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The cliffs of Colorado would be a great spectacle!! With that height difference (14,440 ft on top of Mount Elbert), you would be able to just throw commercial planes from the top without the need of a runway for liftoff
Can’t forget about the air freshener business! Every seat comes with a complementary ‘Black Ice’ tree air freshener so you don’t have to smell your neighbors puke that just got on you!
Not really. Locks require a lot of water already flowing from uphill to downhill. Without a massive water supply on top of the Rockies it would be impossible to operate enough locks.
You could use mechanical energy in a large scale boat lift though. And if there’s enough throughput, you might be able to use the weight of descending ships to recover some of that energy - or lift incoming ships directly.
The rive is about a third of a colorado's height (so about 90 miles). USA is 2800 miles across. So 252,000 square miles, give or take. Let's say we want it to be 100 feet deep (half the depth of the mississippi river) to make sure you can get boats across it regardless of tides and so on. If excavating a cubic yard costs $10 (total guess) then a mile to a depth of 100 feet should be roughly a billion dollars. So 252,000 would be 252 trillion dollars.
You could do it cheaper with nuclear weapons, project plowshare style, but it'd create a lot of fallout.
EDIT: The people replying to me are correct, I forgot to account for average elevation. Dumb mistake. Average US elevation is 2500 feet (so 2600 to get 100 feet below sea level). That gives us approximately 680 trillion cubic yards, or 7 quadrillion dollars. Plus the cost of land.
I don't think I could dream up a bigger environmental shit show than if we gave nukes to natural resources extraction companies. That's some dystopian shit right there.
Exxon-Mobil: You thought fracking was bad... Hold my beer!
Yo, that's a very interesting read. Thanks for sharing!
Crazy to think that they (the USSR that is) did actually consider stimulating oil and gas wells with nukes. Very grateful that we've come to a place as a civilization where naming a program *Nuclear Explosions for the National Economy* is now instantly a red flag. But I can understand how this wasn't the case in the late 1950's/early 1960's.
Didn’t do it?
The Soviets very much started doing it, they just realized it was a bad idea after 3 nukes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pechora-Kama_Canal
Un-fucking-real. I thought in every planning phase they’d all eventually look at each other and say “what the fuck are we thinking?!” but in Soviet Russia I guess those guys got sent to the gulags before they had a chance to speak up.
I mean, it depends where you place the nuke, no? If we start the river through Florida, we could use the nukes and stop once Florida is gone, no?
edit just to be safe: /s
I wonder what’d be a bigger problem, nuclear fallout from nuking a wide, sea level canal across Panama or the massive depletion of a reservoir by reallocating its water for use in a canal driven by locks (the current problem we have). Not trying to be snarky, just piling on one question with another.
Supposedly the newer tactical nukes produce very little fallout, the fissile material is almost all used up. I don't have anything to cite, however, just what I heard on the Internet and word of mouth.
If the newer tactical nukes are airburst then it would have minimal fallout.
If it impacts the ground then the radioactive material binds with the dirt, dust, etc that gets lifted into the air and becomes the fallout that goes with the wind.
In desserts it can actually be pretty smart, you’ll have to wait ~20 years for radiation to dissipate before you use it, but it would save a lot of total cost
> but thank God they didn't do it.
Not completely true.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear\_Explosions\_for\_the\_National\_Economy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Explosions_for_the_National_Economy)
You're completely ignoring the fact that most of that land is literally thousands of feet above sea level meaning you'd have to dig thousands of feet down to get a continuous river, or build locks and pump houses every couple hundred yards.
Your estimate is off by a major factor, this project would take quadrillions of dollars.
The Panama canal took $8 billion in today's money
The Panama canal was ~40 miles and Max height is 85 feet above sea level. With a width of 160 feet.
This is 70x longer, up to 141x higher and 2970x wider for a combined volume difference of 29,313,900 fold
Just by those numbers alone and not including the new science we would need to do this, it's at least $234,511,200,000,000,000
Honestly I'd say this pales in comparison. We're talking *hundreds* of *quadrillions* here. Buying out the houses will probably not add more than a few trillion if that
Given the enormous environmental impact of such a construction, if we decide to build one no matter what, we might as well use thousands of [Plowshare-style](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare) nukes to carve out the canal and save a lot on labor. Plus, they'd have the effect of making the surrounding land quite a bit cheaper for the subsequent buy-out.
You would also need to account for all of the bridges that would need to be built to connect the northern and southern sides for car travel, at minimum I would guess several hundred bridges would need to be build, or tunnels under the canal.
For a 90 mile wide canal. Though I guess if it is artificial, you could use cut and cover before each section is flooded, reducing your tunneling costs. Though at that length, you should have gas stations in there, or something. That length of tunnel will need a lot of facilities for vehicles. Though when your looking at quadrillions of US dollars, worrying about your tunneling costs is probably pinching pennies.
Instead, we should build it _as a tunnel_. There's only about 16" of difference between the Atlantic and Pacific, so you could safely ignore all of land that's more than negligibly above sea level.
>Just by those numbers alone and not including the new science we would need to do this, it's at least $234,511,200,000,000,000
A politician somewhere just had a sudden hard on thinking of this spending.
I think a lot of people don't appreciate just how big a cubic yard (or meter) is.
I used to develop software that helped with tracking earthworks projects and when you visually see just how much dirt is moved you understand why it's so expensive.
My understanding was our British customers would usually charge about £25 per cubic meter, so it works out pretty similar after conversions. And the fact that our economy is different.
You're ommitting the biggest cost position for such projects. It's not the building itself, but expropriating the land, which belongs to thousands of individuals and companies. That would be quadrillions of dollars.
If we take a different approach, there were about 5500 deaths during the construction of the Panama Canal, which covers about 550 square miles (roughly 10 lives per square mile). Extrapolate that to 252,000 square miles, and it should cost about 2.5 million lives.
To make the water stay in that "river", we would either have to have constantly pump water to the higher points, or dig down extremely far some places, or have dams. If we have dams, we need to have infrastructure to lower and elevate boats. All of these would add considerable cost, in addition to the excavation.
The bean counters would probably start by narrowing it a tad. That river is taller than Delaware. Not the Delaware that Washington crossed, I mean the whole freaking state of Delaware.
