Death Valley in California comes to mind seeing this video. The place is hot, dry, nice to visit and nice to leave. The world does not need more deserts.
They cant displace that much water now , it would raze global water height / flood modern coastal + river dwellings / places all over earth . They would have to blow trenches in Russia Siberia Antarctic northern Canada to hold the water inland in huge man made lakes that would freeze/not evaporate.
Nature causes its natural disasters by itself. I see no harm in humanity causing a "natural disaster" to avoid famine, economic crisis and wars. It is better to build a dam in the Mediterranean than to go back to the Middle Ages or the Stone Age.
@@AnimeAne-fo8iz Better to do than not do. If humanity does not develop its means of production, it will die. Better to do than go back to the middle ages.
What about ocean level rise due to Mediterranean water going to the ocean? What about the land being useless due to being salted from the evaporated sea?
Not only that, but the loss of that large a body of water would damage Europe's climate drastically. And the newly exposed sea bottom would be an enormous salt flat with temps hotter than the Dead Sea.
I'm no meteorologist but I think the global wind patterns are such that the Mediterranean gets most of its wind from the west. That's where the Atlantic ocean is, so it would be very humid. It would mostly not expand the Sahara. The climate would probably be similar to France or Italy in the northern regions, though the southern regions would be more like North Africa, of course. The reason the Sahara is so dry is that it gets most of its wind from the East, which is pretty much entirely covered by land. The wind is extremely dry for most of the year so it rarely rains in the Sahara. This wind continues traveling westward and eventually reaches the Amazon rainforest. Lots of sand/dust/minerals get carried to the Amazon this way and contributes to its fertility. The worst part of this plan is the fact that it will take millennia for the newly exposed land to develop into anything useful. The amount of salt in the ground is going to be a huge issue. The Mediterranean is about 900,000 cubic miles of ocean water. Ocean water has about 120 million tons of salt per cubic mile. All of that salt is just going to be sitting on top of the ground when the water melts away. I haven't actually watched the video yet so I don't know if they have a plan to deal with the salt but I can't imagine it's a good plan. Oh, and that doesn't mention the risk of building things below sea level. It's like New Orleans except one million times the size. So, a pretty terrible idea all around.
In XX century Soviet agricultural megaprojects drained Aral sea, almost killing it. Hundreds of km2 turned into nastiest kind of desert, bringing fierce winds and deadly salty sandstorms to everything around. It was a gigantic disaster. Now it's slowly recovering thanks to doing aftermath on complex hydrology in the region.
It's only a part of the story. Those megaprojects have never gone away with the dissolution of the USSR. Now Uzbekistan is taking advantage of them. But Kazakhstan, of course, puts effort in refilling one part of the basin. Yet you didn't mention that the Aral sea used to dry out in the past. 400 years ago the Amudaria river flowed into the Caspian sea instead. This branch is Called Uzboy.
@@HoundGrinwell it was natural process but in 20th century it was man made , yes unfortunately Uzbekistan ca not afford stop using those canals for cotton irrigation , I wonder if Kazakhstan could make a wall and separate aral sea and try to restore their part
@@pauldruhg2992 well it is man made because of the canals and they took to much water from it because USSR needed cotton I think it was because egypt decided to not to sell their cotton to soviets.
1) land around the Mediterranean won't get any rainfall because of zero precipitation 2) reclaimed land will turn into another desert expanding sahara 3) countries dependent on the sea ports, fishing and coastal tourism would lose everything 4)dam which is going to be made out of steel and concrete, will have to face corrosion from sea water and stresses from untameable ocean currents 5) inorder to build a dam, the Mediterranean sea has to be diverted to the sahara, causing major drawbacks to the livelihood, p0is0ning the groundwater reserves, causing desert to emerge as a sea itself. 6) middle eastern countries heavily relied on desalination plants will find themselves living in a uninhabitable place. 7) no countries in this planet can source in raw materials in such large quantity, to fill the seas that extends to a kilometer depth Only plausible method is to build group of islands, just like china did in the south china sea and join these group of islands step by step fully closing the gap of gibraltar But half the europe wont get rainfall, when Mediterranean dries up, and cargo ships have to traverse circumventing africa increasing the cost of life. The land reclaimed will be full of brine pools and salty marshes making the living impossible for thousands of years
Yeah I guess destroying the entire Mediterranean region just to have more desert might be a bad idea, but maybe we could still dam the Black sea, just as a little treat? In fact that might even be good just to desalinate the Black sea and de-stratify it so the depths could have life, although I don't know how long it would take for all the salt to diffuse out of such a serious stratification, probably hundreds of years at least unless you pipe one of the inflows to the sea floor, but you would at least get a fair bit of the depth back quite quickly.
That new land would be ridiculously low in elevation, and absurdly, blazingly hot. It would also disrupt pretty much every coastal community in the Mediterranean.
Not to mention fundamentally altering the climate and weather. Warm up travelling up from Africa is responsible for a lot of Europe's rainfall. What would happen we are already fairly sure of because the African continent is already pushing into Europe, as that happens most of continental Europe will become a desert. Fortunately we'll never see it because it will take millions of years.
@@jooproos6559 Didn't the Rhein almost dry up recently? I live on a island in the North Atlantic (Britain) so rain comes with the territory most of the time.
What about the Suez Canal and all the rivers flow into the Mediterranean Sea it would need continual pumping etc unless his plan was to use the water to hydrate the Sahara
it was a different time that allowed dreaming big, the mediterian part is crap, but i wonder now if damming the congo river REALLY would have gotten some kind of big lake right into the sahara dessert... now that this mean disrupting so many african countries with all citizen that can't move freely between those african states this can not work.. but in total, making the sahara green by forcing a huge lake next to it.. could you use a huge pipe system to get a big chunk of water from a central african river to really only guide the lake creating right into the border region of the sahara... ?? could that actually work... that way you wouldn't also flood unimaginable areas of rain forest and fertille savana, that lake size really looked.. ridiculous! and you would also not influence local weather paterns that extreme, as a suddes huge lake could influence it.. at leaqst 10.000 times more manageble to try and build and 1000 km pipeline guiding some pretty big fresh water feed from big central african river then it would be to try and dam the mediterian. PS, video was a bit disappointing, climate science clearly would link a 200 meter below sea level cimate to simular climat conditions as death valley ... and the entire climate around the mediterinian would become so much dryer with less sea to start evaporation from... complete disaster.. so the more you limet all to huge changes, on places that are climate wise really okay right now, the better!
@@JeroenJA Sahara is so large I doubt building few pipelines from a central african river would prove adequate. More likely that there'd have to be hundreds, if not thousands, of desalination plants all around the coast of northern Africa, connected to vast water infrastructure to turn Sahara green once more
people today '' no you can't build this building 15m higher, it disrupts sun and local arhitecture'' people 100 years ago *LET'S DAM THE MEDITERANEAN SEA*
This is the reason that London has such wacky tall buildings, nothing's allowed to be built that blocks the view to St Paul's cathedral nor can it overshadow it. Hence all the weird shapes and lack of skyscrapers, though why one is being built in the shape of a sex toy...
You didn't mention the most obvious criticism of such a plan: Creating two shrunken hyper-saline seas at the bottom of the world's newest and biggest death valley which will by proximity cause heating and drying of adjacent former coastal lands lowering precipitation causing desertification would be a disaster rather than of any benefit.
"Sir, I have a cunning plan." "What is it, Baldrick?" "What if we sawed the Rock of Gibraltar in half and dropped it across the Strait? Then we could drain the Mediterranean Sea so any European could walk to Africa." "Or any African could walk to Europe." "I didn't think of that." "Naturally you didn't. Next you'll be suggesting we excavate an underground passage between England and France and call it the Chunnel." "No sir, I'm not that crazy."
