Subnostr

Most power needs can be supplied by OTEC - ocean thermal energy conversion. And there's also solar, which is cheap enough already to probably be enough all by itself. Energy storage, I've always felt that we overcomplicate... On land, a large weight could be lifted to store energy, then let down to use the energy. Tall buildings should have this... At sea, a water tank at the top of each piling could do the same job. It might synergize with otec quite well - idk, just a suspicion.

Likewise, fresh water accumulation needn't be as complicated as we make it currently. I've often imagined a sort of floating alembic to gather fresh water via evaporation. There's all sorts of unexplored directions for that.

The potential money makers at sea are potentially (am I over using this word?) huge. Algae farms making diesel and methane can power the solar system. Like, the whole thing... Methane for methalox fuel and diesel for heavy machinery. OTEC offers enough energy to be competitive mining bitcoin. Much more than enough. Mariculture can easily produce enough food for the entire world, even a world with multiple times current population. Really, its a crime that we aren't using our oceans. Its absurd...

ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 1y ago

yeah, OTEC is complicated though, and it is essentially a turbine powered by a thermocline, it more or less could be said to be a variant of chimmney effect

but i generally agree, there is some awesome things you could do with floating settlements. i just think that you need to calculate in the potential of tidal movements that are more than 1SD outside of the range of recorded history, at least, this changes the equation of how you do it, a lot, like what happens if a bunch of tethered floating things suddenly need to spend a week or two sitting on the sand more or less directly under them, leveling them is gonna be a big problem... just one example... can you fx that with some kind of adaptable multi-leg prop system somehow, idk what would be required, tbh, it's a big problem

and what happens if your tethers put your vessels under water in a short term rise of water?

personally, i think the equations are simpler to solve if you are simply at 2km altitude or higher, the chances of water pushing your breathing level more than a kilometer further is nearly zero, at all, but in the sea, i think 2sd over the usual tidal movement is feasible boundaries for design

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Discussion

Comte de Sats Germain 1y ago

Could be wrong, but I think most of the ocean is deeper than high elevation land is high. Regardless, piles solve waves. A pile is a vertical thingy that floats in the water. The waves can do whatever they want, it just bobs up and down. A long horizontal thingy, like a barge, would get wrecked by waves applying force in different places, like holding a stick with both hands and kicking it. So with the pile, there must be some ratio of pile mass to attached mass that can be attached without endangering the structure with horizontal-ness. And if it gets really crazy, detach whatever is attached to the pile, and bring it back when the storm is done. Just an idea. Anyways, I think it's doable.

ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 1y ago

it basically a heavy mass with a particular anisotropy

it absorbs a lot of force in all directions but especially up and down

the thing is this doesn't address the problem that your things in between need to tolerate maybe as much as 100m of immersion and there needs to be a warning system that alerts the dwellers to enter and seal up for this case

as i see it, this is more practical with a tunnel burrowed into solid volcanic rock, at a high altitude, where you don't have to adapt to anything but merely need to breathe for a few weeks while everything is locked down

that's basically the countermeasure i see as most effective, unless you have gravity control and then all bets are off, a lot of things change in their difficulty because you can wrap a space in zero mass