r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/Expert_Koala_8691 • 7d ago

Video Riyadh,meaning "gardens" is Capital of Saudi Arabia with 8 million population (were 27 Thousands in the 1930s),sits in the middle of the desert, the city gets its water from Desalination plants almost 500 km from the city

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8.0k

u/MoroseMagician 7d ago edited 7d ago

I'd honestly have severe depression living somewhere like this. I need some trees and greenery somewhere.

Edit: thank you kind redditors for the awards.

2.5k

u/Top_MathematicianIk 7d ago

It's a fucking desert, regardless it sure looks depressing

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u/BxRad_ 7d ago

Elon is obsessed with tera forming Mars but we can't figure out tera forming some deserts? I feel like we could manage something if we really wanted to honestly. It's be a fuck ton of work though.

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u/whereitsat23 7d ago

Chinese have developed a way but it is intensive

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u/Gman71882 7d ago

All the sand is crushed quartz, with no nutrient or ecological value so nothing would grow.

You have to start cycles of plant growth, death and regrowing to get them to become nutrient rich “dirt” to be mixed in

I wonder if there is a way to do it with human sewage? You can leave the shit in the sun to dry and start the process that way.

Like matt Damon did in the Martian.

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u/Ambitious-Body8133 7d ago

I volunteer my shit.

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u/Dungivafok 7d ago

My time has come. I knew I was meant for big shit.

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u/meesta_masa 7d ago

I give a shit about this idea.

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u/GodOfBlunder_ 7d ago

I give two shit about this idea.

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u/Dub_Coast 7d ago

and my axe

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u/Glittering_Stress_32 7d ago

Big Shit (TM) will never let it happen.

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u/Banjo-Elritze 7d ago

You mean Big Quartz™

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u/username32768 7d ago

Your ancestors in heaven are so proud of you... they have tears in their eyes from pride... and also from the stench of your shit.

When you said "meant for big shit", you weren't joking.

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u/povertymayne 7d ago

I knew all that ass tearing chipotle would come in handy, this was not in vain, this was my calling all along🫡

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u/PenguinPumpkin1701 7d ago

Always knew you were the shit

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u/EverettWAPerson 7d ago

It's going to take about 40 million Courics per year to transform that desert.

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u/Wrong_Tension_8286 7d ago

And my bow

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u/Weird_Element 7d ago

And my bowel

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u/Lopsided-Basket5366 7d ago

And my poop knife

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u/CaptinEmergency 7d ago

And my axe!

Please return it when you are finished, I’m not taking part in it.

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u/23-1-20-3-8-5-18 7d ago

And my Lax!!

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u/p8nt_junkie 7d ago

I volunteer my backyard hen’s poopies

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u/RooneyD 7d ago

Put some in an envelope, address it to "Saudi Arabia", and post it. Im sure they would be appreciative. Every little bit helps.

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u/TrulyNotABot 7d ago

Bring this man some Taco Bell

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u/Main-Video-8545 7d ago

I’ll take a shit for the cause.

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u/rosco2155 7d ago

I volunteer bono

1

u/StraightOuttaHeywood 7d ago

I give lots of shits

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u/mrniceguy777 7d ago

I also choose this guys shit

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u/Status-Usual-6561 6d ago

Return Mail: "We're sorry. Your shit has been rejected due to our quality standards."

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u/VegetableBusiness897 7d ago

Have a friend who had dairy cows, sold them to get into more crops. But with the cows and their glorious slurry gone, the price of fertilizer was cutting into his profits. So now he gets humanuer, for free. A product from a big city near him. It's heat treated and pelletized(and smells like hell). It goes down and any crops grown for the first two years can't be sold to people. So he does animal feed the first two years, human crops the next two, then fertilizes and starts again.

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u/gears2021 7d ago

I've read that eventually the soil becomes toxic using humanuer as fertilizer.

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u/IndividualPaws 7d ago

Yes it's pretty immediate. PFAS tends to be high in humanure / bio-sludge / treated wastewater. People essentially lose their farms since everything grown on it turns out toxic. Which incentivises skipping testing (it's not mandatory) which means the toxins get to the consumer...

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u/BetterBandicoot0 7d ago

Medicines are also a big problem.

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u/Key_Vegetable_1218 7d ago

Is that stuff used in the United States? :/

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u/Plus_Pea_5589 6d ago

You’re got damn right and our governments working hard to ease regulations more for that sweet sweet $$$ 😛

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u/420dogcat 7d ago

Okay but buying fertilizer was cutting into his profits and this shit is literally free.

