What if we wanted to colonize the sea?

If you'll allow other than ocean floor, what about ocean thermal conversion on a massive scale?:eek::cool::cool: Gigantic oil rig-like structures, first near shore off Puerto Rico, the Yucatan, New Guinea, maybe Ethiopia & Brazil, then in mid-ocean. Add wind farms offshore & (to deliver the power) relay satellites. The "harvest"? Energy, fresh water, kelp...plus ocean research and tourism $$.:cool::cool:

OTOH, there's mining of the ocean floor manganese nodules... Beyond that, I'm not sure what you can "harvest" on the continental shelf.

From both, you're going to get big investment & development of minisubs , & hard diving suits (akin to JIM suits), for research & tourists--just for starters.
Oh yea, the sea floor was mentioned as the expected "hardest to get to" location, not as an exclusive. I would love to hear what everyone else thinks about creating reefs specifically to replenish the fish populations.
 
About General Electric deep underwater Base

I wonder why 4 km was their target depth?

I am wondering what we could do now with wave generators covering a square mile of ocean surface, or tide generators up and down the coasts.

Official it was for mining raw material like Oil drilling or Manganese nodule from abyssal plains in international waters.

but there also Military component to it, the US Navy study in 1960 underwater Submarine base in sea mount, under "project Rock-Site".
and ICBM launch complex on abyssal plains under MX-program.

tunnel3a.jpg



i forgot Sea City is also allot proposal to build platform were people could life on ocean.

sea-city-2.GIF

one of almost build one was Sea City project in 1971
it a Artificial island build on Dogger bank in North sea to house 30,000 people.
mostly offshore oil and gas field worker and there family, Sea City would be 25 miles south from North sea Oil Gas fields.
next housing Sea City feature shopping arcades, schools, a Football station even a Zoo

but sadly Sea City was a architects proposal who loose it support as Oil price shock rise the cost
the drilling rig operators were not interest in huge expense to build and maintain Sea City, after Politic back out of proposal for same reasion...
 
I suspect that colonization of the sea will always be something that is possible, but probably wont be a goal in & of itself – but if there is an economic reason for a colony then it is much more likely to happen.

Personally I think that surface colonies to manage sea-plantations (growing, eg, kelp for industrial hydrocarbon synthesis & commercial fish farms) would create a sufficiently large economic justification for people to be there – but I cant see how you can move from a small colony of say a few hundred people to a city of a few tens of thousands.

Also I cant see how an undersea city can come around, given the abundance of (easier & more viable) alternatives. Cool, yes. Practical... not so much.
 
For me the oddity is that as anyone whose spent a lot of time on a ship will tell you, being on the ocean is a tale of the many tasks you will do, promptly, exactly when the expert in one of many subsets tell you to do them, or everybody dies. More than that, everyone has to keep ready to react, quickly and without hesitation, to an emergency that could happen at any moment. It's the quintessential "everyone is in this together" environment, because if it isn't, everyone one might die.

Anyone who's spent a ton of time around the college kids who make up some of the most enthusiastic proponents of seasteading will see the disconnect here almost immediately.

My friend is interested in the idea although luckily his wife very much is not (much more level headed, non libertarian that she is). It really is rather odd.

The idea of sea steading is pretty much a lifestyle of very small communities with strong views that require massive resources in order to survive. Whilst being vulnerable to outsiders.
 
My friend is interested in the idea although luckily his wife very much is not (much more level headed, non libertarian that she is). It really is rather odd.

The idea of sea steading is pretty much a lifestyle of very small communities with strong views that require massive resources in order to survive. Whilst being vulnerable to outsiders.

Honestly, I'm not sure about the total impossibility. A floating colony would get tons of sunlight in the right area, and given advances in materials science, probably a great deal of electrical power. Advancements in bioengineering (think CRISPR), makes me wonder whether they couldn't have bioreactors churning out all sorts of crud. The big bottleneck is desalinating enough water, but that can be doable. Some sort of floating biohacker paradise seems doable and kind of cool.

The thing that boggles my mind is the ideology - International Waters sounds so very libertarian, but it really means "place far from help where the elements can kill you." You need everyone pulling together - not some lords and peons libertarian set up where the powerful can opt out. If there's any group able to pull of a society that wouldn't be a prelude to a mass drowning, it's Mondragon - not the libertarians.
 
Don't get me wrong, I think that it will become sustainable at some point, I just don't see that it is at present. All of the things one would need to make a small community of humans viable without constant contact or support from nearby land exist in concept, but they don't seem practical or affordable right now. So it is a bit like a space colony in some ways. It will be doable but so impractical that one would need to devote billions to it and still be firmly anchored to a nearby landmass.

Independence it would not be.

If I was into this general philosophy I would buy/settle an island in a place far away from the relevant central government, or other places, where supervision is likely to be light if just for practical reasons. At least if one is on land a lot of the hard technical issues can be removed.

The problem is that these islands are often pretty inhospitable. NZ for one has a few far - off islands that no one cares about. Although they'd be off limits for conservation reasons now. But 30 years ago? Maybe not
 
Don't get me wrong, I think that it will become sustainable at some point, I just don't see that it is at present. All of the things one would need to make a small community of humans viable without constant contact or support from nearby land exist in concept, but they don't seem practical or affordable right now. So it is a bit like a space colony in some ways. It will be doable but so impractical that one would need to devote billions to it and still be firmly anchored to a nearby landmass.

Independence it would not be.

If I was into this general philosophy I would buy/settle an island in a place far away from the relevant central government, or other places, where supervision is likely to be light if just for practical reasons. At least if one is on land a lot of the hard technical issues can be removed.

The problem is that these islands are often pretty inhospitable. NZ for one has a few far - off islands that no one cares about. Although they'd be off limits for conservation reasons now. But 30 years ago? Maybe not
My ulterior motives are now revealed, lol. I think that if we want to establish 'space colonies', then they are going to be existing in a hostile enviroment, far from help in case (rather, WHEN) things go wrong. OTOH, with the recent Japanese discoveries of rare earth ores 'north of the Hawiiaian Islands', I could see that we could soon indeed be having the economic incentive to establish deep sea facilities.

While these facilities would indeed be 'far from help', they would not be as far from help as even an orbital colony. Even better, though, is that building such facilities and keeping them manned permanently, will give us very useful information on populations living in hostile enviroments, and (I think at least) be better learned on the ocean floor than after boosted into orbit, and only then finding out what doesn't work and what does.
 
Top