While people argue about climate change, no one can deny that ocean levels are rising. Farmers in places like Bangladesh have been forced to leave their farms because they are now underwater. Since, regardless of the cause, this trend shows no signs of reversal, could floating cities be the answer to prevent eco-refugees becoming our next big population problem?
Off the top of my head, I'd say that if that was a workable solution it would probably be a fairly limited one. It reminds me of a small man-made "island" I saw on TV... It was floating largely because of a bunch of 2 litre empty plastic soda bottles being fastened together. I guess there could be a survivalist solution in there somewhere.
I think the Netherlands have been working on this, as so much of their land is below sea level. I read a very extensive article about just this kind of thing online , a year or two ago. Sorry I don't remember where to direct you. The neatest thing about the whole floating city thing is that you can relocate your house if you choose. Have a bunch of loud, fighting neighbours? Uncouple your house from there and float in another area!
Lots of people live on boats in 3rd world countries. Problems happen when a typhoon or hurricane hits. No where to hide then. I also wondered about sewage since they usually just dumped it. The ocean has only a certain capacity for pollutants and I believe that we are overloading it in a lot of places.
It's a cycle and unfortunately I don't think we are going to get the best of the planet. It's doing it's thing and many will likely suffer and die. It's happened before and will happen again. I don't think there really is a solution.
I watched it on “Ripley’s Believe it or not” before but I don’t think that anyone will be following his hobby. That would take a lot of money to have a floating island.
If you weigh the cost of the floating city against the cost of refugees flooding existing cities that are ill equipped to handle the migration, the floating city might be the cheaper option!
