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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."
The technical issues: Hurricanes, typhoons, rogue waves, tropical storms... Even if you make your lilies float, what's on top could still be blown over, and how many people want to live with an ocean view that turns dark and deadly every couple years? Oh... wait... New Orleans. Nevermind. The lemmings will pay plenty to drown in the ocean.
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I wonder how the engineers for the Green Float concept solved (if, indeed they did) how such a lily-pad city concept would be able to withstand tsunamis, which a floating city in the middle of the Pacific Ocean would be especially vulnerable. Unlike tsunamis on land, a lily-pad city, I'd think, would add the additional complication that the city could sink or fragment or capsize, trapping or killing a lot of people.
Also, with regards to the "carbon-negative" claim - do they mean carbon negative with regards to its operation? Or are they also including the incredible amount of carbon that would've had to be emitted in the construction of such a structure?
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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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Well, I guess it might work out better if they want to build new ones...
(though realistically, probably pipe dreams anyway (nothing particularly new?), again / better to use the tech in most efficient way and place - an existing land, for example)
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The energy cost of building this seaborne city would be much greater than whatever savings it might obtain, whether built at sea or shipped there from a land base. How about the energy costs of moving people between this city and anyplace else, from which it would be remote?
Building on land isn't less energy efficient, it's more efficient. There's plenty of land near enough to oceans to take advantage of the ocean energy, without the higher costs of operating everything on the ocean. Any merit to these principles would be better applied to building a city on an island rather than a floating city from scratch.
This project is an obvious waste of time, money and energy. I smell a government grant sucked up by bankers and their grad student patsies.
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I live in Atlanta. I don't want to turn into a mermaid.
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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.
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... like the islands of San Serriff?
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
http://www.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.
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it should read "Artists Propose Lily Pad-Like Floating Cities"
The fractal growth concept is kind of cool though.
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One word: Septic
The ocean is not your toilet.
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This concept was explored in much greater detail in Marshall Savage's book "The Millennial Project: Colonizing the Galaxy in 8 Easy Steps" (look it up on Wikipedia...) Honestly, I like Savage's methodology better- use OTEC (power generation through ocean temperature differentials)power to accrete/ grow your building materials from seawater. But then again, all this sort of thing is blue-water blue-skying....
They talk about using magnesium for construction.
Magnesium and salt water is about as bad as it gets for corrosion problems.
That thing would be decomposing faster than they could build it.
anyone else think that looks like Farpoint?
Or am I so bored by this meeting that I am making nutty observations?
blah blah blah
Most countries have an abundance of land making this fantasy of a city completely redundant. While Japan is noted as having far less usable land than say the U.S., Europe or continental Asia, skyscrapers, land reclamation and urban sprawl usually do the trick in making room for population growth.
To conceive of this mammoth project might be an architect's wet dream, but realistically, the global population is not so extreme that this needless reallocation of resources is warranted.
In terms of generating renewable energy and minimizing resource use, one only needs to look in our backyards - we've the technology to go carbon neutral/negative now. It's the political and societal will that's lacking.
Can you imagine a fleet of Chinese trawlers smashing into such a city because they claim the water it's under? Somali pirates would like to pay a visit as well.
I an Engineer, and I propose that supermodels be required by law to date Engineers... that doesn't mean it's going to happen!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Or they could just lash a bunch of ships to a super carrier and let it float nearly aimlessly around the Pacific Ocean, picking up and dropping off refugees every time it stops.
But then I realized the cable was blue, so I only gave it one star. I hate blue.
The proof of concept (known as the Carnival Splendor) for the "floating city" idea isn't going well....
They've been working on this at http://www.seasteading.org/ for several years now. Cities in the sea, and being able to move your "Seastead" from one city to another if you don't like living there.
The green float would "use a number of technologies to make a carbon negative system" and "would also produce zero waste by recycling resources and converting waste into energy". However none of their proposed ideas to accomplish these tasks would be any easier to do on a green float as opposed to on dry land. If it's so easy to build a carbon negative city with zero waste, prove it first on dry land...it will surely be more difficult to do on one of these contraptions where you have so many other technological nightmares to deal with. And I won't bother to mention what a catastrophe it would be when one of these things sinks or flips over in a major storm.
