• marcos@lemmy.worldEnglish
      11·
      2 months ago

      We make fun of bad fiction because it has to be realistic… but reality has no such constraint.

  • CobraChicken3000@lemmy.caEnglish
    13·
    2 months ago

    21 thermonuclear warheads and you can get a channel as wide as the empty space between Newt Gingrich’s ears.

  • idiomaddict@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    1 month ago

    Some facts about newt Gingrich in case you’re ever unsure if he’s genuine or not:

    Newt Gingrich married his former geometry teacher (honestly, it sounds like he was a victim here- they married at 19 and 26, shortly after he graduated), then divorced her for his mistress when she got uterine cancer. After marrying the mistress, he divorced her for his new mistress when she got MS.

    He chronically underpaid child support for the first marriage and his ex wife had to raise funds from her church to support their two children.

    Gingrich has a PhD in history. His half sibling is a queer lesbian. At the same time that he was trying to impeach Clinton for his Lewinsky affair, Gingrich was cheating on wife #2 with at least wife #3.

  • Rentlar@lemmy.caEnglish
    9·
    2 months ago

    The ships passing through get upgraded to spicy ships, that’s a plus.

    (“Plus” as in premiums so high it’s practically uninsurable)

  • BradleyUffner@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    1 month ago

    Even if you ignore the radiation, that material doesn’t just magically go away. It just shatters the rock. You still have to clear the channel and build the infrastructure.

  • Alcoholicorn@mander.xyzEnglish
    41·
    2 months ago

    Still asking, how bad would it be? Old craters are safe enough to walk through, and modern nukes can be rendered less radioactive, right? So how much less would it have to be that this would go from an environmental and geopolitical catastrophe that future generations will condemn us for to merely an unbelievably bad idea?

    • Tar_Alcaran@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      2·
      1 month ago

      Sure, the future canal would be mostly safe, especially after decades. But there’s a rather big problem in that making the canal very much wouldn’t be.

      Using nukes for mining was actually tried, it left a very impressive crater you can visit today: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedan_(nuclear_test)

      It also caused more fallout than any nuclear bomb ever. And the crater is “only” about 450m. So you’re going to be blasting a LOT of highly radioactive dust into the surrounding several countries. Even with more efficient nukes causing less fallout, that’s probably not going to be very popular.

      The material doesn’t go away by magic. It gets ejected and scattered over a wide area, after being in a nuclear explosion and getting highly irradiated. The blasting a canal would throw an entire canal’s worth of fallout around the area. That will go away mostly eventually, but it won’t be fun living within several hundreds of kilometers for a for decades.

      And of course, even with the decades old Sedan crater, there’s a giant radiative ball underneath.

      • ohulancutash@feddit.ukEnglish
        1·
        1 month ago

        Also, unless you’re dropping the bombs from a B-1, you have to actually take nukes to the middle east, on the ground, and trust that no-one wants to steal them.

  • pulsewidth@lemmy.worldEnglish
    7·
    2 months ago

    Even if you’re a 30%-lead boomer with decades of severe alcoholism, and think this is a good idea of geoengineering (it is not).

    There’s no way that intentionally irradiating large key trade areas of several middle eastern and north African countries for hundreds of years could have any negative blowback on the US now, is there?

  • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    11·
    2 months ago

    Oh…

    Oh no.

    Oh dear god.

    … Operation Glass Cannon appears to be on the drawing board, the irony consultants were I guess all DEI hires and got fired by DOGE.

    … god fucking DAMNIT.