I'm all about this. Great ideas. Doubt the Canadians would be on board, but you never know, if you start laying the groundwork now.
I fully intend to move somewhere in a Canada border state in retirement, so if we can start working on developing a cold place, I'm all for it. After living in a place with excessive heat, it's more appealing, but someone needs to scope out where the prettiest cold places are, too. I'm guessing that not all of Canada looks like Glacier National Park.
I'm a Quebecer and I don't see this ever happening. Canada itself is headed towards being more decentralised rather than less, and our provinces already have much more power than American states do. Also fuck off we're full, unless you're talking about just the Canadian west, which you can have.
On the feasibility side, most of northern Canada is part of the Canadian shield, where the earth is a very thin layer of soil over rock. There's also a lot of swamp. This could potentially be geoengineered away at great effort. One thing that you can't overcome is the low amount of solar energy you get there, so even if the climate warms up, you could still be stuck with a short growing season.
You should try invading in the winter. We (through Hydro Quebec) supply most of the electricity they use in New England and New York State, so that would be interesting :)
Canada is fast becoming a Chinese/East Indian colony and transforming demographically even more rapidly than the United States due to insane immigration policies the past 50 years.
Victor David Hanson (Top tier Classical Greek Historian) made the distinction between external and internal colonization.
Internal colonization happens when the preferred lands are occupied, but lower quality land within the same broader territory is still available to be cultivated.
External colonization occurs when the lower quality internal land is all occupied, and completely empty (or mostly empty) land exists elsewhere that can be taken. That empty foreign land usually must be higher quality than the local unoccupied land though, so this sort of colonization only occurs when internal colonization has been mostly completed.
Before seriously colonizing any bits of inhospitable Canada, we’d need to make use of the many parts of America that are basically completely empty, but not as terrible as the Yukon, or just have some arbitrary government programs to encourage people to move there when there’s better empty land farther south.
“The Land Was Everything” by Victor Davis Hanson, is a great book about this, and it spends quite a bit of time on modern America, not just Ancient Greece, so it’s relevant to the modern world.
You quote Hanson as your point of entry for these terms, "internal and external colonization," but I am aware of them through a different chain: they are used explicitly used in Mein Kampf and Zweites Buch, borrowed from Ludendorff and Karl Haushofer, then from Machiavelli, who got them from Greeks. Where we might have a disagreement is on the eventual effects of climate change which I am anticipating, which you might deny.
Aren’t the worst case scenario climate predictions ~3*C? Maybe it’s an issue with my own understanding, but that doesn’t seem like enough to make Canada any better than Montana.
Climate change is not like a thermometer where you turn up the temperature the exact same amount in every inch of the globe. This is largely because of the jet stream and the geography of the world, including the shape of the continents and oceans, as well as altitude and mountain ranges. So there are some areas of the globe that will see very little temperature change, while other areas will see massive change. It's not evenly distributed. The problem with Montana isn't that it's cold, but that the soil quality is bad because it's mountainous. A more fair comparison would be Minnesota, North Dakota, Michigan, New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine.
This would be more convincing if I wrote a whole article on it, but the biggest resources that we need are oil and water and soil. Canada has those things. The idea that we should fill up Arizona and Montana *first* ignores the fact that mountains with no water and no oil are relatively useless.
edit: I'm not opposed to building cities in Kansas, I'm in favor of that, it's just that Kansas is probably going to become very arid over the next century, so Canada would be better because it has more fresh water and oil.
People in the early 20th century were much more passionate about terraforming earth. Obviously there are still vast uninhabited parts of the world to colonize, but we can go even further beyond. Yes, there were glaring issues in projects like Atlantropa and the enclosure of the North Sea, but it's much more plausible than terraforming a planet we can't even send people to. I've been drafting a world based on a terraformed Venus, and it doesn't seem plausible for such a process to happen on a timescale below several centuries and maybe millennia. Temperature can be moderated through the construction of artificial lakes and umm... hmm.. Weather machines, perchance? We all know the CIA has them. So why can't we use them for our benefit? I guess it has negative effects on other countries.
"Since Biden took office in 2021, America has experienced unprecedented levels of immigration which have never been seen before in human history."
What is this based on? I summed legal immigration, plus Southern Border Crossings, plus refugees each year and divided them by population to get this trend"
There has been a sharp spike in Southern Border encounters in recent years, but it is not the highest ever for the US, much less the world. That immigration became a political issue is consistent with what happened in past spikes. The 1850's spike, the largest ever, gave rise to the Know Nothings, who became part of the new Republican party. Republican policy like the Homestead Act which opened up vast tracts of land for settlement, easing concern about too many immigrants. There was another spike in the 1880's and a groundswell of opposition to excessive immigration. They was also support for immigration from business interests who believed it led to lower labor costs (guess whose view won?). The next peak was in the early 1900's. This one also led to opposition, which was intensified by involvement of immigrants in terrorism (1919 Red Scare & Palmer Raids). This time Republicans responded and shut down most immigration in 1924. The next peak was 1999 and we saw strong anti-immigration sentiment during the Bush administration, leading to the 2006 secure fence act.
The reality of a black president stirred fears among certain white Americans about their country being changed by all the immigration. These fears were a capitalized on by Donald Trump who created the MAGA movement. Note this happened at a time of fairly low immigration. In reaction to MAGA, the Democrats became more gung-ho on immigration, giving rise to the recent spike.
Are you implying that the 2.5 million southern border crossers realized into the country have caused more habitat destruction that the 2.5 million additional Americans added to the population from other sources?
It's upsetting how many people are against developing and settling Canada, content with the easily lived in regions.
One issue is we need to simultaneously develop better relations with Russia and the development of their North. Getting larger trade flows through the region would give extra financial logic for living there.
The main motivation for Martian colonization is that there are no human governments on mars. It’s much harder to get to mars than the bottom of the ocean, but the absence of hundreds or thousands of bars of pressure makes it easier to live there after you arrive
"The best thing that could happen"? How would it benefit the inhabitants of an established urban environment in e.g. Greenland to have people from a culture which needs an urban environment but can't create one descend upon them? It sounds to me like a formula for hundreds of Beiruts worldwide.
You're not quoting me, so I'm not sure who you're talking to. Sounds like you're imagining a 3rd world invasion of Greenland, which I never suggest. What I say is "The best thing that could happen to these countries is a massive population collapse to relieve pressure on infrastructure and begin urbanizing."
Northern Alaska is also a possible place to colonize, especially with their BLM/govt-owned lands
if things like ecumenopolis ever be a thing, they would do very great in this kind of new colony, coupled with nuclear reactors with well elaborated electric grid integration, you could have a very cheap energy source, all in the distance of electric car, or in case of a very good transit-based planning, a colony where everything is accessible by trains
I'm all about this. Great ideas. Doubt the Canadians would be on board, but you never know, if you start laying the groundwork now.
I fully intend to move somewhere in a Canada border state in retirement, so if we can start working on developing a cold place, I'm all for it. After living in a place with excessive heat, it's more appealing, but someone needs to scope out where the prettiest cold places are, too. I'm guessing that not all of Canada looks like Glacier National Park.
I'm a Quebecer and I don't see this ever happening. Canada itself is headed towards being more decentralised rather than less, and our provinces already have much more power than American states do. Also fuck off we're full, unless you're talking about just the Canadian west, which you can have.
On the feasibility side, most of northern Canada is part of the Canadian shield, where the earth is a very thin layer of soil over rock. There's also a lot of swamp. This could potentially be geoengineered away at great effort. One thing that you can't overcome is the low amount of solar energy you get there, so even if the climate warms up, you could still be stuck with a short growing season.
Sounds like you need to be invaded by America.
You should try invading in the winter. We (through Hydro Quebec) supply most of the electricity they use in New England and New York State, so that would be interesting :)
Colonized by who? Asian and third world immigrants?
I’d prefer Americans
Canada is fast becoming a Chinese/East Indian colony and transforming demographically even more rapidly than the United States due to insane immigration policies the past 50 years.
I know. I prefer Deep Left’s proposal over Indian and Chinese demographic replacement.
But Deep Left isn’t a racialist or cares about white people. He merely advocates imperialism as part of his vitalist neoliberal creed.
Vitalism and neoliberal are contradicting beliefs
I know.
Victor David Hanson (Top tier Classical Greek Historian) made the distinction between external and internal colonization.
Internal colonization happens when the preferred lands are occupied, but lower quality land within the same broader territory is still available to be cultivated.
External colonization occurs when the lower quality internal land is all occupied, and completely empty (or mostly empty) land exists elsewhere that can be taken. That empty foreign land usually must be higher quality than the local unoccupied land though, so this sort of colonization only occurs when internal colonization has been mostly completed.
Before seriously colonizing any bits of inhospitable Canada, we’d need to make use of the many parts of America that are basically completely empty, but not as terrible as the Yukon, or just have some arbitrary government programs to encourage people to move there when there’s better empty land farther south.
“The Land Was Everything” by Victor Davis Hanson, is a great book about this, and it spends quite a bit of time on modern America, not just Ancient Greece, so it’s relevant to the modern world.
You quote Hanson as your point of entry for these terms, "internal and external colonization," but I am aware of them through a different chain: they are used explicitly used in Mein Kampf and Zweites Buch, borrowed from Ludendorff and Karl Haushofer, then from Machiavelli, who got them from Greeks. Where we might have a disagreement is on the eventual effects of climate change which I am anticipating, which you might deny.
Aren’t the worst case scenario climate predictions ~3*C? Maybe it’s an issue with my own understanding, but that doesn’t seem like enough to make Canada any better than Montana.
Climate change is not like a thermometer where you turn up the temperature the exact same amount in every inch of the globe. This is largely because of the jet stream and the geography of the world, including the shape of the continents and oceans, as well as altitude and mountain ranges. So there are some areas of the globe that will see very little temperature change, while other areas will see massive change. It's not evenly distributed. The problem with Montana isn't that it's cold, but that the soil quality is bad because it's mountainous. A more fair comparison would be Minnesota, North Dakota, Michigan, New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine.
This would be more convincing if I wrote a whole article on it, but the biggest resources that we need are oil and water and soil. Canada has those things. The idea that we should fill up Arizona and Montana *first* ignores the fact that mountains with no water and no oil are relatively useless.
edit: I'm not opposed to building cities in Kansas, I'm in favor of that, it's just that Kansas is probably going to become very arid over the next century, so Canada would be better because it has more fresh water and oil.
People in the early 20th century were much more passionate about terraforming earth. Obviously there are still vast uninhabited parts of the world to colonize, but we can go even further beyond. Yes, there were glaring issues in projects like Atlantropa and the enclosure of the North Sea, but it's much more plausible than terraforming a planet we can't even send people to. I've been drafting a world based on a terraformed Venus, and it doesn't seem plausible for such a process to happen on a timescale below several centuries and maybe millennia. Temperature can be moderated through the construction of artificial lakes and umm... hmm.. Weather machines, perchance? We all know the CIA has them. So why can't we use them for our benefit? I guess it has negative effects on other countries.
"Since Biden took office in 2021, America has experienced unprecedented levels of immigration which have never been seen before in human history."
What is this based on? I summed legal immigration, plus Southern Border Crossings, plus refugees each year and divided them by population to get this trend"
https://mikebert.neocities.org/Immigration-Fig.gif
There has been a sharp spike in Southern Border encounters in recent years, but it is not the highest ever for the US, much less the world. That immigration became a political issue is consistent with what happened in past spikes. The 1850's spike, the largest ever, gave rise to the Know Nothings, who became part of the new Republican party. Republican policy like the Homestead Act which opened up vast tracts of land for settlement, easing concern about too many immigrants. There was another spike in the 1880's and a groundswell of opposition to excessive immigration. They was also support for immigration from business interests who believed it led to lower labor costs (guess whose view won?). The next peak was in the early 1900's. This one also led to opposition, which was intensified by involvement of immigrants in terrorism (1919 Red Scare & Palmer Raids). This time Republicans responded and shut down most immigration in 1924. The next peak was 1999 and we saw strong anti-immigration sentiment during the Bush administration, leading to the 2006 secure fence act.
The reality of a black president stirred fears among certain white Americans about their country being changed by all the immigration. These fears were a capitalized on by Donald Trump who created the MAGA movement. Note this happened at a time of fairly low immigration. In reaction to MAGA, the Democrats became more gung-ho on immigration, giving rise to the recent spike.
The graph you post is per capita, which is not what I said. I'm speaking in terms of absolute numbers.
Then its meaningless since we have record number of people in the world and so record numbers of everything associated with people.
It is not meaningless with regard to habitat destruction.
Are you implying that the 2.5 million southern border crossers realized into the country have caused more habitat destruction that the 2.5 million additional Americans added to the population from other sources?
It's upsetting how many people are against developing and settling Canada, content with the easily lived in regions.
One issue is we need to simultaneously develop better relations with Russia and the development of their North. Getting larger trade flows through the region would give extra financial logic for living there.
Colonization requires willing and able colonists.
The main motivation for Martian colonization is that there are no human governments on mars. It’s much harder to get to mars than the bottom of the ocean, but the absence of hundreds or thousands of bars of pressure makes it easier to live there after you arrive
"The best thing that could happen"? How would it benefit the inhabitants of an established urban environment in e.g. Greenland to have people from a culture which needs an urban environment but can't create one descend upon them? It sounds to me like a formula for hundreds of Beiruts worldwide.
You're not quoting me, so I'm not sure who you're talking to. Sounds like you're imagining a 3rd world invasion of Greenland, which I never suggest. What I say is "The best thing that could happen to these countries is a massive population collapse to relieve pressure on infrastructure and begin urbanizing."
Northern Alaska is also a possible place to colonize, especially with their BLM/govt-owned lands
if things like ecumenopolis ever be a thing, they would do very great in this kind of new colony, coupled with nuclear reactors with well elaborated electric grid integration, you could have a very cheap energy source, all in the distance of electric car, or in case of a very good transit-based planning, a colony where everything is accessible by trains