Humanity started small using agriculture to
change the world to suit our needs. Each new step seemed bigger and more ambitious. So let’s take a look at what grand projects
the future might have in store. So today we begin a new series looking at
how we could apply to our own world some of the technologies we’ve discussed for terraforming
and colonizing other worlds. A key point we make about terraforming is
that when you’re done, that planet is very changed, not the world it was plus some grass
and trees, but with everything down to the mountains altered. And that’s part of why I decided to name
this series about remaking our world, Earth 2.0. In this series, we will cover colonizing oceans,
greening deserts, thawing polar lands, and overhauling several other sorts of terrain. We will explore motivations for such projects,
as well as the impacts on connected ecosystems and the hazardous uncertainties. There’s obviously a huge moral dimension
to renovating the Earth and impacting the lives of its inhabitants, but we’re mostly
going to skim or bypass ethical matters. We’ll be assuming the roles of engineers
and mega-architects, exploring what we can do and how we could do it, but leaving the
ethical aspects for everyone to ponder on their own. Also, while our focus is Earth, many of these
methods will be viable on other planets, so perhaps some that shouldn’t be used here
might be usable someday on an uninhabited planet. We’ll be beginning with oceans, very appropriate
since they cover most of the planet. In fact, they’re far too big to cover in
a single episode. So we’ll wait until Episode 2 before we
head very far from shore or dive down deep. Today we will focus on seasteading, offshore
structures, and artificial islands. This isn’t entirely a futuristic topic,
as even ancient cultures built extensions onto coastal land or reclaimed islands by
filling them in with dirt and retaining walls. Indeed, we’ve reclaimed large chunks of
land with dykes, and we’ll look at creating artificial reefs today as a variation on that. There’s a long history of ships at sea or
unpopulated small islands being fairly independent of any nation, even if just unofficially. A ship’s crew sailing around the seas might
hail from a dozen different lands and change its flag as many times throughout a journey. The net effect is a tradition that once you’re
a certain distance from a land, its laws no longer apply. One of the major motivations to create living
and working space at sea is precisely to be free from any existing national jurisdiction
or create a new one. The flip side is that a country can attempt
to extend its borders and jurisdiction by wrapping a sea in islands it has built, something
that has generated quite a bit of international legal debate that we won’t get into here. There have even been some attempted micronations
like Sealand, a decommissioned anti-aircraft gun platform in the North Sea, occupants of
which declared it a sovereign nation in 1975, complete with a flag and anthem. It’s never been officially recognized, but
laws evolve, and a large populous floating structure or completely artificial island
might have a better claim and stand a chance of being recognized. Being an independent nation has some obvious
advantages, and an artificial island is an attractive place for more than just casinos,
tax shelters, pirate servers, or activities that are illegal elsewhere. Controversial or dangerous research you might
have difficulty doing elsewhere might fit. We often discuss mental or physical augmentation
processes like genetic or cybernetic engineering, and it wouldn’t be surprising if a lot of
the R&D or initial clinics offering such services were done offshore. Not just to avoid possible legal restrictions
either, genetically engineered crops or extinct species we’d returned via cloning can be
more easily contained this way, to avoid contaminating ecosystems. Similarly, a lot of the obstacles to private
space launches come from regulations, mostly pretty reasonable ones, that countries tend
to have about such things. Most of those do relate to issues from ground
based launches or being close to populated areas, so sea based launches are doubly attractive
in that regard. Now, most of these are of limited scope, it’s
handy to have maybe a dozen offshore launch pads or clinics or casinos but there’s no
reason one would fill the ocean with tens of thousands of such places. However these do represent the motivation
and funding sources for initial efforts. Like any colony effort, those early projects
are where you do your learning to make future islands better and cheaper, but they also
color and flavor future efforts and the cultures that grow up around them. Not too many folks live in Jamestown, Virginia
farming tobacco, or Salem or Plymouth Massachusetts burning witches, nor are most Australians
prison convicts, but for good or ill those earlier colonial efforts had a massive impact
