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I was being sarcastic but also making a point. What's the point of having a chunk of land the size of Europe and just leave it sit there to do nothing. I know how difficult it is and expensive to build a road or rail in these kinds of conditions but it is technologically feasible and why shouldn't we? We need to develop and populate Nunavut and building roads and infrastructure is the best way to do it. There are probably just as many mineral resources in Nunavut as in a good chunk of Siberia. How do you think Yakutsk and Norilsk got built? Did they appear out of thin air? The Russians were wanting to develop Siberia and built several cities there and they are in a much better position to develop their resources than we are.
Yes, it's technologically feasible. Why not build it? Because it's expensive as hell, with VERY little return. Plus, you could never keep it ploughed properly in the winter. People would be dying left, right and centre in car accidents, because who can save you out there in time? Where is the closest ER? Shoot, even the highway from Athabaska to Fort McMurray is a death trap.
Populate Nunavut?? Don't you think if people wanted to put up with -45C winters, Yellowknife would be booming?
Why? Why do we need to develop the north? Why do we need to develop every single square inch of this planet? What's the point of having it sit there and do nothing? it isn't doing "nothing". It's animals, ecosystem, and people, are doing what they've BEEN doing...forever. The ruggedness, and inhospitable environment of northern Canada is PRESERVING what is quickly becoming extinct on this planet, and that is NATURE. Pure, unmolested, nature.
Canada's boreal forest alone stores 208 billion tons of carbon. It is important for regulating global temperatures, and provides jobs for a lot of people in the north. So...let's...chop it down?
Besides, has anyone asked the people of Nunavut (Our land) if they want the rest of us coming up there and destroying their way of life? Because that's what is going to happen. We'll wreck it, like we wreck everything else.
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At least the Russians tried to build highways in Yakutia even if it wasn't easy. What has Canada done in Nunavut?
Yes. But it's easier to do with slave labour. We've got wagon trails in Nunavut, too. lol
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What about roadways though? Much more practical to build roadways anyway.
Actually, I think for this, it would be more practical to have rail. If we're going to do anything, it should be build rail. The train ploughs it's own road, and never spins out. Instead of having hundreds of trucks rumbling around up there, you could have trains bring up much more, and much larger supplies. But the people would still have to depend on air freight, to move it from whatever major depots the train goes to, to the smaller hamlets. Why? Because it seriously is NOT feasible to build roads criss crossing the north, servicing places on the interior of Nunavut with as little as 300 people. Probably less. Much less.
That railway would follow the coast of Hudson's Bay, and the Arctic ocean, because that's where the most settlements are. And 4 of the 10 towns with populations over 1000 aren't even on the mainland.
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But you are missing a key point here. Once that highway to Rankin Inlet is built, that whole area will attract development and population along it. Build it and they will come as they say... so that 1,100km highway won't stay empty for long. There will be settlements built along it to take advantage of the infrastructure available.
I'm not missing anything. Until things warm up up there, people from the south will not want to live there.
You can't farm it, it's hard to build on, and the weather sucks.
Last edited by Magnatomicflux; 07-22-2015 at 12:41 AM..
No, they didn't, but I don't think that Canadians are keen to set up a large-scale system of forced labour camps across the north of their country.
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Originally Posted by deneb78
The Russians were wanting to develop Siberia and built several cities there and they are in a much better position to develop their resources than we are.
But you are missing a key point here. Once that highway to Rankin Inlet is built, that whole area will attract development and population along it. Build it and they will come as they say... so that 1,100km highway won't stay empty for long. There will be settlements built along it to take advantage of the infrastructure available.
You are missing a vital point: there is nothing to attract people to Rankin Inlet, and nothing similar along the way.
Deneb, I don't know where you come from, but you are making the mistake so often made by Americans: Canada is so empty; Canada should put some infrastructure in the empty spots, and it will fill up. Well, no, it won't; if nothing grows on it and it produces nothing. That's the reality of the Canadian Shield, which crosses Manitoba, Ontario, and Quebec: billion-year old granite, interspersed with muskeg. No farming and no industry (too far to markets); thus, no settlements.
As much as I am , as a keen environmentalist, against development in general, I must acknowledge Deneb here has a point : with climate change and population growth, in the long run developing ARCTIC REGIONS -and even Antarctic-will be unavoidable. Heck, billions $ ARE CURRENTLY INVESTED IN SPACE RESEARCH because some daydreamers like Stephen Hawking imagine colonizing Mars or the exoplanets at million light years, while at the same times millions of undeveloped sqmiles lie here on our blue Planet : talk of skewed priorities in our day and age.
....... with climate change and population growth, in the long run developing ARCTIC REGIONS -and even Antarctic-will be unavoidable........
Maybe, maybe not. At present the Arctic cannot be easily developed because it is frozen tundra and permafrost (frozen mud) keeping methane and CO2 trapped under the surface. If and when climate change causes the Arctic regions to thaw out it will become one giant toxic black swamp sitting on top of quick-mud which is sitting on top of rock. Wildlife and plants will die and humans won't be able to remain there.
It will still take at least another couple hundred years or more for those regions to naturally drain into the Arctic Ocean and dry out. It will have to do it on its own in its own way because at present humans don't have the technology to drain, dry out, terraform and develop a vast swamp that encompasses so many thousands of square miles.
Once the region is drained and dried out what will remain is rock and rotting peat releasing the previously trapped methane and CO2 into the atmosphere. No wildlife will be able to survive that and no plants will grow there until the toxic gases have dissipated and the rotting peat can be mixed and terraformed with supplemental soils brought in from other locations around the world. It will be like terraforming an alien planet in outer space into something that humans can survive on.
No matter how much more human population growth there will be in the future I think it will take a very, very long time before the Arctic regions can be developed enough for infrastructures to be put in place and to be able to grow crops and support increasing populations.
A much more easily attained alternative would be for human populations to stop increasing at such an unprecedented rate as has been happening in the past 140 years, stop using up and wasting remaining resources, stop polluting and stop spreading out and destroying or pushing the rest of nature out of their way.
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