Goodnight, Oppo

"Rainbow" (rainbeaux) 04/28/2014 at 02:14 • Filed to: None

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I'll leave you with a brilliant idea: What this world needs is an entire floating country anchored in the middle of the ocean. Think about it.... as long as we don't bring any onto it, there will be no bugs and shit to deal with. That alone is a plus, but then we're also practically immune to earthquakes and stuff since the water would absorb the tremors. Tsunamis wouldn't have broken in the middle of the ocean, so they'd just be a very minor annoyance. Fires would be easy, too, since every building could be readily equipped with a pump drawing from the vast supply of seawater. I'm too lazy to think of any other benefits, but whatever.

Jeff-God-of-Biscuits > Rainbow 04/28/2014 at 02:18

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You mean like continents?

Rainbow > Jeff-God-of-Biscuits 04/28/2014 at 02:19

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You mean someone has already invented this? :(

Jeff-God-of-Biscuits > Rainbow 04/28/2014 at 02:20

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Nope, you're the first, if it helps.

Squid > Rainbow 04/28/2014 at 02:23

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What do you do with waste? Also the cost of any goods you want will be ridiculously high. And the need for a car would probably be nil. If you were to grow any kind of food on your magical place you would need bees at the very least to help you pollinate the plants.

You also are forgetting that storms are pretty intense out over the ocean and they don't just have little waves. Your floating island city would need to handle 40 waves.

Another question, did you just watch Water World ?

beardsbynelly - Rikerbeard > Rainbow 04/28/2014 at 02:23

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and with lashings of hubris ye shall name it Atlantis

Singhjr96 > Squid 04/28/2014 at 03:25

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Maybe it could be floating, and anchored close to shore. Like a few hundred feet. Then if there is a tsunami, it could just be towed out to sea. There could be a bridge to cross the gap, or you could park, and have some sort of railway system that cuts across the center of the island. Power could be drawn from power lines, and renewable resources. There also should be a wall or levy or something on one side of floating city.

Jordan Clifford > beardsbynelly - Rikerbeard 04/28/2014 at 03:38

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atlantis 2 - sponsored by Pepsi

BiTurbo228 - Dr Frankenstein of Spitfires > Jeff-God-of-Biscuits 04/28/2014 at 11:24

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I assume this one would be floating wit ha flexible anchoring (chain or something) as opposed to continental plates that are floating on the magma beneath. It's the difference between an olive floating in a Martini and the Martini glass itself :)

BiTurbo228 - Dr Frankenstein of Spitfires > Squid 04/28/2014 at 11:25

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The storms would be a big problem, but if you placed it somewhere in the Sargasso Sea or something (google it, it's really cool), then you could probably subsist entirely on farming plants from the sea and fishing.

BiTurbo228 - Dr Frankenstein of Spitfires > Rainbow 04/28/2014 at 11:30

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That would be a clever idea, but probably very tricky to put into practice. Food shouldn't be a problem, if you placed it somewhere in the Sargasso Sea or something (google it, it's really cool), then you could probably subsist entirely on farming plants from the sea and fishing.

Drinking water would be tricky though. You'd need to have some pretty big evaporators or something to de-salinify the seawater around you.

Power would be alright if you ringed it with generators that converted wave action into energy.

You'd have to import all your raw materials though, which might make things expensive.

Place it on a major shipping lane and you could probably get quite a good economy going catering to crews of transport vessels. You'd also allow tankers with smaller fuel cells (or underfueled big tankers) to complete big journeys by stopping off halfway through.

PS9 > Rainbow 04/28/2014 at 16:30

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Impossible. Lots of problematic assumptions here, starting with this one;

but then we're also practically immune to earthquakes and stuff since the water would absorb the tremors. Tsunamis wouldn't have broken in the middle of the ocean, so they'd just be a very minor annoyance.

NO. This is not even a tiny bit correct. The kinetic energy associated with earthquakes and tsunamis does not vanish once in the water. 'Water' is just a particle system that carries the energy from once place to another, and it will continue until it encounters an obstacle. You remember the 2011 Tohoku earthquake? The one that destroyed Sendai and helped create the Fukushima Nuclear incident? Here's the epicenter:

And Here's the energy map of the resulting Tsunami:

See all that red? The deep red edges? Those are tsunami waves generated by the earthquake. There wasn't a single continent in the pacific that wasn't affected, though Sendai obviously got the worst of it. Tsunamis of any kind would be impossible in your magical earthquake absorbing ocean. The real ocean allows local earthquakes to have global, country and continent-spanning consequences. Also this:

The Earth's axis shifted by estimates of between 10 cm (4 in) and 25 cm (10 in). This deviation led to a number of small planetary changes, including the length of a day, the tilt of the Earth, and the Chandler wobble. The speed of the Earth's rotation increased, shortening the day by 1.8 microseconds due to the redistribution of Earth's mass. The axial shift was caused by the redistribution of mass on the Earth's surface, which changed the planet's moment of inertia. Because of conservation of angular momentum, such changes of inertia result in small changes to the Earth's rate of rotation. These are expected changes for an earthquake of this magnitude.

A natural phenomenon with the power to significantly change the earths rotation can easily crush any megastructures we would put in the ocean as if it were aluminum foil in your hands. This is why we don't build them there.