Engineers Propose Lily Pad-Like Floating Cities 309
Zothecula writes "The idea of going offshore to satisfy our renewable energy needs isn't new, but the grand vision of Japan's Shimizu Corporation goes way beyond harnessing green energy at sea for use in cities on Terra firma — it takes the whole city along for the ride. The company, along with the Super Collaborative Graduate School and Nomura Securities, is researching the technical issues involved in constructing its Green Float concept — a self-sufficient, carbon-negative floating city that would reside in the Equatorial Pacific Ocean."
Tsunamis are only dangerous in shallow water (Score:4, Interesting)
The displacement of large water which causes the tsunami would not affect deep-water installations... now hurricanes and typhoons would be disastrous.
Anecdotally, I was in Thailand during the Indian Ocean Tsunami. I spoke to folks who had been flooded, who swam away from floating ATM machines and such, and also a boat captain who told me that one mile out, they felt the tsunami... it was like a small sudden wave/bump and passed in a few seconds.
Re:The technical issues (Score:3, Interesting)
Oh... wait... New Orleans. Nevermind. The lemmings will pay plenty to drown in the ocean.
Even before Katrina, many of the devastated areas in New Orleans weren't exactly prime real estate. So I don't think it's fair to say that people will "pay plenty" to live in poor conditions. Don't you find it more likely that these proposed cities will quickly turn into conveniently off-shore ghettos?
Seasteading (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.seasteading.org/ [seasteading.org]
Idea's been around for a while. The main issue is that it takes some major bucks to get a project like this off the ground so it'll likely remain among the list of intriguing ideas nobody's been able to finance like intercontinental bridges, beanstalks, arcologies, and such.
Typo in headline (Score:5, Interesting)
it should read "Artists Propose Lily Pad-Like Floating Cities"
The fractal growth concept is kind of cool though.
Re:The technical issues (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:The technical issues (Score:5, Interesting)
I agree 100%. In fact, post-Katrina, many of the political shenanigans that flew in the past, have not been put up with. There have been a number of politicians go to prison for bribery and the like. Jim Letten [bestofneworleans.com] has done a world of good to help clean up dirty LA public service people. Sure, we still have problems, but we have come a LONG way since Katrina.
Heck, these days, people are calling Chicago politicians more corrupt and crooked than NOLA ones. Katrina, in many ways was a blessing and a curse. Yes, it was devastating to many who lost everything. But it also helped flush the city of a lot of what was wrong with it...the dead weight, the crime (still bad, but doesn't seem as bad as before), and the corruption. New Orleans is a MUCH nicer place to live now, than before Katrina. New blood is flowing in (many in the 30-35 educated ranks moving here), new businesses are coming in, many of the projects are being replaced with mixed housing..and pretty soon, we hope to have a major bio-medical corridor come in to replace some horribly blighted areas at the end of the Mid-City area which will help revitalize that area, and the areas closer to the French Quarter.
Re:The technical issues (Score:4, Interesting)
Lots of cities all over the world are like that, it is a solvable problem. We need port cities, they will tend to sink like this.
That's not really true. The number of port cities that have sunk below sea level is quite small, even over the span of thousands of years.
The logical approach is to gradually move the city to higher ground by simply doing NOTHING, rather than putting up a levy system that, over the long run, is going to be unmaintainable.
This does not require any expenditure of money, or a foray into the politics of greed. Simply benign neglect, allowing low lying areas to be used or abandoned as the economics and subsidence dictates will do what is logical. People will move.
Floating cities strike me as another idea that, over the long run, are unmaintainable.
Seriously. The oldest ship we have is around 200 years old, and it serves no purpose other than a historical nostalgia piece.
Imagine an entire city needing a new hull as the passage of time and storms takes their toll. The political pressure to run in and do something dumb is enormous.
By the time that happens, the rich and powerful will have sold off every inch of said floating city to the poor. It will be a floating slum.
If we can't stomach losing a city inch by inch over a hundred years, and therefore get stampeded into building levies, imagine pressure to bail (figuratively and literally) out the floating city with the leaking hull, full of poor people with no money to maintain what they have been saddled with.
Re:I have given this thought previously... (Score:4, Interesting)
Being tethered to the support "pylons", if you had a good balast system installed you might not need to pressurize at that shallow of a depth, since that pressure is well within the bounds of current and conventional construction materials to endure. (Several hundred PSI at worst.)
You would "weigh down" the structure with dirt, and use a pumped ballast system to control the bouancy of the complex. There would be an emergency pressurization system to cause rapid ascent in the event of a major mechanical disaster (interconnects between modules breaks, balast system experiences extreme fault, etc--) which would pressurize individual modules, and make them self-bouyant in order to prevent having people in them sink to davy jone's locker, but this system would only activate in the "OMG WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE! AHHH!" type circumstances.
Basically, the idea is to have the connected modules have "neutral bouancy" at that depth, by having static ballast to overcome their water displacement. With that achieved, direct airway access to the surface is possible, as long as the skin is made of a material strong enough to endure the crushing weight of the water around it.
As you go deeper down, the pressure difference is too high for materials science to keep 1 atm pressure, so they have to "reinforce" the skin by pressurizing the interior; this is when you start having decompression issues and the like.
Even then, there are effective maximum depths at which ordinary atmospheric gas becomes a problem, but you already seem to have a full working knowledge of that problem.
At the extreme, the pressure inside the vessel (needed to keep it from crushing up like a soda can) is itself deleterious to the health of the occupants, causing biological disorders in and of itself. (the pressure starts mucking up with cellular metabolism and various vital processes, simply because of the different chemical properties that the body's fluids take on in such conditions.)
As such, "Living on the deep ocean floor" is probably never going to happen.
This "Shallow, neutrally bouyant" approach looks plausible though.
Re:The technical issues (Score:2, Interesting)
Yeah, it's a floating arcology. The pictures look good though, like 1960s SciFi book covers.
I say - let this company research this problem, and see what they come up with. I'm sure it will be different, or be compromised, or be a lot smaller, or without a fricking giant tower in the middle that will be vulnerable to high winds. I'm sure they've got lots of physicists and engineers working on it.
The tower is 500m diameter. That's nearly 200,000 square metres of space. A family can live in 100 square metres comfortably (~1000 square foot) although those of you with 2000sqft mansions in the US might not think so. Even if the tower was eradicated and there was a 2D living space, that's 2000 families, or around 5000 people, although you might want some roads and paths and space inbetween dwellings. Even a collection of low-rise flats would house vastly more people.