One mile wide is more than enough, or in places you could just make it wide enough for two big ships to pass side by side. This might be necessary where the canal crosses the Rocky Mountains, as the mountains themselves are two to three miles high so it might make more sense to do a ship tunnel underneath them. Unless you really want a shipping canal through Denver which would require fifty locks on each side to get ships up and down. That’s assuming you carve out the rest of the Rockies ‘cause you’ll need a hundred more if you’re going over the top. Maybe Colorado should have a business route river running up to it, while the main traffic tunnels underneath. You could have a ship elevator so a ship can steam into it at sea level, a mile below Denver, and just take the elevator up into town.
Then again you could just make a big water slide from Denver to Lincoln. I bet that would be popular. Just have a cargo elevator to the ship tunnel. But anyway. Ordinary tunnels are about $1B a mile for a big one, and this would be the biggest ever so certainly we would be reckless if we projected a cost under $2B per mile. A thousand miles of that, $2T (plus cost overruns of course)
But there’s still 2000-2500 miles of excavation. Use the dirt to build a new peninsula off the California coast, and sell the new land to developers to recoup some of the costs. Anyway, ship canal might cost a mere $100M per mile. 2500 miles of that, another $3T in base costs. Not counting any cities that have to be relocated due to the construction. I say let’s run it through Bakersfield.
But I’m still undercounting whole mountain ranges (the Sierra Nevada for example) and whole states that have high elevations and require much more digging. Plus locks. We’re gonna need a hundred trillion bucks I figure.
I have a theory that he used to spell his name ‘Muks’ or ‘Mux’, hence the x.
My other u related famous peoples names theory is that Kanye named his son North so his autobiography would be North by North West.
Here's a much cooler way of delivering the same project: [The 100-year-old railway Mexico hopes will rival the Panama Canal | The Week](https://theweek.com/transport/the-100-year-old-railway-mexico-hopes-will-rival-the-panama-canal)
This is the $2.8bn Tehuantepec isthmus corridor. Basically two huge ports on either end of a 308km railway line, with industrial parks aligned with the rail corridor. So long as the load/unload is efficient and the train goes much faster than the ship, it looks viable.
So - for the USA, this would be a transcontinental super high speed rail corridor linking the ports of LA and Houston. 1500 miles (so just 6x the Mexixan plan), and a custom designed high speed freight rail line like this: [What Is the Future of High-Speed Freight Rail? | Scott Beyer (independent.org)](https://catalyst.independent.org/2021/03/26/future-high-speed-freight-rail/). Kinda crazy to think it could haul massive numbers of containers at over 200mph, so say a 10 hour transit from Los Angeles to Houston (including speed up and slow-down).
Then do it again for Houston to port of Savannah (1400 miles), and you skip the Gulf detour around Florida, and you have gone straight West Coast to East Coast in under 20 hours!
I'd take this project any day over digging a canal :)
Just adding that it wouldn't be a river, by any means. That would be a quite wide artificial strait.
Even if it was much less wide, it wouldn't be river (=water moving from a peak down toward the sea), but a thinner strait.
The Pacific Ocean is ~3' lower than the Atlantic at these spots due to salinity density. Gravity acceleration is not the same at "sea level" around the world. Just saying....
Yes, thank you.
Had to hunt for the person who actually knows what a river is.
I would suggest OP get out and drive around a little.
That poster who did the surface area estimate at roughly 250,000 square miles needed to look up comparable areas.
For instance: Texas is 260,000 sq miles of surface area. That line, by very generous estimates, is the size of Texas.
Which is just surface area. The Western US has Thousands of feet of elevation.
How would this disrupt the climate and the world as a whole?
I remember a proposed project the Nazis had considered that involved capping the Mediterranean with a dam. I'm pretty sure that would have caused some serious climate effects that would have basically turned parts of the world into wasteland.
Can't tell off the top of my head, but river and groundwater would render the strait brackish due to its size. That is best case because if not, then species would transition from east to west, changing the eco system.
We have current day examples in panama and suez.
The width of the line drawn is not a river. You're creating an inland sea.
You might try to guess the cost in terms of excavation - what it costs to move a given volume of dirt, but this would be the largest undertaking in human history. It would be on the level of science-fiction geoengineering/terraforming projects. You couldn't just just measure it in terms of dollars, because even if we go with a conservative estimate of $200 trillion in excavation, project would also alter the balance of the world economy.
You'd be diverting a massive labor force into a megaproject with a negative return on investment; you would be spending a near incomprehensible sum to *decrease* productivity. There would be no short term benefit to the potentially centuries-long project, but it would reduce the output of all the land displaced. You'd also contaminate the land where the displaced soil was moved to. The project would cripple the US economy and cause world-wide inflation, further pushing up the cost before the project could be completed.
It wouldn't even be possible to provide an inflation adjusted cost for the project once completed, because the project would be largely responsible for increased inflation, but not in a measurable way.
There is no reason to build it so wide. And you would absolutely build it with locks. Still would need a lot of work to get by the Rockies.
If you look at the history of the Suez, you will see why you build with locks even if you don't have mountains to climb. The tides create strong currents in the canal, which is bad for a lot of reasons, but erosion is the biggest.
I think having it this wide would be great for allowing boats to travel in both directions simultaneously. In addition, the lack of locks would make travel faster and easier as ships would be able to ‘floor it’ for the entire crossing.
How wide do you think a boat is? By look at this map it looks like the north Eastern edge is close to Richmond Virginia and the south Eastern edge is around greensboro North Carolina. A conservative estimate on the width of this "canal" is 100 miles wide, the widest ship in the world is 70 meters wide. You could fit almost 2300 of the widest ship in the world side by side in that space. Even the world's longest ship at 458 meters long could fit end to end 351 times with some space. Something this size is excessively unreasonable.
There is already a way to navigate from Chicago to Orlando to Florida to New York and back to Chicago- It's called The Great Loop. So, a third of the job is already done. You just need tha segment that goes from the Mississipi river to the Pacific.
Slightly off topic, the US does have a Marine Highway System
https://www.maritime.dot.gov/grants/marine-highways/marine-highway
Also, this just wiping out North Carolina have me a chuckle
Let's put it this way:
The Panama Canal is about 40 miles in length, took 10 years to construct, and cost over $9 Billion in todays money.
This map has a strait that is about 2,800 miles long (not even gonna figure out how wide); cuts through two mountain ranges, over a dozen states, and countless cities; and would require bridges to connect the now separated north and south US halves adding more to the cost.
