every rational part of my brain fighting the 7 year old me inside me who knows Bagger 288 is the coolest thing ever
this post was submitted on 02 May 2025
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This is very real and has been an issue for years. I remember when I was younger, watching public TV, and I saw a news report about an elderly lady who was forced to sell her home along with the rest of her village so that they could dig up the entire area for coal. At the time it was a big deal, because she took so long to agree, which got media attention. It was incredibly depressing. It felt dystopian.
It is an engineering marvel, indeed, as it is the biggest mobile machine of the world.
Bagger 288 (and its sibling, Bagger 293) are probably the biggest machines which move freely on soil. They're about 225 m long, 96 meters tall and weigh 14 200 tons.
In the length category, the F60 overburden conveyor bridge (which moves on rails) is (was?) several times bigger, at 502 m length. It weighed less, however, at 13,600 tons.
Alternatively, build a flying machine with TNT duplicators
[ilmango intro music] 🥭🥭🥭
Do you know what happened to him? I miss his content
haven't been into Minecraft YouTube (or any YouTube really) for a year or so, was unaware he wasn't active
i know he's some kind of engineer irl so it may just be work keeping him busy. bummer either way
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I love how I know the name Bagger 288 because of a 16 year old meme
We make logging companies "replant forests" (yes it's not at all the same as the old growth but it's something). Why do we let mining companies completely rape the land and replace nothing? It doesn't even look like they backfill with the unused debris, much less restore topsoil or plant anything.
There are time lapses of this machines movement from satellite / aerial photography and you will see that the soil becomes green again.
Most of the forests in Germany aren’t truly old growth tho. Instead it’s basically all wood plantations
Where I live they are required to rehabilitate the land afterwards, but usually that's after the mine has been running for like 30+ years and by the time they shut down, they do some weird financial trickery and declare bankruptcy despite having made millions in profits the previous decades and then they just walk away and tax payers need to clean up.
Honestly, that's on the government for not either levying the industry, or making them set up a fund to pay for that.
Why do we let mining companies completely rape the land and replace nothing?
The government spend billions to brainwash people and turn them complicit. Check out the "germany rearming" threads to see how even on lemmy plenty of people are happy with the raping.
It will be turned into a giant lake once they are done mining. You burn a lot of volume and filling it wil soil again is just not possible
Except they actually do backfill it and plant trees; it's still an ecological horror though
Well, not 100% on this, but maybe because we're an overaged society that elects corrupt politicians rather than accept that change in lifestyle is necessary? Or maybe it is the brainwashing of the Springer-press that continues to vilify the Greens. Maybe a mix of both.
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Here in the UK I know of lots of old mines and quarries that, because the ground is inherently unstable once the mining has finished, the land gets reclaimed as a nature reserve. Think nice walks, wildflowers, native trees, marshlands etc. A lot of effort goes into making habitats for insects, birds and animals.
Whether or not it is all paid for by the mining companies, I don't know.
Underground mining and strip mining are very different in the possibilities to recover.
Both underground mining and strip mining will devastate natural and urban areas in Germany for centuries. For the former black coal and iron mining areas they basically have no solution except to keep the pumps running indefinitely as the flooded underground mines would collapse, causing sinkholes and eating the houses on top. For the strip mining, these will be scars on the earth until geology has taken care of it in a few million years.
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They do backfill, but they obviously lose quite a bit of volume in the process, so they cannot completely fill the hole. The remaining part is usually flooded.
Tbh there is a lot done do make the Land usable once the mining process is through
And not nearly enough because no human activity can realistically cover some 100-200 million years of geological processes.
In most places they just want to flood the hole. These artificial lakes then become a toxic hole because the Iron-Sulfide exposed during mining oxidizes into Iron-Sulfate, leading to these lakes being diluted Sulphuric Acid for decades if not centuries.
Also the groundwater cannot recover a century of pumping it out in less than multiple centuries. Then the water used for flooding is diverted from rivers, which already are running low in these region and the artificial lakes are evaporating a lot of water, further drying things out.
Oh and of course the holes tend to be sold to some smaller private investors by the end of their lifetime who do not have nearly enough funds to be held liable for renaturization. So the tax payers will be looking at dozens if not hundreds of billions of damages to front over the next centuries while the profiteers moved their money elsewhere.
First of all I very much agree with you, no amount of human made renaturalisation will make the Land the same again. Nontheless I wish to explain the current process that exists in Germany from my first and second Hand experience.
To start, these surface coal mines span a much larger area than the lake that remains at the end, means they are moving through the landscape generally taking multiple years. During active mining plans about the final state of the landscape are already being drawn up and the company responsible for the mine is required to build up finances to fully finish renaturalisation, with is a process that already starts during active mining in areas where the coal has already been taken out of the ground, as they filled up by the earth taken from the active side of the mine. In doing so it is generally planned in a way to have similar soil roughly back in the layer it used to be before, so top soil will be on top again, once the ground is there again, plants are grown. Depending on the area planning there are generally mostly areas for farming and for forests, on farming areas there is a certain set of plants that are meant to be grown to increase the fertility of the ground and I believe in forest areas things may be similar, in any way, those areas are prepared (over multiple years obviously) and are often times already in use/pretty far developed even as the mine is still going.
When it comes to the end of such a mine and the often necessary lake, they are usually flooded through external water input and not the ground water, allowing for a better water quality. This of course doesn't change anything about the lowered ground water level that takes decades or more to recover and the increased evaporation but at least you can swimm in it without the fear of it melting your skin off. Besides that a problem that may occur with landslides on the piled up dirt side of the lake is nowadays generally eliminated with ground ramms to basically make the soil set in a stable position.
As to holes being sold of I cannot say much, I do know tho that they are under "bergaufsicht" so under surveillance by the ministry of the state responsible for mining till renaturalisation is finished and in the case that the original owner cannot finish it for whatever reason or some so far unknown late damages occur the ministry is also responsible.
Over all I wish to say that I am not defending the general practice of digging up mass amounts of earth, destroying existing eco systems, sometimes destroying villages and leaving a lasting impact on the area but I just wanted to at least mention that at least a whole lot is being done to try and mitigate the effects it has...in Germany...currently...
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Bagger 288! Bagger 288!
The Bagger 288 is there to safeguard all mankind.
The Bagger 288 wreaks total utter devastation.
The Bagger 288 contains an artificial mind.
This mind is full of hatred, violence is its sole vocation.
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Being destroyed by a giant machine is terrible but it did file the proper paperwork first so what can be done at this point?
I hate so much how accurate this is as a metaphor for how many politicians deal with the fascist AfD.
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Uhm no bagger-288 was created to protect mankind from godzillas and doom robots from the future.
ok I hate coal and fossil fuels, but this thing is so cool
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