AHC: Underwater City by 2000

Underwater settlements were a staple of the 60's and 70's literature, but they seems to have fell out of favor since, despite being more feasible than outer space exploration. The technology exists in my opinion, it's a matter of money and maybe environmental regulations / legal status of international waters.

Yet all we ever had are a few science labs, and some novelty hotels with observation bays just under the surface.

Would it be possible to have a POD during the XXth century leading to the establishment of a proper permanent underwater colony? If so, how big?

Egomaniacal founder and mutated abominations optional.
 
Probably because there isn't much of a reason to. For tourism, you could never leave your hotel, unless it also included an artificial island, in which case why not just build most of the hotel there and leave the underwater parts for observation? Cheaper and less of an engineering problem. In fact, even considering deep sea mining, it's questionable why you wouldn't just have the settlement be on the surface and use cables and tall pylons as conduits for workers and equipment.

The one advantage might be that on the sea, you can build down as much as you can build up. So a tourism based seastead or more likely, a coastal city which wants more land but reclaiming it isn't an option, might be building down on some buildings instead of choosing to build out (perhaps not wanting to mess with ship travel) or up (because they already have and don't want to build higher). But again, underwater engineering is expensive, so this would be a last resort. Perhaps bad storms would be an incentive for this.

A potential might be with Cuba as a state, where the US goes for the submerged floating tunnel approach for a combined road/rail tunnel. It's a long distance, so eventually seasteads with some sort of "exit ramp" from the tunnel pop up as rest stops. With the advances gained in underwater engineering TTL, and not wanting to put too much above water due to hurricanes and sea traffic, a lot of these structures would have undersea components which might up the majority of the buildings. Perhaps in TTL's further future, like the 22nd century, a mostly underwater city suspended between various artificial islands runs from Florida to Cuba with the original tunnel little different conceptually than a normal interstate (perhaps its designated I-95 as well), and like any interstate, has been expanded numerous times over the years. The original rest stops are now urban areas with their skyscrapers inverted, stretching down to the seafloor in some cases, while "suburban" buildings are all around them. It gets admitted as a state in this time since the million people who live there are sick of Florida and Cuba not paying enough attention to them. Such statehood gives ideas to people living around other Caribbean transport tunnels built later.

Inverted floating cities seem like the best option for underwater cities.
 
bikini-bottom.jpeg
 
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Underwater settlements were a staple of the 60's and 70's literature, but they seems to have fell out of favor since, despite being more feasible than outer space exploration. The technology exists in my opinion, it's a matter of money and maybe environmental regulations / legal status of international waters.
Well, we don't have cities in space, either. So 'easier than space' doesn't mean much.

One possibility might be food prices go so high that paving farmland to expand cities simply isn't economic any more, and so several coastal cities expand offshore, instead. Lots of Chicagoland is turned back into farm land, and Chicago moves partly into the lake. Similarly with coastal Chinese cities, etc.

Initial developments in this scenario might be individual massive buildings just off shore, connected by tunnel or elevated train to the mainland. As development progresses, it becomes more feasible to provide the infrastructure for a whole development at once instead of piecemeal for each building. As the developments go deeper, eventually the whole thing is waterproofed, not just the first few floors.

As sealevels rise, the fully submerged bits have little to worry about, while the old fully terrestrial downtowns get swamped and need incredibly expensive infrastructure renovation, and become MORE expensive than the seaburbs.
 
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