on the civilizations that arose from them. So I tend to find it amusing that a lot of
the initial motivation to create cities in the seas is likely to be a desire to circumvent
laws. We’ll explore other motivations to do more
extensive settlements in a moment, first we should note what sort of types of sea based
habitats we have. The simplest ones begin working with what
you already have. You can extend land from shore by constructing
dykes and pumping the water out, you can build peninsulas or bridges to islands this way
too. But it does take a lot of rock and dirt to
make a new chunk of land, and more the deeper out you go. If you want to build a square kilometer of
new land out where the ocean is a kilometer deep, you need a cubic kilometer of rock,
indeed more than that since it will need to expand out near the base like a cone or pyramid,
not a cylinder or cube as wide at the top as the bottom on the ocean floor. Such a foundation might need to be a few cubic
kilometers, or a few billion cubic meters, each massing a few tons. One might easily need 10 billion tons of material,
requiring hundreds of billions of dollars in costs just to dig it up, move it, and dump
it into the sea, already giving this island a land value parallel to land prices in the
most expensive parts of our most developed metropolises. Needless to say it’s cheaper near land,
where the seafloor is a lot less deep, but out deep your island building is likely to
either involve island reclaiming or more artificial processes. Island reclaiming is where most of the material
is already there, and you’re just adding some and flattening out higher up places to
end with more land. There are many islands that could be expanded
this way, and just as many that don’t quite reach the surface. There are whole chains of undersea mountains
and volcanoes, and these could be added to, slicing rock from mountains to put into the
sea potentially let’s you get twice the living area since you can terraform those
mountains, but we’ll save that, along with activating volcanos to create islands, for
a later episode. Alternatively, if you want to go deep out
in the sea far from any island, regular or submerged, and be connected to the ocean floor,
you might opt to go more for metal scaffolding. Offshore platforms are often simply a structure,
or island, built up on stilts or a framework tower. Now an obvious variation is a structure which
simply floats, a large ship essentially, but you might anchor one to the seafloor with
tethers, or build much more vertically than a typical ship by having large and deep pontoons
it rested on. This one is interesting because you could
have your island be quite elevated, floating in the air not on the seashore, with supports
sinking down to those pontoons, if you want mobility, or the ocean floor if not. So you could sail right under one and protect
the island from large waves during storms. Beyond that, for those that are basically
big ships, or reclaimed islands, verticality doesn’t come into the equation much, but
if you’re building your islands, either by dumping rock and dirt to form a traditional
one, or making a framework tower, there’s a lot more reason to go vertical as you are
doing so anyway. We’ll save a lot of the discussion of under
the sea habitats for next time, but it’s worth noting that an artificial island that
is not floating is not likely, in most cases, to be a single flat layer, but rather one
built up as much as downtown metropolis, and down too. Indeed, where buoyancy is concerned, you need
to make sure you’re building down as much as up, and while waterproofing and corrosion
are concerns, building down into water is a lot easier than down into dirt and rock. So these islands might more resemble arcologies
than a simple flat traditional island. So let’s discuss some more motivations for
moving into the seas. First, for the floating structures at least,
there is mobility. You can’t move a city, you can move a cruise
ship though or a drilling platform. One might imagine a giant floating stadium
that toured the Atlantic Seaboard or Mediterranean for hosting major sporting events or other
types of events like carnivals or festivals that do better by touring areas rather than
staying still. Mobile amusement parks or race tracks or other
things which are hard to pack up and move normally but financially do better by being
mobile. Museums come to mind, one on a boat can visit
a town for a month or so then move to the next, where it’s new and novel. Similarly, platforms for resource extraction
or fishing might want to move around to reach new resources or avoid overfishing an area. But there’s a second part of mobility. A city can’t move, but neither can its components. I can’t rearrange a city, but a floating
island could easily consist of many modular platforms that could attach, detach, and rearrange. One might imagine a standardized set of platform
modules, presumably square or hexagonal, able to be rearranged or moved to other floating