The problem with big and ambitious projects is that the bigger they are, the more problems they cause, and more problems there are, the more likely they are not to be solved.
Does not have to be so. As long as the project actually makes sense from the get go. But problem is with most big projects these days they do not make sense as they are often created by people with highly inflated egos such as dictators.
They may have to build it just to maintain the status quo in the Mediterranean especially if the collapse of the remaining glaciers on Earth is imminent
One aspect you failed to address is the very salty Mediterranean sea would result in highly salty land, not fertile, and an even saltier sea that would kill most of the fish. Al this would result in more downsides than benefits. And no one was conscious of the balance of nature.
To be fair, the congo dam would solve a lot of the water problems across many countries in Africa. But its an absurdly expensive project that a world power would struggle to achieve, much less a third world country in Africa.
Every criticism aside (all of which are valid), I'll give the guy credit for trying to come up with a plan to better the world. It was wildly messed up, but he had good intentions.
He had no intention of making the world a better place, only for Germany. He ignored the cause which was - Wealth inequality and resultant unsustainable wealth inequality. He had no qualms about Germany invading other countries to get that space. We want to fix Socio/Economic problems, We get a Socio/Economics expert not an architect. Besides all the other problems only the super rich benefit from massive poverty because people will naturally be desperate to do anything to change their economic situation... into which the wealthy ruling elite for thousands of years know how to exploit.
@@AdmiralBison thinking on a global scale wasn't as much of a thing back then. We have to allow for the way people of the past thought in these assessments. He wanted to make things better for his country and to avoid war. Those are admirable things. It is true that it was all to the benefit of his homeland and at the expense of others, but how can you take into account these factors when you spent your entire life in a world and culture that didn't really do that? You and I think on a global scale and are quick to consider the impact on people far away because we are primed to do so by culture as well as the ability to rapidly spread news to anywhere in the world. At the same time it would not be unreasonable to expect him to consider the locals during his project. The point here is that unless we have any explicit writings or recordings from him detailing his deeper thoughts on the matter, we can only theorize. It's complicated and that's why you can't just jump to conclusions using modern ethics when considering history. You're may be right, but you're making very definitive claims without anything solid to go on. tl;dr don't condemn the actions of someone when you can't factually validate your take. leave room for error and benefit of the doubt.
The bottom of a drained Mediterranean would be an uninhabitable deadly desert of death with temperatures over 160°F/71°C due to adiabatic heating, and the changes in weather and precipitation patterns would have horrific consequences both regionally and globally we can't even calculate.
The Germans wanted "Lebensraum" because they have historically looked at Slavic Jewish people as "untermenschen" basic history covered up by English language pro-German propaganda@@MegaBuildsYT
@@sexgod6909 according to the paper by Chen et al. BMC Genomics (2017) 18:655 DOI 10.1186/s12864-017-4037-3 we a re still talking about 2% germination in water with 0.8% NaCl concentration: the average for seawater is 3.5%. May work, may take time.
A Soviet agricultural projects drained the Aral sea. Hundreds of km2 turned into the nastiest kind of desert, bringing fierce winds and deadly salty sandstorms to everything around it.
As long as it would take to remove tens of thousands of cubic km of salt that extend downward more that 10km below the bottom of the sea. In other words, about the same time as people in Hades get a supply of ice water.
I'll mention that in 1940, Germany's population was around 70 million, compared to 83 million today. One can imagine that the prospects of 'overpopulation' might have *seemed* very real to people back then - there were fewer high rise buildings/apartment blocks, and food production wasn't as effective as it is today. Anyway, this plan, if realized, would've been a disaster for the planet, flooding other parts of the world, destroying cities and submerging islands, the list goes on.
I don't think they only seemed real. They were in a completly different situation than us Germans today, 1. There died a lot of people in WW2 what cleared a lot of space. 2. Many people were not born because of WW2 3. In 1920 nobody could predict that our population will sudenly stagnate after 1970 as this was a never before seen event If the opulation would have grown as it did back in 1920, we would easily have around 145 milion people here in Germany.....
I dunno about draining the Mediterranian, but that whole plan to irrigate the Sahara does sound interesting, yes lives would be disrupted down south but if the desert could become habitable again it would add way more living space to make up for it (at least in theory).
To fix the sahara, you'd have to kick out all of the muslims that invaded & conquered Africa & turned it into a desert hellscape, compared to the lush grasslands it used to have along the coast under Roman rule & earlier. Muslims aren't farmers who know how to tend the land, they are herders which ultimately destroys land & turns it into desert.
In 1900 there were 140 million people in Africa. The population of Europe at that time was 300 million. Basically he was talking about the unpopulated unused areas of Africa not the overpopulated 1.3 Billion people in Africa today so it wasn't the same issue.
And what right you have in our continent?! Least entitled European, this is the crux of the world's problems, including Palestine now!! Europeans so entitled they made Palestine pay for European sins against the Jews.
1.3 Billion people in Africa over such a HUGE continent is hardly overpopulation. Why do ppl love to point fingers at Africa when the overpopulation really exists elsewhere
@@dagmarbubolz7999 overpopulation is a myth, nearly all countries have trouble to hold their current population, and even in African countries like Nigeria, the new middle classe don't want more as two kids. The population is in decline, at the moment we don't see it in the data, bcs people get older, but as soon as we lost our elderly people we will face a decline!
@@dagmarbubolz7999 that would be bc it went from 140 million to almost 10x that in 100 years. It's over populated for what it can support based on the infrastructure there or is that too hard for you to understand
You would find tons of gold and historical treasures. People have been sailing the Mediterranean for over 3'000 years now and were transporting precious metals back and forward all the time, a lot of this ships sunk for various reasons. Of course I'm not "pro draining the Mediterranean" by any means, just saying.
I'd love to see more videos about other unrealized mega-projects from the past, such as the plan to flood the Qatara Depression in Egypt or the plan to build a second Atlantic/Pacific canal in Nicaragua using nukes to dig it.
I've always been fascinated by the Qatara Depression project. And the fact that back in the day nuclear blasts for engineering was a perfectly fine idea.
A Soviet agricultural projects drained the Aral sea. Hundreds of km2 turned into the nastiest kind of desert, bringing fierce winds and deadly salty sandstorms to everything around it.
This phenomenon of dependence of Mediterrian on the waters of Atlantic Ocean can be used for tidal power generation. This will help massively in increasing the renewable energy production in Europe
Putting a hydro power station at the strait of Gibraltar still sounds like a pretty good idea. The water that flows in to replace evaporation may as well be utilised somehow. It's not as if the water would be prevented from flowing in as first envisaged.
@@TehButterflyEffect so, it sounds like it faces the same kinds of problems as getting energy from the tides: even though there's technically a *huge* amount of energy that could be gained from it, it's just not feasible to turn it into electricity?
10:40; irony! Now, those same Africans are pouring into Europe because they haven’t found a way to survive without the colonialism that they fought against so bitterly….
I was about to say switch that saying to “not wanting a stream of Africans coming into the continent” and you’d be crucified within seconds. And it reminded me of a saying “You know what they had in Zimbabwe before fire? Electricity”
1:00 and 11:28 maps are quite inaccurate (for Interwar period): 1. Ireland is unified (or is still under British rule) 2. Germany doesn't own (southern) Prussia 3. Finland doesn't own Karelia, Salla and Petsamo 4. Belarus and Ukraine are independent 5. Soviet Union doesn't own Caucasus (Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan) 6. Turkey seems to have lost Turkisth War of Independence and got even more carved up than it was supposed to be 7. Lithuania owns Vilnius
@danielbenson9942 Bro Hitler and the nazis didn't rise to power in Germany till the mid-1930s same with the idea of lebensraum, and the first world war ended in 1918. You cont your timeline completely messed up.
