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Engineers Propose Lily Pad-Like Floating Cities
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."
For the price that you pay to build a whole city on the ocean, you could probably build the city on land, build the power generation stuff in the ocean, build a bunch of redundant transmission lines between the two, and still have tons of money left over to improve your lifestyle (and if you really want "green" stuff you could use to build extra windmills or switch to organic foods or whatever else). This really makes little sense.
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In the middle of the ocean, a tsunami would barely be felt or noticed.
I'd be more interested how they intend to deal with extremists flying an A380 into the 1km high tower, and what the impact of said tower collapsing onto the lily pad would be.
It explained the lack of typhoons, but a lot of TFA doesn't make sense at all.
The Japanese may go for that population density, but it's not for me. The city I live in is 100k people and it must be twenty times that area, and it's too densly populated for my tastes.
Huh???? In a half mile area? WTF?
Free Martian Whores!
Hey...it only rarely happens...
So do massive oil spills from deep sea drilling. How do you feel about legislation to stop that from happening again, Mr. New Orleans?
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
and if it wasn't for the man made disaster that was our levy system,
You mean, if it wasn't for the greed and corruption that left the levee system unmaintained and ready to fail.
And of course there's the fact that the levee system was rated for a category 3 hurricane, while Katrina was actually a Category 4 - in other words, exceed the specs, expect failures.
I've visited NO. It's a decent place to visit. Wouldn't really want to live there till they get out of the Poverty-Pimp business though.
I 'm willing to take that chance; it really is so improbable that its the least of my worries.
The very existence of NO is just begging for Katrina and many more similar disasters."
Well, it isn't like we just decided in the past couple of decades we'd like to build and little burg here and move in 'cause it would just be cool to live below sea level.
New Orleans is older than the United States itself man...it is a city that is almost 300 years old man.
And, it is located precisely where it is for a number of reasons, the largest reason being near the mouth of the Mississippi river to the Gulf. NOLA is a very important port city for the US. Pretty much everything from the midwest comes through us to go out to the world. You like seafood? Well, we pretty much provide about 1/3 of the US's seafood from this area. You kinda have to live near the water to do that. You like Oil? Well, at least..do you need it? Well, a great deal of the US's spigots are due to NOLA and our immediate areas, everything from people to run the rigs, to the 'taps' that the tanker ships unload to shore...to the refineries that people here run and work in.
NOLA is a very important city...even if you don't care about the culture that NOLA has given the US, music, food, etc....economically, you should rethink how important you think it is.
And hell...why can't we invest to protect it like the Netherlands does their areas that are below sea level?
Every place in the US has its problems.
Do we abandon CA, because it has earthquakes, fires, and mudslides? Do we abandon the cities in the midwest that flood from the Mississippi river? Do we abandon the panhandle states due to all the tornadoes? Do we abandon NYC because it is a target for terrorists (not to mention, they are WAY overdue for a hurricane situation that makes the one in NOLA look like a puddle jump)?
Quit bitching about it...and come have some fun down here. We're friendly...its funny to watch it wear off on my northeastern friends that come here to visit.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
The Titanic was built to go ON the ocean.
Bob Ballard found it UNDER the ocean.
Lesson:
When it's "ocean" vs. "techno-hubris", bet on "ocean".
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
*shakes head* Whatever... I got plenty more karma to burn stating the truth even when it hurts some delicate snowflake's worldview.
I don't think your original post is that offtopic, but I can say that seeing about 5 posts here with you arguing "this is ontopic, meta this, woe is me!" really isn't on topic of floating cities.
/. isn't about getting nothing but praise for comments, it is about making an interesting discussion.
Mods here are *sometimes* like a box of chocolate. You aren't sure what you will get. Sometimes posts that shoot up to +5 end up at -1, sometimes it is the other way around. I wouldn't worry about the modding that your posts get. If you are posting quality content, the masses will override the few. Besides,
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
What happened to doing things because they're cool. Sure it doesn't make sense now, but imagination is a powerful thing, and what about building the world's tallest building? There's no point to have a 150 story building, but we learned alot in doing so and we have something cool to look at. Who cares if it's pie-in-the-sky, great engineering projects would always seem silly. What do you think the people thought when Stonehenge was first being planned?