City of the future sinks into the ocean

[humble3d]

City of the future sinks into the ocean

Japanese firm devises plan for an Ocean Spiral community that descends nine miles to the seabed

With dry land increasingly at a premium, a Japanese construction company has come up with a plan to sink a spiralling city into the depths of our oceans.

Each Ocean Spiral will be home to about 5,000 people, according to Shimizu Corp., with each structure also incorporating business and office facilities, hotel and entertainment facilities.

A blueprint for the city of the future was unveiled in Tokyo this week, with Shimizu confidently predicting that the first of its underwater cities would be ready for residents to move in as early as 2030.

At the surface, the city will have a vast floating dome that could be made watertight and retracted beneath the surface in bad weather.

Beneath the dome, the spiral structure would descend as much as 9 miles to the seabed, where an "earth factory" would produce methane from carbon dioxide by using micro-organisms, the company said.

The seabed could also be mined for rare earth minerals and metals.

Generators would create power by taking advantage of the difference in the temperature of sea water at varying depths, while undersea docking facilities would enable supplies to be delivered and research to be conducted.

Shimizu plans to build the Ocean Spiral from resin instead of concrete and to use industrial-scale three-dimensional printers to create the components.

The cost of developing the first undersea city has been estimated at 3 trillion yen (£16.24 billion), although the company says that subsequent versions will be significantly cheaper.


An artist impression of the modern-day Atlantis (Shimizu Corp) via link below...

Shimizu has been working on the project with the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology and Tokyo University and believes it will take five years to build the first unit.

Shimizu has a reputation for blue-sky thinking in a country in which construction firms are traditionally conservative in their approaches to projects.

Previously, Shimizu has proposed creating a 250-mile wide "belt" of solar panels around the Moon that would gather and relay a constant supply of energy to "receiving stations" on Earth by way of lasers or microwave transmission.

Another plan is to build vast floating islands for the shrinking atoll nations of the Pacific, such as Kiribati.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/japan/11244758/City-of-the-future-sinks-into-the-ocean.html

[dMog]

yes...sound safe...sink a city 9 miles in the ocean in the biggest earthquake zone in the world

[CODYQX4]

Yeah I don't want to live underwater.

The true city of the future will float in the sky, get it right silly Japanese Developer Guy.

You know, I've said it before, the fix for lack of space is to build "up, not around". I imagined ridiculously tall skyscraper apartment complexes everywhere. If you could seriously make stuff float mid-air you wouldn't have to worry about earthquakes ever again.

[dMog]

Yeah I don't want to live underwater.

The true city of the future will float in the sky, get it right silly Japanese Developer Guy.

You know, I've said it before, the fix for lack of space is to build "up, not around". I imagined ridiculously tall skyscraper apartment complexes everywhere. If you could seriously make stuff float mid-air you wouldn't have to worry about earthquakes ever again.

just falling from the sky...yikes...

[VileTouch]

yeah, they're running out of land to house all of their citizens and now they want to take over the ocean floor. and noone have raised the obvious question:

dude...maybe we should stop breeding like rabbits for a while? it might sound crazy, ya know?, in this age of skyscrapers and underwater cities, but it might just solve our overpopulation problem.. weird thought huh?

[AlexCross]

yeah, they're running out of land to house all of their citizens and now they want to take over the ocean floor. and noone have raised the obvious question:

dude...maybe we should stop breeding like rabbits for a while? it might sound crazy, ya know?, in this age of skyscrapers and underwater cities, but it might just solve our overpopulation problem.. weird thought huh?

Since when we have a problem with overpopulation? In Japan there are villages/cities that have close all the schools because there aren't any chlidren there anymore. Same problem you will find in almost any country.

[VileTouch]

yeah, they're running out of land to house all of their citizens and now they want to take over the ocean floor. and noone have raised the obvious question:

dude...maybe we should stop breeding like rabbits for a while? it might sound crazy, ya know?, in this age of skyscrapers and underwater cities, but it might just solve our overpopulation problem.. weird thought huh?

Since when we have a problem with overpopulation? In Japan there are villages/cities that have close all the schools because there aren't any chlidren there anymore. Same problem you will find in almost any country.

yes, i can see that

that's why people are packed like sardines in kapuseru hotels:

yes, that's 8 "rooms" ( the term "morgue" comes to mind >_< )

[AlexCross]

We are talking here about countries, not about one city, that has >50% of the population of the entire country in it.

[VileTouch]

We are talking here about countries, not about one city, that has >50% of the population of the entire country in it.

fair enough. so, do you predict that some of those people will leave tokyo to live in the ocean floor?

for what i see they long for human contact :P

maybe they would feel lonely there