Widespread Macro-engineering

With any POD between now and the late 1800s (but preferably sometime in the 1900s-1930s, hence its place in After 1900), make it relatively common for governments and any other suitably large groups to fund the construction of vast projects like an early Channel Tunnel (which was actually planned at some point in the 1800s IIRC), damming the Red Sea, or following through with any one of Frank Lloyd Wright's or Buckminster Fuller's ideas.

Preferably I'd like for history to progress to the point that in the '80s-'00s the world would have gotten used enough to this sort of thing that an attempt at Atlantropa would be seen as possible.*

*Let's assume that nobody involved would have any issues with it besides the feasibility of the thing and there's nobody talking about how Atlantropa would destroy so-and-so's economy.
 
Butterfly WWII and especially the rise of Liberal Democracy and free-market economics. A longer, deeper Great Depression might lead to centralized, quasi-authoritarian statist regimes gaining power in more Countries of what then passed for the developed world.
Absent the stimulus caused by rearmament, governments might well have plowed additional resources into massive infrastructure-cum prestige projects.
 
Powerful nations spent enough on wars to afford these projects earlier. We could see the Chesapeake bridge-tunnel in the 1930's and the Chunnel in the fifties. The Houston Ship Channel could have reached its present size in the 1920's . More dams and more hydroelectric power.

I'm thinking along the lines of my post in the "One billion Americans" thread in th ebefore 1900 section. Perhaps Amillennialism becomes the dominant Christian view. Catholics are pretty close to this. Perhaps some pope is an outright Amellinealist. Even some American Baptists today embrace Amillennialism.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amillennialism

Amellinnealists seek to promote human thriving and promote taxation of the rich to fund huge projects like the Houston Ship Channel, the Chunnel, and the Chesapeake crossing many years before they were completed OTL.
 
Top