No Food, No Utopia: How Will Floating Cities Survive? | Big Think

No Food, No Utopia: How Will Floating Cities Survive?

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Being able to look into the future is a skill that mankind has dreamed about for thousands of years. But seasteading expert Marc Collins believes that the future lies in floating cities where we'll be able to grow meat in laboratories and drink desalinated sea water. It's not that crazy (at all) to believe that once the sea levels rise far enough that humanity will have to either leave the planet or adapt to the new high waters. Marc Collins is the co-founder of Blue Frontiers, a company that aims to design these cities on the sea.

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MARC COLLINS:

Marc Collins was born in Hawai’i, the son of an American father and Tahitian mother, raised in Mexico City and attended college in the United States. He returned to his mother’s home country of Tahiti, in 1991, where he became involved in the family business of black pearl farming and retailing. He ran a successful chain of Tahitian pearl jewelry boutiques and after 17 years in the business, was invited to join the government as Minister of Tourism from 2007 until 2008.

In 2010, he launched French Polynesia’s first challenger Internet Service Provider, Viti, offering the first wireless 4G network on the island of Tahiti. From March 2012 to March 2013, Marc was the Area Manager, Pacific Islands, for the Hawaiki Submarine Cable, which will soon be connecting New Zealand to Hawaii.

In May 2013, Marc and four other partners launched Tahiti’s first OTT (over the top) entertainment platform, NiuTV. In November 2015, NiuTV became the 3rd licensed Internet Service Provider in French Polynesia, under the brand “Smart Tahiti Networks”.

In 2017, Marc became an Ambassador for The Seasteading Institute, as well as a co-founder and VP of Public Affairs for Blue Frontiers.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Marc Collins: The pilot project is quite modest. So before we go out and build huge floating structures for hundreds and thousands of people we’re building a small pilot which will be about the size if you can imagine a soccer field—It’s around 7500 square meters.

The engineers are saying it shouldn’t be a single platform, it should be multiple smaller platforms. So maybe 12 platforms of 625 square meters. So imagine a platform 25 meters by 25 meters next to another one with connecting bridges.

And the reason for smaller structures is that we’re going to be inside the reef, within the lagoon of an island. And what you don’t want is to cast a shadow on the bottom of the lagoon that will obviously impact photosynthesis which means we’ll have a problem with the environment. So we needed smaller platforms in order for light to penetrate and we need deep lagoons.

So we had to literally do an inventory of all of the depths of the lagoons around the main islands we’re interested in. We found certain lagoons and the engineers are telling us and environmental consultants are saying that between 25 to 30 meters of depth we will be very—we won’t have an impact on the light situation. So that’s one of the elements of location.

Now in terms of size, because it’s a pilot we don’t anticipate being able to be completely self-sustaining on food. We can be completely autonomous on energy, on fresh water, completely recycle our gray and black water, do all of that and deal with our trash.

What we’re not going to be able to do on the pilot is be 100 percent self-sustaining for food. But we do have a food group that’s involved in trying to look at these technologies and what we can do. And we’re looking at all sorts of stuff.

I mean there’s one thing that kind of came out of a laboratory in Hawaii from NEL, the National Energy Laboratory in Hawaii. They call it “cold ag”, cold agriculture.

What it is is you put a pipe, a small pipe maybe 500 to 900 meters deep. You bring in cold, deep ocean water—so it’s similar to the sea water air conditioning systems. There’s been two of them put—the first two have been put into resorts in French Polynesia so those are installed and working.

The difference here is that you run the cold water through copper pipes, so small little capillaries that you bury under soil.

So the air in French Polynesia is very humid and warmer, so when that warm moist air hits these tiny capillaries, even under the ground, what happens is obviously you get condensation and moisture around those tubes.

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