positive news related to Syria? gasp
Every day I hear news about the BRI, it brings me hope. The US will stop destroying the world.
Wikipedia article on China's BRI: Long text about treaties signed, infrastructure built and planned as well as some of the trouble that is clubs to arise along the way of such a big project. Includes a map of said infrastructure.
Wikipedia article on the Free and Open Something Pacific Something, the US' counter-initiative to the BRI: A few paragraphs about how American bureaucrats have written a paper about how "free" and "open" should be understood. Includes a map showing where the Pacific is.
I thought the US counter-initiative was called the Build Back Better Extended Universe or something
There have been more than 10 western alternatives to the BRI, and so far none of them have gotten off the ground
That's the other initiative but president Joe Mansion would give them any money to buy a map.
Build Back Better Extended Cinematic Universe
Now with Black Panther so you can see how not-racist we are
This is honestly my only major inkling. I know it leads to lots of infrastructure aid and trade income but it needs to be funneled properly. Here's hoping the BRI can aid in Syria repairing itself from the predations by the US
I'd like to join China's proposed belt and road initiative. Where do I sign up?
China will go down in history for fixing the evil shit :amerikkka: has done.
Genuine question; is the Civil war winding down in Syria? Because I've stopped hearing anything about it, and it seems that Assad is still in power, or at the very least has his government propped up enough that they can still fight, despite being sanctioned by most the worlds nations.
Yeah the actual fighting is significantly less bad than it was a few years ago. Situation is still awful tho, manually because of the "new" (2 years old now I think?) sanctions
Wow what a coincidence that Assad is going to use another chemical weapon attack, therefore justifying more US intervention. Don't look too closely at where it came from though..
So messed up that hes killing his own people, something that we have never done
China should build the Bengal Dam, and turn Belt and Road into Belt and River. Bengal Bay is one of the rainiest places on earth, + freshwater from Brahmaputra. Harvest it and send it to Xinjiang/Thar desert.
build the infrastructure for land reclamation in the Sunda shelf, and rainwater harvesting, send it all to the bleached white deserts of Thar/Central Asia/MENA
literally creates new land, fixes flooding, potentially fixes geopolitics and united Asia if done properly
NAWAPA wanted to divert rivers. Diverting rivers is always worse, because it means youre affecting every point downstream on the river. And you're just distributing an already shared water resource--you're not actually CREATING any new resource.
This idea does not do that, it takes freshwater which otherwise would have been spat out into the Bay of Bengal, and just puts it elsewhere. Freshwater which would have otherwise been turned into saltwater, gets to be freshwater instead.
It WILL affect wildlife off the Bengal coast. It would turn from a saltwater bay into a huge freshwater lake. Fishermen would have to transition to catching freshwater fish, but in return, they get to NOT DIE from massive flooding, and other places in Asia also get multiple Germanies worth of arable land.
South Korea also already built something similar, and is using it (Saemangeum dike). It only cost 2.6 billion dollars. The Bengal dike would have to be about 10x longer and 10x deeper, let's say $260 billion, and just for the hell of it let's say it costs 3x more for various reasons, at a total of $750 billion. but surely China can afford something that costs less than a trillion dollars, and gives them a Germany worth of arable land?
TLDR: NAWAPA wanted to export already-existing Canadian freshwater to the US. Bengal dam takes unused freshwater from the Bay of Bengal, and puts it somewhere else, also prevents global warming from killing 400 million Bengalis.
it would still require the same kind of unimaginable engineering and reckless abandon. and for the record NAWAPA was working from the exact same premises of water going to sea=bad, lets instead make it go where dry
If you look at what NAWAPA was trying to do, it was very different. They wanted to dam SEVERAL rivers and divert them. Many of the complaints were about disrupting the flow of the rivers.
