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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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Tsunamis are barely detectable in the open ocean. Their height builds up as they approach land.
Hey...it only rarely happens, and if it wasn't for the man made disaster that was our levy system, Katrina wouldn't have hurt us much at all.
99% of the time...life is GREAT down here. The attitude, friendly people, interesting culture, banana republic government (is entertainment for us locals)...and the fact that we understand the concept of the "to go cup" at bars, makes it all worthwhile.
Ok, so a storm comes from time to time, really it is usually just an excuse to pack and take an impromptu 4-day vacation to visit friends relative, or maybe even take the party to Beale St. in Memphis.
There are reasons why people live here...and want to visit here.
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First we need puddle jumpers, yes puddle jumpers.
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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.
Technically, Tsunamis only rise to their maximum height as they get closer to land. Out at sea, they're mostly beneath the surface. It takes a decrease in depth to force them up into the walls of water we associate them with.
Bearing that in mind, and further considering that we can and do have ships at sea when Tsunamis happen, I assume the problem is manageable, and was probably considered for the Green Float design sometime prior to this point.
Slightly off topic, but did anyone else notice in the overhead pics that these things look fractal derived?
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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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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?
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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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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?
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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?
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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Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
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.
and if it wasn't for the man made disaster that was our levy system
Wrong, if it weren't for the man made disaster of building a city that requires a massive levy system because it's sinking and now several feet below the level of the nearby ocean....
The very existence of NO is just begging for Katrina and many more similar disasters.
I've got several acres of grass out in my backyard. Tell you what, I'll even throw in an open bar and still only charge half what the cruise costs.
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.
Or elite gated communities which house the corporate headquarters of multi-national banks such that they avoid paying any taxes what so ever? And I'm sure many very rich people like the idea of retiring to a small personal island in the south pacific - now they can have it built to order.
So living in a real city isn't your bag. That's cool, it keeps the prices down for people who don't mind the density.
10-50k people per 3 sq km isn't that bad, anyway... it's comparable to Hoboken NJ (around 40k in 3.2 sq km), which is pretty dense compared to a lot of urban neighborhoods in the US, but is still quite livable.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
No no, these guys want to build cities ON the ocean.
New Orleans was build UNDER the ocean.
Crucial difference. :)
I 'm willing to take that chance; it really is so improbable that its the least of my worries.
Oil obeys the laws of nature, not the ones passed by congress.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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 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.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Like in sg atlantis, you would have a city that can move as a ship does, and also have a shield against the elements, surely a cloak of invisibility would help against the wraith!
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.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
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".
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Not all people are as hideous to look at as Australians.
How about figuring out a way to gather up the trash in the pacific and to aggregate it into a floating island?
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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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*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,
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The state did ask for help eventually, didn't it? The help provided was substandard. You'd think they would have prepared themselves better so that when states did ask for help, it'd be ready to go, but that's not what happened. The military was off in a foreign country busy slaughtering the natives for oil, rather than being prepared for actually dealing with domestic problems.
Aside from that, the Federal government completely failed at preparing the area for disaster beforehand, such as by having better levies. Obviously, that's not all Bush's fault (the neglect of LA has been going on for decades), but he certainly didn't do anything to help.
Finally, appointing some moron to head FEMA whose only experience was running a stupid horse show was a recipe for disaster. (Of course, the Democrats aren't any better at picking people with relevant experience: Obama (who had no experience of his own) picked a Supreme Court justice who had never even been a judge!)
The military was off in a foreign country busy slaughtering the natives for oil, rather than being prepared for actually dealing with domestic problems.
The US military is made up of many divisions. Louisiana didn't need the Marine Corp (unless martial law were ever to declared), they needed the Army Core of Engineers plus additional grunt work. And that's exactly what they got. From what I understand, there was no shortage of help here.
Aside from that, the Federal government completely failed at preparing the area for disaster beforehand, such as by having better levies
That's a STATE issue, *not* Federal. In fact, Louisiana has a special levee board (created long before Katrina) that's further broken down into regions with fund allocated to their maintenance. They had a funding an procedural system in place. All of this could have been avoided with proper planning by the state.
I direct you to http://pdfcast.org/pdf/chart-of-accounts-louisiana-local-government
And yes, I used to live in that state. Please learn a thing or two about it before you start slinging the political talking points around. You're spreading FUD when you do.
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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.
No matter how much you like it, don't try to convince those not emotionally attached to it that NOLA is of a piece.
The slums add no charm nor endearing culture. There is no logistic necessity for ANY of the parts below sea level, they are a result of bad planning or no planning.
This smacks of latent racism and blaming the victim. Poor, black residents of new orleans have functionally no control over the elevation of their homes. To indicate that these peoples homes are somehow entirely devoid of value is the same kind of logic that justifies forced relocation of oppressed people anywhere anytime in history. you say that its a free country and all those living in the projects can simply move, but the same argument was made by fools after katrina: "those who lost everything in the hurricane should have simply packed up and left, they had 4 days warning." that probably requires the kind of capital and means of travel often shared by those communities, not individually owned and operated. i think that if you want to analyse the relative importance of parts of the oldest and most historic cities in the united states, you should consider that living in and maintaining that historicity is not simply a privilege but a civic duty to the living memory of the united states im sure you hold so near and dear to your heart. OTOH, i think it would be pretty baller to live on a floating city, so...
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.