@@danielbenson9942 Here's what borders of Finland looked like in 1920-1940: fi.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiedosto:Finland_%281920-1940%29_location_map.svg and borders of Poland, Germany and Soviet Unio looked like during 1920s and 30s: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Rzeczpospolita_1937.svg
Yes, the Doggerland restoration! It's not just about sea control. They were projecting plans to drain it, bringing the Dogger Banks back to dry land as the were in the Mesolithic. One dam would shut off the English Channel. Canals would keep the ports on some rivers like the Thames, Rhine, etc. in contact with the sea. I've seen maps of the plan.
I wonder why Sörgel didn't consider closing the Baltic sea by dams through Denmark. After all, it's closer to Germany. Maybe he understood how Kiel would have a problem with that idea, while ignoring the problems of, say, Marseille.
A Soviet agricultural projects drained the Aral sea. Hundreds of km2 turned into the nastiest kind of desert, bringing fierce winds and deadly salty sandstorms to everything around it.
A Soviet agricultural projects drained the Aral sea. Hundreds of km2 turned into the nastiest kind of desert, bringing fierce winds and deadly salty sandstorms to everything around it.
No one knows that there is a tectonic fault right in the middle!? And it's moving?! Making a video about this is omitting this fact is even worse than the original idea.
Honestly, the historical and archeological mysteries we could uncover and perhaps answer could alone make this a compelling idea. Imagine all the treasures and artifacts and lost civilisations that litter the seafloor.
You should imagine the lost civilizations Spain, Italy, Malta, Sicily, Greece and Turkey buried under the dunes Sahara desert then expanded to border of Germany
That was an insane project but another insane project has also been considered and that is to drain out the Baltic Sea by building dams or walls between the UK and Norway in the north and UK and Netherlands in the south.
Before the last ice age the island of Great Britain was connected to both Norway, France and what is now Belgium and the Netherlands. The North Sea was an inland salt water lake.
Yes!They really think about that!!Its just crazy!That would be a very low "polder"!!I am living in the polder they talked about as a example,but it is massive already and takes a lot of time to put into reality !
given the flow from Atlantic to the Mediterranean I am surprised the lack of effort to use all that flow with undersea current generation techniques. there is a wave generation system for Gibraltar
Damming the Mediterranean would have global environmental consequences that Sörgel never understood. The newly drained land area would have been hot salt flats, not only useless for farming be it would have raised the surrounding temperature of Southern Europe to an unbearable degree. This would have turned Europe as a whole into a hot and dry desert, and sand and salt kicked up would spread across continents further running their capacity to support human life. Sörgel thought his plan would have saved humanity from war, he didn't foresee that it would have doomed humanity by altering the global climate.
lets not forget that adding all that water from the Med into the rest of the earth's oceans would raise sea levels significantly, so this is a HIGHLY dubious proposition.
Not by much but enough for it to be a bad idea for that reason alone, less water evaporation and rainfall would be even worse and the best way by far for transportation of goods are by ship making the idea crazy
One of the reasons for the success of Europeans is that the European cost line is much longer than Africa despite Europe being much smaller, and the many nice port spots and navigable rivers Europe has compared to Africa which the Mediterranean coast and water evaporation which as stated in the video higher than all the rivers flowing into it, even though the Nile River also flows into it, one of the main reasons Europe is a sweet spot is because of all the water nearby wherever you are in Europe compared to most places. The inability for people like him to understand the consequences of this ideas makes his ideas as deadly as the “Great Leap Forward” in China, which were like this idea meant to improve people’s lives, but instead it was 5 times as deadly as the holocaust 6 million deaths, the Great Leap Forward cost the lives of 30 million people in a few years period, and almost all the birds in China were killed because a Communist can do nothing wrong = blame someone or something else, and a few % of their diet was human food, but almost all was insects like grasshoppers or locust, which you probably can figure out what happened when they didn’t have their natural enemies to eat them 😮 not a lot of food left for smart bird killers, who didn’t have the ability to self criticism or predict what consequences there actions would bring. The road to hell is paved with good intentions as they say. Of course only if you can’t think what are the likely consequences of your actions, good intentions are not inherently bad, people who think they are good and right because they have good intentions are the dangerous ones.
I have to counter argue Sorgel's plan and say it's a bad idea; dams are a blockade of cargo ships and if Atlantropa drains the Mediterranean, it would not only put the Suez Canal out of commission, but force European cargo ships to find another route to trade with Eastern Asia.
The question unasked here, is what do you do with that volume of water? Displacing that much water would only cause more problems than any benefits of the dam. Not to mention the inconceivable ecological damage it would have caused. 😅
4:20 He didn’t want to wait for another tectonic plates movement, but what did he think would happen, if they did after the dam was built? It could have flooded entire cities with a 100m water tide.
There seems to always be a crazy engineer that wants to do something absolutely unhinged. Another dude wanted to fill the San Francisco bay. They sound novel until you see the catastrophic effects, like with the Aral sea.
Dan Simmons sci-fi saga Ilium-Oliympos also depicts in some chapters a far future Mediterranean Sea, drained and used as huge food producing land...and many evil surprises. Recommended.
I crossed the straight of Gibraltar from Spain to Morrocco and back on a ferry. It took about an hour or so to cross each time. It would probably cost way more than $1 trillion as the majority of megaprojects seems to go overbudget.
From what I had seen, when the Mediterranean basin was naturally cut off from the Atlantic in prehistory, its climate was rather similar to Death Valley, but on a massive scale. This projet may have created a lot of land, but whether it would be useful as living space is a different matter.
Hi, Sir. Great video. Thanks a lot for the hardwork you have put in to make this wonderful video. Just a request: Can you make a video about what would happen to Europe and Africa if this was constructed? Like, for example: the economic impact, environmental impacts, etc. Can you give your opinion, Sir? Thank you, Sir👍. Great video❤.
there was a video on youtube that talked about what would happen and basically all it would do was make North Africa and all of the Mediterranean a massive desert and ruin the nations that were on the coast
Cody from AlternateHistoryHub actually wrote a fiction book, The Atlantropa Articles, set in a world where this project was actually completed. Might be worth checking out if you want to see more speculation over the possible impacts of this plan
If you give everyone 100m2 of space you can still fit the worldpopulation in 60 percent of Alaska territory. So its nonsense that the world is overpopulated.
The problem is not room to stand up and walk around. Food production is the issue. Since you mentioned Alaska _ how much of the land there is suitable for agriculture ? If you allow for cold, heat, drought, elevation, erosion, roads and cities, forests, rivers and lakes, only a small part of the land on earth is farmable.
If water is still flowing into the Med from the Atlantic because of evaporation, it should still be possible to harness that current to generate power without needing to dam it. There's this portable gizmo you can buy right now which is basically a propeller connected to a generator. You put this thing into running water and it generates power to charge your phone or run a lamp. It can also run on wind power if needed. I'm thinking a much scaled-up version of these could be strung across the Gibraltar strait and generate huge amounts of power to service both Europe and Africa. And it could easily be done in such a way that it would not negatively impact the environment or shipping.
“Not everybody liked these proposals. In hindsight, they represented the colonialist tone in Europe at the time and didn’t take into account the people who already lived in Africa. People who didn’t want a stream of Europeans flowing into the continent and claiming the land as their own…” Swap these roles around and everyone would cry racism despite that being exactly what’s happening right now on an absolutely gigantic scale. *Oh* the irony!
