Floating cities - the water supply problem

From: "Dr. Omni"
To:
Sent: segunda-feira, 19 de fevereiro de 2001 00:29
Subject: [spacesettlers] Floating cities

[snikt]
> Also, until now Savage has not addressed a vital point (perhaps the most
> essential one) for building any floating city - but I'll not say which
point
> is that until I finish this chapter and make sure that it will not be
> addressed at all...
>
[snikt]

I've already finished the chapter about Aquarius and now I'm sure: Savage
does not write a single line about how people living in floating cities in
open sea would get drinkable water. I had to return to the section where the
functioning of the OTEC is explained and then I found out that he simply did
not bother to make explicit from where drinkable water would come from: from
the evaporator of the OTEC, which would produce enormous amounts of
distilled water through a low-pressure process...

However, for the "sea villages" that we are thinking about, OTECs would not
be an option, and water would have to come from another source. I think that
the most obvious source is: rain.

Imagine a sea village built under a dome with a circular reservoir around
it. When it rains, water slides over the dome and falls in the reservoir. If
the reservoir gets overfilled, then part of the water can be pumped to
internal tanks. A dome with a diameter of only 100 m - perfectly viable to
our current civil engineering - could gather about 7900 m^3 of water per
year, considering an unremarkable rainfall of 1000 mm/year. If the average
sea villager consumes 145 l/day, then this dome could hold a population of
about 150.

I'm considering just domestic consumption. For agricultural purposes, it
would be better to cover crops with hemicylindrical domes and use other rain
storage system. Or simply count with rain falling directly over the plants,
like in conventional agriculture...

Also, although I talked about "domes", actually Im considering any shape
able to gather rainfall. A pyramid of even a conventional roof would be
equally efficient, having the advantage of providing a much better
occupation of space for humans. (Unlike Savage, I don't believe that round
shapes are practical, much on the contrary... Indeed, I think that when he
talks about the curvilinear internal architecture of Aquarius, he was just
pushing that "cybergenics" thing too far...)

Dr. Omni
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