Big fan of WH40k as the exemplar of massive scale. This article[0] defines a super volcano as
>The size of volcanic eruptions can be expressed by the volume or mass of magma released (table 1), with super-eruptions yielding in excess of 450 km3, or more than 1×10^15 kg, of magma (Sparks et al. 2005).
Wikipedia says the Empire State Building has a volume of 1e6 m3 or 0.001 km3. So the eruption would be equivalent to at least 450,000 Empire State Buildings worth of magma.
Mt Everest is some 90km3, so only 5 Mt Everest equivalents.
These amounts are too big for me to comprehend, but yeah. Going to need a bigger boat.
Those numbers aren't that large. They aren't small in anyone's estimation, but the Empire State Building is a lot less than the amount of material a motivated earthmoving company can get through in a year.
There'd be some interesting technical challenges tearing down Everest, but it is conceivable. The part that requires creative thinking is why it would be worth it spending that much money.
Except that volume gets released with an eruption, not over a year...Imagine 5 mount everests lifting up into the air and coming down at the same time.
I don't have a sense of the scale you are talking, but I would love to see more megaprojects. Truly mega. When we aren't getting in our own way, humans do some pretty awesome stuff.
I don't. The reason is that even though we are probably capable of doing so we lack the responsibility required to do this without the chance of massive negative side effects. Every time we've upped the scale in our abilities it has only resulted in more damage, not quite balanced out by more progress. This is a real problem: we can get ourselves into the kind of trouble that we don't seem to be able to get ourselves out of. We never stop and say 'this is enough', we always take the next step, create a new level of problems that then requires yet another level of innovation to control it and so on.
It's the sorcerers apprentice, but a weird variation on it. Just supposed that what the GP says is possible and doable: what guarantees do we have that we fully understand the system we are messing with? How much risk are we willing to take? Who are the stakeholders in these risks?
Without answers to all of these questions we run the real risk of biting off more than we can collectively chew and if and when we do there won't be an 'undo' button to press. Well, technically will have pressed it, but quite possible on a time-scale that we didn't quite envision.
I've seen the most stupid proposals of the kind that you are suggesting: PNE's ('Peaceful Nuclear Explosions') on a scale never dreamed of before to remake the face of the Earth, create new watersheds and so on. And to incidentally put an amount of radiation into the atmosphere that would be absolutely unparalleled. The fact that we can do these things doesn't mean that we automatically have to do these things.
I keep thinking about the discovery of nuclear power: what if we hadn't? Would that be such a huge problem or would we simply have found other, better ways of providing ourselves with power? And if we did, what would be the short term, mid term and long term consequences of doing so? Because the energy stored in the core of the Earth is the ultimate form of fossil energy: between gravity and plate tectonics life had a way of escaping the oceans and without that we'd be fish, mammals in the ocean at best. Good luck with that electronics project you were working on in that environment.
It's tricky: we have one Earth. Any decision that irrevocably removes something from that Earth carries a price tag the value of which may not be visible for a long time to come, so caution would seem to be the best way forward, even if that isn't our nature. Our nature is just to act and then to pass the buck to the next generation.
"If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice."
Some time ago scientists were concerned that the Earth was headed into another ice age. Then we started burning all of this carbon, so that's not happening anymore. Great, catastrophe averted. Now we're burning way too much and going hard the other way.
Damn it.
Okay, so the status quo is no good, maybe we should build a whole bunch of nuclear plants so we can stop burning coal. What could possibly go wrong?
That's a fair point, however, action has often much clearer short term consequences than inaction, and the consequences of inaction can be studied at leisure because action always is still an option. But once you've done your action thingy you can't go back to what it was like before.
Perhaps surprisingly I do agree with you, I often talk about civilization having a Peak Comfort and that we should try to find contentment and sustainability over driving for progress toward some yet defined goal.
Two things come into the conversation though, while some of us have probably hit peak comfort it is not exactly universal. The second is we still haven't solved the energy problem, and it is us getting in our own way that is doing it. A megaproject of some kind can kind of sublime the status quo and make grand leaps forward in spite of ourselves. Maybe not a geothermal plant harnessing the earths's subterranean magma, but truly massive renewables installations or just actually doing nuclear power at last.
I hear what you are saying though. I would love to see some kind of utopian near future megaprojects solve the energy problem, but that is with the assumption that we did our homework, and our current track record is pretty bleak in that regard.
That's all agreed on, but in principle the energy problem is solved: we're quite literally bathing in energy for 12 hours every day for half the planet on average. We just suck at collecting that energy. And that is a problem that you might be able to solve without such massive environmental impact as what we've seen so far. More so if we focus on conservation first, so those 'massive renewables installations' are exactly where it is at in my book.
And your point that comfort (and even food) isn't universal is also well taken, if anything that should be our first order of battle: to establish some stable and sustainable quality of life and then to go about ensuring that everybody has access to that level. Of course our political and financial institutions are not well geared towards such solutions and that is where most of the challenge will come from. On a technical level I don't think that's unsolvable if you focus on quality and sustainability.
I agree with everything except your conclusion. Even if we could resist our fundamental nature how do we know that our current values are more correct than the evolutionary forces that have kept us alive for millions of years?
We keep getting in to trouble and getting away with it. What if whoever didn’t get into trouble also didn’t survive.
I invite you to find yourself a copy of any or all of
The Control of Nature by John McPhee,
A River Lost by Blaine Harden, and
Marc Reisner's books Cadillac Desert and A Dangerous Place.
I like a mega challenge that is manageable because everyone can do their tiny part. Like the Justdiggit project [0], on a mission to regreening Africa and cooling down the planet. All one needs is a shovel and knowledge how to dig shallow holes with a ridge to avoid rainwaters flushing furtile topsoil away, and store water for plants to grow in the dry season.
Do you know if they have anything on the following? Sahara is the source of minerals for the Amazon rainforest (winds carry fine sand over the Atlantic), "regreening" Africa is likely to stop this transfer, leading to soil exhaustion in Amazon.
Have you heard of The Line? It's going to be a 500m high, 200m wide, 170 km long linear city / megastructure housing 9 million people; real science fiction stuff, but construction is underway with phase 1 ready by 2030: https://www.neom.com/en-us/regions/theline
>The size of volcanic eruptions can be expressed by the volume or mass of magma released (table 1), with super-eruptions yielding in excess of 450 km3, or more than 1×10^15 kg, of magma (Sparks et al. 2005).
Wikipedia says the Empire State Building has a volume of 1e6 m3 or 0.001 km3. So the eruption would be equivalent to at least 450,000 Empire State Buildings worth of magma. Mt Everest is some 90km3, so only 5 Mt Everest equivalents.
These amounts are too big for me to comprehend, but yeah. Going to need a bigger boat.
[0] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsta.200...