Really depends on which year he is talking about uk.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A3%D0%BA%D1%80%D0%B0%D1%97%D0%BD%D1%81%D1%8C%D0%BA%D0%B0_%D0%9D%D0%B0%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B4%D0%BD%D0%B0_%D0%A0%D0%B5%D1%81%D0%BF%D1%83%D0%B1%D0%BB%D1%96%D0%BA%D0%B0
@@ziggity7851 actually the map is not a real map. It looks like a mixture between pre ww1 and post ww2. Pre ww1, there were no Poland or baltics or Balkan countries. All the north east countries of Europe were Russia, all the south east European countries were Austria-Hungary (not all but most of them). The map of Europe in the 1880s was also different..
What the video completely fails to mention are the ecological consequences of this project. For example, that the newly reclaimed land and the surrounding area would have become so hot and dry that it would not have been habitable anyway. Or that the global sea level would have risen by 10 meters.
But.....why would the seas rise? The water is evaporated. Gone! This question is to give you an idea of what it would be like for scientists to have to try to explain to politicians and the public what the problems connected with a crazy scheme like this are.
Considering that such a mega project is still impossible shows that humanity still has to advance a lot before hallucinating about becoming interplanetary and interstellar species. Means more advancements in construction engineering and materials engineering is required so that such seemingly impossible megaprojects are very much possible to build and sustain.
It's possible. Highly impractical and very difficult to do but we could actually do it if we actually got multiple countries working together. We shouldn't though
Railroad Tycoon 2 has similar scenarios to play out: damming the Med and a central power station in Spain. While fun scenarios, not easy, you begin to realize that all that water had to go somewhere, but sea levels stayed the same as pre-dam levels. A few other "points" crop up as well.
Tectonic plates would have said Nah to the dams at the straight of Gibraltar. The moment those plates would shift would mean the massive re-flooding of all those colonized areas. It would likely have been the biggest catastrophe in death toll seen on this earth.
We might need a dam like this to keep the level in the Mediterranean constant and could also produce a lot of energy. This dam might be far less cheaper than to create a dam for each city around the Mediterranean sea.
There would be massive environmental impact besides the already mentioned risk of dam failure and resulting catastrophic flooding. But still the beauty of the plan is in its boldness.
"and people from Europe could more easily move into Africa" ... I think we all know that would not be the direction of travel and that it would not be Europeans filling up this new land.
Completely idiotic, creating a massive desert where no one can live and destroying millions of people living near the old coast does not exactly help make new living room
Do you think humanity could build a dam of this size? 🤔
no
yes i think in next century maybe
Yeah, we could. But we are not gonna
sounds like another Aral sea disaster but much worse
yeah, but it would not be good for us
Death Valley in California comes to mind seeing this video. The place is hot, dry, nice to visit and nice to leave. The world does not need more deserts.
That's natural . Now the Salton Sea to the south of there in its current state is a man made disaster
Yeah and Europe doesn't need more people walking in from Africa or the middle east, thank goodness this was never done.
They cant displace that much water now , it would raze global water height / flood modern coastal + river dwellings / places all over earth . They would have to blow trenches in Russia Siberia Antarctic northern Canada to hold the water inland in huge man made lakes that would freeze/not evaporate.
It wouldn’t be a desert. It wove land you could grow crops.
The enviromental impact alone would be crazy. Could you imagine how it would change weather patterns?
Nature causes its natural disasters by itself. I see no harm in humanity causing a "natural disaster" to avoid famine, economic crisis and wars. It is better to build a dam in the Mediterranean than to go back to the Middle Ages or the Stone Age.
yes i guess impact could be much more danger than we ever thaught
@@AnimeAne-fo8iz Better to do than not do. If humanity does not develop its means of production, it will die. Better to do than go back to the middle ages.
People believed god made earth for human still many
What about ocean level rise due to Mediterranean water going to the ocean? What about the land being useless due to being salted from the evaporated sea?
"The Sahara desert isn't large enough, let's expand it some more" is quite the take.
"Oh wait, there is too much desert. Let's build another humungous dam to solve the problem and create another sea."
Not only that, but the loss of that large a body of water would damage Europe's climate drastically. And the newly exposed sea bottom would be an enormous salt flat with temps hotter than the Dead Sea.
I'm no meteorologist but I think the global wind patterns are such that the Mediterranean gets most of its wind from the west. That's where the Atlantic ocean is, so it would be very humid. It would mostly not expand the Sahara. The climate would probably be similar to France or Italy in the northern regions, though the southern regions would be more like North Africa, of course.
The reason the Sahara is so dry is that it gets most of its wind from the East, which is pretty much entirely covered by land. The wind is extremely dry for most of the year so it rarely rains in the Sahara. This wind continues traveling westward and eventually reaches the Amazon rainforest. Lots of sand/dust/minerals get carried to the Amazon this way and contributes to its fertility.
The worst part of this plan is the fact that it will take millennia for the newly exposed land to develop into anything useful. The amount of salt in the ground is going to be a huge issue. The Mediterranean is about 900,000 cubic miles of ocean water. Ocean water has about 120 million tons of salt per cubic mile. All of that salt is just going to be sitting on top of the ground when the water melts away. I haven't actually watched the video yet so I don't know if they have a plan to deal with the salt but I can't imagine it's a good plan.
Oh, and that doesn't mention the risk of building things below sea level. It's like New Orleans except one million times the size. So, a pretty terrible idea all around.
I heard that they want to nuke bomb on deserts for creating a large lake.
I think they would still let all the river water still come into the "lake" : )
In XX century Soviet agricultural megaprojects drained Aral sea, almost killing it. Hundreds of km2 turned into nastiest kind of desert, bringing fierce winds and deadly salty sandstorms to everything around. It was a gigantic disaster.
Now it's slowly recovering thanks to doing aftermath on complex hydrology in the region.
Very interesting, I never heard of that. I'll look into it.
It's only a part of the story. Those megaprojects have never gone away with the dissolution of the USSR. Now Uzbekistan is taking advantage of them. But Kazakhstan, of course, puts effort in refilling one part of the basin.
Yet you didn't mention that the Aral sea used to dry out in the past. 400 years ago the Amudaria river flowed into the Caspian sea instead. This branch is Called Uzboy.
@@HoundGrinwell it was natural process but in 20th century it was man made , yes unfortunately Uzbekistan ca not afford stop using those canals for cotton irrigation , I wonder if Kazakhstan could make a wall and separate aral sea and try to restore their part
It drained after privatization happened. If you don't maintain something it will wither.
Also there is a project to feed Aral with Ob river 😊.
@@pauldruhg2992 well it is man made because of the canals and they took to much water from it because USSR needed cotton I think it was because egypt decided to not to sell their cotton to soviets.
1) land around the Mediterranean won't get any rainfall because of zero precipitation
2) reclaimed land will turn into another desert expanding sahara
3) countries dependent on the sea ports, fishing and coastal tourism would lose everything
4)dam which is going to be made out of steel and concrete, will have to face corrosion from sea water and stresses from untameable ocean currents
5) inorder to build a dam, the Mediterranean sea has to be diverted to the sahara, causing major drawbacks to the livelihood, p0is0ning the groundwater reserves, causing desert to emerge as a sea itself.
6) middle eastern countries heavily relied on desalination plants will find themselves living in a uninhabitable place.
7) no countries in this planet can source in raw materials in such large quantity, to fill the seas that extends to a kilometer depth
Only plausible method is to build group of islands, just like china did in the south china sea and join these group of islands step by step fully closing the gap of gibraltar
But half the europe wont get rainfall, when Mediterranean dries up, and cargo ships have to traverse circumventing africa increasing the cost of life.
The land reclaimed will be full of brine pools and salty marshes making the living impossible for thousands of years
Yeah I guess destroying the entire Mediterranean region just to have more desert might be a bad idea, but maybe we could still dam the Black sea, just as a little treat?
In fact that might even be good just to desalinate the Black sea and de-stratify it so the depths could have life, although I don't know how long it would take for all the salt to diffuse out of such a serious stratification, probably hundreds of years at least unless you pipe one of the inflows to the sea floor, but you would at least get a fair bit of the depth back quite quickly.
