Antonios,
I like your thinking outside the square , but mindful of the below:

“Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven”

I recommend one variation to the blue print.Rather than build an oasis in out back Oz, which if it succeeded, would likely be either claimed by “traditional owners”, taxed out existence by hungry politicians, or swamped by “refugees”. We should be colonising Mars & The Moon--big time!

Even with present technology we could begin -with a little will in right places . I’d wager there would be no shortage of volunteers, and there’d be fantastic blue sky potential… once we do a bit of terraforming.

Actually, the process has already begun -in a small way http://www.redcolony.com/

Antonios Good on you for having a go but your idea would be very expensive and I doubt even slightly economically viable. Would it be just a tourist attraction? I dont think you could produce much timber or food. Not compared to say somewhere like the Hunter Valley or the Darling Downs.

The links you posted should illustrate the problems and certainly dont provide you with much support. The Australian desert getting more rain is great but not so great for the parts that are now getting dryer as the article points out. Egypts plans are also extremely expensive. $77.7 billion for 3.4 million acres. Thats 13759 square kilometres. We have 550000000 square kilometres of desert. How much would that cost?

The rest of your links about plants are also a worry. Have you never heard of Prickly pear, Lantana, Bitou bush, Cane toads, rabbits, foxes? Introducing new plants or animals to environments where they are unknown is very dangerous and silly and will not be tolerated these days, hence our draconian quarantine laws.

Cant you find something else to champion Antonios? Something more realistic and productive. Like I said before many people far better than us have put far more thought than we can into the same ideas as you are promoting and never has it ever come to anything more than lines on a map or even worse failure and environmental degradation.

mikk
The truth is that we have more rainfalls in our deserts than before.
My links show what the others did and not an advice to copy and past them here.
We have many local plants which we can use we can discuss with our authorities for desert plans from overseas.
Australian authorities and universities will give us the right advices, we need first a group of people ready to work for a small green desert park.
My primary goal is to open a discision about it, to start from somewhere, TO MAKE our first step.
The costs in Agypt, is for fruit trees, I speak for desert trees The machines which produce water from the air are very cheap, few thousand dolars each.
I do not speak for the part of Australia which starts to dry but for the deserts,
What I say is that we can create it. Always the first step is dificult but we should do it and we can do it.
Do not underestimate what australian people can do and do not ignore the benefits from it including the benefits for our tourist industry. AN OASIS IN THE MIDDLE OF THE DESERT.
We have some practical problems to solve where (place), how much will cost each tree, can we find them for free? a basic irrigation system.
BUT OVER ALL IF THERE ARE PEOPLE READY TO WORK FOR IT!
We can not do anything if we are not ready to work, to fight, to try, to spend from our pokets, to make the first step.
Let's give life to a small part of our deserts! Let's encourage others to follow us, let's open a window to the future!
Antonios Symeonakis
Adelaide

Antonios wrote: Let's give life to a small part of our deserts! Let's encourage others to follow us, let's open a window to the future!

Dear Antonios,

Our deserts now have a lot of life. They don't need to be given life. The life in our deserts is life that has adapted to desert conditions. There is no part of Australia that does not have life.

It seems more worthwhile to study the life that already exists in the deserts than to seek to change it. Life has adapted to a region where water is not as plentiful as in other regions. With climate change this will become a more widespread need.

Australia has created problems by ignoring the kind of environment we live in. Cotton is a plant that needs a lot of water. It is a good plant to grow in the US southeast or along the Nile. The Murray-Darling River system is not a good place for it yet cotton farmers have used the scarce water for their crops. The result has been most harmful to the river system.

In the nineteenth century English colonists in Australia had a society dedicated to replacing Australian plants with English plants. The society no longer exists as its harmful effects were finally recognized. http://www.sgapqld.org.au/ is the website for the Society for Growing Australian Plants.

Transforming the desert is not a road to the future. It is a road to a past that disregarded our existing environment and looked on it only as an obstacle for development.

Antonious
What would be the point? Deserts are a natural part of our environment. If the rainfall in desert areas is increasing nature will transform its environment in its own good time and far less intrusively than man.

david f
We are going to transform the deserts in other planets where there is no oxygen, no t life and we will leave a big part of our land as deserts?
Our world slowly-slowly is driven to food crisis, we will need more and more agricultural products and we will leave our land as desert?
Our goal should be how to maximize the benefits of our land including the deserts, how to take advandage from our land to create a stronger country.
We are lucky we have the oceans arount Australia and we can use their water for our needs.
About the desert trees It is beter to discuss it with Australian authorities, I believe we can find some desert trees overseas which can adapt our conditions.
Even if we use only Australian desert plans even then we can plant thousands of them in our deserts and support them. I prefer the creation of a green park close to a main road for use of travelers and tourist industry and to remind other people that they can create green parks in the deserts too..
My final goal is to prove and encourage Australians that we can use our deserts with a better, more productive and usefull way, to convert them for agricultural use.
Antonios Symeonakis
Adelaide