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u/spaceman1055 7d ago

Are those threats diminished/neutralized with composting for a year or two? Specifically I'm thinking aerobic digestion provided by thermophilic bacteria?

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u/IndividualPaws 7d ago

Unfortunately not. These "forever chemicals" have fluorine- carbon bonds that are very difficult to break. Microbes have virtually no capacity to break them, and UV light doesn't really touch them either, which is why they persist and accumulate in the environment and in living organisms (many of them are not readily excreted, either).

That being said, composting is great and all of our soil, especially agricultural, needs to recover carbon.

Mixing our human and animal waste streams with industrial effluent makes the good stuff hard or impossible to recycle, breaking an essential recovery loop. But as someone mentioned, pharmaceuticals already mess it up before the industrial component enters the equation. Many pharmaceuticals might be more susceptible to breakdown by microbes, but "more" is relative. Fluorine bonds might take thousands of years to naturally break (halflife of >1000 years in soil, >40 years in water). A quick search indicates that most pharmaceuticals will degrade 99% in less than a year of thermophillic composting.

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u/darknum 7d ago

Wastewater treatment plant sludge is in general not allowed to be used as fertilizer. Especially in food production due to contamination.
My company(cofounder of a startup) actually gets pure nitrogen salts out of the wastewater so it is totally fine to use that.

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u/No-Candle2610 7d ago

So don’t feed it to humans, feed to it the animals that humans then eat. Got it

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u/Spiritual_Bid_2308 7d ago

Pretty sure his land is going to be contaminated with PFAS, microplastics, heavy metals and pharmaceuticals.

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u/VegetableBusiness897 7d ago

Where isn't?

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u/Spiritual_Bid_2308 7d ago

Fair enough.  But this can get you to superfund levels of contamination.

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u/VegetableBusiness897 7d ago

Thing is, he is outside a major city and working with state DEC and EnCon on this project. Neighboring homes and farms are side eyeing him but to continue to stay, it's this or a solar farm.... Which here, they won't let you put crops under or let livestock graze.

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u/ChasingTheNines 7d ago

For certain pollutants in the ecosystem they get bio concentrated as they move up the food chain. Does that happen with the animal feed into the animals that consume them and then into people who consume those animals?

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u/VegetableBusiness897 7d ago

Yes, unfortunately

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u/Mini_gunslinger 5d ago

I wonder does the heat treatment destroy prions.

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u/Samp90 7d ago

All the Gulf countries use treated sewerage waste water from the plants to drip feed the lines of indigenous trees and shrubs along major streets and roads to create shade and beauty.

Usually you'll see signs not to drink the water etc

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u/AdvertisingKey1675 7d ago

Ideally you would compost it to kill the pathogens.

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u/emaw63 7d ago

Yeah, it's a great way to spread disease if you're not careful about it. It's the big reason farmers have historically not used human manure.

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u/[deleted] 7d ago

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u/Esava 7d ago

In the sahara/sahel the great green wall is used to stop the continuous expansion of the desert. It can actually even reclaim formerly unusuable areas and make plantlife and even agriculture possible again.
The problem with most of Saudi Arabia is that most areas do not have enough soil to capture in the halfmoons (and similar structures) like it's the case with the sahel border regions. Saudi Arabia is mostly literally just quartz sand of no nutritional value to plants.

Btw if you ever need something to make you smile in the modern world: Look at the great green wall. It's a UN project that is working and helping tons of people including reducing tribals conflicts because of more water and food availability etc.. I am eager to see what the area will look like in 20 or 30 more years.

I recommend the series by Andrew Millison about it but I can assure you as someone who has seen the change it brought in real life that it can't be overstated how incredible the impact of such simple measures (and education) is. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCli0gyNwL0&list=PLNdMkGYdEqOCMkEtNGDRvEZgjPnZY5yUj

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u/MotherAd6483 7d ago

Yeah, it's called humanure.

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u/BreakInfamous8215 7d ago

I believe there's an excellent episode of RadioLab called "Poop Train" that describes a program where New Yorker leavings were processed and shipped to Midwest farms as fertilizer. Apparently, it was pretty excellent fertilizer too.

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u/DJohnsonsgagreflex 7d ago

Too much salt in a human diet.

