The green city

the green city

My idea about seasteading is probably the most expensive possible. But we will get something very special for it in return. My plan was to construct a whole city instead of just a house. This is because i don't see why we'd want to live on sea if there's nothing to do?!

Aims

- no fossil fuels - completely self-sufficient (power, food and drinks) - we should be as thrifty with the power as possible. - modular - trade should still be possible

the idea

what we need is a big plateau in the middle of the sea. i was thinking of a big cylinder with a lid on it.

this way we get a big space which we can modify to whatever we want. I want to make it self-sufficient without any fossil fuels, this means we're going to need a green power source, greenhouses, waterpurification and all kinds of industial plants (shoes, clothing, beer), et cetera. This picture indicates my idea the best. It shows that we can best build this city in layers. I'll tell from the bottom up what the layer does and why i'ts located there.

the bottom layer is the seawater, it's there for a good reason: so we can colonize it!

the layer above that is the air bubble, this layer provides buoyancy for the city and can function as power storage as I explained at the Wind turbines page.

Now comes the floor of the island, the place where we build.

on top of this comes the train floor, this floor provides a quick connection to the main land and/or to adjacent green cities. if we chose to make this island very big this floor might even be suitable for local transport by tram or underground. to cheapen the project it's possible to build the tubes but not the tracks until the adjacent citys are a fact.

on top of the train floor comes the underlayment, this floor can provide storage room for everything that's resistant to water. this floor also has another funcion, it has canals. you might think "why canals?" this is because canals provide an exelent way of transportation and boats use less energy than cars.

For those who hadn't noticed jet, all the above is under the sea level. the following floors are above the sea level.

the building floor (actually it holds as much floors as possible) generates space to live, work and learn. Something funny is that all buildings have the same height. this is necessary because the floor on top of the building floor, holds the greenhouses.

the greenhousefloor is the upperlayer for the obvious reason that that is the place with the most sunlight.

Why a city not just a house

If you build a city you can make the ideal balance between offices, industrial area, harbor area, living area, et cetera. you can build the transport systems extremely dedicated to their jobs and therefor cheaper. in the picture below you can see a possible area clasification. The blue lines are canals and the buildingroofs are green from the greenhouses

Terrorism and warfare

We want to build a city on water. All very nice but what about the terrorists. They would probably try to blow us away, which in our case is very serious, because the houses would sink!

Prevention

Terrorists have guns, boats and airplanes. how can we be one step in front of them? - we can forbid boats (how to get where we want?) - we can forbid guns (except the police force would have guns) - we can forbid airplanes (saves a lot of greenhouse gasses in our hood)

So let’s say we'd forbid guns and airplanes. this means everything flying in our air zone is a criminal. this also means everybody carrying a gun and not being a police officer is a criminal. This sounds pretty clear and understandable for everyone.

The idea

We have an island (group) which is part above and part below the water-surface. Let’s use this by building torpedo launchers against piracy boats. A big tower with some anti aircraft artillery and if we build a tower lets use it as a control post for all these weapons. As a summary we’d get this.

CO2-storage

The buoyancy of this city is based on a air bubble, this creates opputunities for co2-storage. Because co2 is air we could use these concrete structures to 'lock up' the co2, instead of using natural rock formations. This would save us a lot of time looking for these natural rock formations and this way we can even make the production of the island co2 neutral.