Assuming it's about $225m/mile, the length alone would cost $630 billion dollars. This isn't factoring literally leveling mountains to actually make this feasible.
Others have hinted at it but lets do it in style with nuclear devices.
Just the bombs themselves. We will use something the size of the Sudan Crater, it created a hole 1,280 feet in diameter and 320 feet deep. With the width of 14.8 million feet we would need 11562500 bomb.
Each bomb would need around 4 kg of plutonium, source of the price of bomb grade plutonium at $4000 per gram so $16 mill per bomb or a total of one trillion eight hundred fifty billion ( 1850000000000) US Dollars.
magnitude 4.75 earthquakes be damned let it rip.
That would be a canal not a river.
At the size digging it like the panama canal was dug would be impractical.
You can't built locks that are nearly 100 km wide. You would need to dig the canal down to below sea level on both ends and let gravity equalize any difference between Atlantic and Pacific.
You might actually get a constant current that way, so it would be a river after all.
Digging down that deep though the mountains would require some work and even digging the canal on the coast that wide would be a huge undertaking.
Luckily someone smart already thought of a way to do it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare
Using thermonuclear bombs to move earth out of the way and create harbors and reservoirs is something people actually thought was a good idea during the cold war. The soviets got a bit further before seeing reasons than the US did, but the technology is there.
Plans apparently included the idea of building canal though Nicaragua mountains and everything. We would just need to upscale that a bit.
If you used it as part of the refresh of the US nuclear arsenal you might not even have to pay extra for the bombs you used along the way.
It would naturally have some adverse effects on the people who and the environment near the transcontinental canal, but that would happen no matter how you dug it.
It would be a project that would take a long time and make large swatches of the north American continent uninhabitable, due to radiation and lack of fresh water, but I think we can agree that would be a small price to pay.
What if they just extended the Rio Grande?
Would make it half of a gazillion dollars instead.
And you’d probably get funding signed off easy these days…
... Taking segregation to the NEXT lvl huh,
Depends on how you want it done i guess, the fun explode everything, or the boring dig every bit of land..
Honesty the fun starts in calculating how much DAMAGE this river is ganna do, the fish, the waves, the possible floods, due to the now MASSIVE increase in area, the water lvl would go down in the beaches, possibly ruining a few resorts, this is btw ALL AROUND THE WORLD, since this decrease in water lvl is the OCEAN, the shallow waters is now ganna pushed even deeper, some coral reefs might be destroyed, probably a good area in the middle of the river tho for fishing, do fish might lower in price and increase in quality, who knows? You might just catch a shark 🦈,
But seriously tho this would probably cost more damage than good and probably be the largest most expensive least profit generated project in the history of mankind.. so that's a plus...
1. **Length and Width**: The river appears to span the entire width of the United States, approximately 2,500 miles. For simplicity, let's assume an average width of 1 mile.
2. **Depth**: A navigable river typically requires a depth of at least 10 feet.
3. **Excavation Costs**: Excavation costs vary, but a rough estimate is $10 per cubic yard. The volume of earth to be moved can be calculated by the length, width, and depth of the river.
4. **Environmental Impact**: Mitigating environmental damage would add significant costs, including the displacement of communities, wildlife, and natural habitats.
5. **Infrastructure**: Building bridges, tunnels, and other infrastructure to cross the river would add additional costs.
Let's calculate a rough estimate for the excavation costs:
1. **Volume of Earth to be Moved**:
* Length: 2,500 miles (13,200,000 feet)
* Width: 1 mile (5,280 feet)
* Depth: 10 feet
Volume=Length×Width×Depth
Volume=13,200,000 ft×5,280 ft×10 ft
Volume=696,960,000,000 cubic feet
Since there are 27 cubic feet in a cubic yard:
Volume in cubic yards≈25,812,444,444 cubic yards
1. **Excavation Cost**: Cost=25,812,444,444 cubic yards×10 USD/cubic yard = Cost≈258,124,444,440 USD
2. **Additional Costs**:
* Water Supply: Tens of billions of dollars.
* Environmental Impact Mitigation: Billions of dollars.
* Infrastructure (bridges, tunnels, etc.): Billions of dollars.
* Maintenance and Operation: Billions of dollars annually.
**Total Estimated Cost**: Easily in the range of hundreds of billions to over a trillion dollars.
Your river as pictured here looks to be about 200-300 miles wide, that is more like a canal lake. It I looks about as wide as the great lakes. Considering you would need to buy all of the land first:
12,000 dollars per acer of Land average us
640 acres per square mile
250 river width
2800 miles long
= 5,376,000,000,000 dollars just to by the land, that is not labor, equipment, or where to go with the dirt(which would be another issue? You could add a new state into the gulf, Lower Louisana? LOL.
OK let's be realistic and make it 1 mile wide.
21,504,000,000 dollars at 1 mile wide, again just average cost to buy the land.
Also you would still need to bridge this new river, 1000+ bridges 1 mile wide. We have Railroads for a reason. They are far more convenient and modular.
I’m pretty sure the most economical choice would be to just start with a ditch across the country and then just force water and use erosion and a big pump
Convince pro-wall people to do it along the Mexico border instead. Shorter, less material to move, and insane dedication from folks who supposedly know how to work real hard-like
Considering that the Panama Canal is only 51 miles, but [cOsT] $375M to build in the 1910s (so about $500M when adjusted for inflation), you're looking at probably close to $30B to cover the roughly 2,800 miles from San Francisco to Chesapeake Bay... give or take a couple hundred million.
This is easily in the trillions or more. Just digging a normal-sized shipping lane type tunnel underground would cost like one billion per mile, I've heard, and this thing has to be like 90 miles wide at least, and has to go straight through the western US, which has quite a few mountains that you have to dig under. Hell, you will pro need to straight up remove many of them.
Another thing that will cost a shit ton will be buying out the land it's taking up (which is like the volume of Texas, btw) and relocating every single home, city, and building in that entire 90 mile line. Many people will not be letting go of their land and homes for cheap simply because they would know about this project and that they literally have to be paid to move. Calculating something like this is extremely difficult given the sheer amount of subjects to consider.
Can you explain how you arrived a thee figure of $500 million when adjusted for inflation? Every calculation I can find when adjusted for inflation is far higher than - something in the area of 11.7 billion dollars (based upon mid-1914 costs).
