And whenever I see one of these private island concept renders, I always ask myself the same question.
Where does the shit go?
Everyone, from the ubermensch billionaires to the lowly slaves (I’m sorry, “workers”, like they’ll keep that pretense up for long) has to shit. Oh, piss too. So do any pets or livestock. So where does the shit go? I never see the sewage treatment plant in these drawings, I guess that’s all meant to go into the “maintenance” areas or something, pesky little mechanical details that the help will figure out. Are they planning on dumping it overboard? Good luck with fishing or aquaculture. Also, enjoy having your superyacht coated up to the waterline in feces. And just smell that ocean breeze, with its aerosolized fecal matter spraying all over your faces and food. Hope you’ve got good doctors.
I mean, billionaires are more than willing to run a closed-loop wastewater and composting system, right?
Shoot, I can’t find it right now, but there was a story a while ago about some guy living on a kind of mini-artificial island (it looked like a large, fixed buoy). It was totally dependent on outside inputs, though, so not quite the same thing.
When I saw this BB article I was wondering what the benefit would be to having an artificial island, anyway, as opposed to an advanced ship with good support systems (e.g., energy, water). Then you could at least move as needed.
This and the latest portable housing solution for the homeless. Every month or so a news outlet breathlessly documents the latest renderings of a bicycle house or a floating island as if this is a real thing people are actually doing, and it’s inevitably some kid’s unresearched second year design project. And then BB dutifully posts a link to the article, and people retweet or share or whatever and it takes on a life of its own.
Here’s what it looks like when rich people actually do build private islands. Note how few have any development on them, despite the project being almost two decades old. There is a hint of a suggestion here that billionaires don’t actually find this nonsense very desirable.
I’m still struggling to figure out what the abstract cgi shapes actually mean, here. I assume the window-less hexagons are apartment buildings? (The “interior” as opposed to “balcony” apartments?) The oval cut-outs show distinct layers - are those layers inhabited floors? If not, why have the oval cut-outs, which seem to function as light wells? I can’t shake the feeling that everything is vague because they don’t really have a plan here.
I can understand the interest, though - having a floating island outside Miami has an appeal, given that only a floating island is the only real estate still going to be above sea level before long.
Is this the Westworld dystopic model, where the island is maintained by a force of robots that are indistinguishable from humans— and that there is absolutely no danger of the robots replacing the billionaire denizens.
Or, is this the Alita: Battle Angel / Elysium dystopic model, where the billionaires keep a subject class of humans in the lower decks— who totally never get out of line, storm the upper deck, and slay their masters.
Yet another rehash of Libertarian Sea-Steading Scams? As near as I can tell, almost all of them were more focused on getting donations to their foundation so they could study the problem rather than actually building anything. There was a floating hotel that was sometimes off Asia and sometimes in the Caribbean that they could have bought for about $20-30M, which would have been big enough to test the critical problem (“Can you be recognized as sovereign if you’re a floating island and don’t own any dirt, or are you legally just a boat?”) but they tended to divert it to “how would we design a really cool multi-billion-dollar giant floating island?” “what would the lightweight government be like?” “Imagine all the things you could do on a private island like money-laundering and entertaining-drug consumption!”
Right? Without answering that question, I don’t really see the benefit of trying to create an artificial island versus just fine-tuning ship technology to support food production and waste management.
Or, you know, we could become a functioning, humane and productive global society that doesn’t destroy our planet’s carrying capacity for human life and/or drive ourselves to never-ending warfare. But learning to be nice to each other is way harder than solving all those other engineering problems. (/s)