That new land would be ridiculously low in elevation, and absurdly, blazingly hot. It would also disrupt pretty much every coastal community in the Mediterranean.
Not to mention fundamentally altering the climate and weather. Warm up travelling up from Africa is responsible for a lot of Europe's rainfall. What would happen we are already fairly sure of because the African continent is already pushing into Europe, as that happens most of continental Europe will become a desert. Fortunately we'll never see it because it will take millions of years.
YES, JUST LIKE THE AMERICAN DESERT IN THE SOUTHWEST,
@@darthwiizius Well,we could easily cope with a lot less rain than today with all that rain we have already in the past few years!
@@jooproos6559
Didn't the Rhein almost dry up recently? I live on a island in the North Atlantic (Britain) so rain comes with the territory most of the time.
What about the Suez Canal and all the rivers flow into the Mediterranean Sea it would need continual pumping etc unless his plan was to use the water to hydrate the Sahara
Mr. Sorgel was clearly smoking some seriously good stuff.
and he was allowed out of the mental hospital to promote it (was he sponsored by shrinks)
My thoughts exactly. Did the first person he suggested this to not give him the are you mad look?
it was a different time that allowed dreaming big,
the mediterian part is crap, but i wonder now if damming the congo river REALLY would have gotten some kind of big lake right into the sahara dessert...
now that this mean disrupting so many african countries with all citizen that can't move freely between those african states this can not work..
but in total, making the sahara green by forcing a huge lake next to it..
could you use a huge pipe system to get a big chunk of water from a central african river to really only guide the lake creating right into the border region of the sahara... ?? could that actually work...
that way you wouldn't also flood unimaginable areas of rain forest and fertille savana, that lake size really looked.. ridiculous!
and you would also not influence local weather paterns that extreme, as a suddes huge lake could influence it..
at leaqst 10.000 times more manageble to try and build and 1000 km pipeline guiding some pretty big fresh water feed from big central african river then it would be to try and dam the mediterian.
PS, video was a bit disappointing, climate science clearly would link a 200 meter below sea level cimate to simular climat conditions as death valley ... and the entire climate around the mediterinian would become so much dryer with less sea to start evaporation from... complete disaster..
so the more you limet all to huge changes, on places that are climate wise really okay right now, the better!
Man you ain't lying. Dude is crazy.
@@JeroenJA Sahara is so large I doubt building few pipelines from a central african river would prove adequate.
More likely that there'd have to be hundreds, if not thousands, of desalination plants all around the coast of northern Africa, connected to vast water infrastructure to turn Sahara green once more
people today '' no you can't build this building 15m higher, it disrupts sun and local arhitecture''
people 100 years ago *LET'S DAM THE MEDITERANEAN SEA*
This is the reason that London has such wacky tall buildings, nothing's allowed to be built that blocks the view to St Paul's cathedral nor can it overshadow it. Hence all the weird shapes and lack of skyscrapers, though why one is being built in the shape of a sex toy...
XD
Good spelling 😂😂😂
and thats why people today are paying for the mistakes of the people from the past. like the invention of plastic and the stupid smart phone
@@rumaanahadjee7349 what?
xD
plastic itself isn't a problem.
it's the way we did (not) dispose of it
Thank goodness they solved the space problem by building up instead of drainging the entire Med sea! What a crazy idea
No, they solved the space problem by solving the overpopulation problem. They just... over-corrected....
I'm glad this guy was in the past. Insane.
You didn't mention the most obvious criticism of such a plan: Creating two shrunken hyper-saline seas at the bottom of the world's newest and biggest death valley which will by proximity cause heating and drying of adjacent former coastal lands lowering precipitation causing desertification would be a disaster rather than of any benefit.
Levels of the lakes would be maintained through the dams.
@@johnburns4017but the lakes would be dead, due to the salinity.
@@DinoAlberini
The point was the levels.
@@johnburns4017 fair enough
money
"Sir, I have a cunning plan."
"What is it, Baldrick?"
"What if we sawed the Rock of Gibraltar in half and dropped it across the Strait? Then we could drain the Mediterranean Sea so any European could walk to Africa."
"Or any African could walk to Europe."
"I didn't think of that."
"Naturally you didn't. Next you'll be suggesting we excavate an underground passage between England and France and call it the Chunnel."
"No sir, I'm not that crazy."
you mean all the poor Africans could walk to Europe.
@@johnduch2815 Well, the poor ones can't afford to drive or ride.
Well, there's not only Africans in France. A few frenchmen are left.
@thePronto Looks like YT took down my response. Now I know why they banned me from posting for 24 hours. 🏴☠
🎵 "Black AAAAdder, Black AAAAdder, With many a cunning plan!" 🎵🎵
The problem with big and ambitious projects is that the bigger they are, the more problems they cause, and more problems there are, the more likely they are not to be solved.
Does not have to be so. As long as the project actually makes sense from the get go. But problem is with most big projects these days they do not make sense as they are often created by people with highly inflated egos such as dictators.
This one is big and ambitiously stupid
@@kidandresu We really need to make sure liberals don't hear about it then.
Most likely get half built and then just abandoned.
They may have to build it just to maintain the status quo in the Mediterranean especially if the collapse of the remaining glaciers on Earth is imminent
One aspect you failed to address is the very salty Mediterranean sea would result in highly salty land, not fertile, and an even saltier sea that would kill most of the fish. Al this would result in more downsides than benefits.
And no one was conscious of the balance of nature.
Yes, that is what happened to Aral sea.
To be fair, the congo dam would solve a lot of the water problems across many countries in Africa. But its an absurdly expensive project that a world power would struggle to achieve, much less a third world country in Africa.
Every criticism aside (all of which are valid), I'll give the guy credit for trying to come up with a plan to better the world. It was wildly messed up, but he had good intentions.
Path to hell is paved with good intentions
@@ticks60You beat me to this very quote.
He had no intention of making the world a better place, only for Germany.
He ignored the cause which was - Wealth inequality and resultant unsustainable wealth inequality. He had no qualms about Germany invading other countries to get that space.
We want to fix Socio/Economic problems, We get a Socio/Economics expert not an architect.
Besides all the other problems only the super rich benefit from massive poverty because people will naturally be desperate to do anything to change their economic situation... into which the wealthy ruling elite for thousands of years know how to exploit.
@@AdmiralBison thinking on a global scale wasn't as much of a thing back then. We have to allow for the way people of the past thought in these assessments. He wanted to make things better for his country and to avoid war. Those are admirable things. It is true that it was all to the benefit of his homeland and at the expense of others, but how can you take into account these factors when you spent your entire life in a world and culture that didn't really do that? You and I think on a global scale and are quick to consider the impact on people far away because we are primed to do so by culture as well as the ability to rapidly spread news to anywhere in the world.
At the same time it would not be unreasonable to expect him to consider the locals during his project. The point here is that unless we have any explicit writings or recordings from him detailing his deeper thoughts on the matter, we can only theorize. It's complicated and that's why you can't just jump to conclusions using modern ethics when considering history. You're may be right, but you're making very definitive claims without anything solid to go on.
tl;dr don't condemn the actions of someone when you can't factually validate your take. leave room for error and benefit of the doubt.
No, results matter lol
The bottom of a drained Mediterranean would be an uninhabitable deadly desert of death with temperatures over 160°F/71°C due to adiabatic heating, and the changes in weather and precipitation patterns would have horrific consequences both regionally and globally we can't even calculate.
Probably have turned Northern Europe into a desert.
Just a moronic idea.
It would also be extremely salty, so any thought of arable land there would prove to be fantasy.
no matter heat lot, newermind, petter dry all mediterraine area water all off and delete many place. and move all water to sahara desert.