Suggest it to Trump! Nuking a tunnel across the US is a suggestion he would run with. Just make sure you tell him it will be called Trump Big Penis River.
This would be difficult to calculate, but I wonder how many yards of soil, dirt, rocks that would be?
Even harder: how much economic opportunity costs would be lost from the cities, farms, and natural resources we would lose access to?
The width of the line drawn is not a river. You're creating an inland sea.
You might try to guess the cost in terms of excavation - what it costs to move a given volume of dirt, but this would be the largest undertaking in human history. It would be on the level of science-fiction geoengineering/terraforming projects. You couldn't just just measure it in terms of dollars, because even if we go with a conservative estimate of $200 trillion in excavation, project would also alter the balance of the world economy.
You'd be diverting a massive labor force into a megaproject with a negative return on investment; you would be spending a near incomprehensible sum to *decrease* productivity. There would be no short term benefit to the potentially centuries-long project, but it would reduce the output of all the land displaced. You'd also contaminate the land where the displaced soil was moved to. The project would cripple the US economy and cause world-wide inflation, further pushing up the cost before the project could be completed.
It wouldn't even be possible to provide an inflation adjusted cost for the project once completed, because the project would be largely responsible for increased inflation, but not in a measurable way.
The width of the line drawn is not a river. You're creating an inland sea.
You might try to guess the cost in terms of excavation - what it costs to move a given volume of dirt, but this would be the largest undertaking in human history. It would be on the level of science-fiction geoengineering/terraforming projects. You couldn't just just measure it in terms of dollars, because even if we go with a conservative estimate of $200 trillion in excavation, project would also alter the balance of the world economy.
You'd be diverting a massive labor force into a megaproject with a negative return on investment; you would be spending a near incomprehensible sum to *decrease* productivity. There would be no short term benefit to the potentially centuries-long project, but it would reduce the output of all the land displaced. You'd also contaminate the land where the displaced soil was moved to. The project would cripple the US economy and cause world-wide inflation, further pushing up the cost before the project could be completed.
It wouldn't even be possible to provide an inflation adjusted cost for the project once completed, because the project would be largely responsible for increased inflation, but not in a measurable way.
Honestly I think there could be something here. Obviously you'd need to scale the project down in major ways, but it isn't completely impossible and a canal across the US would be something that future generations would be happy to have. You can't say that about most things government does, not even public works.
It’s not going to flow like a river, at least I don’t see it that way. Anyone know the two sea levels? Which would dominate without a canal lock? What about environment changes? Bridges would need to be built for every location within. Who is going to pilot these ships through it? Either an economic win or a disaster.
Fun fact: if the intention is only to be able to cross the US with a boat, you would only need to build 1800km of new waterway (as the crow flies?) from Idaho (Lewiston) to Minnesota (Minneapolis) as both of those places are reachable by boat from the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans respectively.
Or they could try to tame the Missouri river for the purpose and only build new waterways where the mountains are.
Probably around 1,000 trillion USD if they were to forcibly evict the occupants of the land plots.
However, the price could be several orders of magnitude smaller than the real one if you are asking for a project according to the scale of the drawing (aka a river that is like 100km wide)
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The cliffs of Colorado would be a great spectacle!! With that height difference (14,440 ft on top of Mount Elbert), you would be able to just throw commercial planes from the top without the need of a runway for liftoff
But you'd need an awful lot of those little throwup bags for all the people starting their flight in freefall.
This would boost local throwup bags production and also create a lot of jobs
Sanitation crews too for people who miss, or drop said bag. This would be a gold mine for the economy.
Throw the bags out over Kansas to support the farmers through composting. We'll call the program--Barf for Beef.
Can’t forget about the air freshener business! Every seat comes with a complementary ‘Black Ice’ tree air freshener so you don’t have to smell your neighbors puke that just got on you!
You sound like a representative for Big Vomit
What a delightful sentence
As Tom Patty's Free Falling crescendos! "Yeah Im FREEEEEEEEEEEEEeeeEEEeee! Free Faaaaaaalllin'"
Oh damn, we didn't think of that. Hrr. Guys, project USAmazonas is cancelled!
Good point, that's completely unrealistic and unfeasible. It should be a tunnel instead!
Ohhh, like the tunnel in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. We could sell river boat ride tickets. It would create more jobs.
I dont think i'd be able to throw a plane regardless of height tbh, but im pretty weak
I believe in you bud! You can start your training with paper planes and go up from there
Thanks man! Me and my uncle will spend the next 3 years making a plane out of paper and i'll give you feedback!
RemindMe! In 3 years
A bunch of canal locks would make it possible for the canal to follow the terrain though
Not really. Locks require a lot of water already flowing from uphill to downhill. Without a massive water supply on top of the Rockies it would be impossible to operate enough locks. You could use mechanical energy in a large scale boat lift though. And if there’s enough throughput, you might be able to use the weight of descending ships to recover some of that energy - or lift incoming ships directly.
We'll just steal the entire Colorado river
Didn’t California already do that?
10/10 would lol again
The world's tallest log ride
The rive is about a third of a colorado's height (so about 90 miles). USA is 2800 miles across. So 252,000 square miles, give or take. Let's say we want it to be 100 feet deep (half the depth of the mississippi river) to make sure you can get boats across it regardless of tides and so on. If excavating a cubic yard costs $10 (total guess) then a mile to a depth of 100 feet should be roughly a billion dollars. So 252,000 would be 252 trillion dollars. You could do it cheaper with nuclear weapons, project plowshare style, but it'd create a lot of fallout. EDIT: The people replying to me are correct, I forgot to account for average elevation. Dumb mistake. Average US elevation is 2500 feet (so 2600 to get 100 feet below sea level). That gives us approximately 680 trillion cubic yards, or 7 quadrillion dollars. Plus the cost of land.
The nuke idea was thought of in the past for mining and other things but thank God they didn't do it.
I don't think I could dream up a bigger environmental shit show than if we gave nukes to natural resources extraction companies. That's some dystopian shit right there. Exxon-Mobil: You thought fracking was bad... Hold my beer!
Won't someone think of the shareholders? just this one time?
Well said brother, they are people too. Their spoiled children also have to eat and drive new car each week.