cities entirely. Indeed, you’d likely want to build floating
islands like this anyways in order to solve some of the problems caused by being supported
purely by the ocean’s surface. While you could imagine a lot of these would
include drawbridges with associated utility hook ups for power and water, it’s possible
boats or amphibious vehicles may be used instead of cars. This sounds like something a little out there,
but actually, it’s been done before and is still done today by the Uros people who
live on floating islands on the highest inland lake in the world, Lake Titicaca in South
America. They’ve been living this way for thousands
of years. If your neighbor is giving you grief, it’s
a relatively simply matter of detaching your part of the floating island from theirs and
floating away. It makes for a good change of scenery and
better neighbor relations when you can literally choose who your neighbors are and change your
mind later too. For that matter, there are a lot of folks
who opt to live in recreational vehicles, RVs, especially when retired, and if they
don’t like their neighbors, they can just move to a different lot. It should be noted that RV size is mostly
limited by vehicle size, but as automated vehicles come into play, a person might be
able to bring a large modular house along with them in a long caravan of self-driving
vehicles that re-attach at the destination. However, houseboats and ships are less constrained
by size, hence oil supertankers and aircraft carriers, so we can supersize this idea. We could have floating islands that can move
around and attach and detach based on the desires of the residents. Say some residents want to go to the tropics,
but we decide we want to go skiing. Other folks are in a constant search for temperate
weather, not too hot, not too cold. No problem, we just get together with the
ones that want to head to the colder climes while everyone else goes with the tropics. We wave goodbye and the various groups go
their separate ways, possibility to join up again at some point in the future. Humans are wanderers by nature, bound to the
land once we developed agricultural, but in the future you could potentially take your
farm with you. Speaking of travel, another motivation is
stops along the way. Planes wanting to cross the Atlantic or Pacific
have to make a very long voyage and be configured to that, and fly certain routes. The flight network changes a bit if someone
builds or reclaims an island big enough to land a large jet on the middle of the ocean. Since jet fuel is less dense than water, keeping
supplies on hand actually adds to your buoyancy allowing more overall mass too. This is the basic concept of an aircraft carrier
after all, you’re just going bigger and more civilian. An artificial oceanic airport city complete
with hotels and recreation. It’s also worth remembering that aircraft
carriers aren’t our only example of floating islands that already exist, we’ve got some
rather large collections of garbage floating around our oceans and it’s a lot easier
to clean such things up, possibly even profitably, if you’ve got safe ports of call closer
at hand; ones already equipped to recycle or process such material. This is another motivation: although there
are some advantages to doing manufacturing at sea, the big disadvantage is that factory
workers don’t want to take a ship or plane to work everyday. However, as automation improves you need fewer
folks, not all of whom would need to be on-site, and the bigger the facility, the more comforts
you can offer those who do need to stay there. The biggest advantage of manufacturing at
sea is cooling, since you’ve got an effectively unlimited supply of coolant on hand, something
also handy for computing and server farms. As energy itself becomes less of a bottleneck
on human production, getting rid of heat is going to become an increasing problem for
us, and as a rule people live in warmer places. Throughout the series as we visit inhospitable
parts of the planet and try to make them more livable, we’ll note that they often have
advantages for manufacturing or computation. It’s worth remembering one lesson we learned
in the Outward Bound series while looking at settling planets. Colonizing a planet does not necessarily mean
many people live there. Turning an entire exotic planet or moon like
Mercury or Titan into a huge mine, factory, or computing engine is still colonizing it
and is probably a better use of that resource as opposed to terraforming it for human habitation. Of course power on the seas is a concern since
we’re not a civilization with cheap and abundant power quite yet. One can, for instance, float solar panels
near an artificial island, withdrawing them when it’s dark, you’re moving, or there
are storms. We’ve already demonstrated floating solar
farms for powering civilization on land, but they seem to suffer from the same problems