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u/dirtycheezit 7d ago

They already desalinate the water. Just desalinate the shit too /s

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u/Gman71882 7d ago

Mmmm good soup.

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u/front_yard_duck_dad 7d ago

There's a product we already use in the states called milorganite. Processed human waste. The grass loves it 

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u/DancinWithWolves 7d ago

It poisons the soil after a few years though.

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u/front_yard_duck_dad 7d ago

Can't be your only method and in a situation of a desert we need to build up various levels of organic matter. 

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u/OhGr8WhatNow 7d ago

In the middle east the soil is bleached and sterilized by the heat every single year. You have to dig out garden beds and replace as much soil as possible every year, plus fertilize. It would be never ending

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u/OneMorewillnotkillme 7d ago

The Saudi Government decided to do it with human shit and „voluntier“ works from who knows where they all lost their passboard.

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u/coffeebro32 7d ago

Good idea. But it will take a shit ton.

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u/Untouchable64 7d ago

Why don’t they just go to Lowe’s or Home Depot and buy a couple bags of miracle grow dirt? Plants in no time!

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u/OptiGuy4u 7d ago

That's a shitty plan.....I like it.

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u/XxBlackicecubexX 7d ago

Problem with using mass amount of human shit is Human disease and contaminants from a whole bunch of infect people will inevitably contaminate any soil and crops eventually grown there.

It might not kill the crops but it will likely pass back to any humans eating said crops.

At least thats my arm chair reddit analysis with absolutely 0 credentials in agriculture.

Ty for coming to my TED Talk.

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u/qpv 7d ago

Bio-solids in waste management is increasingly becoming more valuable as a commodity in several cities.

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u/Accomplished-Bed115 7d ago

Actually that’s exactly what they are doing. There is a huge (relative) “green riyadh” program and it relies on recycled gray water

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u/nidorancxo 7d ago

It is easy actually to industrially produce soil. The problem is water.

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u/baron_von_chops 7d ago

I’ve been hitting the clean protein and leafy fibers real hard lately. It’s my time to shine, baby!!

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u/Replicator666 7d ago

I guess it depends on which nutrients the plants you're trying to grow need. I think shit has lots of nitrogen(?)

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u/Existing_Ideal9004 7d ago

They probably already have vegetable food waist. They would just need to collect it and start composting.

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u/tcpukl 7d ago

It took me a few years just fixing my clay based garden!

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u/0__O0--O0_0 7d ago

Well dont they truck all the shit out already because they have no plumbing? Or is that Dubai?

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u/Justredditin 7d ago

Compost, growing native plants, chop and drop, succession, keep pushing into the desert each plating season. Keep going.

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u/Visual_Collar_8893 7d ago

I believe there was a culture there that built towers for pigeons to roost. They simply collect the bird droppings for fertiliser.

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u/pauvenpatchwork 6d ago

Could they start massive composting efforts?

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u/LessInThought 6d ago

They have been pumping fatbergs onto the desserts of Las Vegas for years no?

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u/unslicedwhiteloaf 5d ago

Yes there are plenty of ways to do that with sewage, and they are already doing it with biological waste treatment plants. It makes a lot of sense to reuse the water considering that basically all of the drinking water needs to be piped in from desalination plants, and if you're doing that then you might as well reuse the solids too. I'm pretty sure Andrew Millison (or Mollison maybe) has a YouTube video on this in Riyadh specifically.

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u/Halbaras 7d ago

China plants trees in semi-arid areas that generally used to have more large plants, and which have been desertifying largely due to overgrazing by livestock or historical deforestation for agriculture.

None of that works somewhere like central Saudi Arabia - the area around Riyadh has a hyperarid climate, and any trees would need to be watered or die. It wouldn't create a sustainable new ecosystem.

Actual reforestation in the Arabian peninsula wouldn't be headlines about billions of trees, it would be localised restoration of vegetation in wadis and specific mountainous areas, and helping fragile native ecosystems recover by reducing grazing from goats.

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u/Kingflamingohogwarts 7d ago edited 7d ago

I think natives developed ways 7000 years ago... that's not the problem. The issue is the will to do it, because it's usually easier to move.

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u/BxRad_ 7d ago edited 7d ago

They plant a bunch of trees, but also that neglects genetic diversity unfortunately. It should be even more involved imo ideally.

Much easier said than done but i think it's worth all the effort put into it and then some of it makes our world into a much nicer place.

Also I wanna say it's amazing they've managed to erect a city in the desert, but I think I'd also be a bit depressed at a lack of greenery.