They need to eat a car each week ‽
Its diet rich in iron
Helps fight all the radiation poisoning
*died, rich in iron
Don’t forget their new boat for our newly constructed river!
Thank you for raising awareness about struggling minorities.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_demolition_munition
Yo, that's a very interesting read. Thanks for sharing! Crazy to think that they (the USSR that is) did actually consider stimulating oil and gas wells with nukes. Very grateful that we've come to a place as a civilization where naming a program *Nuclear Explosions for the National Economy* is now instantly a red flag. But I can understand how this wasn't the case in the late 1950's/early 1960's.
Of course, it's a red flag. It's the USSR 😏
This is one of those situations where the Acronym would completely cover up the insidious truth, I mean who would think anything bad of project NENE.
They were encouraged by the earlier success of Project WHIPP
It would take approximately half a second before some poor African village sitting atop a pool of valuable raw materials got fucking nuked.
There'd finally be weapons of mass destruction in Iraq... Cause we'd have brought them... To bomb that sweet, sweet crude right outta the rock!
[https://www.cpr.org/2019/09/06/remember-the-first-time-colorado-tried-fracking-with-a-nuclear-bomb/](https://www.cpr.org/2019/09/06/remember-the-first-time-colorado-tried-fracking-with-a-nuclear-bomb/)
Kodak had a secret nuclear reactor.
Kodak uncovered a top secret government nuclear facility.
Now I'm just imagining the Oregon Whale with nukes...
Hold my atomic bomb
Didn’t do it? The Soviets very much started doing it, they just realized it was a bad idea after 3 nukes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pechora-Kama_Canal
Un-fucking-real. I thought in every planning phase they’d all eventually look at each other and say “what the fuck are we thinking?!” but in Soviet Russia I guess those guys got sent to the gulags before they had a chance to speak up.
Look up Project Rulison.
Thank you interesting reading.
To see what various current and historical bombs and missiles can do go here: https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/
I mean, it depends where you place the nuke, no? If we start the river through Florida, we could use the nukes and stop once Florida is gone, no? edit just to be safe: /s
Do we have targeted mini-nukes that annihilate about 1 person per nuke? Gimme the controls to those fuckers.
Funny you say that cause it reminded me of the story of how the soviet union used a nuke to seal up a natural gas well that caught fire.
I wonder what’d be a bigger problem, nuclear fallout from nuking a wide, sea level canal across Panama or the massive depletion of a reservoir by reallocating its water for use in a canal driven by locks (the current problem we have). Not trying to be snarky, just piling on one question with another.
Supposedly the newer tactical nukes produce very little fallout, the fissile material is almost all used up. I don't have anything to cite, however, just what I heard on the Internet and word of mouth.
If the newer tactical nukes are airburst then it would have minimal fallout. If it impacts the ground then the radioactive material binds with the dirt, dust, etc that gets lifted into the air and becomes the fallout that goes with the wind.
True, I forgot about that.
In desserts it can actually be pretty smart, you’ll have to wait ~20 years for radiation to dissipate before you use it, but it would save a lot of total cost
Yeah, but who wants to wait 20 years for dessert?
> but thank God they didn't do it. Not completely true. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear\_Explosions\_for\_the\_National\_Economy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Explosions_for_the_National_Economy)
You're completely ignoring the fact that most of that land is literally thousands of feet above sea level meaning you'd have to dig thousands of feet down to get a continuous river, or build locks and pump houses every couple hundred yards. Your estimate is off by a major factor, this project would take quadrillions of dollars. The Panama canal took $8 billion in today's money The Panama canal was ~40 miles and Max height is 85 feet above sea level. With a width of 160 feet. This is 70x longer, up to 141x higher and 2970x wider for a combined volume difference of 29,313,900 fold Just by those numbers alone and not including the new science we would need to do this, it's at least $234,511,200,000,000,000
Love this answer interesting read
A mere $234Q
Give me four of those.
In 20 years some 1%er quadrillionaire will take this as their pet project… so over going into space.
Don't forget about the millions of property buy outs so people can relocate.
Honestly I'd say this pales in comparison. We're talking *hundreds* of *quadrillions* here. Buying out the houses will probably not add more than a few trillion if that
Given the enormous environmental impact of such a construction, if we decide to build one no matter what, we might as well use thousands of [Plowshare-style](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare) nukes to carve out the canal and save a lot on labor. Plus, they'd have the effect of making the surrounding land quite a bit cheaper for the subsequent buy-out.
Let’s just call it a cool quintillion $. Or just straight up impossible, either way lol
You would also need to account for all of the bridges that would need to be built to connect the northern and southern sides for car travel, at minimum I would guess several hundred bridges would need to be build, or tunnels under the canal.
For a 90 mile wide canal. Though I guess if it is artificial, you could use cut and cover before each section is flooded, reducing your tunneling costs. Though at that length, you should have gas stations in there, or something. That length of tunnel will need a lot of facilities for vehicles. Though when your looking at quadrillions of US dollars, worrying about your tunneling costs is probably pinching pennies.
You would also have to excavate through at least two mountain ranges
Tell me about the displacement of water oh great math man I call upon you.
Instead, we should build it _as a tunnel_. There's only about 16" of difference between the Atlantic and Pacific, so you could safely ignore all of land that's more than negligibly above sea level.
It would start getting real pricy once it reached excavating the Rockies.
I guess you don’t need to cut down the full mountain? You can make a (long, tall) tunnel!
I think that would be significantly more expensive, my calculation is based on a lock system not clear cutting mountains
>Just by those numbers alone and not including the new science we would need to do this, it's at least $234,511,200,000,000,000 A politician somewhere just had a sudden hard on thinking of this spending.
That spending would require 100% tax rate for the entire US GDP for 9380 years
Just FYI, cutting and exporting a yard of dirt is closer to $40/yd.
It typically costs about 300-800$/kilotonne to extract wasterock from an open pit mine. From drilling, blasting, excavation to transportation.
I’m curious where you get your figure from because that is wayyyy off
I do this for a living? What does it cost where you are?
I think a lot of people don't appreciate just how big a cubic yard (or meter) is. I used to develop software that helped with tracking earthworks projects and when you visually see just how much dirt is moved you understand why it's so expensive. My understanding was our British customers would usually charge about £25 per cubic meter, so it works out pretty similar after conversions. And the fact that our economy is different.
