[ExI] Africa wants to double in size

[Adrian Tymes]

On Tue, Sep 2, 2025 at 1:02 PM spike jones via extropy-chat
<extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
> BillK, I have long been aware of not just the relative size of Africa with respect to Russia (and everywhere else) but also that its natural resources are more abundant and easier to get to than anywhere.  I am astonished the locals haven't set up more industry analogous to what was done in Europe, Asia and the Americas.  They have energy, lotsa solar, plenty of people, plenty of everything.  We could turn that place into the new center of the world, lotsa tall beautiful buildings everywhere, cities, productive mechanized farms, money waaay up the kazoo everywhere, transcontinental freeways, oh the works.  We could turn Africa into Gotham City, the swingin place to be, Batman!
>
> Instead, most of it is just savanna, nothing, vast wasteland, boring, lions, tigers, chimps, the world's game reserve.  Get those damn beasts to the zoo and let's get going, fix this place up, put in some CIVILIZATION!  Africa needs a VISION!

A large part of the problem has been, ironically, people wanting to do
this for or to them, with...
* A minor or completely absent "with them" component.
* No controls to keep things from going broken or corrupt.
* In many cases, no intention to keep things from going corrupt.

Whether paying one tribe to turn other tribes into slaves, setting up
colonies for resource extraction, or just seeing every success
cannibalized by a people long used to having to cannibalize to survive
(and encouraged to do this by outside parties, who continue to
basically treat them as wealth extraction colonies), "put in some
CIVILIZATION" in Africa is not so simple as it seems - even if you
start from those parts where there is civilization.  (Nigeria, for
instance, is the 6th most populous country in the world.  You might
start by considering Nigeria, Egypt, Kenya, and/or South Africa.)