NAWAPA wanted to divert rivers. The Bengal plan does not divert rivers.The Bengal plan dams the whole bay. The rivers are completely untouched. The equivalent of this would be damming the Arctic/North Alaskan areas where the rivers drain, and then sending that water back into North America.
(no such proposal was ever made, probably because these drainage areas are SO FAR away from the Arizona desert--Asia lucks out here because Bengal is so much closer).No, it's NOT the same logic, because when you divert a river, downstream flow is affected and the water's altitude is lower. Certain branches of the river can go completely dry because of this.
NAWAPA was purely about water. Bengal is about water, but ALSO about preventing the catastrophic flooding that NECESSARILY WILL happen to 300,000,000+ people if you do nothing. Building it is a twofer, basically
Also, the Bay of Bengal gets 2.5x more rainfall than the Alaskan coast. And the Brahmaputra-Ganges-Meghna's discharge is 4x bigger than all the combined rivers of Alaska/Canada. So the bang-for-the-buck is way higher too.
And in addition to all that, China and India simply need more land, far more urgently than the US. China also has far more capacity to build something like that than the US.
The Bengal plan WOULD have environmental effects, but only for the actual Bay reservoir area. Not for the land/riverine areas. And the effects would simply be a matter of quality, not quantity. Rather than forests running dry and being deprived of a precious resource, it would simply be a seawater habitat turning into a freshwater one. The engineering would be equally unimaginable though, yes. But the EU is looking at a North Sea dam which would actually be a lot more difficult to build than this.
the dam part is perfectly feasible.
gathering freshwater from that project and hurling it at the Tarim basin ... Thats NAWAPA shit. just casually sending large quantities of water 4,000km over the tallest mountain range on earth :sicko-hyper:
then there's the fact we'll have no idea just what the fuck any of this will cause---the dam & greening desert will fuck with rain patterns, the ocean currents, multiple ecosystems, just generally our already unravelling ecology
but since everythings fucked anyway who cares lets do it. they're gonna put fucking chalk in the sky and a billion satellites in orbit, it'd be a shame to not build great monuments down here
gathering freshwater from that project and hurling it at the Tarim basin … Thats NAWAPA shit
yea, creating the artificial river is the part of the proposal that I haven't really checked numerically, and probably would be the hardest part, but it still feels doable within the timescale of 2 decades. Intuitively, it feels like they'd have a few pumping stations across Bangladesh, then one heavy-duty one to pump it up onto Tibet, and from there send it down a dynamited-carved river.
then there’s the fact we’ll have no idea just what the fuck any of this will cause—the dam & greening desert will fuck with rain patterns, the ocean currents, multiple ecosystems
not that much. There wouldn't be any less water in the ocean, so rainfall patterns would be unaffected. Ocean currents would be barely affected, it's a very small sliver of the entire Bay of Bengal, and a very shallow depth. The only changed ecosystem would be that within the reservoir, and some tiny local spots right next to it.
In exchange you get to create 2 Germxny's worth of green land in the desert. It would only add water to the atmosphere there which didn't exist before.
but since everythings fucked anyway who cares lets do it
now that's what I like to hear.
Intuitively, it feels like they’d have a few pumping stations across Bangladesh, then one heavy-duty one to pump it up onto Tibet, and from there send it down a dynamited-carved river.
that "heavy-duty pump" is going to be an enormous fucking project and the power it needs is astronomical. im talking a fusion plant.
and that simple canal is going through rough shit, its not like digging the all-american canal. and then there's the Kunlun to get over too.
Yes, it's a lot. But this is the country that built the biggest rail system on earth in a decade. I feel that it's doable, and that infrastructure experts should analyze the idea
this undertaking would make the rail system look like childsplay. the two largest lift systems ever devised (in terms of volume & vertical distance) serving the longest canal system ever built.
this sort of thing afaik has never been done. diverting water in a mountainrange to a different watershed is one thing, taking water from close to sealevel and pumping it up thousands of meters... even the passage from Tibet to the Tarim basin will be the world's largest.
https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/water-pumping-costs-d_1527.html
Did some calcs and the cost of pumping that amount of water (the entire Brahmaputra system) up to the Tibetan plateau (18,000 ft) would be $2.3 trillion/year
Considering there are several other workarounds, like going around Tibet instead of across, or carving a river into the plateau which is only 5000ft elevated or something, this cost could be brought down to $600 billion/year.
