I’d love to see some serious engineers tackle this issue. It’d be interesting to see the oceanic habitat options they’d come up with. I’ve often thought that one option would be to dredge soil from the ocean floor to build farms that float above on floating glass barges. There’s the desalinization to think about, or going deep enough where salt isn’t an issue anymore.

The point here is that sooner or later, this will happen. It’s just a question of when, and where, and by whom. Some may choose to embrace environmental standards, while others may choose to disregard them. This article gives us all a chance to discuss the options. The more we as people think about this as a future inevitability, the more we can try to think of the best possible scenarios that cause the least amount of harm. It’s only a matter of time.

0. water tanks at bottom – atmospheric pressure to push it back up, then a mechanical device running on solar energy to push the base of tank back down
1. segment the arms and put in sensors and counterweights.
2. true- but versus an oil rig still a better project, no?
3. you have an ocean to float farms on.
4. robots
5. algea as excess biofuel

it’s pretty and can be engineered.

Firstly, the ‘arms’ seem to have little to no flex in them – waves would snap them into pieces or cause extreme sea sickness – this is why ships are only of certan lengths – it’s due to the wavelength of the sea they are traveling in.

Secondly, the deeper you go, themore materials you need to protect your cargo – this is going excedingly deep, and hus is going to be excedingly expensive in terms of carbon and money.

Next is the issue of food – you cannot produce enough to make the platform viable in the long run, and anything you do requires MASSIVE deliveries on a continual basis, which blows out of the water the carbon neutral basis.

Furthermore, how are you going to keep the outside windows clean at the depths that this is talking about?!?! No window washer that I know of will work at that depth, and the mass of crud that will acumulate will slowly drag the structure down to Davy Joanses locker.

Then we have the standard issue of the renewable energy. How are you going to store it for times when there is more demand than energy being produced? Batteries are expensive, energy inneficient, need replaced regularly (in terms of the lifetime of a structure like this) and are excedingly crbon expensive and enviromentaly damaging both in their production and their destruction after their useful life has expired.

All in all, it looks nice, but is highly impractical – someone was fishing for “ooo, isn’t it pritty” comments when they desged this.

I wonder if they thought about ways of using the really high atmospheric pressure at depths of 400 meter – trash compactor?

or using cable ties when anchoring (like some oil rigs) to then produce electricity via movement of Gyre, the amount of force produced by this thing moving would really produce some electrical current.

farming could easily be done down in the tube, basically make a bunch of Heliostat bouyes that transmit sunlight via fiber optic cables down to the deep farm.

i like it…