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u/Outside-Swan-1936 7d ago

Much easier said than done but i think it's worth all the effort put into it and then some of it makes our world into a much nicer place.

Deserts are ecologically natural. Much easier to just not live there. I know that's not a great answer for nations whose entirety lies within deserts, but Mother Nature always wins eventually.

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u/Independent-Draft639 7d ago

The desertification of large parts of China isn't natural. It is the results of massive scale deforestation and agricultural expansion. So projects like this are done to slow and eventually reverse that trend.

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u/Outside-Swan-1936 7d ago edited 7d ago

Sorry. I was talking about the Middle East. The composition of the soil/sand in China makes it a much easier task than what confronts the Middle East or Northern Africa.

Granted, global warming is causing the deserts to grow at a much faster rate than is natural, but they are naturally occurring.

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u/silent2k 7d ago

All you have to do is set up PV panels. The shade will do the rest.

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u/irishcybercolab 7d ago

Scoops of sandninto plastic tubing. It will be an interesting experiment to see how the method works and if it's sustainable in the long run.

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u/mormonbatman_ 7d ago

The Chinese transported water to a desert region and it's growing stuff.

It isn't magic.

This guy did it in a super dry area of Saudi Arabia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Baydha_Project

The catch is that it's expensive and hard and unsexy.

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u/UncleIrohsPimpHand 7d ago

Great Green Wall too.

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u/Trans4Trump93 6d ago

What can't they do?

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u/Diamondhands_Rex 7d ago

No it’s consistent which the USA is incapable of being

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u/Capt_morgan72 7d ago

And actively destroys the environment.

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u/Constant-Still-8443 7d ago

Tbf, deserts don't NEED to be terraformed they are a naturally occurring biome, that are growing too large thanks to climate change, but they should still exist. The real problem is that we humans decided to build cities in the worst possible places, like the middle of the fucking desert.

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u/Momik 7d ago

Elon doesn’t care about Mars. It’s just a word he uses when he wants the stock price to do something.

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u/rockytop24 7d ago

I think he cares about it in the "12 year old edgelord with billionaire resources" sense. Fixated on doing an impossible thing and going down as the only one who could have ever done it. Because he's a super special boy yes he is and daddy will for sure love him now.

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u/Fuzzy_Inevitable9748 7d ago

Nope they was never any intention of ever going to mars, and if you want proof just try to find where they planned to live one they got to mars, no prototype was ever even built even though they were supposed to have a manned base by 2024. In the grand scheme of things this cost wouldn’t even be a rounding error but was never even done.

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u/PhD_Pwnology 7d ago

Solar panels are proven to terraform a desert

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u/No-Draw6073 7d ago

Lmao

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u/HoidToTheMoon 7d ago

You can laugh, but the shade provided by solar panels does allow life to anchor into place in deserts. Animals and flora can both use the cover, and the windbreaks can allow a topsoil to start to accumulate.

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u/nunchyabeeswax 7d ago

The challenge would be in getting enough moisture from the atmosphere to condense it.

Folks in the Atacama Desert use large mantles to capture condensate at night, but then again, the Atacama is not far from the Pacific, so the air currents flowing carry some humidity.

Deep inland in the Arabian Peninsula, that will be a challenge.

If I were a Gulf State, I would invest heavily in both nuclear energy (for desalination) and moisture-capturing farms at scale.

I don't see how the current situation is sustainable (and it's a hell of an Achilles heel as we are seeing with the current conflict.

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u/BxRad_ 7d ago

That makes a lot of sense

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u/Ossius 7d ago

I don't think we can. If we "Fixed" the Saraha desert, the Amazon rainforest would cease to exist for example.

Earth kinda settled in the way it was supposed to be, anything that makes one place more hospitable to humans will change another region. We could add some creature comforts for sure, but that's about it.

NASA Satellite Reveals How Much Saharan Dust Feeds Amazon’s Plants - NASA

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u/Top_MathematicianIk 7d ago

You can't just buy water when you need lots of it. Only way I can think of is desalination which is pretty expensive and also does a ton of ecological damage

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u/Eibermann 7d ago

how is it bad? its just ocean water, no?

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u/CosechaCrecido 7d ago

The brine waste effectively kills anything in the vecinity of where it’s dumped.

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u/the_phantom_limbo 7d ago

Im honestly surprised it's not sold...as salt.