If your going to propose something impractical why not go big like a Dyson Sphere!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere
The majority of the inhabitants would live in 1km high “City in the Sky” towers located at the center of the circular cells
The idea of a futuristic city comprising of isolated skyscrapers in vast expanses of open parkland was a fashionable one for futurists in the 50s and 60s, but it's contrary to everything we know about how humans like to live. We like our streets at ground level, our cafes to sit outside, and so on. It's nice to be able to walk to places rather than being forced to drive everywhere because nothing is built anywhere near anything else. If you have to get from one of these towers to another then you have a long trip ahead of you.
Tall buildings are fine for work, play, and for a certain demographic to live in, but if you put lower income people in high rises it can become a nightmare as the UK found out with its ill-fated experiment with high rise living in the 60s.
Still an interesting concept though.
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It sounds like the setup for a SciFi movie. Starts out with a group being transported to an inactive city beneath the sea, but when power fails it floats to the surface, where they are attacked by soul sucking aliens and evil machines while searching for power units. Maybe we could call it Stargate Atlantus, or something like that.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
For the Japanese a person per square yard is arm's length. Americans would be bumping butts and bellies at that range.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Whenever there's a discussion about colonizing the moon I wonder why not expand into or onto the ocean? There's a lot less technical challenges to overcome and help would be a lot closer if needed.
If course, anybody who thinks the earth's land is full has obviously never been very far from a city.
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It makes me sad that the History Channel showed this whole concept on Modern Marvels long ago, and it is just now news on /. Everything was explained, demonstrated, and visualized and here we are talking about the concept without a reference other than an article that is outdated. Very sad day for me.
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First step to having a floating city, is making sure the wraith does not see you...and also warp drive capability
In other words, they want to build the fabled city of Atlantis.
Except without
- the ability to safely sink below the ocean and rise up again at will. For example, to submerge beneath passing tropical storms.
- the ability to travel the seven seas to travel and explore [ok, my idea, not part of the fable, unless you consider below]
- the ability to take off and fly between star systems and/or galaxies [the Stargate variety]
Of course, should tragedy strike and it really does sink (assuming its not designed to do so), then it really would fit the story of the real ancient city of Atlantis (presumably an island that was hit by an earthquake and sank below the ocean) that inspired said fables.
Joking aside, this is a good idea for the future. Particularly for Japan, which suffers from a shortage of stable land, and whose people are already used to commuting between islands. Furthermore, if they can truly make it self-sufficient, then it would serve as a great model to learn how to build future Lunar,Martian,etc. colonies.
The First Step is having enough ZPMs, everything else comes after that.
David Brin has the concept of the inevitable Sea State in his book Earth. Of course, in the book the planet rejects the Sea State once it attains consciousness... [sorry for the spoiler -- but the book is definitely worth reading. I'd read it along with Neal Stephenson's Zodiac -- both interesting ecological sci-fi]
Engineers Propose
Full stop. Very old concept. This is not a new proposal. This is more like "five hundredth time we've been promised flying cars and perpetual motion"
Historically this always fails for two reasons:
Nothing corrodes stuff like the sea. Its barely economically feasible to build giant movable profit generating machines that slowly corrode away. Making "dirt" to build huts on or whatever is not going to generate enough economic activity to pay for maintenance. Or at least it never has in the past. You'd think if its feasible, we'd have had cultures like Bedouin nomads of the sea...
The other fail is dirt isn't as useful as buildings. And stuff floating on the sea is too flexible to build much bigger than cruise ships. And the weight per square foot is too high to do heavy industrial work.
So the best bet is always piling fill on shallow reefs to make new islands. But even that is usually economic doom (see Dubai, etc)
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Nice, if you willing to settle for a city floating on the water. If you'd like your city to be floating, period, however, Bucky's still got your back...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_nine_(Tensegrity_sphere)
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of one of these floating cities. Dry land is not a myth!
How about figuring out a way to gather up the trash in the pacific and to aggregate it into a floating island?
love is just extroverted narcissism
I'm pretty sure as amusing as it is to see "Diaper Dave" Vitter and other oddities in your representation, it's pretty clear that in highly corrupt areas, not only do big-ticket items cost more, but quality of those things is dangerously low. Take a look at those schools in China.
This among other reasons, is why corruption can be deadly and should be fought tooth and nail.
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It's interesting that each story posted here that has something to do with potential future-tech (near or far future) is often met with torrents of skepticism, with plenty of "I bet they didn't think of THIS and that's why it won't work" posts.
