Zesamoedepast wrote:
-
With a PoD of any point after January 1 1900, there must be a fully independent sovereign state with its center of population on the Antarctic continent by at least 1985.
[*]No ASBs or Antarctic thawing allowed.
As written probably not possible despite some of the suggestions. In general you can’t have the needed technology to survive let alone prosper till the late 50s which only leaves about 30 years to become an “independent sovereign state”. Worse keep in mind that said state needs to have the population, resources and infrastructure to defend itself from anyone who might wish to dispute its
sovereignty
The key is energy and frankly prior to the late 1950s we didn’t the technology to access in any realistic way the resources of Antarctica that could be used to produce energy there. And it takes massive amounts of energy to keep people alive in a place like that.
Take the only probable source between 1900 and about the mid-50s which is coal. Here’s the current best information on where coal is on the continent and most of it is buried under a LOT of ice:
https://www.worldcoal.com/coal/14032016/mapping-antarctica-coal-coal2016-388/
(and for some other reference the profile in this one shows how MUCH ice)
https://www.coolantarctica.com/Antarctica fact file/science/threats_mining_oil.php
And the stuff that's isn't covered in ice is still frozen pretty solid. And to even find the oil you have to drill through the ice and frozen rocks to get a good idea of where any oil might be. Offshore? Possible but again you have to do a lot of exploration and it still might not be much and that’s a mid-60s to late-70s tech level in and of itself.
The key to note here is you have to get the mining equipment to Antarctica, you have to support miners and construction workers and you have to spend a huge amount of time, effort, resources and money and your production will likely be small. And then you have to also build processing facilities and power plants there as well. And everything has to be imported to keep people alive while all this is going on. Now assume you have electric lights and heaters, (and of course steam) which will allow people to keep warm and grow food, (hydroponics is questionable but it’s a known method of growing experimental plants for science by the first part of the 20th century, but let’s say it’s available for argument) and keep in mind you have to grow food to feed to animals as well as keep them warm and process them and their waste eventually.
Once nuclear power is available you can install a reactor and get all the heat and power you need. (Both Camp Century and McMurdo Station had nuclear reactors but they weren’t GOOD nuclear reactors

) And there’s some geothermal available in some areas but again you have to get through a lot of ice to even begin to get to it.
(
https://pubs.usgs.gov/circ/1974/0705/report.pdf)
And all this costs somebody a HUGE amount, for which there is no justifiable return. Nothing you ship north is going to be able to recoup this massive investment. And unless they don't care about money or investment they are not going to let someone, who btw greatly depends on outside help and effort to even survive, walk away with it. This would be very much NOT a "colony" but a resource extraction effort so likely this whole operation can't survive more than a few weeks on it's own in any case.
Now let me point out I’m not saying that Colonization of Antarctica is impossible just highly improbable. LuckyLuciano touches on this concept with Frei Otto's Arctic City (
https://www.iconeye.com/architecture/features/item/10164-frei-otto-s-arctic-city *) in that you don’t “plan” to follow the more ‘conventional’ colonization concepts because the environment won’t let you do so. You have to start with and plan for being essentially a near-self-supporting colony from the very beginning.
This is; “Mars Colonization” Conundrum: The Prequel! In a nutshell. In that if you start OUT with the idea of colonization, not exploitation or really utilization past basic needs and you have to have the technology and infrastructure base installed and have it up and running before the majority of your colonists arrive. And no you won’t be making money by exporting resources, (it’s barely possible to make the ‘exchange’ economically viable using a lot of brute nuclear power and that assumes the power plants were written off or maybe bought used from the military) and stripping the environment which won’t leave a very desirable ‘environment’ for any colony.
And keep VERY much in mind building the ‘colony’ is going to be both tough and easy. Tough because it has to withstand the Antarctic weather and conditions. Odds are a ‘dome’ won’t work btw as, (this may surprise you) it snows in the Antarctic and this builds up unless regularly swept or blown off. (To the point the base of the dome over the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station broke from the pressure after only 13 years of use) Easy because it’s been found that rather than burying in the ice pre-made structures on skids elevated above the ice seem to work well. Tough again because those shelters need to be heavily braced and anchored to the ice, be super-insulated because they are constantly exposed to the weather and bleeding heat due to wind loss, (temperature differences of over 140 degrees between the outside surface and inside surface of a structure are around the average down there) and even so still take a lot of energy to maintain.
Now interestingly enough while looking for information on Project: Habakkuk and its construction material Pykrete-ice, I ran across this interesting item:
http://www.rael-sanfratello.com/media/teaching/TM_Draft_rael.edit.pdf
The general idea isn’t new, in that the proposed system tries to ‘layer’ the protection AND provide exterior separate zones so as to moderate temperature in the interspatial zones and attempts to reduce the overall energy burden. The general concept is the “Skybreak” (B. Fuller) or “Double-Shell” building concept where you essentially build an outer building inside which you build another (or more) buildings. Oddly enough it’s one of the suggested methods of building a colony on another planet such as the Moon or Mars (as well as on Earth) since the “outer” layer is the toughest layer allowing you to build somewhat less tough inside with a greater flexibility of design since they don’t have to handle the higher stress.
Unfortunately this one still runs afoul of the problem of buildup stress on the outermost layer but at least actually tries to use ‘local’ materials for some construction. (And I cannot disagree with the suggestion that pykrete would be a fantastic building material in a place like the arctic/Antarctic) I also don’t see why you really need ‘light transmission quality’ since a more obvious choice would be to install some clear ice non-loadbearing ice ‘windows’ or ‘lens’ sections if you need to bring ‘natural’ light inside. (
https://www.open.edu/openlearn/scie...e/physics-and-astronomy/physics/make-ice-lens) I’ll also point out you don’t have to make pykrete with blocks but can ‘spray’ it like spray concrete. (
https://research.tue.nl/en/publicat...-spraying-of-water-and-wood-fibers-to-reinfor,
https://gizmodo.com/a-bizarre-wwii-era-supermaterial-made-of-ice-is-making-1588892440, I’ll note they “oopsed” and removed the form before the ice had fully settled meaning the dome collapsed prematurely but well after it was closed anyway)
The problem is mobility. You tend to have it whether you want it or not when you build on the ice since for the most part it’s in motion towards the sea. (LuckyLucianon’s “Arctic City” picture would be IN the water of that bay in probably less than a couple of decades unless It’s mounted on skies and can be towed which I doubt. Looked at the concept, no it wasn’t) Even in Antarctica the ice is moving or in the process of building-up or reducing and anything on or under the surface has to deal with the process. (Some current stations move around on giant skis and some simple jack themselves up as the snow and ice builds up some are in fact on sections of actual rock/ground but there's not a lot of it)
Now I agree with Grand Duke of Austria when he says he’s sees colonies on the ocean before we’d see the colonization of Antarctica. In fact I could see off-shore Antarctica being a place to build such ocean colonies at least as a starter/seed colony. Artificial Ice Islands are in fact a “thing” and have been since the 70s, (
https://www.boem.gov/BOEM-Newsroom/Library/Publications/2005/c_core468.aspx,
https://www.scientific.net/AMM.725-726.245,
https://patents.google.com/patent/US4373836A/en)
Randy
*=He wasn’t the first or the last either;
https://medium.com/predict/domed-ci...buckminster-fullers-wildest-ideas-672b9b6a0b0
http://socks-studio.com/2015/10/03/the-artic-city-a-project-by-frei-otto-and-kenzo-tange/
http://socks-studio.com/2014/03/16/first-city-in-antarctica-a-1980-83-study-by-amancio-williams/[/quote]