The
Least Action Principle
the critical principle for large-scale development
It makes
no sense to launch large-scale arctic-focused development
projects, such as the fifty-year NAWAPA project to divert the northern rivers
that currently flow into the sub-arctic oceans, overland to the South, to
irrigate the southern deserts of the USA and Mexico for increased agricultural
production. Such a project was developed in the 1960s by an American
engineering firm and became known as the North American Water and Power
Alliance (NAWAPA) project. The project didn't go anywhere at the time, but it
is now being promoted again as an economic driver to redevelop the collapsing
North American economy. But why would one go this route, building giant dams
in a 50 year project to divert the farthest rivers on the continent, and small
ones at that, across 2000 miles of mountains, pumping the water across a high
elevation plateau, to irrigate low elevation areas, when greater volumes exist
'locally' that flow into the ocean, which can simply be diverted in confined
arteries within the oceans to flow to the areas were water is needed, to be pumped
into a pipeline distribution system.
This change
in the NAWAPA process would enable the desired result to be obtained with far
less effort and in a far shorter time. This would accord with the platform on
which the natural universe operates which always utilizes a path that requires
the least actions to meet an objective. This principle applies to economic
processes too. If this principle was enabled for NAWAPA it would be expressed in
two ways. One way to express it would be to choose the closest source, instead
of the most distant, and the choose the most efficient path, rather than the
most difficult one. The second way in which the least action principle would be
applied, would be to produce the diversion and distribution infrastructures in
automated industrial processes with the least amount of human action required to
achieve the desired end.
The least
action principle can be applied to NAWAPA in both of these ways, that would
enable the most rapid and most efficient completion of the process.
Enabling
the most efficient path
The
promoted design of the project would indeed be a huge consumer of human labor, the largest ever. It would
involve the laborious building of over 300 separate projects, including major dams, one
standing 1,700 feet high (3.5 times as the Great Pyramid in Egypt), and another
dam standing 900 feet high, both of which are to be built in permafrost
country, in order to raise the water levels of two of the northern rivers to
such height that the rivers flow backwards and drain southward to be pumped into the Rocky
Mountain Trench. From there the water would be channeled far to the South through
a long string of reservoirs, tunnels, canals, aqueducts, with pump lifts in
between that lift the diverted water over the 5,500 foot high hump of the Nevada
Great Basin of high elevation desert, before it can reach the deep Southwest. If
the project was built and be completed after a construction period spanning nearly
half a century, the NAWAPA complex would be the largest single infrastructure
item ever
created on the face of the planet. The pump lifts alone, that would drive the
system, would require 38 major nuclear power plants to provide the power for the pumping.
The giant
project would eventually, after four to five decades of construction, deliver
upwards to 90 million acre feet of fresh water per year to enable
irrigation for food production in areas that are currently deserts. The least
action principle would enable the same outcome by diverting water of the outflow
of the Columbia River to the coast of California in thin-walled arteries made of
basalt, produced in automated industrial processes. On this basis the entire
project could up and running before the licensing of the numerous projects for
the overland route would be arranged, and construction could begin. The same
principle could also be applied to divert parts of the outflow of the Mississippi
River to the coast of Texas, to be distributed from there to all the dry areas
East of the continental divide with minimal pumping action required.
Applying
an efficient universal principle
The most
wide-spread natural diversion on the planet utilizes the efficient principle of
Water-in-Water Conveyance. The Great Ocean Conveyer Belt moves many-times
greater volumes of water around the world than all the rivers in the world
combined. It is a natural expression of a universal principle. With this
principle being applied in the small, the flow of large rivers of fresh water
can be enabled, confined into
thin-walled arteries in which enormous volumes of water can be transported extremely efficiently over long
distances. On the same principle great floating reservoirs be created. With fresh water being 2.7% lighter than salt water, the
created fresh water reservoirs would simply flat on the surface of the oceans, separated by 'thin'
membranes from the salt water. Almost
any volume of water can be stored and transported that way. With NAWAPA
enabling this technology, based on the least action principle, fresh water
shortages would become forever history on our planet.
Least
action in time
The least
action principle would also need to be applied to the NAWAPA project in
respect long-term efficiency. In this respect the sub-arctic sourced diversion would fall
apart with the onset of the next Ice Age glaciation cycle, which could begin
already during the
construction period, or if not, could occur in the immediate decades thereafter. The onset of
glaciation would immediately disable the northern rivers and thereby disable
the entire project. In this case the enormous economic effort, that would have
been
devoted to the northern project, would have been wasted, and the opportunity
that existed, to
prepare the world for the real need, to protect the food supply against the
disabling cold period, would be wasted likewise. This
potentially horrendous tragedy, that is inherent in the current NAWAPA design,
could be avoided
by enabling the available least-action options for the NAWAPA design.
Least
action for efficient land use
Applying the
available least-action options
to NAWAPA design does
not mean that the idea of irrigating the southern U.S. and Mexican deserts for
increased food production would be in danger of being unattainable. To the
contrary. It would mean that still better objectives become attainable. The potential near return
of the Ice Age glaciation in the north, if it became
acknowledged, would re-orient the NAWAPA development focus towards even
more-efficient options for increasing food production, then irrigating the
deserts, by placing agriculture afloat onto the tropical oceans. In this case
the desert areas would remain retained for industrial use and the building of
new cities, which would add up to an even more efficient land use, and a more
powerful expression of the least action principle.