Now don't misunderstand - identifying caveats, weaknesses, errors, threats, dangers, oversights, and other potential problems is absolutely vital to the success of any project, but we (myself included) tend to post as if we don't believe any engineer or scientist working on the project-du-jour would think of any of them, while we are the sole identifiers of problems, the only possessors of some fundamental and absolute facts that cause the project at hand to be entirely unfeasible.
This a tech/science/deep-thoughts site, filled with tons of very insightful and intelligent contributors. Just seems that we'd be a little more on the side of, "hey, neat idea, I wonder how they worked around the problem of 'x'" rather than, "idiots didn't even consider 'x' I bet, it'll never work."
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And the idea is as ridiculous now as it was then. If that city arrangement actually worked, we'd see one of them on land by now. People don't want to live in what is essentially a giant apartment building. At least, the type of people that are educated and skilled enough to afford living in this "prime" real estate. Not saying it'll never happen, or it's a bad idea, I'd love to see it personally. But it's so far fetched, such a low demand, and such a wild departure from a normal lifestyle that it's highly unlikely.
One good hurricane and a floating city might become a flying city or perhaps a great place to drown.
I guess you've never been to Manhattan. There aren't a lot of homeowners there, and the people are highly educated and probably paid a lot more than you are.
Atlanta!
As an engineer, I like to think about screwy problems from time to time myself, and have even devoted a little time to the concept of floating housing and infrastructure;
The problems with building in the ocean are immense:
1) The ocean is not "smooth and placid", even on a calm day. The cyclical action of small waves lapping against, and rolling under the surfaces of any floating structure causes abrasive damage to those surfaces. This is worsened by "Cavitation", when the water is moving quickly, (basically dissolved gases in the water get turned into little erosive bubbles as the water gets 'torn' by small surface imperfections as it flows over it) such as when there is high wind. This means that any non-self-regenerating surface (pretty much anything other than living tissue of some sort, like coral) is going to end up as nanoparticulate goo in one of the ocean's gyres.
2) Bouyancy is a major, non-trivial issue. Bouyancy will degrade over time as organic "Cling-ons" stick to the water-exposed surfaces. (In the ocean, this includes coral buds, kelp fronds, barnacles, and friends.) Additionally, "uneven" construction above on top of the "plate" will cause listing of the bouyant building surface. You would need to displace an obscene amount of water to hold up a traditional wood-frame house. (I know, I did calculations for it!) Even more if you intend to have any kind of yard or agricultural system running, since dirt weighs MORE than water. (meaning you must displace MORE water than the same volume of soil.)
3) Strapping discrete units together causes mechanical stresses at the joints, as the whole under-surfaces of the floating plates act as levers, applying blunt prying force on the joins. You can alleviate this somewhat by using a cantilouvered (sp? whatever.) design, but then you end up with mechanical wear as the joints rub from the undulating motion of the connected platforms.
All of these problems are major issues for "Fair weather" construction-- The implications of weathering a hurricane or coastal tsunami wave (remote ocean, where the water is deep, Tsunami are not a major factor.) impose whole orders of magnitude greater difficulties.
Based on some observations I have made on water turbulence, any "Floating city" would be better off about 6 meters under the water's surface, than it would be at the surface. Most ordinary wind driven water flow is greatly slowed and stabilized by the time it reaches that depth, reducing cavitational damage on the outer skin of the complex. Bouancy is more easily controlled with a ballast system, and due to the subdued wave-action at that depth, the mechanical forces between modules is greatly reduced.
Such a complex could be constructed between what would essentially be "deep ocean oil platforms", but without the oil pipelines. These would function as pylons to help constrain the floating complex, and provide the infrastructure to enter and leave the complex at the surface.
Building UNDER the water has other problems though-- Namely, risk of flooding, people getting trapped in airlocks, and the whole ball of wax of air, air quality, and atmospheric reprocessing/exchange. (Sad truth-- pumping air is expensive.) At such a shallow depth (basically 18 feet or so) there is little risk of developing nitrogen narcosis, but there would still be psychological effects of living in a tin-can.
Pretty much, the difficulties in constructing and maintaining a general purpose, habitable structure that is underwater is why there are so few of them, and none of them are 'large scale' construction projects.
Video and interview with Shimizu engineer available here.
That could work ... till the ZPM's run out of power and the wraith attack.
