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This is Africa
And this is the Sahara Desert
A pile of sand that's about the same size as the United States
Linving inside of this enormous area are more than two and a half million people
So imagine taking the country of Slovenia and spreading everybody out to live there across China and you'll get an idea of just how desolated it is
There is evidence, though, that not too long ago, the entire Sahara used to be green
For the past few hundred thousand years, the Sahara has switched back and forth between a desert and a grassland over and over
Every forty-one thousand years, because the long-term changes in Earth's rotation, messing up the location of the North African monsoon
The next time the Sahara will turn green naturally this way will be in about fifteen thousand years or in seventeen thousand AD
But humanity is nothing if not grossly impatient
Imagining the course of human history with a green Sahara would be radically different
The Sahara has always been a giant and obvious barrier for travel between the Meditteranean and Sub-Sahara Africa
Thousands of kilometers of desert, rought Atlantic waters of the west and the lack of many markets south of Morocco prevented Pre-Modern explorers from ever getting past it
Centralized states like Egypt, Carthage, the Romans, Byzantines, and Islamic empires surrounded the desert in the north and the east
But all of them failed to control or expand beyond the desert
In an alternate history scenario where the Sahara is green, all of this ages and enables these states to expand their influence deep into the African heartland
Even in Modern times, turning the Sahara green somehow would revolutionize the entire world.
And open up a tight amount of land for colonization and settlement by the world's ever-growing population
One of the most Modern attempts at doing this so far was a plan developed nearly one hundred years ago to creat an artificial sea in the middle of it all, right here in Egypt
The plan doesn't seem too crazy at first, but progressently gets more and more insane as this video goes on
But first, a quick geography lesson