as solar does everywhere. Wind power is a bit better, and of course
one can extract power from the motion of the sea itself. Floating nuclear reactors are already a proven
technology, we use them to power our navies and icebreakers, but are unpopular near densely
populated areas. Of course, air conditioning uses up a lot
of power and if we minimise that use by following a temperate climate, we limit our energy footprint
too. We’ll see next time that there’s some
good power options for deep down in the sea, such as nuclear, but one worth mentioning
for now is if you are using big cables or pylons to anchor yourself in place, there’s
an option for using geothermal with those too. The important aspect is that you can generate
power anyplace you have a temperature difference between two spots, and the thermocline between
the upper layer of the ocean and everything a kilometer deep or more is rather sharp. Even ignoring that if you are down on the
ocean floor, once you connect down to it, you are already a lot deeper and closer to
the Earth’s Mantle than we usually go for geothermal. This makes hydrothermal, or using that temperature
difference throughout the depth of our ocean to generate power, an attractive option for
these structures. Many of these methods would also combine well,
and it’s nice to have multiple generation methods; diversity in power sources is never
a bad thing. However, a more likely approach might be biofuels,
particularly for export, and this brings up seafarming. The oceans are vast, and have lots of life,
but the further you get from shore, the more that drops off. There’s plenty of light, but there’s just
not much nutrients, they’re all way down where the sun doesn’t reach too. Many of the ocean’s ecosystems rely on some
species that are very good at extracting dilute nutrients from water. We can enhance this process artificially,
by taking something of an iceberg approach. Icebergs are slightly less dense than seawater,
so they float but only a little bit sticks out. Similarly, we could build a relatively small
and cheap area above water for people that was connected to a vast underwater mesh that
let light in and had nutrients, and was good at extracting those from the water and keeping
them. These need be little more than lots of nets
which can absorb nutrients and act as a place for plants to anchor themselves to. However we might go more elaborate and use
thicker branches, akin to roots, but acting backwards in that we might pump nutrients
like nitrogen down to them. Nitrogen produced by using wind or solar as
the power source. Up on the island, which I will call a Jellyfish
Island, you have the normal human habitat with houses, factories, shopping centers and
civic buildings. Down below you have a much wider region in
which algae – a great source for biofuel – and other plants grow, attracting fish
and setting up a nice mobile seafarm. Extra biomass can be used for biofuel and
it will leak some down to lower levels of the sea as marine snow, the food source for
things living far deeper than the sun can reach. The Jellyfish part comes from it potentially
having long tentacles it might use to anchor itself in place and also to scrape the ocean
floor for nutrients it can haul up. But another aspect of such a place is that
it isn’t just farming, it is mining too. The oceans contain a lot of metals, even precious
and rare-earth metals. Ocean Extraction, the process of filtering
out those metals from the water, or getting them off the seafloor, has come a long way
in recent years and could be a competitive source for some materials we want, particularly
lithium for batteries and fusion. Should we get an even better power source,
like fusion, we might extend our farms a good way deeper, providing them light where the
Sun can’t reach, something we often refer to as vertical reefs here, we’ll save that
for the following episode but it’s amusing since some jellyfish glow and so might their
man made island analogs. Now I chose Jellyfish Islands after likening
them to icebergs because we might have actual iceberg islands, albeit temporary ones. We’ll be looking at turning the desert green
once we’re done discussing the oceans, and desalinating seawater to do that is very energy
intensive. The bigger an iceberg is, the longer it can
last without melting as it drifts south, and the less of its water is lost proportionally
in the process. We might drag icebergs south, letting the
current do most of the work, but giving them a nudge and carefully cutting them off in
the first place at an ideal size and time. Such things might be ideal for bringing freshwater
to places that are short on it, and we might be able wrap them up to melt slower. There’s also something amusing about the
idea of parking an iceberg off the coast of Los Angeles and running a ski slope on it
for people to visit. That’s a big thing to remember throughout
this, it’s nice if you can find a single thing that provides the economic incentive