[Insert pithy quote here]
No, seriously, think long term. Maybe in a 1000 years from now this will seem to be a good idea. But now and for the next 200 years, it's just fantasy-science fiction.
It isn't sinking in with the tech crowd here, but the United States is broke. We really don't have any money any more. There aren't going to be any great big new projects like there were in the 20th century.
All the technical advancement of the past 100 years has come from the ability to use ever-increasing amounts of cheap oil. And the amount of oil that we can cheaply pump out of the ground is reaching its peak. And there is no realistic energy source to replace it, cheaply.
Oh yeah, tell me about the upcoming research on hot fusion, cold fusion, 80% efficient solar cells, giant ocean wave turbines, lava heat exchangers, induced micro-earthquakes, whatever. But, research is one thing and getting any of these sources able to surplant cheap oil is something else.
There is no money to finance the huge capital expenditures needed to transform the energy systems from oil/coal to anything else. The banking system in the USA has imploded: and no one will talk about it.
In thirty years you will tell your children and grandchildren that long ago people could just jump into their cars and drive anywhere they wanted to, anytime that they wanted to. But they won't believe you. Because it will be far outside of their own life experience. Just like you don't believe that fifty years ago it was no big deal to bring your rifle with you on a commercial airplane trip when you went on a hunting vacation out west.
Anyway, there aren't going to be any giant floating cities in the future. There isn't any money to actually build them.
You want a glimpse of the real future? Visit Haiti. Corrupt, bankrupt, stupid, backward, crowded, loud, hopeless, and filled with lots of clueless rich people running around trying to help but doing nothing.
I like the idea. Heaven is: a Saturday afternoon, lying on the couch watching the game on TV with a beer in the one hand, a cigar in the mouth, and a fishing pole out the window. Even if a tsunami hit, if the ocean is deep enough, it will simply pass harmlessly under me without my knowing it!
ISTR seeing a model for a proposed floating city on display in Pilkington's (Pilkington Glass) in St. Helens (UK) sometime in the early 1960's
Stop the depletion of the seas due to industrial fishing (not to mention the "research" on whales) and then I can consider you a serious country!
Of course, industrial fishing is not practiced only by Japan. It is utterly unbelievable - the amount of dead creatures which we don't use and throw back into the water (dead) can be up to 90% of all there is in the net!! Why no one is screaming bloody murder! Why do we tolerate this amount of BS in the world? At the moment the 20 monkeys are spending our money to chat about currency wars and printing money by the Feds, while at the same time the oceans are empty.
I am sorry, but just like one of my old post about the amazingly energy efficient jet engines (what's the profit, I asked - we will just fly more frequent so any "saving" will be immediately canceled by increased consumption and increased population) I have to say it again - what's the profit? Why the fuss? Why do we even bother to listen to this drivel? It only gives the illusion of safety and mislead us to believe that someone actually has an objective of making sustainable economy. The objective is always the same - money and power. Without real paradigm shift all efforts are meaningless.
The system we are living in encourages destructive behavior; anybody who slows down the rate of destruction is immediately in losing position since success is measured by the things consumed and accumulated. So, we are like kids who stuff themselves uncontrollably with sweets. All will get sick at the end (in our case die rather than being sick), but while there is still candy everyone keeps eating as fast as they can, because otherwise "the other kid will eat more and be stronger than me".
Stop wasting resources to tell us how we should not waste them, while at the same time saying that any decrease in consumption leads to economy collapse.
I wonder why people keep bickering about insignificant things (not specifically here, but in general), keep on discussing forever "in what colour to paint the ship, while it is sinking?" Another analogy - we are needlessly throwing in the garbage bin packs food that contains say 1000 calories per pack, but we build special trash bin (using LOTS of resources for R&D) which converts into useful energy small portion of the energy released by the impact between the food and the container. WOW, we are getting back 20 calories, otherwise lost in heat! We are going green! Youhoooo!
I am speechless by all this. Such stupidity surely will be edited by natural selection. Can't wait...
Recycle
This is blinging
It'd be amazing how much more trivial something like this would be if we had a theoretically perfectly rigid/strong material that could withstand near-infinite forces, and was super cheap to produce.
That and unlimited energy such as fusion would propel us into a real space age. Sigh...
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This is idea is few dozens to hundreds of years old. Way to go, /.
In related news, my concept city, which I do not plan to calculate or verify otherwise, is on the moon and uses unicorn bone dust for power.