Friday, May 15, 2015

Floating Cities In The Ocean



















































Oceans have two things cities need a lot of: space and water. Solar powered water desalination would make sense. Floating happens on its own. It should be possible to build really large cities. You build one unit and scale it. Seafood would be abundant. Multi-storey farming would be an option. Beam in some internet. Water transportation is cheap. And these cities don't have to be in the middle of nowhere. They could be just 10 miles or so out. You don't have to feel cut off. You might even commute to your weekly meeting on the land. And rising sea levels don't affect ocean cities.

In the floating city concept, the "skyscraper" part would go in both directions. There is no basement, to speak of. The elevators take you to the surface. That would make for interesting living. Oceanscraper would be the word.

Large cruise ships are floating cities, but not designed to be sustainable.

These cities would generate their own electricity through solar and wind.

How about cities on the water that are not even disconnected from the land! As a way to claim more land than might be lost to rising sea levels.

The ocean is half way to Mars.

City floating on the sea could be just 3 years away
floating cities are the perfect places to experiment with new forms of government. ..... the floating city may be built in modular pieces so that city blocks and neighborhoods can be recombined to create new urban layouts. .... seasteads are loosely based on oil rigs, but with important modifications. ..... We care more about sunlight and open space
FLOATING CITIES: IS THE OCEAN HUMANITY’S NEXT FRONTIER?
“Three-quarters of our planet Earth is covered with water, most of which may float organic cities,” Fuller explains in his book Critical Path. “Floating cities pay no rent to landlords. They are situated on the water, which they desalinate and recirculate in many useful and non-polluting ways.” ....... Fifty years on, with heavy pollution causing climate change and rising sea levels, Fuller’s floating city concept is being seriously considered as an antidote to those problems. ...... With almost 20% of the world’s population living in China, it is no surprise that the People’s Republic is one of the keenest countries to translate Fuller’s idea into a modern reality. ...... a four square mile floating city ...... Using the same technologies that CCCC used to build a 31-mile bridge between Hong Kong, Macau and Zuhai, a series of prefabricated 150m x 30m blocks would be created in a factory and floated out to site for construction. ...... The city’s infrastructure includes a cruise dock, walkways and a network of roads and canals that will be used by electric cars and submarines, keeping the island free from congestion and air pollution. ....... Recreational green spaces would be located above and below the water’s surface while farms, hatcheries and rubbish collection facilities would allow the community to produce its own food and sustainably dispose of waste. ...... “The project offered an opportunity to develop a new urban nucleus of world-class residential, commercial and cultural facilities, as well as to promote a zero-carbon, energy-efficient and self-sufficient city” ....... The Seasteading Institute aims to take the idea of floating cities even further, creating communities that have political autonomy whilst existing under the sovereignty of a host state. They are currently in discussions with several potential host countries and are aiming to establish their first seastead by 2020. ........ the city’s base structure would be constructed out of 50m x 50m modular platforms, which will cost approximately $15m each to build. ..... “Oil platforms can withstand waves but we want to create something with a clearer connection with the water. A protective wall is one strategy we’re looking at that may help. ....... a basic structure out of expanded polystyrene (EPS) blocks. These are made up of tiny cells filled with air so are impossible to sink. ....... combining EPS with concrete to create something really solid and stable with a low centre of gravity. These foundations would then be anchored to mooring poles, allowing them to move up and down with the tide. ....... Freedom Ship International .. the proposed vessel’s superstructure would rise twenty-five stories above its broad main deck and have its own airport, banks, library, hospital, athletics facilities, casinos and warehouses catering for up to 80,000 people. ........ We’re well on the way of securing our initial target of $1bn investment funding ....... “Most of the world is covered in water but we’re still hunter-gatherers on the sea”
Has the time come for floating cities?
Whereas some coastal cities will double down on sea defences, others are beginning to explore a solution that welcomes approaching tides. What if our cities themselves were to take to the seas? ...... A floating village at London's Royal Docks has the official nod, and Rotterdam has a Rijnhaven waterfront development experiment well under way. Eventually, whole neighbourhoods of water-threatened land could be given over to the seas. After decades of speculation and small-scale applications, the floating solution is finally enjoying political momentum – and serious investment. ....... You could extend an existing city like London into the water quite far before ever being seriously challenged by infrastructure issues. ..... In the 1960s, futurist Buckminster Fuller designed a floating city, Triton, for 100,000 residents ..... Fresco's floating city designs – generally gear-shaped – prescribe the use of "memory metals". Compressed into small cubes, they are easily towed out to sea, where they can be snapped back to the size of buildings. ...... Airports are particularly prime for floating: they essentially require a large platform that is close to the destination city without being intrusive. ....... The abundant wind available at sea could power turbines. Ocean thermal energy conversion could harness the temperature difference between the surface and the depths – a process that also provides fresh water as a byproduct. DeltaSync even envisions residents cultivating aquaculture in lieu of gardens, manufacturing their food requirements from nutrients found in upwellings at the edge of continental shelves. A so-called "Blue Revolution" in aquaculture would be required for the oceans to provide this level of sustenance. (Even without cities at sea, though, ocean harvesting may be our best hope, as land-based agriculture faces salinated soils and a critical phosphorus shortage.) ........ Freedom Ship would essentially be a mile-long flat-bottomed barge with a high-rise building on top. Weighing 3 million tonnes and with a top speed of 10 knots, the floating city would circle the globe every three years, stopping 12 miles offshore at each port for a week at a time. High-speed ferries would connect the 40,000 residents and 20,000 crew to the mainland and bring back visitors. "We won't just be visiting those countries," says Freedom Ship director and executive vice president Roger Gooch. "We anticipate those countries visiting us." ....... Freedom Ship's size – and its $11bn price tag – gives it a credibility problem ....... The thriving Hong Kong sampan-dwelling community of Causeway Bay was not to last. There was no garbage or sewerage treatment system, and fire constantly threatened the wooden structures. Breakwaters that made up the typhoon shelter also limited water circulation, leaving pollution to accumulate in the harbour. The wastewater from the moored vessels combined with leaked sewer discharge and storm drain runoff to create unsanitary living conditions. .......

