With the way things are going, I would gladly love to have Lex Luthor as president. Even if he is willing to betray our planet to Braniac or Darkseid at the slightest prevacation.
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I was just thinking it would be cool if these were city size Roombas that went around hovering up all the ocean garbage as part of the city’s life cycle.
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Did you play that? I’m not sure i share your enthusiasm for living there… 
Can’t be worse than the reality we’re currently in…
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That’s also where the poop goes. Tilapia will eat anything.
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I wouldn’t object to all the Randroids going off to live in their own underwater utopia, away from the rest of us.
Kelp is the new kale.
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Fantasizing about running away to the ultimate suburban gated community?
SEE ALSO:
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I guess you get to sleep well…right up until the next tsunami.
It may spawn another genre of steampunk fiction…the sudden reappearance of the lost city of Gilliganet, that floated away, untethered, in the great storm of '03 and hadn’t been sighted for 14 years. Oh what a tale its inhabitants would tell…
They tend to be in sheltered waters and pollution is a big problem with all that fish poo building up on the sea floor and killing off the ecosystem.
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Well, if you can juuuuuuusssst hang on a bit longer, you might be in luck:
https://www.seasteading.org/floating-city-project/
and umm also:
Btw not sure the Proximans haven’t already started in on the full takedown around here…
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Yes and no.
Oh yes, so true.
… however, tilapia are freshwater (and sometimes brackish water) fish.
The Floating City of The Future might be better served by bacteria that may breakdown sewage (standard operating procedure at most sewage processing plants) and oh hey these desalinate:
or oh I dunno shrimp or something:
http://www.fao.org/3/Y1187E/y1187e35.htm
… come to think of it, there may have to be intermediary floating rice paddies or chinampas or something…
Just thinking out loud here. It’s an interesting proposition of stacked functions, nested loops, attempting closed loops, etc. assuming it’s sustainable and robust wrt Crazy Extreme Weather.
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Floating Spirulina Colonies? Rats and Cats for stirfry, (Things worked out pretty well for a while. We would make smallchange trading our made-from-floating-garbage handcrafts with passing ships. But after the Great Blow we’d scarcely see a smokestack on the horizon. First the rats disappeared, then the cats. After that, when the neighbours would invite you over for stirfry we knew it was the beginning of the end…)
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“Interlocking hexagonal tiles” and nobody references Catan: Seafarers?
It’s like I don’t even know this bbs anymore.
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Still waiting for Sea City 2000, the floating pyramid I was promised by the Usborne books in the 1980s.
You’re expecting an awful lot, from folks who couldn’t spell “arcology” ^^’ …
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Of course not! Even with automation, they’ll need plenty of servants to keep it running.
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SF authors briefly caught Space Colony Fever, resulting in lots of short stories and whole novels overselling the concept. I ate it all up as a teen. Gradually grew disenchanted, if only because the other enthusiasts seemed really set in their ways, and kept expecting other people to fund the idea while simultaneously planning to declare independence against the tyrannical earth government.
Any last attachment to the idea came crashing down at a panel on the future of cities at a SF convention. Bruce Sterling lit into the idea; it was hilarious and smart. His critique boiled down to “Imagine if an SF convention was held on a submarine, and you could never leave.”
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Well…
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Okay that is seriously cool. Chinampa, eh? Just goes to show that we are not very creative in modern times that is a brilliant idea.
As for floating cities, it should go without saying that it is possible to make one. The technology to make floating rafts of dirt stay together and build on has already been done. It is not crazy to say this can be done in the idea that everybody is thinking of with floating pads of arable dirt and grass with houses floating on the ocean.
What has not been done is the desalination system for something like that to my knowledge but there are plenty of people who could quickly make something usable out of it.
Much like many of man’s desires, we have the technology right now to fulfill this but there is just no reason for most people to bother with this it doesn’t do anything practically for anyone right now and it’s just novelty that would require a significant amount of money to make at scale.
Floating cities are kind of like flying cars, it’s one of the futuristic tropes people like to dream about, but no one actually sees a practical purpose for their existence enough to bother really making it happen even though it’s doable. And much like flying cars, it’s an infrastructure problem more than its technology problem. Where do you do this and have people legally live? How do you anchor it and propel it, and mainly how do you get insurance for any of this?
Most futuristic projects don’t happen simply because of infrastructure concerns not technological ones.
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