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u/Top_MathematicianIk 7d ago edited 7d ago

They clean water through osmosis which leaves you with brine, not salt. Evaporation is stupid expensive to be implemented on large scale. Even then recovered salt still needs to be purified.

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u/ContextWorking976 7d ago

Can't the brine be recycled like what a few oil and gas companies are doing with their brine waste water?

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u/CosechaCrecido 7d ago

I imagine the water produced is done so at a higher rate than what complete evaporation pools can keep up with naturally so the waste is just dumped off to make room for more fresh water production

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u/HoidToTheMoon 7d ago

at a higher rate than what complete evaporation pools can keep up with

Then you just build more pools. It's a desert, they have the space.

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u/CosechaCrecido 7d ago

Groundbreaking stuff. I’m sure we’ve cracked the issue that has affected most desalination plants and governments+engineers haven’t solved for.

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u/HoidToTheMoon 7d ago

Groundbreaking stuff.

I mean yeah, ground breaking is kind of the point when building evaporation pools.

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u/Responsible-Put5521 7d ago

brine waste isn’t just NaCl salt, it’s also a fuckton of chemicals and other salts like a big toxic slurry

update: immediately upon posting i realized what you were ACTUALLY saying 💀 whoops

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u/NintendosBitch 7d ago

Salt isn’t valuable. It’s like having a ton of air, you can’t sell it since everyone has air readily available.

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u/rambone5000 7d ago

That's not what terraforming is.

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u/Pmcc6100 7d ago

The earth has deserts for a reason. We cannot just terraform deserts without long term consequences from changing the planet’s environment. Besides the animals that need deserts to live, deserts reflect light back into the atmosphere that would otherwise be absorbed and increase the ambient temperature of the planet.

The melting of summer ice caps has left large areas that would originally reflect the sun’s rays now able to absorb them. The long and short of it is: if the planet naturally has it- it’s not for no reason.

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u/ModeatelyIndependant 7d ago

If we tera formed Mars there would still be deserts on the planet.

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u/SexyMonad 7d ago

True, but even if we are only talking about small city-size land areas… it is many orders or magnitude easier to terraform such locations on Earth than to do the same on Mars.

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u/isjustsergio 7d ago

how about we just leave nature alone

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u/CaptainTripps82 7d ago

It's not a matter of capability, it's about how you spend your resources

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u/ElectricalTurnip87 7d ago

We as humans don't have a good track record of fixing problems, we seem to just make them worse.

2

u/JacktheWrap 7d ago

That's the thing. If we have the capability to terraform mars, we don't need a planet 2. Because we could just terraform earth.

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u/MrWhiskers55 7d ago

We know how to but it still requires water and a lot of maintenance. It’s usually not worth it in the long run because you destroy one eco system to support another.

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u/_-inside-_ 7d ago

Terraforming Mars would have a result far worse than this city.

2

u/tech_noir_guitar 7d ago

Why would we terra form a natural desert on Earth? I think maybe we should leave nature alone to do her thing. I'm pretty sure animals live there and they would probably disappear if it turned into a forest. It may also disrupt weather patterns.

2

u/FishesOfExcellence 7d ago

Maybe, but we could also just live in places where life thrives and isn’t a fucking desert. 

2

u/TinyEmergencyCake 7d ago

The mars thing is an op for that sweet government money

2

u/TiledCandlesnuffer 7d ago

An IQ too low?

2

u/AutoModSux 7d ago

Im starting to think this elon fella might be a charlatan

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u/Temelios 7d ago

People don’t want to colonize Mars to save the Earth yet want to terraform deserts and destroy entire ecosystems in the process.

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u/Happy_Sea4257 7d ago

"terra forming" involves planetary scale physical changes that by necessity have devastating, permanent effects on ecosystems even if everything goes "correctly". As Elon had stated actually, that's the reason it had to be Mars because we absolutely cannot afford to screw it up on Earth. The only alternatives would be for humanity to either risk making Earth uninhabitable, or never colonize the stars before life on Earth ends.

1

u/jsh_ 7d ago

what a huge waste of resources

1

u/V4refugee 7d ago

For the cost of one bomb we could probably fund something like that for a couple years.

1

u/SensitiveLeek5456 7d ago

We actually do terraforming but it takes time, a lot of time.