When Tanka families were offered public housing on land in the 1980s, most chose this option.

...... Untethering from land seems a big moment for a floating city, akin to blasting off to colonise another planet. To reject our ancestral habitat to this degree seems like hubris. How could a group of people survive alone among the waves? ..... But it is a fallacy to imagine we're self-sustaining even in our land-based communities. Many of our essential goods arrive by tanker anyway – a sea-based location would be all the more convenient. Far from impractical utopias, floating cities could be every bit as integrated into global society as the ones we already have on land.





Cutting Edge Urban Design












Water Parkitecture: A Look at the New Cutting Edge in Urban Design
Urban Planning Ideas for 2030, When Billions Will Live in Megacities
by 2025, the world will have 37 megacities, defined as urban areas with more than 10 million people. New York City and Newark are expected to have more than 23 million inhabitants; Tokyo, more than 38 million people. All told, well over half of the world’s population will be living in these super settlements. ..... two-thirds of that population will be poor .... New York, Rio de Janeiro, Mumbai, Lagos, Hong Kong, and Istanbul ...... “Many of these proposals are based on the idea that top-down planning has been failing people in many aspects.” ...... 85 percent of Hong Kong is surrounded by water, yet the city’s population is expected swell by 50 percent. ....... building eight new islands, each dedicated to an economic or social activity unique to Hong Kong, like fishing. ....... a new kind of utopia, where the TOKI clusters get retrofitted with micro-farms, solar panels, and shared car services. Called R-Urban, the services would be open-source and connected through a series of apps. It builds a sharing economy layer on top of the TOKI clusters, which reinforces, rather than destroys, the sense of community that drew inhabitants there in the first place. ........ Governments might want to eradicate favela housing, because they can’t control it, but that improvisational style of living exists in part because of the skills and community values that already live in a city. That’s an opportunity, not an obstacle.
Sweden's Cutting-Edge, 17-Story Greenhouse
After 12 years of planning, Swedish design firm Plantagon has finally begun construction on its first vertical greenhouse. The 17-story structure will grow food year-round for the city of Linköping (pop. 104,000) in the hopes that its model will prove more cost-effective than shipping food in from the countryside. ....... Central to its design is a "transportation helix" that transports potted vegetables on a rotating conveyor belt for better exposure to sunlight. ....... "As urban sprawl and lack of land will demand solutions for how to grow industrial volumes in the middle of the city, solutions on this problem have to focus on high yield per ground area used, lack of water, energy, and air to house carbon dioxide."

Wednesday, May 13, 2015

Early State Tech Startups

Charging Bull, a bronze statue by Arturo Di Mo...
Charging Bull, a bronze statue by Arturo Di Modica at Bowling Green, Manhattan, New York City (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
I met a friend for lunch today near the Charging Bull, Battery Park. I said, I remember this graphic from one of the textbooks in high school biology. It showed a few different species a few weeks after conception. They all looked the same. Early stage tech startups are like that. You don't know if you have a camel, or a human being, or a unicorn. Or a stillborn. Most early stage tech startups end up being stillborns.