to build such a place, but you’ll always be looking for additional uses too: they make
marginal or unprofitable options profitable, and make profitable ones very profitable,
and more economically diverse and resistant to market disruptions. Cities that rely on a single industry are
very vulnerable, that’s exactly how you end up with ghost towns. So if you can have a ski resort you can stick
on your icebergs and a server farm taking advantage of the cold for computation, and
a casino and a trailing pack of dolphins and whales for people to visit, you do better. Now this is more deep blue than coastal, and
in truth extending our coastlines is probably the path we’ll use the most, but I think
the deep blue holds a special interest in this topic, because folks want to run off
and set up their own nations, and I should note that in the long term that’s probably
a losing bet. Start nation-building at sea so you can make
your own, and other countries are going to start pressuring you to sign treaties and
follow international customs, like having customs and other regulations. And they do have some muscular ways of encouraging
cooperation if need be. You’re probably out of luck if you get invaded
by one and try to complain to others when you’ve been smugly acting as a port of call
for illicit doings, smuggling, and tax evasion. Of course, we do have such places now too,
hence offshore accounts. Moreover, nations have citizens and citizens
typically are in favor of all those laws and regulations, that’s generally why we have
so many, they just kind of accumulate every time something happens and the population
tells their leadership to fix it. So even left on its own, some new autonomous
oceanic city-state is probably going to start taxing, regulating, and restricting things,
and this is all assuming you don’t get annexed. There’s a lot of advantages to being a citizen
or province of a major nation after all, and whole new ones might emerge just in the seas. You might have a nation of Atlantis, some
big country composed of hundreds of floating city states, or existing countries might simply
create whole new states on top of the ocean. Since such things are likely to be small and
incremental though, you might most often see states and provinces expand this way. It would be very easy to imagine the state
of Hawaii expanding by reclaiming undersea islands in the archipelago. Back on the coast though, people might be
moving those coasts. As mentioned, we’ve been reclaiming land
with dykes for a long time, and rising sea levels might encourage a lot of R&D and economy
of scale to develop cheaper and improved versions of that technology. We also have breakwalls, meant to protect
places from strong waves and cut down on erosion. But a breakwall has the potential to be its
own ecosystem, as this is what the typical reef or barrier island is after all. Instead of just dumping rock there, you can
tweak it a little to be nicer for sea life to latch onto, or for farming too. You could put wind turbines on them as a power
source, but you can also take advantage of tidal generators. A tidal generator is a simple device: tides
come in and water rises, filling tanks, and when it goes out, water level drops and leaves
those tanks, spinning a turbine and making power. Quite a lot of it too. So one might opt to skip traditional breakwalls
of solid rock and instead build huge, hollow tanks for water to fill, with turbines for
tidal power, wind turbines on top of it, and build the exterior to be perfect for aquatic
life to latch onto. You can also strain those tanks for nutrients
and valuable metals while you’re at it. Or skip the wind turbines and build some expensive
coastal housing there. Indeed, if you did that, you might decide
to build a second breakwall further out. Then do it again, and again, adding to your
land by adding layer after layer. We’ll call these Mulberry Coasts in memory
of the Mulberry Artificial Harbors deployed in World War 2, that allowed huge fleets to
rapidly dock and dispatch their troops and gear in places where normal landing wasn’t
really an option. You end up with layer after layer of long,
thin islands branching out from cities, protecting them against rising sea levels, storm surges,
or even tsunamis, and doubtless with breaks and bridges to let you travel in between by
land or sea. Not a simple breakwall, but places hundreds
of feet wide, probably with a road down the middle and houses on each side, each maybe
even with its own little cove and beach, each very rich in sea life. This seems like a very economical approach
that ought to have many advantages to it and provide solutions to many of today’s problems. I could imagine us doing this all along thousands
of kilometers of coast out for dozens of layers for many kilometers out. Amusingly, you could do it inward too, and
if you prefer freshwater instead of seawater, you can simply make sure one layer is cut
