Ocean Colonization

Tada! This first one depicts an attempt to bring light to an interesting notion... "A sea of trash five times the size of Britain sits just below the surface between California and Hawaii in a becalmed area of ocean known as the north Pacific gyre. There, plastic waste is deposited in a slowly twisting, soupy mass by the circular pattern of the world’s sea currents."

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article5536818.ece

Another, smaller attempt...

http://rraft.blogspot.com/

Kinda inspiring, I might have to start collecting large water-cooler bottles to build a catamaran or something...

 

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There have been some interesting proposals about floating cities, freedom ships, etc. A few linked here.

I like the idea of growing a sort of organic matrix of CaCO3 on which to build. Use tidal, wind and solar power for electricity. I saw some experiments growing columns like that in the ocean, in an old Leonardo art and technology journal (MIT publication) I think.


Cheers

 

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reduce the number of everything including fishing industry

 

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The fishing industry is doing a pretty good job of reducing the fishing industry. In another decade, there won't be much left to fish.-

 

That will take care of the sharks as well.

 

Between longline by-catch and demand for shark fin soup, we won't have to wait until the sharks run out of food.

 

Yep. And then there are probably still morons around that try to eradicate sharks because they are supposedly evil.

 

Would someone like the honor of inserting a lawyer joke here?

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The stage is all yours..

 

Dark Life by Kat Falls

Dark Life by Kat Falls is a young-adult science fiction series about colonizing the ocean floor while everyone on land lives in "stacks." Amazon.com has reviews posted for Book 1, rating it from 1 to 5 stars. Anyone interested in exploring the "science behind" either idea?

 

i'm not sure about strictly logistics, but I believe high-tech companies will be heading out to see more and more in order to avoid jurisdictions. For example I know of an online casino which operates from a huge cruiser and it's definitely worth to them in terms of return. Others operate from indian reserves, but I'm guessing it's still somehow cheaper to operate from a vessel if these guys chose that route.

 

This does not seem very plausible to me. Not because it can´t be done, but because the nations with technology to do it are on average with less than replacement birth rates - I.e. they will have lots of old hotels and apartments with low occupancy rates - No need to build more living space on the sea floor.

The nations that are poor with low technical skills and still growing populations will not build on the sea floor as they can not. There is no reason to think the capable rich nations will build nice high-tech homes on the sea floor for these poor over crowded nations. They never have. Why would they start?

 

I just have this to say: back in the 1970's Junior Scholastic and other such school magazines for youngsters were always going on about farming the ocean and ever so cooly taught us the term 'aquaculture'. Now it's 40 years later and the oceans are so over-fished that even sharks, the creatures of nightmare's and the film Jaws are endangered, and I read that fish farms are filthy, unhealthy and inhumane.

So yeah, let's talk about ocean colonization.

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I was going suggest you read Daily Science Fiction story "outer rims"
by Toiya Kristen Finley. This story was sent to me on Friday, April 8th, 2011, but the on-line version has been infected with a Trojan virus, according to Avast! There's no connection that I know of between the two writers, but Finley sure sets the stage for Falls. Falls speeds things up a bit by having the Atlantic coast slip off into the ocean, while Finley has it eaten away by super-sized storms accompanied by rampant bubonic plague, which has only affected a few in today's Oregon. Falls has oceans rising to prehistoric levels that don't allow present infrastructure to survive, hence humanity concentrated in "stacks." I've only read reviews of her "Dark Life," as I have trouble getting even e-books where I live, but a couple of high-rises have already been built using termite-mound technology. Real termite mounds, however, are mostly underground and always reach down to a reliable source of underground water. These eventually fail and the termite "stack" dies, but every rainy season they always send out an over-abundance of winged termites looking for new territory. Falls posits some humans not liking to live like termites, hence underwater colonization. Colonizing the surface of the sea could be made to work, too, using (en.wikipedia.org) "Polynesian navigation" methods, but she doesn't go there, at least not in the reviews, and the Hollywood movie bombed so badly I don't even remember its name. You can't sustain an ocean-going culture of cruise ships without ports and a tremendous lot of produce of every kind.

 

It should be noted that these "garbage patches" are not literally the size that environmentalists claim them to be. There's not a large island that floats about on the sea; rather it's small pieces of garbage spread over a vast area. So they probably aren't a great candidate for colonization, being that almost all the pieces are granular, and underwater.

 

1- Deveope tech that withstands salt water, and a very efficient way to turn it into fresh water.

2- As far as land race goes it will probably be like the moon. But for a while like Antarctica, where no one claims territory but lets everyone know they are setting up shop (HERE) for Research......

3- Fantasy here but pure energy from the oceans and a constant food source.(maybe in a few thousand years)

 

I'm fascinated... I wonder if it would be possible to develop some kind of barrier to convert salt water to fresh water around certain structures (IE bridge supports) in order to prevent erosion and other damage... hm...

Not at all. Underwater this would obviously be a larger problem, because the energy would have to be derived from geothermal vents or nuclear reactions. Above water the problem is much easier; tidal, wind, solar.

Remember though, food can be grown provided nutrients and energy. In oceans, I would recommend fish (above water) or algae (below or above). Harvesting the emissions from geothermal vents might actually be a viable solution to finding nutrients underwater, although we could theoretically make a completely self-sustaining settlement underwater, assuming money was no object.

 

Greatly increased food production and energy for splitting H2O etc. is the result of OTEC, which studies show is economical on the energy yield alone. (No large scale OTEC systems have been built, mainly I think because the insurance costs are not known. IMHO, this is the sort of problem that governments could and should solve.)

Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion uses Rankin cycle with organic working fluid that boils at temperature of tropical surface ocean and the ~4 degree C deep water* for condensing -waste heat rejection. I.e. there is large, vertical pipe which brings up the deep water which is very rich in the nutrients missing in surface water and warms it so it does not sink back into the deep.

* Almost all the deep ocean is at ~4 C as that is water´s densest state and the poles provide that low temperature to all the oceans depths.