Let's play a little thought experiment.
Okay so we're going to ignore political borders. The whole world is in a Schengen of some sort.
We're going to (sorta) ignore engineering and material problems. Let's say we have practically unlimited materials, so everything that isn't technically impossible on a pure engineering standpoint is on the table.
We want to create an infrastructure to allow a person in a vehicle to travel via vehicle to as much of the planet as possible. Essentially we're going to create a hypothetical worldwide highway system.
Obvious one out of the way first, the Bering Sea. A bridge or tunnel here would connect the two supercontinents; the huge Americas and the unbelievably massive Afro-Eurasia.
And this one isn't as crazy as it seems. The idea has been thrown about with varying degrees of seriousness for a good long time. While the weather is a problem the Bering Strait is only about 180 feet deep and about 53 miles and you could probably use the Diomede Islands as midway points. That's only slightly more crazy than the Jiaozhou Bay Bridge or Lake Pontchartrain Causeway.
So with this, and we'll just say we've also fixed gaps in the land highways like the 100 mile long Darien Gap (A heavily rain forested area that leaves a 100 mile gap in road coverage in Central America) and the lack of proper roads in much of Northern Alaska and Siberia, we've connected the two biggest chunks of land and humans.
Let's go deeper.
Ignoring Australia (for the moment, we'll come back to it) our next most populated unconnected landmass is the island of Java (and we'll throw Sumatra in here since they are so close.) Java is only separated from Sumatra by the 15 mile wide Sunda Strait and Sumatra is only separated from Singapore (and with it mainland Asia) by the the Malacca Strait, which is only a mile and a half at its widest.
Next we head north to Japan, or more specifically Honshu the next most heavily populated island. Honshu is already connected to Hokkaido by the Seikan Tunnel (it's currently a train tunnel but we can work with that).
Now it gets a little trickier. To the north of Hokkaido is the Russian island of Sakhalin, separated by the La Pérouse Strait. Easy (he says from a computer ignoring that he's talking about one of the most massive engineering superprojects that would ever be completed) but that only puts us on another island, not on the continent. To accomplish that we would need another bridge across the Strait of Tartary to Russia proper. The other two major Japanese islands are already connected by bridges, so that gets Japan out of the way.
Next on our island list... Great Britain. Chunnel, done. Again it's currently a railway but we can work with that. But while we're here we might as well put up a connection between Great Britain and the island of Ireland. 3 or 4 different bridge, tunnel, causeway or combination plans have been proposed to gap the Irish Sea, so we'll just pick one of them. Great Britain and Ireland are now connected to Europe, and via what we've already done a good chunk of the rest of the world.
Salsette Island, India you've already got multiple bridges connecting you to the mainland, you're good to go.
Sri Lanka, you've still got good remnants of land bridge to India that was passable by foot as recently as 1500. Build that sucker up and we're golden.
So far nothing too crazy, as in everything I've said here has been at least suggested somewhere by somebody with a full brain and a straight face, albeit almost always as some crazy far future possibility.
Alright let's get a little more crazy. The land down under. Australia... could be a problem. You've could maybe leapfrog bridges from the northern tip of Queensland across that scattering of islands to Papua New Guinea... but that only gets you Papua New Guinea. We would then have to leapfrog several hundred miles across multiple spans of various islands in Indonesia to get us back to our Java/Sumatra connection that definitely straining even the soft sci-fi fantasy we're working with here. Same with the Philippines.
New Zealand, Madagascar, Taiwan, the Falklands, Hawaii, Guam, the Galapagos, Hainan, Tasmania, most of the islands in the Caribbean... you guys are probably gonna stay islands on any timeframe I can image. Although connecting some of these chains of island together (North and South Island in New Zealand for example.)
So how much of this, if any, are we ever gonna see and forms will it take?
Okay so we're going to ignore political borders. The whole world is in a Schengen of some sort.
We're going to (sorta) ignore engineering and material problems. Let's say we have practically unlimited materials, so everything that isn't technically impossible on a pure engineering standpoint is on the table.
We want to create an infrastructure to allow a person in a vehicle to travel via vehicle to as much of the planet as possible. Essentially we're going to create a hypothetical worldwide highway system.
Obvious one out of the way first, the Bering Sea. A bridge or tunnel here would connect the two supercontinents; the huge Americas and the unbelievably massive Afro-Eurasia.
And this one isn't as crazy as it seems. The idea has been thrown about with varying degrees of seriousness for a good long time. While the weather is a problem the Bering Strait is only about 180 feet deep and about 53 miles and you could probably use the Diomede Islands as midway points. That's only slightly more crazy than the Jiaozhou Bay Bridge or Lake Pontchartrain Causeway.
So with this, and we'll just say we've also fixed gaps in the land highways like the 100 mile long Darien Gap (A heavily rain forested area that leaves a 100 mile gap in road coverage in Central America) and the lack of proper roads in much of Northern Alaska and Siberia, we've connected the two biggest chunks of land and humans.
Let's go deeper.
Ignoring Australia (for the moment, we'll come back to it) our next most populated unconnected landmass is the island of Java (and we'll throw Sumatra in here since they are so close.) Java is only separated from Sumatra by the 15 mile wide Sunda Strait and Sumatra is only separated from Singapore (and with it mainland Asia) by the the Malacca Strait, which is only a mile and a half at its widest.
Next we head north to Japan, or more specifically Honshu the next most heavily populated island. Honshu is already connected to Hokkaido by the Seikan Tunnel (it's currently a train tunnel but we can work with that).
Now it gets a little trickier. To the north of Hokkaido is the Russian island of Sakhalin, separated by the La Pérouse Strait. Easy (he says from a computer ignoring that he's talking about one of the most massive engineering superprojects that would ever be completed) but that only puts us on another island, not on the continent. To accomplish that we would need another bridge across the Strait of Tartary to Russia proper. The other two major Japanese islands are already connected by bridges, so that gets Japan out of the way.
Next on our island list... Great Britain. Chunnel, done. Again it's currently a railway but we can work with that. But while we're here we might as well put up a connection between Great Britain and the island of Ireland. 3 or 4 different bridge, tunnel, causeway or combination plans have been proposed to gap the Irish Sea, so we'll just pick one of them. Great Britain and Ireland are now connected to Europe, and via what we've already done a good chunk of the rest of the world.
Salsette Island, India you've already got multiple bridges connecting you to the mainland, you're good to go.
Sri Lanka, you've still got good remnants of land bridge to India that was passable by foot as recently as 1500. Build that sucker up and we're golden.
So far nothing too crazy, as in everything I've said here has been at least suggested somewhere by somebody with a full brain and a straight face, albeit almost always as some crazy far future possibility.
Alright let's get a little more crazy. The land down under. Australia... could be a problem. You've could maybe leapfrog bridges from the northern tip of Queensland across that scattering of islands to Papua New Guinea... but that only gets you Papua New Guinea. We would then have to leapfrog several hundred miles across multiple spans of various islands in Indonesia to get us back to our Java/Sumatra connection that definitely straining even the soft sci-fi fantasy we're working with here. Same with the Philippines.
New Zealand, Madagascar, Taiwan, the Falklands, Hawaii, Guam, the Galapagos, Hainan, Tasmania, most of the islands in the Caribbean... you guys are probably gonna stay islands on any timeframe I can image. Although connecting some of these chains of island together (North and South Island in New Zealand for example.)
So how much of this, if any, are we ever gonna see and forms will it take?
via International Skeptics Forum http://ift.tt/2iVP2P5
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