It is a bad idea, that sane people do not entertain for a second.
this would drastically affect my fishing season
😂
The Germans wanted "Lebensraum" because they have historically looked at Slavic Jewish people as "untermenschen"
basic history covered up by English language pro-German propaganda@@MegaBuildsYT
Ok, let’s cancel the project then. We will built 167 km line city in a desert instead
😂@@pompom6675
Exactly… same level of idiocy, different locations. I think they will now reduce it to about 2km.
I love the German ingenuity and the 'we can do it' mentality. Makes me proud to have it part of my background
Wir schaffen das. Millions of Syrians who don't have your attitude
Man is a Factorio engineer, way ahead of his time.
I am German and have not heard of this project until today. Thanks for the video
What stone have you been living under? A bunker?? You do know the war has ended right?
xD
@@2wheels1guy25
some library may have had this document only 100yrs back to scroll back
@@2wheels1guy25 There was zero need for that crap answer. This was the first time I'd heard it too.
This is up there with Trump's plan to nuke the hurriganes. Because hurriganes were not destructive enough without being radioactive.
I wonder how long it would have taken to desalinize the now-exposed bottom of the sea to a level suitable for any kind of agriculture.
Genetically modified crops would work just as the Chinese have proved with SEA RICE..
@@sexgod6909 according to the paper by Chen et al. BMC Genomics (2017) 18:655
DOI 10.1186/s12864-017-4037-3 we a re still talking about 2% germination in water with 0.8% NaCl concentration: the average for seawater is 3.5%. May work, may take time.
A Soviet agricultural projects drained the Aral sea. Hundreds of km2 turned into the nastiest kind of desert, bringing fierce winds and deadly salty sandstorms to everything around it.
As long as it would take to remove tens of thousands of cubic km of salt that extend downward more that 10km below the bottom of the sea. In other words, about the same time as people in Hades get a supply of ice water.
I believe they imagined they had a thousand years...
I'll mention that in 1940, Germany's population was around 70 million, compared to 83 million today. One can imagine that the prospects of 'overpopulation' might have *seemed* very real to people back then - there were fewer high rise buildings/apartment blocks, and food production wasn't as effective as it is today. Anyway, this plan, if realized, would've been a disaster for the planet, flooding other parts of the world, destroying cities and submerging islands, the list goes on.
I don't think they only seemed real. They were in a completly different situation than us Germans today,
1. There died a lot of people in WW2 what cleared a lot of space.
2. Many people were not born because of WW2
3. In 1920 nobody could predict that our population will sudenly stagnate after 1970 as this was a never before seen event If the opulation would have grown as it did back in 1920, we would easily have around 145 milion people here in Germany.....
Not the mention that out of those 83 million, about over 15 million are non Germans. Fear of overpopulation turned into fear of native depopulation.
70 million white people in 1940. Now there's only around 65 million white people in Germany. You have declined.
a desaster to the planet? I think the planet doesnt care if people can live on it.
4. Germany was bigger then.
I dunno about draining the Mediterranian, but that whole plan to irrigate the Sahara does sound interesting, yes lives would be disrupted down south but if the desert could become habitable again it would add way more living space to make up for it (at least in theory).
Irrigate, with what ? Salt water ?
Typical bonehead colonizer talk
@@sbkenn1 Congo river is fresh water
@@akneebreeated not nearly enough and places downstream need it.
To fix the sahara, you'd have to kick out all of the muslims that invaded & conquered Africa & turned it into a desert hellscape, compared to the lush grasslands it used to have along the coast under Roman rule & earlier. Muslims aren't farmers who know how to tend the land, they are herders which ultimately destroys land & turns it into desert.
Sörgal's project survived only through the TV series Man In The High Castle.
In 1900 there were 140 million people in Africa. The population of Europe at that time was 300 million. Basically he was talking about the unpopulated unused areas of Africa not the overpopulated 1.3 Billion people in Africa today so it wasn't the same issue.
today we need a wall around Europe!
And what right you have in our continent?!
Least entitled European, this is the crux of the world's problems, including Palestine now!! Europeans so entitled they made Palestine pay for European sins against the Jews.
1.3 Billion people in Africa over such a HUGE continent is hardly overpopulation. Why do ppl love to point fingers at Africa when the overpopulation really exists elsewhere
@@dagmarbubolz7999 overpopulation is a myth, nearly all countries have trouble to hold their current population, and even in African countries like Nigeria, the new middle classe don't want more as two kids. The population is in decline, at the moment we don't see it in the data, bcs people get older, but as soon as we lost our elderly people we will face a decline!
@@dagmarbubolz7999 that would be bc it went from 140 million to almost 10x that in 100 years. It's over populated for what it can support based on the infrastructure there or is that too hard for you to understand
Imagine all the archeological treasures
You would find tons of gold and historical treasures. People have been sailing the Mediterranean for over 3'000 years now and were transporting precious metals back and forward all the time, a lot of this ships sunk for various reasons. Of course I'm not "pro draining the Mediterranean" by any means, just saying.
....and looting hey.
I'd love to see more videos about other unrealized mega-projects from the past, such as the plan to flood the Qatara Depression in Egypt or the plan to build a second Atlantic/Pacific canal in Nicaragua using nukes to dig it.
She MegaProject Channel some are real some are just theories
I've always been fascinated by the Qatara Depression project. And the fact that back in the day nuclear blasts for engineering was a perfectly fine idea.
Random guy: *makes a hole in the dam*
The mediterranean:🌊🌊🌊
What a horrific idea.
Sorgel was truly a mad scientist!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
A Soviet agricultural projects drained the Aral sea. Hundreds of km2 turned into the nastiest kind of desert, bringing fierce winds and deadly salty sandstorms to everything around it.
@@benitofranklyn4237Why do you keep spamming that on every comment?
This phenomenon of dependence of Mediterrian on the waters of Atlantic Ocean can be used for tidal power generation. This will help massively in increasing the renewable energy production in Europe
Putting a hydro power station at the strait of Gibraltar still sounds like a pretty good idea. The water that flows in to replace evaporation may as well be utilised somehow. It's not as if the water would be prevented from flowing in as first envisaged.
The water "flows" at such a small rate that it wouldn't generate a meaningful amount of energy.
Imagine how much force would pushing onto the dam from the atlantic side
@@TehButterflyEffect so, it sounds like it faces the same kinds of problems as getting energy from the tides: even though there's technically a *huge* amount of energy that could be gained from it, it's just not feasible to turn it into electricity?
Let’s shrink the wealthy coastline and make a desert. Genius.
10:40; irony! Now, those same Africans are pouring into Europe because they haven’t found a way to survive without the colonialism that they fought against so bitterly….
I was about to say switch that saying to “not wanting a stream of Africans coming into the continent” and you’d be crucified within seconds. And it reminded me of a saying “You know what they had in Zimbabwe before fire? Electricity”
@ or…The right to vote for someone other than Mugabe, an army that could win or… farms that actually fed the continent ….you nailed it tho!
1:00 and 11:28 maps are quite inaccurate (for Interwar period):
1. Ireland is unified (or is still under British rule)
2. Germany doesn't own (southern) Prussia
3. Finland doesn't own Karelia, Salla and Petsamo
4. Belarus and Ukraine are independent
5. Soviet Union doesn't own Caucasus (Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan)
6. Turkey seems to have lost Turkisth War of Independence and got even more carved up than it was supposed to be
7. Lithuania owns Vilnius
Bro, I saw the first map and instantly needed to see if anyone else talked about it, and now there's more at 11:28?😭
I'm by no means an expert on the exact borders but the map looks pretty good for the early 1920s. Which is the period that this video is about.
