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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.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
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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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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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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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'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.
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.
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.........
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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*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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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.
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?