport seawater, we'll have figured out where to put all that excess salt. All the other impurities will be rerouted to their right places. The teleporters will become the best water purifiers since, well, PŪR and Brita.

Now, questions:

  1. What disadvantages would you find from adding ourselves new land through this method?
  2. Would this do more harm than good? How?
  3. If one offshore teleporting platform could beam away 10 cubic miles of water every month, how many of these structures would the oceans need to lower the sea level by 1 foot every month?
  4. What type of power source would a floating teleporting platform need to do its duty? (Would a nuclear reactor suffice?)
  5. I understand that world's seaports may not be able to function at their current locations because the waterlines would recede from their docks. How do you suppose these seaports will adapt?
  6. What of Venice, Amsterdam, and other canaled cities?

No comments:

Post a Comment