The Bengal dam itself would cost $500 billion at most, judging from the North Sea dam estimates.
The cost of the infrastructure (aka artificial river) for transporting the water, based on the costs and water volume capacity of the Suez Canal (but scaled up to the Brahmaputra's size), would be $6 trillion.
So basically China would spend $6.5 trillion on this project, over a span of let's say 6 years to get the entire thing built. And then once built, It would take 6 years at $600B/yr of pumping water (or 12 years at $300B/yr, with India using the other half of the freshwater)
Would China be willing to sacrifice $1 trillion/year for 18 years to acquire a Germany?
this is necessarily back-of-the-envelope on both our parts but 1 trillion a year in energy cost alone appears to be more than the entire united states uses in a year :what-the-hell:
which is why i haven't emphasized money, this stuff is beyond legal fictions you're butting up against engineering and technological limits. i can't even get a ballpark on how many fusion plants you'd need to make this happen because the technology isn't close to that state.
and lets talk 'path of least resistance', going around is probably impossible. criss-crossing that many watersheds without messing them up (having to pipe/tunnel this enormous amount of water)would get absurd & you can't even avoid having to elevate up onto the Iranian plateau, and then up thru the Fergana valley---add to this the fact most of the regions you have to pass on the roundtrip are just as arid & would want that water just as much so why bother going so far?
the idea of burrowing through and avoiding lifting any more than you have to has been assumed in all my estimates. and it's still in the realm of magic engineering.
but speaking of exploiting a sudden surplus in freshwater from a project on the indian side of the himalayas, sending it to arid regions in India is infinitely more possible and less trouble. I'd modify the plan to (the still extremely ambitious target) Thar Desert, or completely fabricating some new intense agricultural operations on the river & lake and nearby. If you're worried for how China should benefit from that, they can get shipped produce from it
wish I had some way of doing this tbh
maybe I should just start a twitter account and reply to Chen Weihua
yes. the red area would be the reservoir held back by the dam.
It receives heavy rainfall and Brahmaputra water. This would desalinate the body of water over time.
The dike would have some type of submerged floodgates near the bottom. When the dam's level is higher than the ocean, you open the gates, and salt water goes out. When the dam's level is LOWER than ocean, you shut the gates, and ocean water doesn't come back in.
Theoretically, this reservoir of water would be totally desalinated in 4 years this way. Then it could be piped into those relevant areas for greening.
note, I'm not a civil engineer or anything, feel free to point out why this wouldn't work, but it just seems like it would. it's just fluid pressure equations
Is there anywhere I can read more about this? This is super interesting
it's a worldbuilding project I sort of brainstormed up myself, but I have some excel tables with relevant numbers scribbled in.
Basically China is already reclaiming a lot of land, they turned something like thousands of 20,000sqmi of coastal ocean into land over the last few decades (my memory might be off on this, but it's a big number)
problem is, this reclamation will get a lot harder as the coastline deepens. Instead of dredging from -5ft, they'll have to dredge from -50 ft.
There's a huge amount of land underneath the Sunda shelf, and it could be easily drained and turned into land. Basically a free North America. But that's a long ways off.
A more doable project for this century is to build a dam across Bangladesh which will 1) prevent flooding of Bangladesh and India's W.Bengal, and 2) capture huge amounts of rainwater and Brahmaputra river runoff for use in the Thar desert/Xinjiang/Pakistan
South Korea did a small version of this in the 90s with the Saemangeum Dike.