@danielbenson9942 Bro Hitler and the nazis didn't rise to power in Germany till the mid-1930s same with the idea of lebensraum, and the first world war ended in 1918. You cont your timeline completely messed up.
@@danielbenson9942 Here's what borders of Finland looked like in 1920-1940: fi.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiedosto:Finland_%281920-1940%29_location_map.svg and borders of Poland, Germany and Soviet Unio looked like during 1920s and 30s: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Rzeczpospolita_1937.svg
what are you even talking about ^^ the maps and the project arent new proposals from today...
Make a video about the people who want to drain the Baltic sea and the North sea. Those plans are quite recent!
Those plans are not about draining the sea but to subdue it.
Yes, the Doggerland restoration! It's not just about sea control. They were projecting plans to drain it, bringing the Dogger Banks back to dry land as the were in the Mesolithic.
One dam would shut off the English Channel. Canals would keep the ports on some rivers like the Thames, Rhine, etc. in contact with the sea. I've seen maps of the plan.
I wonder why Sörgel didn't consider closing the Baltic sea by dams through Denmark. After all, it's closer to Germany. Maybe he understood how Kiel would have a problem with that idea, while ignoring the problems of, say, Marseille.
Yeah, lets bring back Doggerland 😆
A Soviet agricultural projects drained the Aral sea. Hundreds of km2 turned into the nastiest kind of desert, bringing fierce winds and deadly salty sandstorms to everything around it.
Imagine thinking the world would say "Yeah, we don't need shipping through the Med, let's turn it into a giant desert".
There would still be shipping through the lower sea levels and just need locks to raise and lower the ships
A Soviet agricultural projects drained the Aral sea. Hundreds of km2 turned into the nastiest kind of desert, bringing fierce winds and deadly salty sandstorms to everything around it.
@@benitofranklyn4237 At least the Soviets didn't go through with the plan of turning Siberia in a land of dammed lakes ...
@@rick149ou They wanted to do what? I'll look into it. They once turned Nazino Island in Siberia into an island full of cannibals tho.
@1:00 Lol, putting Finland, Sweden in this population explosion map is hilarious... 😂😂😂
We all know why Europe needs a sea between it and Africa…
We do?
@ Well, maybe not you…
@@AereForst Then your statement is inaccurate. Care to explain?
@ Whatever floats your boat
@@wolfdogalsatian I should rephrase my original statement: We all know why you’re prefers a sea between it and Africa.
So I finally can retake the sunglasses I lost last summer
Politicians and engineers can't even agree on a bridge from Spain to Morocco
wonder why 🫣
Usefull for corrupt people and politicians.
@@alexandredacunha4224shut up
Given the current events I'd say that bridge would be a VERY bad idea
what's the benefit of such a bridge for Europe?
I'm Greek and I don't want to to stop going to my beloved sea 🥰
If you pre buy I bet you would a great deal on future beachfront. You can buy several plots then sell them to build a house.
No one knows that there is a tectonic fault right in the middle!? And it's moving?! Making a video about this is omitting this fact is even worse than the original idea.
Honestly, the historical and archeological mysteries we could uncover and perhaps answer could alone make this a compelling idea. Imagine all the treasures and artifacts and lost civilisations that litter the seafloor.
You should imagine the lost civilizations Spain, Italy, Malta, Sicily, Greece and Turkey buried under the dunes Sahara desert then expanded to border of Germany
It would have turned into a huge desert.
What???
more like a big dry Salt Lake
That was an insane project but another insane project has also been considered and that is to drain out the Baltic Sea by building dams or walls between the UK and Norway in the north and UK and Netherlands in the south.
Before the last ice age the island of Great Britain was connected to both Norway, France and what is now Belgium and the Netherlands. The North Sea was an inland salt water lake.
Yes!They really think about that!!Its just crazy!That would be a very low "polder"!!I am living in the polder they talked about as a example,but it is massive already and takes a lot of time to put into reality !
you mean the North Sea... Baltic is east of Denmark
given the flow from Atlantic to the Mediterranean I am surprised the lack of effort to use all that flow with undersea current generation techniques. there is a wave generation system for Gibraltar
The Austrian painter painting his own world rn
This is a GREAT idea !
No country wants to be land locked.
This feels like a reference to a certain mod for a certain game.
Where a ancient kingdom returns as a freaky state
Where someone wants you to verify your clock
Does anyone wanna eat some Streng-Geheim-Os.
The brain rot is real
I wouldn’t want to be anywhere near that dam blocking the Mediterranean Sea if it was real and it collapsed..
But imagine the wave you could ride 🏄
Error at 4:47 : Nurek Dam (304m high) is in Tadjikistan, not in China. In 2028 Rogoun Dam will reach 335m high, onthe same Vakhch river
WAIT, IS IT HECKIN' TNO REFERENCE?!????
As someone from Tunisia, i see this an absolute loss 😢
Damming the Mediterranean would have global environmental consequences that Sörgel never understood. The newly drained land area would have been hot salt flats, not only useless for farming be it would have raised the surrounding temperature of Southern Europe to an unbearable degree. This would have turned Europe as a whole into a hot and dry desert, and sand and salt kicked up would spread across continents further running their capacity to support human life. Sörgel thought his plan would have saved humanity from war, he didn't foresee that it would have doomed humanity by altering the global climate.
lets not forget that adding all that water from the Med into the rest of the earth's oceans would raise sea levels significantly, so this is a HIGHLY dubious proposition.
Not by much but enough for it to be a bad idea for that reason alone, less water evaporation and rainfall would be even worse and the best way by far for transportation of goods are by ship making the idea crazy
One of the reasons for the success of Europeans is that the European cost line is much longer than Africa despite Europe being much smaller, and the many nice port spots and navigable rivers Europe has compared to Africa which the Mediterranean coast and water evaporation which as stated in the video higher than all the rivers flowing into it, even though the Nile River also flows into it, one of the main reasons Europe is a sweet spot is because of all the water nearby wherever you are in Europe compared to most places. The inability for people like him to understand the consequences of this ideas makes his ideas as deadly as the “Great Leap Forward” in China, which were like this idea meant to improve people’s lives, but instead it was 5 times as deadly as the holocaust 6 million deaths, the Great Leap Forward cost the lives of 30 million people in a few years period, and almost all the birds in China were killed because a Communist can do nothing wrong = blame someone or something else, and a few % of their diet was human food, but almost all was insects like grasshoppers or locust, which you probably can figure out what happened when they didn’t have their natural enemies to eat them 😮 not a lot of food left for smart bird killers, who didn’t have the ability to self criticism or predict what consequences there actions would bring.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions as they say.
Of course only if you can’t think what are the likely consequences of your actions, good intentions are not inherently bad, people who think they are good and right because they have good intentions are the dangerous ones.
I have to counter argue Sorgel's plan and say it's a bad idea; dams are a blockade of cargo ships and if Atlantropa drains the Mediterranean, it would not only put the Suez Canal out of commission, but force European cargo ships to find another route to trade with Eastern Asia.
Damn, whattaguy Herman Sörgel! Great interesting video. Thank you.
I like how this guy didn’t really think of the ecological collapse that would occur.
He was a German... those don't think more than two steps in the future.
They didnt know about ecological problems..
@@virgiliustancu9293 cred ca nu ii cunosti pe nemti.
Neither "collapse" nor "problems". "Changes" is the word. Changes.
@@cristinabutasimon9159 Nemtii sunt niste criminali psihopati la scara industriala. Romanul fura la o masina, doua, neamtul fura la 10 milioane.
There was a novel made by Cody Franklin about the world if that project came to be. It’s called the Atlantropa Articles.
Wowser..❤❤
I was more intrigued about the congo dam to store freshwater. That could have serious positive developments
imagine the metal detecting opportunities that would have brought,,
Very interesting. Thank you.
