Your proposal is fairly modest compared to some of the ideas out there.
In his wildly enthusiastic 1860 book The Central Gold Region, William Gilpin claimed that the Mississipi Basin could support at population of 1.2 billion people, and was destined to become the “world’s amphitheatre”, with all of the world’s trade running through it in a grand “Asiatic and European Railway”.
In his wildly enthusiastic 1860 book The Central Gold Region, William Gilpin claimed that the Mississipi Basin could support at population of 1.2 billion people, and was destined to become the “world’s amphitheatre”, with all of the world’s trade running through it in a grand “Asiatic and European Railway”.