Would terraforming the Sahara Desert fix Africas problems?
Not as directly or as clearly as you might think. Thing is, it’s not just famine caused by droughts. A lot of the problems in Africa can be traced back to general societal collapse triggered by the over-reliance on, and abuse of, “strong man” types of dictatorships during the post-colonial period. It’s a case of too many dictators taking the money and running until there’s no real way any money’s going to be left in place in large chunks of the continent. So if the “terraforming” you propose helped, the main effect of it might be that it helps more in the “moon shot” effects. Sure, the extra non-desert land helps, and making a farmable breadbasket out of the world’s largest desert is nothing to sneeze at. But an implicit part of the effort is that money gets spent in a *structured* way on roads, irrigation, jobs, farming, sustainable forestry…it gets put back into Africa as civilization. It’s a really roundabout way to solve the problem, in other words. The actual problem is *Nation
