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Floating City


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Hi Hannah and welcome to Hypography!

 

As a general rule, it's best not to post the same question in multiple forums (at Hypography or any other discussion site), because you'll get fewer good answers or discussions, and quite frankly you'll tick certain people off. I've left your topic open under Science Projects and Homework which looks most appropriate for your question as it is directed to getting your science project done. If you decide later you want to have a more general discussion on the topic, just let us know and we'll move it to a different forum.

 

Flotation is not a difficult problem: the structure just has to weigh less than the water it displaces. People have built concrete ships and many deep-water drilling platforms no longer are built on bases held up from the ocean floor, but rather float. Scaling it up is linear in cost, so it's actually not impractical at larger scales, just much more expensive per square mile than building on land which is already sitting there. With a floating city, you need to "manufacture land" too, so no matter what it's more costly, but may in fact be worth it, if the proximity to some location is valuable enough. (The social and economic aspects of this question are as interesting as the scientific-manufacturing ones).

 

Flotation of course requires no energy, but most "levitation" mechanisms would require lots: the electro-magnets you'd need might suck more power than the rest of the "floating city" needs, and you'd need to figure out how to get *them* to float! Levitation could provide a great solution to stresses of strong seas though, so it's not something that should be dismissed without thinking about it, it'd just be a lot more expensive!

 

Interesting project! :cheer:

 

The baby beats the nurse, and quite athwart goes all decorum, :phones:

Buffy

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Food for thought:

 

New Method Predicts Monster Waves

 

Rogue waves are more common than most people realize, and scientists are starting to predict when and where they will strike...

 

...The Norwegian Dawn, a 965-foot ocean liner , was sailing back to New York from the Bahamas on April 16 when it was struck by a storm that pounded the vessel with heavy seas and the rogue 70-foot wave. The wave smashed windows and sent furniture flying.

 

In a separate event, a buoy off the coast of Alabama recently recorded an average wave height of 16 meters before the gauge broke, Panchang said. Since that figure is just an average of measurement of a sea-state, the biggest wave at that location was probably twice that size--32 meters, or about 100 feet....

 

....The radar instruments on the satellites detected the height of individual waves at the surface in 3-mile by 6-mile patches of the sea. Three weeks of data, including 30,000 of these patches or "imagettes" of the sea with their wave height information were analyzed and searched for extreme waves at the German Aerospace Center.

 

A scientific team counted more than ten individual giant waves around the globe more than 75 feet high during the three-week period....

 

Me thinks the sea is not a wise choice of foundation for building cities.

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As these cities grow in the future the implications of growing into their own country have to be examined. Will they be afforded the shoreline buffer all countries enjoy? Will they be entitled to the mineral rights underneath the new floating mass? will they be admitted to the United Nations? Will they become tax havens for the world? The questions for these floating projects are endless, but it's a cool idea and if they can make it work it will be something to see.

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As C1ay points out, waves and storms could be a problem, but then people build their houses on the Gulf Coast and in Tornado Alley or on top of the San Andreas Fault, or next to Mt. Etna...ah the folly of human endeavor...

 

The motivation for doing it though always seems to come from two completely different sources:

  1. Creating some new separate "state" so that people can avoid what they don't like about their own countries, in which case the goal is to build some floating thing in the *middle* of the ocean far from anything else. No one's really ever done this because it's the hardest thing to do, mainly because of those pesky storms.
  2. Extending real estate near or connected to land where the local land is already heavily used/allocated.

It's the latter that's always fascinated me. This goes way back in history, with the Aztecs building farms around Teotihuacan (Mexico City) on top of Lake Texcoco. But it's still around, sometimes in rather disturbing ways, like the plan back in the 50's and 60's to fill in San Francisco Bay....

 

(Source: US Army Corps of Engineers)

 

Just because you *can* do something doesn't always mean it's a good idea....

 

What we have learned is that the law itself must be saved, that this requires constant vigilance against those that would change or weaken it, :phones:

Buffy

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