I 100% agree with this article, but I suspect it will not be well received here. HN is so focused on innovation at all costs that anything that goes against that will be rejected.
I think that one of the issues with doing as the author suggests and thinking of technology as a transformation is that it can be hard to come up with the downsides of your new tech. Engineers will constantly be encouraged by management and customers to deliver a solution, and often saying 'this is my solution, but it comes with caveats' will be frowned upon. Additionally, it's clear in retrospect that the expansion of the city the grand canal allowed would lead to depletion of the ground water which would lead to sinking of the city and the canal being inneffective, but was that known at the time? Could engineers working on a canal project have anticipated socioeconomic trends like this? I'm not saying they couldn't have, just that it's difficult.
"Absolute disaster" .. or "transform the canal side environment into similar to the seaside environment" ?
> Also pumping up that much water would require an absolutely enormous amount of energy, and dozens of pumping stations.
Similar to other water pumping projects about the globe that cover distances further than 65km across rises of a similar magnitude?
The canal system already has dozens of pumping stations, abd there's a regenerative energy recovery factor to the operation that makes the total energy required somewhat less than just a straight lift x tonnage.
This makes me question that shouldn't we have another canal built? Like if so much of the world's economy depends on this route shouldn't we build an extra canal to speed up the transportation and also act as a redundancy
Good point, though you probably need a strong flow for turbines, which will be an issue for the bubble barrier. And for large rivers that are also deep (i.e. any river that is used for larger scale shipping), the infrastructure seems extreme.
It's one thing to handle a 10m wide canal that's 2m deep, it's quite another to install that system on a river that's 800m across and 10m deep. I believe we'll quickly reach a level where it's not economical to do put a lot of energy into it to catch what little waste there is. On the other hand, maybe there are positive side effects, more oxygen in the water?
From a system design perspective, it's kind of nuts that the entire planet has only one single canal connecting two major bodies of water, and it's in a country with a, shall we say, precarious government. Surely such a single point of failure is a massive risk. Granted, geography doesn't leave us many choices, but could we at least build another, parallel canal to it?
> Using traditional things ( eg. Cofferdams) for non-traditional uses ( raising water instead of lowering) aren't always considered by the same experts.
True but I guarantee you that's not the case here. Any engineer who's familiar with canals will have coffer damns in the front of their mind, because that's exactly how locks work. And besides that, it is (forgive me), kinda obvious.
I promise you the people working on this have thoroughly explored the possibility of raising the water level, probably by more means than you or I can guess.
It'd be nice to know in exactly what capacity this was discussed.
The article just says that "architects, developers, real estate experts and business owners were brought together in May to discuss ways of preserving the city's buildings in this watery cityscape of the future".
Who set this up? Were canals a serious suggestion with a reasonable amount of support, or just thrown out as a possibility during a brainstorming-type exercise?
I still don't understand why anyone building a new canal through Central America would not be trying to maximise the effectiveness of their work by building a sea level canal wide either enough for continuous crossing in both directions or dig two canals and make each one continuous flow in a single direction.
Yes it's a bigger challenge, but these projects are some of the few remaining opportunities in modern economics to say "we expect payback time of two decades" and not get laughed at. No locks no lock maintenance, continuous flow, more ship, more money.
It's also possible to use novel techniques from the last hundred years of progress to "dredge forward" using water itself as an an active tool to wash away all but any hard rock terrain that needs clearing. The rain and loose soils that hurt the first attempt at the Panama Canal could be turned into a positive factor with today's technology.
Whenever there are ambitious plans for a poor country, people think of all kinds of reasons not to - the environment! the culture! the local economy! people's family homes! But they forget "these people are already screwed!". This canal is a risk with a bigger upside than doing nothing.
Somewhat worrying that the people in charge of protecting Boston from flooding would waste their time on such an obviously impractical and pointless idea.
Even if Boston already had canals they would still need to build surrounding flood protection systems just like Venice and Amsterdam. So why build the canals?
Interior canals can actually make flooding more likely as New Orleans learned when breaks along canals were responsible for flooring the city after Katrina. The solution - as a everywhere else - was beefed up perimeter defenses not more canals. Canals just make the problem harder and the risks greater. Why build a system to deliver vast quantities of water to the center of a city?
The real problem with building reliable flood protection is that it is impossible to fully test and may not be tested by nature for a very long time. This requires sustained effort by level headed engineers and planners not politically motivated dreamers.
Well yeah, how else would you move the water? USPS? You need a massive network of canals, pipelines, pumps and reservoirs.
I'm really glad our ancestors had the foresight to build the national electrical grid and the national highway system because with an attitude like I'm seeing in this thread I think the folks today would just throw up their hands and say it's too big and too difficult.
I mean, yes, if the Rhine suffers from insufficient capacity, charging money to use it will help ensure that the existing capacity is used as efficiently as possible. For modern examples along those lines, consider the Suez or Panama Canals.
I was under the impression that in places like Amsterdam, canals were useful historically because people didn't have motor vehicles so they were a highly effective way to move goods around town (and to/from remote farms, towns and cities via rivers like the Amstel and IJ, other canals, and the sea).
Today, while extant networks may remain quite decorative and interesting, urban canals seem unlikely to be used for any purpose other than high-end recreation / tourism, and the article does not address any way they'd be directly useful for flood control. It's not even made clear they'd really assist in keeping seawater out of peoples' homes and businesses.
I think that one of the issues with doing as the author suggests and thinking of technology as a transformation is that it can be hard to come up with the downsides of your new tech. Engineers will constantly be encouraged by management and customers to deliver a solution, and often saying 'this is my solution, but it comes with caveats' will be frowned upon. Additionally, it's clear in retrospect that the expansion of the city the grand canal allowed would lead to depletion of the ground water which would lead to sinking of the city and the canal being inneffective, but was that known at the time? Could engineers working on a canal project have anticipated socioeconomic trends like this? I'm not saying they couldn't have, just that it's difficult.
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