8 Craziest Mega-Engineering Projects That Could Rework Earth

8 Craziest Mega-Engineering Projects That Could Rework Earth

Humans have been modifying the Earth for thousands of years, but we’ve barely scratched the surface of what’s possible. Here are eight dramatic ways we could change the face of our planet.

For the purposes of this list, we’re limiting the discussion to megaprojects involving the Earth’s geology, atmosphere, and biosphere. This means no technological megastructures such as space elevators and sky hooks. That’s a subject for another time.

(1) Global Weather Control

Weather control is a prospect that remains well beyond our technological reach, but that could change in the relatively near future. According to nanotechnology expert J. Storrs Hall, the author of Nanofuture: What’s Next for Nanotechnology, we could start to build a weather machine later this century.



Not only could we influence global and local weather patterns, we’d also be able to address climate change. What’s more, we could even make large portions of the Earth more human-friendly and habitable (including Antarctica).

(2) Terraforming the World’s Largest Deserts

The idea of transforming the world’s deserts into lush forests goes back ages, and has many roots in science fiction. No doubt, our planet hosts some rather massive expanses of barren land; approximately one-third of Earth’s land surface is a desert. Some are located in the polar regions (like Antarctica’s McMurdo “dry valley”), but a fair portion are outside these frigid areas, including the 3.5 million-square mile Sahara Desert, the one million-square mile Arabian Desert, and the 500,000-square mile Gobi Desert. There’s also Australia’s interior to consider, the 250,00-square mile Great Victoria expanse.


(Credit: NOAA/Geology.com)








(3) Creating Artificial Islands





(4) Creating a New Continent



The scheme would create 3.5 million square kilometers of arable land along the shores and provide overland access to Africa. And by damming the Congo River, the plan would allow for the irrigation of the Sahara Desert and the creation of massive artificial lakes in the African interior. (Above image: Artist’s impression of Atlantropa (Credit: Lttiz/CC BY 3.0); inset image take from Sörgel’s Engineers’ Dreams)

But as noted by Kees Gispen in Project Muse, Sörgel’s utopian plan was not only grossly unrealistic, it was also an expression of the early 20th Century European expansionist impulse:

The theme that inspired Sörgel’s vision was unbounded technological optimism wedded to deep cultural pessimism — geopolitical, demographic, racial — about Europe’s future in the aftermath of World War I. Sörgel believed that the war had fatally undermined Europe’s position in the world, threatening it from the east with teeming Asiatic hordes — a “yellow peril” about to engulf Europe — and from the west with the rapacious dynamism of American capitalism. As Sörgel and his small band of followers saw it, only the realisation of Atlantropa would give Europe the strength to become a “third force” and maintain its global standing against Asia and America.

Disturbingly, and as Gispen points out, “the similarities between Hitler’s solution to Germany’s problems and Sörgel’s seem perhaps even more significant than their differences.”

(5) Eliminating Vast Swaths of Land

Conversely, we could also remove large tracts of land.






Marshall also says we could flood the planet’s vast depressions, such as the Qattara depression in north-west Egypt and California’s Death Valley. This could serve multiple purposes, including the creation of new bodies of water, the generation of hydroelectricity, and as a means to offset rising sea levels from global warming. But on that last point, and as Marshall points out: “[It] is not worth doing for this reason alone: even if we flooded all of the world’s major depressions, it would barely make a difference.”

(6) Assisted Species Migration

Megaprojects need not be limited to the Earth’s atmosphere and geology — there’s also our planet’s biosphere to consider. Given that humanity has instigated the Anthropocene Era, we’re going to have to give the plants and animals of the world a helping hand every once in a while.

With climate change, the range of landscapes that a species is adapted to moves northward, often much faster than species can move,” explains Ramez Naam, author of The Infinite Resource: The Power of Ideas on a Finite Planet. He says that’s especially true for slow-moving ecosystems like forests and coral reefs.

“One thing we’re pretty likely to do is to help those species move into their new zones — planting forests further north, transplanting corals that thrive in extremely warm waters into other seas that are warming up, and so on,” he told io9.


For reasons unknown, bumblebees can’t migrate northward to avoid warmer temperatures. (Credit: Bernie Kohl/PD)


(7) Eliminating Predation



(Credit: Hamish Paget-Brown/CC SA 3.0)

But such is the dream of David Pearce, a British philosopher and futurist who imagines a future in which animals are liberated from the never-ending cycle of Darwinian processes and its attendant pain and suffering. Here’s what he told me last year when I asked him if it was any of our business to interfere with the animal kingdom in such a sweeping way:

Humans already massively “interfere” with Nature in countless ways ranging from uncontrolled habitat-destruction to captive breeding programs for big cats to “rewilding”. Within the next few decades, every cubic metre of the planet will be computationally accessible to surveillance, micro-management and control. On current trends, large nonhuman terrestrial vertebrates will be extinct outside our wildlife parks by mid-century. So the question arises. What principle(s) should govern our stewardship of the rest of the living world? How many of the traditional horrors of “Nature, red in tooth and claw” should we promote and perpetuate? Alternatively, insofar we want to preserve traditional forms of Darwinian life, should we aim for an ethic of compassionate stewardship instead. Cognitively, nonhuman animals are akin to small children. They need caring for as such.


(8) Mass Carbon Capture

As Ramez Naam explained to me, it’s looking increasingly likely that we’re going to pump carbon into the atmosphere well past the 450 parts per million / 2 degrees Celsius limit that scientists think it’s vital to stop at. Consequently, we need to start thinking about “negative emissions.”

“It’s going to be increasingly important for us to capture carbon dioxide from the air and pump it into underground formations where it can stay for millions of years,” he says, adding that the volume would be absolutely incredible — on the order of several cubic miles every year.


Concept for Carbon Engineering‘s carbon capture “slab.” (Credit: CarbonEngineering.com)

Physicist Peter Eisenberger has come up with a possible scheme. His plan would call for the deployment of scrubbers that use chemicals called amines that can capture carbon dioxide from the open air, where it’s found at concentrations of 400 parts per million. What’s more, his system would also be capable of recycling the amines. Less speculatively, carbon can be captured by a liquid solution of sodium hydroxide, which is a well-established industrial technique.
