No Food, No Utopia: How Will Floating Cities Survive?

Being able to look into the future is a skill that mankind has dreamed about for thousands of years. But seasteading expert Marc Collins believes that the future lies in floating cities where we'll be able to grow meat in laboratories and drink desalinated sea water. It's not that crazy (at all) to believe that once the sea levels rise far enough that humanity will have to either leave the planet or adapt to the new high waters. Marc Collins is the co-founder of Blue Frontiers, a company that aims to design these cities on the sea.
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The pilot project is quite modest. So before we go out and build huge floating structures for hundreds and thousands of people we’re building a small pilot which will be about the size if you can imagine a soccer field—It’s around 7500 square meters.
The engineers are saying it shouldn’t be a single platform, it should be multiple smaller platforms. So maybe 12 platforms of 625 square meters. So imagine a platform 25 meters by 25 meters next to another one with connecting bridges.
And the reason for smaller structures is that we’re going to be inside the reef, within the lagoon of an island. And what you don’t want is to cast a shadow on the bottom of the lagoon that will obviously impact photosynthesis which means we’ll have a problem with the environment. So we needed smaller platforms in order for light to penetrate and we need deep lagoons.
So we had to literally do an inventory of all of the depths of the lagoons around the main islands we’re interested in. We found certain lagoons and the engineers are telling us and environmental consultants are saying that between 25 to 30 meters of depth we will be very—we won’t have an impact on the light situation. So that’s one of the elements of location.
Now in terms of size, because it’s a pilot we don’t anticipate being able to be completely self-sustaining on food. We can be completely autonomous on energy, on fresh water, completely recycle our gray and black water, do all of that and deal with our trash.