Reply #8: Doesn't look or sound like the BBC at all to me

[muriel_volestrangler]

The 'footage' is just the PR stuff from the guy who draws the 'lilypads'; the voice is standard American dumb-newsreader (and, while the BBC does use some non-British journalists, they're not himbos); the BBC would never use music so annoying and trashy underneath a report; and the beginning and end graphics are low-budget crap.

You don't explain how growing their own food suddenly becomes easier when a city is floating in the middle of salt water rather than sitting on the ground. All logic would point to it being a lot cheaper to build a greenhouse on land rather than having to build more floating foundations that have to withstand storms and corrosion. If you claim these cities would be "far more ecologically benign", then I want to see the figures you have to show that. Again, it's easier to put solar panels on the ground than on the sea. Dry land really is a lot more benign environment for humans than the sea. Any people willing to be cooped up in a crowded floating city would be willing to be cooped up in a crowded land city, and would have the advantage of being able to walk, cycle, or ride a train away from it to get to normal land - at once, and not after a costly sea journey.

The only advantage of a floating city is that it could be slightly nearer to offshore wind and wave power generators. But all you'd be saving is the cost of the cables connecting them to land. Compare that with the cost of having to ship so many of the goods the city consumes to it, and the extra cost of the power needed to produce fresh water (yes, you should remember that having to produce your water from saltwater is highly inefficient), and the sea cities will be a lot more inefficient.

By the way, constructing a city "on the sea floor" would be a technological nightmare. Have you any idea how much more difficult it is to work underwater than on land?

And your 'house in a day' robot is no more efficient than building a pre-fabricated house. Your claim that it "can use many different materials" doesn't seem to appear anywhere in that video - it's about a concrete pourer. The reason that no-one has yet tried living in floating cities is not that we can't build them fast enough; it's that it's an uncomfortable, inefficient way to live, with no real purpose. There is not a shortage of land to build crowded cities on; but real world economics means you'll only build the cities when there are things for people to do in them. There's just no point in banishing people to the middle of the sea (indeed, the nearest thing to this that has happened so far is prison hulks - which are looked on as possible mistreatment of prisoners).