off from the sea. This is a good approach for cheap water storage
for places that have shortages at certain times of year, and you could use tidal generators
to power that desalination too. There is a reason why humans tend to live
close to the seas; it’s not just because boats make for easy transport, we’ve got
trains and planes too after all, but because people like living on the coast, and there’s
a limited supply of it. We like living next to coves, wide rivers,
and small lakes too, so much so, that Mulberry Coasts might be very popular residentially. Your ideal planet, in terms of land values,
and biomass for that matter, is not one of vast oceans or continents, but lots of archipelagos
of snaky islands with thousands of kilometers of shoreline. I could easily see Earth, in the centuries
ahead, slowly moving to that format, filling the oceans with lots of thin islands, traditional
or floating ones, while slicing thick canals and new lakes or seas into the coasts or inhospitable
tracts of land. Again, that’s why this is the Earth 2.0
series. We’re not really looking at small changes,
but huge ones that can remake the entire planet. For this first episode I wanted to focus on
something that could be done today or in the near future, and progress incrementally with
our current tech and resources, but as we go through the series we’ll be covering
everything from vast subterranean cities, to ones on top of mountains, or inside them. Warm oases in arctic lands, to cities floating
in the sky, or even whole continents built in orbit or shells of new land around the
planet. You’re going to need to be inventive and
resourceful to make life work on an artificial island, and it helps to have a strong math
and science skill set. To master those skills it helps to engage
in active learning, and have a framework for how all these concepts fit together. Our sponsor for this episode, Brilliant, places
a focus on making sure their courses show how math and science is applicable to real-life
problems and has that as one of it’s core pillars for education. It’s far easier to understand science when
you can see problems and scenarios it applies to, and how. When you truly understand the math and science
behind these concepts, you can see many novels ways to apply it, and that’s where so many
of the concepts we discuss here come from. If you want to enhance your own skills and
understanding, you can go to brilliant.org/IsaacArthur and sign up for free. And also, the first 200 people that go to
that link will get 20% off the annual Premium subscription. A point to remember as we talk about changing
our planet, is that the cultures change too. We mentioned that in regard to how early autonomous
micro-nations in the sea might influence the cultures that arose around them as they grew. Next week we’ll be looking at how that might
affect interstellar colony ships, as while those are meant to settle new worlds, they
spend so much time traveling to them, often centuries or more, that they’d develop their
own new culture specific to living in a generation ship. We’ll be exploring those changes, and what
you can do to minimize them or direct them in a way that will still accomplish the mission,
as well as discussing just how long you can send a ship out for and expect it to last,
in the “Million Year Ark”. The week after that, we’ll return to this
topic and finish exploring the sea, in “Colonizing the Oceans”, and look at some more options
and what we can do deep down on the seafloor, not just the top. For alerts when those and other episodes come
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have a Great Week!
Some really great ideas. One, though, has me puzzled. The idea of using an artificial island as a hub for transoceanic flights. I don’t think there’d be much demand for that.
Take the Atlantic Ocean. You have decent locations for such hubs between Europe and America: Iceland, Greenland, and the Azores. Granted, each is out of the way of a Great Circle path between NYC and London (the classic trip), so they’re not perfect. Of course, you’d want something near the average of multiple different such paths, so that won’t matter as much.
But Iceland is always begging people to layover there, and I don’t think Greenland or the Azores try. Though I think the Azores could make a great case for themselves, if they improve Lajes airfield and get any non-Portuguese airlines to stop there. Lovely climate, especially compared to Greenland and Iceland.
I suppose the question becomes if positioning an artificial island closer to flight paths would be worth just building a bigger airport on existing islands. Or perhaps a combo? Position a floating airport off the coast of the Azores, for example. Might be particularly appealing to such a small island region.
Thank you so much Arthur. Really dug this episode, ever since I read the Bobiverse trilogy I've been really intrested and colony construction.
I am really going to enjoy this series.