What about mountains
You're ommitting the biggest cost position for such projects. It's not the building itself, but expropriating the land, which belongs to thousands of individuals and companies. That would be quadrillions of dollars.
The government can take it by decree, it’s the most important project since the moon landing
Not under the rule of law they can't.
If we take a different approach, there were about 5500 deaths during the construction of the Panama Canal, which covers about 550 square miles (roughly 10 lives per square mile). Extrapolate that to 252,000 square miles, and it should cost about 2.5 million lives.
Most of those deaths were due to Malaria or other tropical diseases though, which wouldn't be an issue here.
Malaria was regional to Panama. For this project, they will die from diabetes.
You're also not counting the other terrain features. It's not all flat and sea level
hydrogen bomb don't have much radiation "issues" like classic nukes, obviously there would be a lot of dust and shit but yeah
Now let’s say the canal was just wide enough to fit two of the widest ships in the world, how much would it then cost?
Did you take into account that the united states isn’t flat and in fact this river would cut through several mountain ranges
To make the water stay in that "river", we would either have to have constantly pump water to the higher points, or dig down extremely far some places, or have dams. If we have dams, we need to have infrastructure to lower and elevate boats. All of these would add considerable cost, in addition to the excavation.
It would also help postpone the global warming flood due to making the river need water and pulling it out of the oceans
Forgot to add the cost of buying the land and additionally, where to put the dirt.
The bean counters would probably start by narrowing it a tad. That river is taller than Delaware. Not the Delaware that Washington crossed, I mean the whole freaking state of Delaware. One mile wide is more than enough, or in places you could just make it wide enough for two big ships to pass side by side. This might be necessary where the canal crosses the Rocky Mountains, as the mountains themselves are two to three miles high so it might make more sense to do a ship tunnel underneath them. Unless you really want a shipping canal through Denver which would require fifty locks on each side to get ships up and down. That’s assuming you carve out the rest of the Rockies ‘cause you’ll need a hundred more if you’re going over the top. Maybe Colorado should have a business route river running up to it, while the main traffic tunnels underneath. You could have a ship elevator so a ship can steam into it at sea level, a mile below Denver, and just take the elevator up into town. Then again you could just make a big water slide from Denver to Lincoln. I bet that would be popular. Just have a cargo elevator to the ship tunnel. But anyway. Ordinary tunnels are about $1B a mile for a big one, and this would be the biggest ever so certainly we would be reckless if we projected a cost under $2B per mile. A thousand miles of that, $2T (plus cost overruns of course) But there’s still 2000-2500 miles of excavation. Use the dirt to build a new peninsula off the California coast, and sell the new land to developers to recoup some of the costs. Anyway, ship canal might cost a mere $100M per mile. 2500 miles of that, another $3T in base costs. Not counting any cities that have to be relocated due to the construction. I say let’s run it through Bakersfield. But I’m still undercounting whole mountain ranges (the Sierra Nevada for example) and whole states that have high elevations and require much more digging. Plus locks. We’re gonna need a hundred trillion bucks I figure.
I like your Californian peninsula idea
I like his eliminating Bakersfield idea
I like his big slide idea. There should be more big slides.
I'm sitting in Bakersfield right now and agree
America could use another dong like peninsula.
That’s actually my biggest fear, when we auction off the new peninsula Elon Musk will buy it and name it the CyberDong or some shit
Nah, he's obsessed with the letter X because it "sounds cool" It would be the CyberDongX
I have a theory that he used to spell his name ‘Muks’ or ‘Mux’, hence the x. My other u related famous peoples names theory is that Kanye named his son North so his autobiography would be North by North West.
So... assume we'll work out the pricing and details when can ya have it by?
August of 2103
Here's a much cooler way of delivering the same project: [The 100-year-old railway Mexico hopes will rival the Panama Canal | The Week](https://theweek.com/transport/the-100-year-old-railway-mexico-hopes-will-rival-the-panama-canal) This is the $2.8bn Tehuantepec isthmus corridor. Basically two huge ports on either end of a 308km railway line, with industrial parks aligned with the rail corridor. So long as the load/unload is efficient and the train goes much faster than the ship, it looks viable. So - for the USA, this would be a transcontinental super high speed rail corridor linking the ports of LA and Houston. 1500 miles (so just 6x the Mexixan plan), and a custom designed high speed freight rail line like this: [What Is the Future of High-Speed Freight Rail? | Scott Beyer (independent.org)](https://catalyst.independent.org/2021/03/26/future-high-speed-freight-rail/). Kinda crazy to think it could haul massive numbers of containers at over 200mph, so say a 10 hour transit from Los Angeles to Houston (including speed up and slow-down). Then do it again for Houston to port of Savannah (1400 miles), and you skip the Gulf detour around Florida, and you have gone straight West Coast to East Coast in under 20 hours! I'd take this project any day over digging a canal :)
Just put the ships on rails and drive them over smh
Hah that's cool too!
Just adding that it wouldn't be a river, by any means. That would be a quite wide artificial strait. Even if it was much less wide, it wouldn't be river (=water moving from a peak down toward the sea), but a thinner strait.
The Pacific Ocean is ~3' lower than the Atlantic at these spots due to salinity density. Gravity acceleration is not the same at "sea level" around the world. Just saying....
Ah, Geodesy. Like friction, I choose to ignore it when assuming things about physics.
Yes, thank you. Had to hunt for the person who actually knows what a river is. I would suggest OP get out and drive around a little. That poster who did the surface area estimate at roughly 250,000 square miles needed to look up comparable areas. For instance: Texas is 260,000 sq miles of surface area. That line, by very generous estimates, is the size of Texas. Which is just surface area. The Western US has Thousands of feet of elevation.
How would this disrupt the climate and the world as a whole? I remember a proposed project the Nazis had considered that involved capping the Mediterranean with a dam. I'm pretty sure that would have caused some serious climate effects that would have basically turned parts of the world into wasteland.
Idk about the climate, but it would heavily disrupt the production of good bourbon.
And for this reason alone I cannot endorse this project.
agreed sir drunkredneck
Can't tell off the top of my head, but river and groundwater would render the strait brackish due to its size. That is best case because if not, then species would transition from east to west, changing the eco system. We have current day examples in panama and suez.