Tuesday, May 12, 2015

A Touch Of Asperger's



“Rather than reasoning by analogy, you boil things down to the most fundamental truths you can imagine and you reason up from there,” Musk has said. “This is a good way to figure out if something really makes sense or if it’s just what everybody else is doing.” ....... To be great, you can’t think like everybody else, and you probably won’t fit in to the herd. As a child Musk was bullied and beaten so badly that as an adult he struggled to breathe through his nose and needed corrective surgery........ John Doerr, a venture capitalist at Kleiner Perkins, who was an early investor in Google, Amazon and Netscape, has said that great entrepreneurs tend to have “absolutely no social life.” Great innovators, like those with Asperger’s, just don’t fit in...... Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has been described as “a robot,” and having “a touch of the Asperger’s,” according to a former colleague. There are stories of a young Zuckerberg having awkward meetings, such as with Twitter’s co-founders. ...... One of Facebook’s first investors, Reid Hoffman, has said his first impression of Zuckerberg was how quiet he was. Zuckerberg said maybe 15 or 20 sentences in an hour-long meeting. ...... “What I most remember was scratching my head going, ‘Huh why is he being quiet?’ It turns out he was being quiet because he’s thinking a lot,” Hoffman said ... “He’s perfectly fine with, ‘Hey if there ends up being five seconds of silence, it’s five seconds of silence, I’m thinking.” ...... Zuckerberg’s willingness to defy social norms has paid off with an uncanny ability to position Facebook to thrive. It’s now worth $228 billion. ... He dared to spend over $25 billion acquiring companies without little or revenue — WhatsApp, Instagram and Oculus. ...... When Zuckerberg spent $1 billion on Instagram, which had never made a cent, many saw it as a crazy move. Now by one estimate Instagram is now worth $35 billion. ......... He wears a gray T-shirt every day, saying he wants to focus his decision-making energy on Facebook not fashion. .... Four of the six PayPal co-founders built bombs in high school. ..... While lots of “normal” people played with Legos, Google co-founder Larry Page built a functioning inkjet printer out of them in college. ...... “Think different,” happened to be Apple’s slogan, which its co-founder Steve Jobs embodied in his youth as he wandered India and experimented with LSD. ...... “If you have autism or if you have a mild form of it you might be kind of less interested in following the crowd and conforming to social norms. And you can think more independently,” Baron-Cohen said. “They want to know are we doing these things because it’s the most efficient way, it’s the best way of doing it or the cheapest way. They want some kind of logic.” ........ Obsessiveness, another trait of those with Asperger’s, also pays off when building a tech company...... Microsoft’s co-founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen were comfortable coding software for hours on end as young programmers...... “Some of the more prudish people would say ‘Go home and take a shower.’ We were just hard-core, writing code,” as Gates told ........ Asperger’s Syndrome is much more prevalent in boys than girls.

1% of 1% of 1%

English: Elon Musk at the panel Tribeca Talks:...
English: Elon Musk at the panel Tribeca Talks: Revenge of the Electric Car, for the 2011 Tribeca Film Festival. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
There was that thing in Zuccoti Park. People rallied against the so-called 1%. That 1% supposedly has 40% of the wealth. Much of it is inherited.

And there is the Piketty book that drew a lot of attention. He says, if wealth will get an annual 10% return, but labor will see less than 3% annual growth, then the gap will never close, it will keep widening.

And then there is this: global companies are sitting on $7 trillion in cash. Just sitting. Not doing anything with it. This is not money on that 10% train. How about $18 trillion?

One, I think there is an economic case to be made that if the gulf between the top 1% and the bottom 10% is too wide, that society is not likely to be growing at its optimum. I am talking economic theory. As to how to go about remedying? That is a debate. I am for ordinary people owning equity stakes in many more companies, and not just post-IPO companies. Heck, I am not opposed to a slightly higher tax rate. And then there is choice, the Warren Buffett choice. He decided most of his wealth should not go to his children. It is bad for them. 90% of his wealth will not go to his children.

Two, a stagnant minimum wage is a bad policy choice. The minimum wage in America should be $10 right away, and in the big cities it should be $15. Urbanization is good for the environment. Go green.

Three, trillions sitting around is stupidity. $10 trillion will take care of a-l-l infrastructure needs across the Global South, and that investment will bring a guaranteed 10% annual return. Win-win. Heck, somebody put half a trillion in Elon Musk's internet access company.

But all that is wealth talk. I meant to talk entrepreneurship, especially high tech entrepreneurship. I once put out a blog post where I said, statistically speaking, being an entrepreneur is like being gay. It is about one out of 100. But then that is everyone. That is pizza store owners.

1% of that 1% might be in high tech. And 1% of that 1% of that 1% might be successful tech entrepreneurs. 1 out of 100 which is 1 out of 100 which is 1 out of 100. 1 out of 1,000,000. You are quite literally one in a million. In a country of 300 million, that would give us 300 such entrepreneurs. That is about right. Does this country have 300 self made billionaires? If not, there is something missing in the social/political/economic fabric. Maybe the 1% have too much wealth, maybe the minimum wage has been too stagnant for too long, maybe there are too many trillions just sitting around, having a negative gravity effect on overall growth and well being. Probably all of the above.

1% of 1% of 1%: self made billionaires are in august company.