Hi all, Isaac mentioned algae farms and that could be a thing. There are underwater wave powered pumps that pump nutrient rich water up from the bottom of the ocean. But here's my copy and paste for kelp farms. A future biomass liquid fuels market could be HUGE, and floating islands out there supervising kelp farms can de-acidify the oceans, stimulate fisheries, increase productivity, feed the world, provide us with liquid fuels, paper, building products — even seaweed concrete — and return the world's CO2 to 350ppm by 2085 if we really get cracking! https://eclipsenow.wordpress.com/saving-the-oceans/
Also, Kelp farming could IMPROVE CATTLE GAINS
Some seaweeds can supplement cow diets to eliminate their methane burps! Cattle methane is not only bad for climate change, but can lose 15% of the cow's potential growth! https://theconversation.com/seaweed-could-hold-the-key-to-cutting-methane-emissions-from-cow-burps-66498
Kelp farming could REPLACE CATTLE? Now it gets crazy. We can turn kelp into meat! Vat-grown stem-cell meat is nearly economical. That is real meat, without hurting a single cow or chicken or pig or turkey. https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2017/02/lab-grown-meat-prices-have-dropped.html That would mean all the meat we could want, from the oceans! http://bigthink.com/ideafeed/answering-how-a-sausage-gets-made-will-be-more-complicated-in-2020 We use about a third of the non-ice surface of the land for animal grazing. Imagine handing that back to nature, to agroforestry, to beautiful hardwoods for furniture or to new managed ecosystems for threatened species. Imagine being able to feed the world while healing the land? That is the promise of kelp, all in an open-sourced vertical farming plan from Bren Smith. http://greenwave.org/ Kelp farming could FIX
CLIMATE CHANGE BY 2085! The following paper looks at recycling kelp nutrients out in the less fertile areas of the ocean to scale up kelp farming to cover 9% of the world's oceans! The in-situ nutrient recycling also separates out and buries the CO2 at sea in large plastic bladders (made from kelp syngas which would also replace a lot of the world's oil requirements with carbon negative energy), restoring our atmospheric carbon to a safe 350ppm by 2085! http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/09575820?sdc=1
another advantage to a floating airport just occurred to me, you don't need separate runways for different wind directions, you just turn the airport into the wind.
Hadn't heard of the Uros people, really interesting culture. Also the Juliabrot shaped islands in the thumbnail is look awesome.
Had idea while on the road for work today: Artificial Islands as Cruise Ships.
I was thinking about what is likely the biggest size constraint to larger cruise ships: port capacity. Simply put, cruise ships can’t be bigger than the capacity of the ports in which they dock. If they are, then they have to use tenders - smaller boats to get the passengers and luggage and cargo and personnel from land to ship. They are generally impractical and cruise lines don’t like to use them.
Well, pictuse using full-sized cruise ships as tenders for some truly massive ship. The cruise ships - lets call them cruise tenders - could be loaded up, with a greater focus on passenger cabins, and then connect with the mothership in some fashion. The mothership would have most of the amenities and support systems. The cruise tenders, when docked with the mother ship, would be connected in such a fashion that passengers could travel to and fro with absolutely no inconvenience.
Beside just the appeal from the sheer scale of this scheme (your cruise ship has a waterslide? Thats nice. Ours has a waterpark), there’d also be improvements on flexibility: cruise lines could pick up passengers from multiple ports (say Miami and Tampa), and visit multiple destinations simultaneously. They could also have rolling passenger counts, picking up and dropping off passengers continuously.
This isn’t really the typical material for Isaac, but I have a hunch cruise lines will play a large role in the growing oceanic economy.
Related concept, but small scale:
Hexagonal islands limiting moats on a land reclamation area ( my drawing with Gimp ):
https://i.redd.it/qi6197sk0q501.png
It is pattern of suburb or village.
3 different basic layout ideas can be found on that picture. Plenty of bridges there. Some bridges or tunnels could be on 90 degree angle to the water movement to enable some small boats moving better.
One swimming pool with purified water is formed by separating a volume of water with a 1 millimeter thick plastic sheet, so it is a sunken tent upside down. This is just option if the moat / canal water is not pure enough for swimming for everyone.
If the water is not moving fast enough to keep mosquitos at bay, it is possible to use a half meter wide canoe-size solar powered boat drone that automatically collects biomatter from the water. The biomass might be usable as raw material.
Moats can be alternative to fences or in addition to fences.
There could be common area parks where people walk in the shadows of solar panels, since trees are hard to get there.
That water movement could be related to a river and be one direction or it could be due to tidal currents and be bidirectional.
Land reclamation means putting ground on shallow water to make land:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_reclamation
Some of the material can be dumped by trucks and some of it can be taken from bottom by ships.
Related pictures:
https://i.redd.it/h83z43mo0b501.png
https://i.redd.it/th7cyttxi1r01.jpg