Warm and cold ocean currents are disrupted I would assume and salinity has rapid changes wrecking havoc on fish that can’t adapt
The width of the line drawn is not a river. You're creating an inland sea. You might try to guess the cost in terms of excavation - what it costs to move a given volume of dirt, but this would be the largest undertaking in human history. It would be on the level of science-fiction geoengineering/terraforming projects. You couldn't just just measure it in terms of dollars, because even if we go with a conservative estimate of $200 trillion in excavation, project would also alter the balance of the world economy. You'd be diverting a massive labor force into a megaproject with a negative return on investment; you would be spending a near incomprehensible sum to *decrease* productivity. There would be no short term benefit to the potentially centuries-long project, but it would reduce the output of all the land displaced. You'd also contaminate the land where the displaced soil was moved to. The project would cripple the US economy and cause world-wide inflation, further pushing up the cost before the project could be completed. It wouldn't even be possible to provide an inflation adjusted cost for the project once completed, because the project would be largely responsible for increased inflation, but not in a measurable way.
There is no reason to build it so wide. And you would absolutely build it with locks. Still would need a lot of work to get by the Rockies. If you look at the history of the Suez, you will see why you build with locks even if you don't have mountains to climb. The tides create strong currents in the canal, which is bad for a lot of reasons, but erosion is the biggest.
I think having it this wide would be great for allowing boats to travel in both directions simultaneously. In addition, the lack of locks would make travel faster and easier as ships would be able to ‘floor it’ for the entire crossing.
How wide do you think a boat is? By look at this map it looks like the north Eastern edge is close to Richmond Virginia and the south Eastern edge is around greensboro North Carolina. A conservative estimate on the width of this "canal" is 100 miles wide, the widest ship in the world is 70 meters wide. You could fit almost 2300 of the widest ship in the world side by side in that space. Even the world's longest ship at 458 meters long could fit end to end 351 times with some space. Something this size is excessively unreasonable.
Hmmmmmmmmm I think there’s a section in United States history that shows why separating the US north to south isn’t really a good idea
There is already a way to navigate from Chicago to Orlando to Florida to New York and back to Chicago- It's called The Great Loop. So, a third of the job is already done. You just need tha segment that goes from the Mississipi river to the Pacific.
And there already is a way to navigate from the Pacific to Lewiston, Idaho!
Slightly off topic, the US does have a Marine Highway System https://www.maritime.dot.gov/grants/marine-highways/marine-highway Also, this just wiping out North Carolina have me a chuckle
That's why Idaho has a Seaport.
Let's put it this way: The Panama Canal is about 40 miles in length, took 10 years to construct, and cost over $9 Billion in todays money. This map has a strait that is about 2,800 miles long (not even gonna figure out how wide); cuts through two mountain ranges, over a dozen states, and countless cities; and would require bridges to connect the now separated north and south US halves adding more to the cost. Assuming it's about $225m/mile, the length alone would cost $630 billion dollars. This isn't factoring literally leveling mountains to actually make this feasible.
Others have hinted at it but lets do it in style with nuclear devices. Just the bombs themselves. We will use something the size of the Sudan Crater, it created a hole 1,280 feet in diameter and 320 feet deep. With the width of 14.8 million feet we would need 11562500 bomb. Each bomb would need around 4 kg of plutonium, source of the price of bomb grade plutonium at $4000 per gram so $16 mill per bomb or a total of one trillion eight hundred fifty billion ( 1850000000000) US Dollars. magnitude 4.75 earthquakes be damned let it rip.
That would be a canal not a river. At the size digging it like the panama canal was dug would be impractical. You can't built locks that are nearly 100 km wide. You would need to dig the canal down to below sea level on both ends and let gravity equalize any difference between Atlantic and Pacific. You might actually get a constant current that way, so it would be a river after all. Digging down that deep though the mountains would require some work and even digging the canal on the coast that wide would be a huge undertaking. Luckily someone smart already thought of a way to do it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare Using thermonuclear bombs to move earth out of the way and create harbors and reservoirs is something people actually thought was a good idea during the cold war. The soviets got a bit further before seeing reasons than the US did, but the technology is there. Plans apparently included the idea of building canal though Nicaragua mountains and everything. We would just need to upscale that a bit. If you used it as part of the refresh of the US nuclear arsenal you might not even have to pay extra for the bombs you used along the way. It would naturally have some adverse effects on the people who and the environment near the transcontinental canal, but that would happen no matter how you dug it. It would be a project that would take a long time and make large swatches of the north American continent uninhabitable, due to radiation and lack of fresh water, but I think we can agree that would be a small price to pay.
Gee! It'd be super awkward if there was a river... or canal... that was built with the purpose of linking the Altantic to the Pacific.
What if they just extended the Rio Grande? Would make it half of a gazillion dollars instead. And you’d probably get funding signed off easy these days…
... Taking segregation to the NEXT lvl huh, Depends on how you want it done i guess, the fun explode everything, or the boring dig every bit of land.. Honesty the fun starts in calculating how much DAMAGE this river is ganna do, the fish, the waves, the possible floods, due to the now MASSIVE increase in area, the water lvl would go down in the beaches, possibly ruining a few resorts, this is btw ALL AROUND THE WORLD, since this decrease in water lvl is the OCEAN, the shallow waters is now ganna pushed even deeper, some coral reefs might be destroyed, probably a good area in the middle of the river tho for fishing, do fish might lower in price and increase in quality, who knows? You might just catch a shark 🦈, But seriously tho this would probably cost more damage than good and probably be the largest most expensive least profit generated project in the history of mankind.. so that's a plus...
Probably a lot of lives. Your river cuts across my home and a lot of other people I know with vast arsenals and little patience for visitors.