If anyone wants my figures (very disorganized and maybe barely understandable), here:
https://i.imgur.com/MWzQ6Of.png
https://i.imgur.com/d8AZb4I.pngfeel free to ask what anything means, or double check my figures and reveal that I made stupid errors
You say the red area would be the reservoir, but imply that that would also be reclaimed into usable land?
no it would not be turned into usable land, because the freshwater resource is more valuable, the location is strategic, and the amount of land gained would not be much. It would be used as a "river". The huge amount of rainwater (one of the rainiest in the world) along with brahmaputra river water, can be piped into desert regions.
no land reclamation with this one. But if China/other countries can cooperate and build expertise building something like this, perhaps in the future they can make stuff like this happen
Although, are we really capable of moving enough water that distance to make a dent in a literal desert
more than you think
I did the calculations: to move the amount of groundwater present in continental US (30k cubic miles), you would need to run a Mississippi river for 200 years
The Taklamakan desert is the size of Germany
Germany is 4% of the US surface areaMississippi moves 1.5 billion m3/day
Total desalination world wide purifies 95 million m3/dayglobal total desalination (half of which is literally just Saudi Arabia) is already 7% of the Mississippi River. (and We need 4% of the Mississippi River to green the Taklamakan over the span of 200 years.
Saudi Arabia moves around 3.5% of the Missippi River alone, lol.This is very greenpilling. It's not the desalination of the water that's the point here, but rather the sheer MOVEMENT of water. There is tons of other stuff (oil, gas, other water, other fluids) that are moved in huge quantities annually.
More Missippis = more fasterer = you don't have to wait a century
The Bengal Dam reservoir actually generates more water than the Mississippi, 200 cubic miles/year instead of 150/year.
So if China could build a trench that transports that water, the Taklamakan would turn into lush, green Germany in 6 years. If you split the water 3 ways between India/Pakistan/China, then 18 years.
Feasibility of building that trench, which basically would be an artificial river: I don't know. I intuitively feel that it's doable, and I feel that the rewards at hand would more than justify any financial sacrifice taken. We're talking about a country that has reclaimed from the sea, over 2 Puerto Rico's worth of land since 1950--I feel like they can definitely build a river from Bangladesh to the Tarim Basin.
Geography would be rough, because it has to go through the Tibetan plateau. But Chinese labor built the California railroads, it definitely feels well within the realm of possibility.
Belt and road --> Belt and River, it has to happen
If the land is reclaimed wouldn't that mess up a ton of stuff; making port cities landlocked and providing a ton of land that would be (starting out) as useless sand and dirt with no vegetation? Like an asian atlantropa project is what I'm imagining essentially; the bay of Bengal I know they have a ton of issues with water coming up so being able to control the water level would be great but actually reclaiming the land like down in malaysia would be a bad idea, no?
Anyway subscribe to Belt and River facts
Bengal project is totally different from the Sundaland project. Sundaland would only be feasible in a century-scale timeline, with basically total Asian unity and complete Asian dominance (and US going home) over the Chinese seas and Singapore strait.
Bengal project is what I'm projecting about doing right now, because you kind of also need to in order to prevent a 300 million-strong refugee crisis. The Bengal project is just too good to pass up, it solves desertification, it solves flooding, and it potentially solves India-China rivalries (if done properly)
But in reference to the "Reviving Sundaland" that I want to eventually happen, yea it would obviously render port cities useless. But you also double or triple your land area. Idk seems like a stellar deal still
the deserts of the world are an important and fragile ecosystem that contribute to the overall health of the world jsut as much as the rainforests and plains. It's less immediately able to be turned into goods for humans, but stop acting like we should just turn all the deserts into forests and farms.
Syria consented. China consented. Is there somebody you forgot to ask? :stalin-stoic:
Outside of China building stronger allies, and the threat of financial imperialism....why?
no they approve, see? :amerikkka-clap: :some-controversy::who-must-go:
