Engineers’ Dreams - Pushing the Limits: New Adventures in Engineering - page 160

too much of a lowering of the Mediterranean's water level, because the lessened weight of water on
unstable areas of the seafloor might lead to earthquakes or volcanic eruptions.
Only in Willy Ley's closing remarks on Sorgel's Atlantropa Plan does he recognize that there are
enormous technical challenges to building a dam across the Strait of Gibraltar. However, Ley found
it “unnecessary to discuss the engineering difficulties” because the political situation of the 1950s
made “the engineering problems future problems, and we can't tell how an engineer 50 years from
now would go about solving them.” It has now been fifty years since Ley wrote those words, and it
is clear that such a project would not be given anywhere near the serious consideration it was when
Sorgel first proposed it—in a distinctly different political climate. The sensitivity of engineers and
politicians alike to environmental impact and the sovereignty of states and peoples make a Gibraltar
or Congo dam more than a technological improbability in the foreseeable future.
Nevertheless, engineers continue to dream, and among their dreams that were not but could have
been included in Willy Ley's Engineers' Dreams are, as we have seen, bridges across the straits of
Gibraltar and Messina. For all of the technical challenges, such fixed crossings are minuscule pro-
jects, with minuscule environmental and political implications, compared to the dams envisioned
by Ley, and they are likely to be realized in the present century. Other projects that are being pro-
moted today as seriously as those Ley wrote about a half century ago include the fixed link between
Alaska and Siberia, thus making worldwide train travel a reality. Another great project envisions
the damming of Hudson Bay, thereby providing a vast new supply of freshwater for North Amer-
ica. The engineers and dreamers of such macroprojects will no doubt continue to promote them.
As Frank Davidson hopes at the close of his 1983 topic on macroengineering projects, Macro, a
work that might be seen as a successor to Engineers' Dreams, the discussion of joint technological
undertakings of unprecedented magnitude may well someday be added to the agendas of summit
meetings as alternatives to war and warfare.