Land bridge to Britain

[Cymraeg]

I'm waiting for someone to turn up and claim that if Caligula had organised a line of slaves from the Channel to the Vosges then they totally could have passed enough rocks to bridge the gap.

 

[Dathi THorfinnsson]

Hmmm....

Roman roads were ~4.2m wide and often more than 1m thick/deep. so ~4m^2 area.

the cross section of a Channel causeway 30m high would be 30*(30+4)m in area assuming a 45 degree slope. or ~1000m^2 area.

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So.... Every length of causeway would take as much work as some 250 lengths of Roman Road. A 20 mile causeway would be like 5000 miles of road - and totally useless until the whole thing was done.

All order of magnitude/back of envelope calculations.


So.....
Would it be physically possible for the Romans to do this? Yes.
Would it be politically or economically possible? Nope. No way. No how.

 

[Napoléon Caesar Augustus]

I'm waiting for someone to turn up and claim that if Caligula had organised a line of slaves from the Channel to the Vosges then they totally could have passed enough rocks to bridge the gap.

Why not skip the middle man and throw the slaves in instead?

 

[phildup]

Merely shift your POD back 15,000 years to the last Ice Age. Sea levels were 300 feet (100 metres) lower because of all that water trapped in glaciers. Humans routinely walked and hunted on the exposed Dogger Banks between Holland and England.

Doggerland! Yay!!!