h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Incidentally, guy on the radio today saying it would be a simple engineering task to lay a pipeline from the Highlands to London and pointed out a 200-mile oil pipeline that's just been completed in England.

He did point out it would need a fairly big bore.



Nearly crashed the car trying to phone in and offer my services.

Alex Salmond wants it going through his house - complete with stopcock.

A stopcock fitted to Alex Salmond sounds like an excellent idea.

I know!

A scheme to extract electricity from old bread.

First build some wee, wooden houses along the side of canals (I think you can see where I'm going here). Fill the houses with pigeons. Feed the pigeons with old bread. Tie sponges to the pigeons legs with stout twine and dip them in the canal (the sponges, that is, not the pigeons - they're pigeons not ducks) and train the pigeons to fly to reservoirs at the top of mountains (maybe you could attract them with more bread). Then simply squeeze the water out of the sponges into the reservoirs. Drain the reservoirs back into the canal via hydro-electric turbines.

Clearly there would be some minor logistical difficulties to overcome. Do we have enough stout twine? Perhaps with global warming we can grow sisal. And how will we keep the ducks off the bread? Perhaps we can just mow them down with the sled.

You're going to need some sort of automatic sponge-squeezing device for that one to work. I believe Wallace and Gromit are currently looking for a new project ...

Mol

>>>> Incidentally, guy on the radio today saying it would be a simple engineering task to lay a pipeline from the Highlands to London

Absolutely, from an engineering point of view it'd be a doddle... it's only a few hundred miles, no permafrost, earthquake zones, huge mountain ranges, gorges, enormous areas of water, etc...

On the other hand, it'd still cost a ruddy fortune - and between the NIMBY's and the Green's there'd be more tents camped in front of the bulldozers than you find at Glastonbury!

Aye, that was the point he was making. The 200 mile Liquid Natural Gas pipeline was laid through areas of outstanding beauty, Sites of Special Scientific Interest etc etc and it cost a fortune but the rising cost of gas made it economically viable. If droughts continue in the South East, there will come a tipping point where a water pipeline will become economically viable.

He also pointed out how much the South East relies on groundwater. Scotland gets 10% of it's water from the ground, the North of England 20% with the %ge increasing as you go south until it reaches 75% in the South East, With falling water tables and pollution from agriculture, that source can't be relied upon.

Pipeline info - http://www.400smilesaday.co.uk/what-a-gas-page3.htm
(a blog, but more interesting for it I think)

Maybe they should just route these things through areas of outstanding ugliness. Like Doncaster.