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Yeah,

that is obvious if you consider that 99% of the ocean is basically never traveled by a ship ...

However if you look at typical freight routes, then the percentage of piracy affected segments jumps up considerably.

Here you have an overview about the 10 most dangerous areas: https://www.marineinsight.com/...

Here you have a life view: https://www.icc-ccs.org/piracy...

I did some math. Previously, I've considered similar absurd ideas, and the cost just didn't fall in their favor.

I feel I should start with a disclaimer: It's currently a very late (or early, depending on one's perspective) hour of the evening, and my physics skill isn't what it used to be. I invite and encourage you all to review my work, and if I'm wrong, please tell me how.

Based on the figures provided, we can work out the magnitude of the problem. The first computation is simple: Our speed will be .3m/s, to travel the (roughly) 10000 kilometers between Antarctica and the UAE in one year.

20 billion gallons of water corresponds to roughly 80 million cubic meters of ice. Cut into a sphere for ease of transport and calculation, it would have a radius of about 300 meters, with a cross-sectional area of about 200,000 square meters. We'll ignore the air resistance of the 10% above water, which falls within the error of my rough calculations. Calculation for the force of drag is ugly*, but works out roughly to C*9*10^6 newtons. That "C" is a coefficient simplifying the effect of the iceberg's shape, ranging from 0.5 for a sphere to 2 for more troublesome shapes.

Considering that range, the water's drag is between 4 and 20 meganewtons. A power source (tugboat, added motors, etc) will need to supply that much force just to maintain speed. If I remember my physics correctly, at 0.3m/s, that's between 2000 and 7000 horsepower.

There are tugboats with that much power. I haven't found much information on the annual cost to operate such a beast, but one tugboat operator gives price estimates per hour. For the purposes of this discussion, we can assume that the quoted price covers the operator's expenses well enough to also cover the overhead of running such a large operation, and the benefits of scale will cover the higher costs of an ocean-going expedition. Those are some very large assumptions, but I don't have information to clarify it further.

With those assumptions, the cost to pull an iceberg for a year is only about $20 to $100 million. That's surprisingly cheap, putting the cost of mostly-fresh water at under $0.001 per liter ($0.005 per gallon). In comparison, a desalination plant supplies water at about $0.0005 to $0.003 per liter ($0.001 to $0.01 per gallon).

In short, it's expensive, but it's in the same ballpark as regular desalination for that much water, and if the losses due to melting and evaporation can be controlled, it might just be feasible. As noted in TFA and elsewhere, it would also be quite the spectacle, promoting yet more tourism to the area.

* The formula I ended up with is F[drag] = C*.5*1g/cm^3*(.9*pi*(80000000 m^3/(4*pi/3))^(2/3))*(0.3m/s)^2.

They were up front about the fact that a name would have to be approved before it was applied to the ship.

Boaty MacBoatface was obviously never going to be approved. Whatever snowball's chance in hell it might have had despite its deep irreverence toward Her Majesty's navy was eliminated by the fact that it's calling a ship a boat.

You don't call a ship a boat. A boat is little. A ship is big. See, e.g., http://www.marineinsight.com/t...

Actually, it's just easier to call them all targets; and leave the boat moniker where it belongs, to submarines.

They were up front about the fact that a name would have to be approved before it was applied to the ship.

Boaty MacBoatface was obviously never going to be approved. Whatever snowball's chance in hell it might have had despite its deep irreverence toward Her Majesty's navy was eliminated by the fact that it's calling a ship a boat.

You don't call a ship a boat. A boat is little. A ship is big. See, e.g., http://www.marineinsight.com/t...

I was under the impression that the only things that people have made that will show that there was intelligent life on this planet in millions of years would be the giant bronze propellers on our largest ships. Not sure about their longevity over a billion years but I have heard estimates that they will last a few million.

These ships don't work like that. If anything, it will usually carry less than the max. The rating is based off of a arbitrary weight for each container which is about half the max weight per container. If overloaded or loaded incorrectly, they can list or even split. Here's two pictures of things that can happen:

http://www.railroad-line.com/f...
http://shariaunveiled.files.wo...
http://www.marineinsight.com/w...