How Libya Built Brand-New Rivers Across the Sahara

"the good, Christian Vladimir Putin"

What a sick, moral fraud you represent

Some of Putin's Good, Christian work:

Then there's the 1 million casualties, five million displaced civilians.

A half million dead Christians, many of them civilians!

But territory (literally Lebensraum) is more important than lives in Putin's (and your) calculus.

MORAL FRAUD!

there’s enough ancient water under the sahara to keep the desert green for 50—100 years. after that it runs out.

the saudis also had an ancient aquifer that they tapped for a couple decades to grow wheat. for awhile they were like the fourth or fifth largest wheat producer.

then the water ran out.

All the deserts of the world will be turned green. That will happen when the price of desalination drops another couple hundred dollars @acre foot to around $300@acre foot.

There are two technologies currently maturing fast that will make that happen. Fusion energy which will reduce the cost of energy to a fraction of what it is today. The second one is a technology that will extract the minerals and metals from salt water at prices that are cheap enough to make them profitable to sell. That’s more complicated but also doable.

In less than ten years this world changing technology will happen.

I was being sarcastic. Ever hear of context?

You don’t need fusion to desal the deserts. There already is a giant thermonuclear reactor in the sky showering the deserts with 330+ days a year of full sun. Commercial panels output 450’watts using exactly 2 sq meters of cell area Th st means in a 10 hour day we will throw out the first and last two hours of daylight at Saharan summer vs winter the yearly full sun avg is 10 hours per day. So 2.25 kwh per square meter per day. It takes 3kWh to desal a cubic meter of seawater to fresh water so each sq meter of surface area makes 0.75 of a cubic meter per day 330 days a year or more.

0.75 cubic meter is 75cm of water over a square meter of surface area. 75cm is 29.5 inches of water per day that’s equal to 29 inches of rain per day per square meter crops in a desert with high ET rates like corn or wheat are going to need 60” per season to grow. That’s two days worth of solar power per square meter flier season you can see that one sq meter of panels would support a hundred sq meters of crops this is the way no fusion needed just cheap panels set at an angle equal to latitude grow crops under the panels the shade will help with the ET loss rates plants don’t need full.blazing desert sunlight it actually too strong for them.

It comes down to cost.

I’ve seen some massive projects around the world that purport to get solar power at the lowest —at around .02 @kwh usually, the numbers on the big solar farms in the desert come in around .035@kwh.

The first-generation fusion plants promise to deliver electricity at .01@kwh.

Where desalination does work currently for farming is with greenhouses because they use water so efficiently. Currently you can see thousands of greenhouses on the coast of southern spain. About ten years ago they put in their first desalination plant to provide fresh water for the greenhouses.

There are smaller operations like this—desalinating sea water for green houses— among gulf arabs and in australia.

Fusion will at some point be the dominate power source but that’s 50 to 100 years away we need to get mining the moon up and running for the helium 3 needed for fusion. Elon is working on the moon mass balance part Starship with 100+ tonnes payload could in theory come home with enough Helium 3 to power the entire world for a period of time like years worth on a single Starship.

Using deuterium (D2) tritium (T3) fusion you need T3 not easy to get it’s radioactive with a 13 year Half-Life. You have to make it by bombarding lithium 6 with neutrons at.high energy...like in a fast spectrum nuclear reactor. Or you have to sacrifice neutrons from your fusion plasma to breed the tritium in a lithium blanket around your plasma. That significantly increased the Q factor for net output. The other other choice is out uranium around your fusion plasma and then lithium around the uranium. Now you have a fusion fission.hybrid that turns uranium into PU239 and copious.neutrons that makes everything around it fiercely radioactive by contact including the lithium you want tritium from. At this point you should just breed PU239 and feed that to a dozen large gigawatt sized normal reactors using the fusion only as the neutron spark plug at the core of the cycle.

CANDU reactors today put out 1.8 cents power to the plant gate half the cost of PWR tech. I will be shocked if in my lifetime fusion is under that price.

Greening the desert has always been a human dream it’s in out a nature to try to improve our habitat. Given the advances in vertical farming and also vat grown proteins, lipids and carbohydrates I don’t see the need to green the desert and only convert less than 1% of all that solar.energy into biomass and then only a fraction into wheat grains, rice or corn kernels.

The future is harvest with hith efficiency solar energy and then use it to vat grow the building blocks of food. Every monogastric needs four things to live and grow. Complete protein with all 9 amino acids, carbohydrates(sugars or starches) and polylipids(fats,triglycerides,monoglycerides ect ) and trace minerals these are inorganic.