The question unasked here, is what do you do with that volume of water? Displacing that much water would only cause more problems than any benefits of the dam. Not to mention the inconceivable ecological damage it would have caused. 😅
Agreed, it's impossible to imagine how many more problems this would create.
The best thing that ever happened to Africa was colonialism.
When the whites left, civilization left too.😂
I love to learn so thanks for the info!
Think of all the lost history under that sea. Also - once they drain it - think of the smell! And the toxic windstorms.
The Aral Sea was just a preview!
no matter smell, italy and etc countrys have lot smell now no matter if have more. good idea dry all area. no problem all other peoples.
4:20 He didn’t want to wait for another tectonic plates movement, but what did he think would happen, if they did after the dam was built? It could have flooded entire cities with a 100m water tide.
One simple word. Moran !!!
A project like would devastate the world in so many way.
HOLY FUCKING SHIT IS THAT A FUCKING FORMER TNO REFERENCE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!??????????????
HOLY FUCKING SHIT SOMEONE ELSE KNOWS TNO!!!!!!?????
There seems to always be a crazy engineer that wants to do something absolutely unhinged. Another dude wanted to fill the San Francisco bay. They sound novel until you see the catastrophic effects, like with the Aral sea.
was the Aral sea now the Aral salt flats
Dan Simmons sci-fi saga Ilium-Oliympos also depicts in some chapters a far future Mediterranean Sea, drained and used as huge food producing land...and many evil surprises. Recommended.
I crossed the straight of Gibraltar from Spain to Morrocco and back on a ferry. It took about an hour or so to cross each time. It would probably cost way more than $1 trillion as the majority of megaprojects seems to go overbudget.
From what I had seen, when the Mediterranean basin was naturally cut off from the Atlantic in prehistory, its climate was rather similar to Death Valley, but on a massive scale. This projet may have created a lot of land, but whether it would be useful as living space is a different matter.
I think they'd be able to do it. When humanity focuses on something they can achieve it. Nothing is impossible🤔🤔🤔
Just because u can do it doesnt mean u should do it
Hi, Sir.
Great video. Thanks a lot for the hardwork you have put in to make this wonderful video.
Just a request: Can you make a video about what would happen to Europe and Africa if this was constructed? Like, for example: the economic impact, environmental impacts, etc.
Can you give your opinion, Sir?
Thank you, Sir👍. Great video❤.
there was a video on youtube that talked about what would happen and basically all it would do was make North Africa and all of the Mediterranean a massive desert and ruin the nations that were on the coast
Cody from AlternateHistoryHub actually wrote a fiction book, The Atlantropa Articles, set in a world where this project was actually completed. Might be worth checking out if you want to see more speculation over the possible impacts of this plan
If you give everyone 100m2 of space you can still fit the worldpopulation in 60 percent of Alaska territory. So its nonsense that the world is overpopulated.
The problem is not room to stand up and walk around. Food production is the issue. Since you mentioned Alaska _ how much of the land there is suitable for agriculture ?
If you allow for cold, heat, drought, elevation, erosion, roads and cities, forests, rivers and lakes, only a small part of the land on earth is farmable.
If water is still flowing into the Med from the Atlantic because of evaporation, it should still be possible to harness that current to generate power without needing to dam it. There's this portable gizmo you can buy right now which is basically a propeller connected to a generator. You put this thing into running water and it generates power to charge your phone or run a lamp. It can also run on wind power if needed.
I'm thinking a much scaled-up version of these could be strung across the Gibraltar strait and generate huge amounts of power to service both Europe and Africa. And it could easily be done in such a way that it would not negatively impact the environment or shipping.
Average envy germanic of Mediterranean brothers
Not as good as my proposal to building a ladder to Mars.
Cocaine? What kind of drugs?
“Not everybody liked these proposals. In hindsight, they represented the colonialist tone in Europe at the time and didn’t take into account the people who already lived in Africa. People who didn’t want a stream of Europeans flowing into the continent and claiming the land as their own…”
Swap these roles around and everyone would cry racism despite that being exactly what’s happening right now on an absolutely gigantic scale.
*Oh* the irony!
1:13 this map is so wrong
Can you explain why?
@@sebastiansprotte2551
Belarus exists
Ukraine exists
Wrong Poland borders
No Ireland
No Free city of Danzig
And many others...
Really depends on which year he is talking about
uk.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A3%D0%BA%D1%80%D0%B0%D1%97%D0%BD%D1%81%D1%8C%D0%BA%D0%B0_%D0%9D%D0%B0%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B4%D0%BD%D0%B0_%D0%A0%D0%B5%D1%81%D0%BF%D1%83%D0%B1%D0%BB%D1%96%D0%BA%D0%B0
This is from 100+ years ago. This is what the borders looked like at this time. Did you listen to what he said before this?
@@ziggity7851 actually the map is not a real map. It looks like a mixture between pre ww1 and post ww2.
Pre ww1, there were no Poland or baltics or Balkan countries. All the north east countries of Europe were Russia, all the south east European countries were Austria-Hungary (not all but most of them).
The map of Europe in the 1880s was also different..
In IT, we have a concept called "single point of failure." That dam would be a HUGE single point of failure.
What separates animals from humans?The Mediterranean.
What the video completely fails to mention are the ecological consequences of this project. For example, that the newly reclaimed land and the surrounding area would have become so hot and dry that it would not have been habitable anyway. Or that the global sea level would have risen by 10 meters.
Very good comment. If the seas rise by even 5 M I got no idea how much coastal land and islands vanishing!
But.....why would the seas rise? The water is evaporated. Gone!
This question is to give you an idea of what it would be like for scientists to have to try to explain to politicians and the public what the problems connected with a crazy scheme like this are.
Considering that such a mega project is still impossible shows that humanity still has to advance a lot before hallucinating about becoming interplanetary and interstellar species. Means more advancements in construction engineering and materials engineering is required so that such seemingly impossible megaprojects are very much possible to build and sustain.
peste câteva sute de ani oricum planeta va fi de nerecunoscut față de ce este acum
It's possible. Highly impractical and very difficult to do but we could actually do it if we actually got multiple countries working together. We shouldn't though
Thankfully, nobody eats any fish from the Mediterranean
Lolol 😂 Touche!
Railroad Tycoon 2 has similar scenarios to play out: damming the Med and a central power station in Spain. While fun scenarios, not easy, you begin to realize that all that water had to go somewhere, but sea levels stayed the same as pre-dam levels. A few other "points" crop up as well.
Tectonic plates would have said Nah to the dams at the straight of Gibraltar. The moment those plates would shift would mean the massive re-flooding of all those colonized areas. It would likely have been the biggest catastrophe in death toll seen on this earth.
One could always build an ark. What a trickster THAT God was...is...whatever.
We might need a dam like this to keep the level in the Mediterranean constant and could also produce a lot of energy. This dam might be far less cheaper than to create a dam for each city around the Mediterranean sea.
This has to be the most self-centered architectural concept ever.
Definitely a narcissist!
@@alidabotes6264 Although he was to his credit thinking of ways to avoid war. Just a very misguided one.
The idea that you even think this was ever anything more than a german fever dream is amusing.
There would be massive environmental impact besides the already mentioned risk of dam failure and resulting catastrophic flooding. But still the beauty of the plan is in its boldness.
Continental drift would be a tough engineering problem to solve at Gibraltar.
Europe with its existing size did enough problems to the world.
"and people from Europe could more easily move into Africa" ... I think we all know that would not be the direction of travel and that it would not be Europeans filling up this new land.
Completely idiotic, creating a massive desert where no one can live and destroying millions of people living near the old coast does not exactly help make new living room
What I heard was an ambitious plan to build a mega-structure which would benefit one continent, not thinking about the other.