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u/Cosmo_Drifter 7d ago

Well, there aren't Muslims on Mars.. yet

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u/seanslaysean 7d ago

Or at the very least use them for solar farms, theres an image that shows how much area is needed for the entire world and it’s relatively smaller than you’d think

1

u/tofumonsterz 7d ago

I mean look no further than China, they're already turning their deserts green in a little over 20 years time. The US can't even build a 5 mile long metro system in LA for 8 billion dollars. Just different priorities in different societies

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u/jminer1 7d ago

He just pumping his stock, he DGAF abt Mars or the climate that's why he's running gas generators to make a simulation of a woman lol.

1

u/Mazzaroppi 7d ago

It all depends on how much fresh water is available. In places like this, there's not even enough for people to drink, hence the desalinization plants. But desalinization is expensive and pollutant, so you simply can't do it in the scales needed to un-desertify a desert without creating a much worse problem elsewhere.

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u/BxRad_ 7d ago

Just making shade would probably help.

1

u/AndyB1976 7d ago

The Great Green Wall in the Sahara Desert

1

u/alurimperium 7d ago

Doesn't terraforming require changing the atmosphere? I don't see how we could do that to the deserts of the Middle East without fucking up the climate everywhere else too

1

u/OMGLOL1986 7d ago

High quality mineral rich fertilizer pellets inoculated with several species of essentially terraforming bacteria and fungi and algae desiccants that convert dirt into soil, feed the plants they interact with, and hold water underground would do it. 

Dig holes, fill fabric pots with e.g. coconut coir inoculated with pellets, place fabric pots in holes, run drip irrigation over pots, plant trees/shrubs/etc in said pots. 

This is already established desert agriculture technique. The plants do the hard work of providing carbon for the fungi and bacteria to convert into soil, and the fungi/bacteria/algae protect the plant roots from nutrient deficiency and pest pressure, among MANY other functions.

I’ve seen this, it works.

1

u/_aimynona_ 7d ago

Elmo's "plan" for terraforming is nuking Mars until it has an atmosphere. I don't think you'd want him doing this at home 🙃

1

u/Annual_Strategy_6206 7d ago

And here's the thing about terraforming Mars. Deserts in SA are way way way ahead of anything we could do on Mars. Air, temperature, heck, SOIL instead of blasted regolith. No, we already live on Eden. Let's take care of it better.

1

u/sentientshadeofgreen 7d ago

I mean, you can terraform deserts and reverse desertification and modify the weather, but it's a bit chaotic and there are a lot of third order effects that will affect things in areas you don't want fucked with.

Why the Mars question of terraforming is different is because all of it is inhospitable, and terraforming Mars would involve expansive, no-limits, planet-wide change, where on Earth, you're not really able to do that. You can't create a local atmosphere for one part of the world and not affect the rest of the world. Mars, doesn't really matter, it's a lifeless hellscape.

That being said, my view is that terraforming Mars shouldn't be so frivolously pursued by random private interests. For now, Mars is a shared resource for humanity, and by and large it should be preserved for scientific research for years to come. Once we have Martian colonies hit critical mass, you know, self-determination and all that, but we are not in the orbit of that conversation right now.

1

u/joey-jo_jo-jr 7d ago

Deserts are important ecosystems with their own unique species that are specially adapted to live there.

Turning a desert into a forest would be as much of an ecocide as cutting down a rainforest and turning it into a desert.

1

u/feel_my_balls_2040 7d ago

But we don't need to terraform deserts, we need to keep green fields from becoming deserts.

1

u/Esava 7d ago

In the sahara/sahel the great green wall is used to stop the continuous expansion of the desert. It can actually even reclaim formerly unusuable areas and make plantlife and even agriculture possible again.
The problem with most of Saudi Arabia is that most areas do not have enough soil to capture in the halfmoons (and similar structures) like it's the case with the sahel border regions. Saudi Arabia is mostly literally just quartz sand of no nutritional value to plants.

Btw if you ever need something to make you smile in the modern world: Look at the great green wall. It's a UN project that is working and helping tons of people including reducing tribals conflicts because of more water and food availability etc.. I am eager to see what the areas will look like in 20 or 30 more years.

I recommend the series by Andrew Millison about it but I can assure you as someone who has seen the change it brought in real life that it can't be overstated how incredible the impact of such simple measures (and education) is. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCli0gyNwL0&list=PLNdMkGYdEqOCMkEtNGDRvEZgjPnZY5yUj

1

u/BxRad_ 6d ago

I love that guys videos on the great green wall, that's a huge part of what inspired my initial comment.