Thin film solar is 25% solar to electrons twenty-five times what plants can do. Adding in a second thin film solar layer under the top one that’s bandgap electron energy level is tuned for infrared spectrum brings in another 20% that’s a total of 45% insolation to electrons 45 times what plants can do. With electrolytic cells now approaching 90% Faraday electron to.organic molecules efficiency no plant anywhere ever again will touch those levels of sunlight to.organic materials humans have vast exceeded what nature can do it’s a testament to our ingenuity.

The future would be solar to desal use that to make brackish water no need to go all the way to 500ppm or less of chlorides you need the conductivity in your electro cells anyways. Then feed electrons to the cells and have them make you millions of.tonnes of the base ingredients of food. At that point it’s how do you use it?

Make high protein bread,or shakes or pudding for direct human consumption. 3D print it into nuggets or tenders or even with the right combination of lipids,carbs and protein into whole meat looking pieces. Of course you could just make kibble out of it and feed it too livestock but that adds cost and more water requirements. Fish are the most efficient feed to fillet, chickens are 2:1 pigs are 4:1 cattle are past 10:1 but you shouldn’t feed them mass carbs and lipids they should be feed cellulose another product that has been made by electrolytic cells directly from water and air for the co2. For most of human history a few staple foods have sustained humans. In the middle east and Europe it was bread for wheat...The prayer specifically says “Give us this day our daily bread” that’s because that is what the average person ate almost exclusively daily meat was a rare treat. Same with Asia with rice, Africa with cassava and yams.

Vat growing starches that are identical to ground wheat, rice, potatoes, ect has been done. So pasta,bread,mashed potatoes,risotto all can be made synthetic starches now and people wouldn’t be able to tell the difference once cooked and processed. Same for nuggets and tenders or.ground meat from vats there will be no textural or chemical difference. It’s when not if. Price will be the factor once synthetics are half the cost of 20th century food people will voluntarily switch out of the economic advantages. People who have their land will.benefit from the huge supply of ultra affordable feed ingredients. My goats don’t need much other than the grass they keep mowed but my pigs are well pigs I welcome synthetic feeds they will put all other feeds off the market on price and eff alone.

I’m not expecting to grow flowers in a desert...

North Texas just opened its newest reservoir, Bois d'Arc, 30 miles east of Sherman.

Texas has only one natural lake of size, Caddo Lake in Southeast Texas. The rest are man made.

the rooted question is how fast will the fusion stuff happen.

I’ve seen a number of interviews with fusion reactor scientists over the years. In the last two years, their confidence stands up like a massive wall. It’s astounding.

They have the same sound of confidence as nuclear (fission) power scientists from the 1950s.

Its not just one company. There are a bunch of them.

Then there’s this:

Microsoft has signed the world’s first-ever deal to purchase fusion energy.

The company has agreed to buy 50 megawatts of energy per year from Washington state-based Helion Energy starting in 2028.

https://thehill.com/policy/equilibrium-sustainability/3997371-in-historic-first-microsoft-signs-deal-to-buy-fusion-power-by-2028/#:~:text=Microsoft%20has%20signed%20the%20world‘s,Helion%20Energy%20starting%20in%202028.

Here’s another article on the same subject.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/microsoft-buy-power-nuclear-fusion-company-helion-2023-05-10/

You can google Helion microsoft fusion purchase power agreement 2028 to get more articles on the subject.

Agree that in time, say ten years—solar will go to .01@kwh. and fusion will go lower.

agree too that vat grown food will become ever more food like and cheap.

The rich will keep their food natural and pay the difference. the poor will take the cheapest nourishment.

The rich will also buy desert land and when the costs of water and energy fall sufficiently—they’ll bring water to their deserts and build there.

Basically, it will be the same kind of build-out as you see in the deserts of Arizona. (the Saudis bought land in Arizona so they could siphon water from the ground to grow grain for animals. Arizona recently shut that down. the Saudis for about 30 years were the world’s fifth largest wheat producer
because they siphoned water from their own fossil water deposits. then the fossil water ran out. like the Israelis they currently desalinate seawater—use it for their cities, clean that water up, and then send it to their farms.

For the future —what we’re talking about —by-the-way— is an earth that can support populations that are 100 times larger than today’s populations.

that technology will be fully in place by the time of the singularity or the mid 2040’s and maybe in just ten years.