My megaproject ideas are mostly pretty standard. I'd build a high speed rail network across North America, and build and expand metro and regional rail systems in and around every city. I'd turn all cities and suburbs into fifteen-minute cities. I'd decommodify housing, and build ten million units of public/social/non-market housing, mostly three bedroom units. I'd link those last three policies together by building TODs around the new Metro and rail stops. And I'd build bicycle networks in every town and city and connect them to the TODs. I'd build bridges and walkways across skyscrapers. I'd put a bidet in every American toilet (uses less water than toilet paper apart from being more comfortable). Fiber internet in every home. A heat pump in every home. An induction stove in every kitchen. Phase out fossil fuels and power everything with Pumped Storage Hydropower and Geothermal. I'd make the US go Metric.
But my truly crazy, obsessive idea would be to bring back the French Revolutionary calendar. Or I'd purge all French influences from English.
If you built a 5km tall lightning rod, it'd sap all the electrical potential from the clouds before lightning can form. There's gotta be a lot of electric potential there, given that it's enough to make lightning. Catumbo experiences 1.6 million bolts of lightning per year, and the average lightning bolt is 5 gigajoules of power, so harnessing it all would produce about 2.5 gigawatts of power, which is about the same as 2.5 ordinary nuclear power plants. This is clearly not worth it, let's do it.
i liked ur idea and thought abt using airships to hoist a wire up there. those huge HVDC cables that cross oceans are capable of transmitting power in the gigawatt scale. but apparently these things are heavy as fuck at ~50 kg/m. so 5 km of this is 250 metric tons!! airships definitely can’t do that and even a tower that tall would be an engineering marvel.
i just thought of another way while typing this! you could send airships up there with giant batteries and just bring them back to earth when theyre fully charged
Do orbital skyhooks that support a cable that comes within a few dozen meters of the earth
Sure, there's some material science problems but the room temperature superconductor is going to fix all thaty!
me, after another long and fulfilling day of getting bombarded with the full force of the heavens for the betterment of humanity
I think the hard part with lightning power is storage. You need some extremely cool/dangerous capacitors that won't detonate on you to pull it off.
That's if you want to actually harness lightning, say with a really big lighting rod. This would be harnessing electrical potential before it becomes lighting, which would be a much cleaner, more continuous flow.
But a five kilometer tall tower is an absurd engineering feat, and building those unrealistically robust capacitors would almost certainly be easier.
That's my fucking president