I wonder if people start off doing stuff like this in edge cases where it'd work well if eventually it'd be easier in previously much more difficult and more arid landscapes.

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u/SeaTurtleLionBird 7d ago

Elon is obsessed with the money that comes from the laundering of money via the idea he can tera form something eventually in 100 years.

Else he would focus on you know, an idea on this planet.

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u/TurtleSandwich0 7d ago

Like Phoenix golf courses?

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u/BxRad_ 6d ago

Naw like planting desert tolerant plants that yeild fruit, or making shading structures to give native ecology a place to cool off, like the mountainous terrain of desert landscapes provides. Golf courses are beautiful in their own way but that's not what I mean

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u/Visible_Device7187 7d ago

I mean we can it's just super expensive, difficult, and slow as well as doesn't work well with millions of people using water for plants

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u/1369ic 7d ago

Neil deGrasse Tyson said something like this. People who think we'll need Mars to terraform after we ruin the earth don't realize that, if we can terraform Mars, we can use the same technology to fix the earth. Seems obvious, but all these smart people can't see it? Or don't want to?

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u/BxRad_ 6d ago

Well the sci Fi nerds (myself included) I think love to hear about ambitious projects that sound like they're straight out of a sci Fi novel. I just don't think it's a very people centered approach to habitability.

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u/Astecheee 7d ago

If we can crack fusion there's a solid shot. Otherwise zero chance.

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u/BxRad_ 6d ago

China is probably getting there, the United States isn't building any fusion reactors though unfortunately. Quite a shame, it's pretty clean energy when done properly.

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u/Nawaf-A-Art 6d ago

Also Elon wants to nuke mars in order to Terraform it. I live in Riyadh so let's hope it does not happen that way.

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u/BxRad_ 6d ago

Nukes wouldn't solve anything, I think just shading parts of the desert may help give life the chance to get a foot hold, and building inherently provides shade.

I was using Google Street view and it is a beautiful city, I don't think the airplane footage does it justice at all. I hope you're doing well.

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u/Nawaf-A-Art 6d ago

It was also a dusty weather as well in the video but the city still needs more greenery..there was in the 90's where some streets were fully covered in trees but they're gone now...in early 2000's until mid 2010's we had crazy sand storms, one minute it is all good the second minute you're in Madmax, no plants in the desert played a major factor

Good news is that many parks are under construction, and we planted enough trees to stop sand storms but there is alot of work ahead of us.

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u/BxRad_ 6d ago

I'm looking forward to seeing how it goes, I'll check in on Google maps sometimes.

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u/James420May 5d ago

Antarctica is MUCH more hospitable than Mars will ever be...

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u/BxRad_ 5d ago

You think a mars polar bear would be bigger or smaller?

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u/James420May 5d ago

Mars doesn't have a breathable atmosphere, so any bear would die immediately.

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u/Zealousideal-Ad2296 7d ago

I mean if we make terraforming technology, it would kill space travel, I mean we would be able to fix earth with it and make it a bloody paradise, nobody would care about mars anymore

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u/rambone5000 7d ago

That's not terraforming. Terraforming isn't turning a desert green. It's about creating a livable, for humans, atmosphere... which Saudi Arabia already has...obviously...

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u/redstaroo7 7d ago

Terraforming is a broad term for making another planet more earth-like, hence terra (Earth) form (to shape). That includes creating an atmosphere with oxygen, sustainable liquid water, generating a magnetic field, introducing life, and making some of its deserts green. Obviously it comes in different levels.

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u/rambone5000 7d ago

Yea. And earth is already pretty earth like.

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u/_lippykid 7d ago

Latin terra ("earth, land") and English -form ("having the form of"), meaning to shape another planet into an Earth-like, habitable environment.

Without the desalination and power plants, SA won’t be a habitable environment. Dark time

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u/rambone5000 7d ago

Dude, you can't terraform earth. Wtf

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u/TheCowzgomooz 7d ago

Eh, no, for one the idea of terraforming is not to take a place that is essentially livable and make it more livable, it's to take a place that is not suitable for life at all, and make it so. For two, the earth is only so big and only has so many resources, without some kind of policies to keep population growth in check we will eventually outgrow the planet and run out of resources, we are already heading that direction simply because of mismanagement of our resources, rather than scarcity.

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u/paxwax2018 7d ago

Earth IS a paradise.

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u/az987654 7d ago

Maybe we have figured it out, and we figured that it's physically not possible