Greening The Deserts

Global Seawater, Inc. plans to make forests grow with nothing more than seawater, sand, and sun.

The plan is to combine mangroves and salcornia - two plants that grow in seawater, and can be used for both food and biodiesel production - with shrimp living in artificial ponds fed by canals to the ocean. The shrimp provide food, their effluent feeds back into the mangroves, the mangroves (which enrich the soil very quickly, by trapping lots of carbon ... great for stopping global warming) allow the growth of salicornia, and the end result very quickly transforms a wasteland into a forest.

Link to Accelerating Future's Singularity Summit liveblogging (it's a big and growing post, so you have to scroll down a bit. The rest is just as interesting, though.)

Link to youtube video, Greening Eritrea.

Combined with vertical farming, technologies like this might make famines a thing of the past for the entire species.

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