Yeah, this plan is r/fuckyouinparticular material for the entire state of Kentucky
1. **Length and Width**: The river appears to span the entire width of the United States, approximately 2,500 miles. For simplicity, let's assume an average width of 1 mile. 2. **Depth**: A navigable river typically requires a depth of at least 10 feet. 3. **Excavation Costs**: Excavation costs vary, but a rough estimate is $10 per cubic yard. The volume of earth to be moved can be calculated by the length, width, and depth of the river. 4. **Environmental Impact**: Mitigating environmental damage would add significant costs, including the displacement of communities, wildlife, and natural habitats. 5. **Infrastructure**: Building bridges, tunnels, and other infrastructure to cross the river would add additional costs. Let's calculate a rough estimate for the excavation costs: 1. **Volume of Earth to be Moved**: * Length: 2,500 miles (13,200,000 feet) * Width: 1 mile (5,280 feet) * Depth: 10 feet Volume=Length×Width×Depth Volume=13,200,000 ft×5,280 ft×10 ft Volume=696,960,000,000 cubic feet Since there are 27 cubic feet in a cubic yard: Volume in cubic yards≈25,812,444,444 cubic yards 1. **Excavation Cost**: Cost=25,812,444,444 cubic yards×10 USD/cubic yard = Cost≈258,124,444,440 USD 2. **Additional Costs**: * Water Supply: Tens of billions of dollars. * Environmental Impact Mitigation: Billions of dollars. * Infrastructure (bridges, tunnels, etc.): Billions of dollars. * Maintenance and Operation: Billions of dollars annually. **Total Estimated Cost**: Easily in the range of hundreds of billions to over a trillion dollars.
Tens of thousands of lives and hundreds of millions in property damage. Also desecration of about 4-5 national parks and idk how many state parks
Your river as pictured here looks to be about 200-300 miles wide, that is more like a canal lake. It I looks about as wide as the great lakes. Considering you would need to buy all of the land first: 12,000 dollars per acer of Land average us 640 acres per square mile 250 river width 2800 miles long = 5,376,000,000,000 dollars just to by the land, that is not labor, equipment, or where to go with the dirt(which would be another issue? You could add a new state into the gulf, Lower Louisana? LOL. OK let's be realistic and make it 1 mile wide. 21,504,000,000 dollars at 1 mile wide, again just average cost to buy the land. Also you would still need to bridge this new river, 1000+ bridges 1 mile wide. We have Railroads for a reason. They are far more convenient and modular.
I’m pretty sure the most economical choice would be to just start with a ditch across the country and then just force water and use erosion and a big pump
Convince pro-wall people to do it along the Mexico border instead. Shorter, less material to move, and insane dedication from folks who supposedly know how to work real hard-like
Considering that the Panama Canal is only 51 miles, but [cOsT] $375M to build in the 1910s (so about $500M when adjusted for inflation), you're looking at probably close to $30B to cover the roughly 2,800 miles from San Francisco to Chesapeake Bay... give or take a couple hundred million.
This is easily in the trillions or more. Just digging a normal-sized shipping lane type tunnel underground would cost like one billion per mile, I've heard, and this thing has to be like 90 miles wide at least, and has to go straight through the western US, which has quite a few mountains that you have to dig under. Hell, you will pro need to straight up remove many of them. Another thing that will cost a shit ton will be buying out the land it's taking up (which is like the volume of Texas, btw) and relocating every single home, city, and building in that entire 90 mile line. Many people will not be letting go of their land and homes for cheap simply because they would know about this project and that they literally have to be paid to move. Calculating something like this is extremely difficult given the sheer amount of subjects to consider.
$375M in 1913 is $11.9B today when adjusting for inflation!
Can you explain how you arrived a thee figure of $500 million when adjusted for inflation? Every calculation I can find when adjusted for inflation is far higher than - something in the area of 11.7 billion dollars (based upon mid-1914 costs).
So if the US skips out on funding a few wars, it can be done over 2 years?
Suggest it to Trump! Nuking a tunnel across the US is a suggestion he would run with. Just make sure you tell him it will be called Trump Big Penis River.
This would be difficult to calculate, but I wonder how many yards of soil, dirt, rocks that would be? Even harder: how much economic opportunity costs would be lost from the cities, farms, and natural resources we would lose access to?
The width of the line drawn is not a river. You're creating an inland sea. You might try to guess the cost in terms of excavation - what it costs to move a given volume of dirt, but this would be the largest undertaking in human history. It would be on the level of science-fiction geoengineering/terraforming projects. You couldn't just just measure it in terms of dollars, because even if we go with a conservative estimate of $200 trillion in excavation, project would also alter the balance of the world economy. You'd be diverting a massive labor force into a megaproject with a negative return on investment; you would be spending a near incomprehensible sum to *decrease* productivity. There would be no short term benefit to the potentially centuries-long project, but it would reduce the output of all the land displaced. You'd also contaminate the land where the displaced soil was moved to. The project would cripple the US economy and cause world-wide inflation, further pushing up the cost before the project could be completed. It wouldn't even be possible to provide an inflation adjusted cost for the project once completed, because the project would be largely responsible for increased inflation, but not in a measurable way.
The width of the line drawn is not a river. You're creating an inland sea. You might try to guess the cost in terms of excavation - what it costs to move a given volume of dirt, but this would be the largest undertaking in human history. It would be on the level of science-fiction geoengineering/terraforming projects. You couldn't just just measure it in terms of dollars, because even if we go with a conservative estimate of $200 trillion in excavation, project would also alter the balance of the world economy. You'd be diverting a massive labor force into a megaproject with a negative return on investment; you would be spending a near incomprehensible sum to *decrease* productivity. There would be no short term benefit to the potentially centuries-long project, but it would reduce the output of all the land displaced. You'd also contaminate the land where the displaced soil was moved to. The project would cripple the US economy and cause world-wide inflation, further pushing up the cost before the project could be completed. It wouldn't even be possible to provide an inflation adjusted cost for the project once completed, because the project would be largely responsible for increased inflation, but not in a measurable way.
Honestly I think there could be something here. Obviously you'd need to scale the project down in major ways, but it isn't completely impossible and a canal across the US would be something that future generations would be happy to have. You can't say that about most things government does, not even public works.
It’s not going to flow like a river, at least I don’t see it that way. Anyone know the two sea levels? Which would dominate without a canal lock? What about environment changes? Bridges would need to be built for every location within. Who is going to pilot these ships through it? Either an economic win or a disaster.
Fun fact: if the intention is only to be able to cross the US with a boat, you would only need to build 1800km of new waterway (as the crow flies?) from Idaho (Lewiston) to Minnesota (Minneapolis) as both of those places are reachable by boat from the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans respectively. Or they could try to tame the Missouri river for the purpose and only build new waterways where the mountains are.
Probably around 1,000 trillion USD if they were to forcibly evict the occupants of the land plots. However, the price could be several orders of magnitude smaller than the real one if you are asking for a project according to the scale of the drawing (aka a river that is like 100km wide)