Bonus question: would this make a new continent?
Then you’d need to dig really, really deep. Even deeper than where the Balrog lives.
Yes, but not for slavery this time, but for fresh water in the decades ahead of climate change. Those freshwater Great Lakes will be awfully attractive 100 years from now.
Nope, the continental plate would not be separated by a river flowing over top.
I would need a study on if this would negatively impact desert ecosystems or introduce invasive species, but otherwise it sounds pretty cool if we limit the size until it’s about as big as the new Panama Canal expansions.
Nevermind any communities you’d separate or destroy by dropping a big ol’ river through the middle of them
It’s not like the number of communities measuring a hundred miles wide are many. Also, believe it or not, the USA has bridge building technology. Shocking, I know.
Luckily this entire swath of land is completely void of human and animal life and nobody will be emminent-domained out of their homes and livelihoods with little to no reward for doing so, and bridges are notoriously so much more permeable than plain flat land. I’m such a silly goose to not have thought of those things when I wrote that very serious comment about this very serious hypothetical 🥸
Americans will literally do anything except build trains
They’re nowhere near the top if you relate it to size though (and also next to none of it is electrified, which is a pretty good indicator of it being mostly old - after all, rail is what even allowrd the country to be built).
But also it’s a joke
I object to electrification being used to judge a country’s railway age and quality. A lot of countries transition into electric trains over a century ago especially in Europe and surprisingly the US. I could talk for hours about the US’s history with electric trains and how short sided business practices combined with the government’s attempt to sorta nationalize the rail industry crippled it’s electrification progress. Not to get too far off topic though there’s only three metrics you can really grade the quality and age of a nation’s rail infrastructure with. That is size, volume, and average speed. In my opinion though avarage speed is the best indicator for a country’s railway age and quality because it gets rid of a lot of the problems other definitions bring up. For example both of the internationally recognized definitions for high speed rail uses a different speed depending if the line was new (155mph) or upgraded (125mph). This causes all sorts of issues because under those definitions Amtrak’s northeast regional train counts as high speed rail as it runs on an upgraded line with a top speed of 125mph even though the northeast corridor has an average speed of 86mph.
You can create this strait and then have a train which runs along it, like the train from Spirited Away
now that we have this river across the whole country, we can finally introduce swimming cars!
or normal cars in bubble wrap… see we’re already brainstorming like it’s a Tesla project
I mean this is a pretty good visual representation of what they did when they built all the highways, just more spread out and the negative implications being mostly pushed off onto whoever didn’t have enough political capital to resist them, i.e. minorities.
No one in the north wants Missouri. I’m south of them and I don’t want them.