What if we “lily ponded” the oceans of the world?
Consider. Two big problems our cities face are gaining enough power for everything their citizens need to run AND gaining enough fresh water for everyone to drink and water their lawns and irrigate the crops they need to eat. What if we solved both by building ‘lily pads’ out on top of the oceans?
Everything starts with a single step, of course. Some tech-billionaire funds the first ‘lily pad.’ It’s a giant hexagon built of, er, [something], basically in the form of a child’s inflatable swimming pool. Perhaps its sides are one mile long. Its surface is flat, and the sides are whatever depth are needed so that it will displace enough water so that it and whatever we build upon it will float. (I’m leaving some details for the engineers to handle, you understand.) What we build on the lilypad is a whole slew of big solar panels. Or even a bigger slew of normal sized solar panels. Whatever. We collect the electricity from all the panels and run it down a ocean floor cable to, say, Los Angeles. Immense amounts of power for everyone!
And that’s not all. Obviously rain will fall on our lilypad. We channel it to a network of inflatable collection balloons, which float underneath the lily pad, so they don’t add to the weight. The fresh water ends up collected into a giant pipe that also runs along the floor of the ocean and gets pumped back to Los Angeles. Immense amounds of nice fresh water for everyone!
Okay, a single 1 mile sided hexagon isn’t probably enough, but you use the profit of the first one to build the next, floating alongside the alpha one, maybe with just a foot or so gap between the sides? And we’re off to the races! One pad pays for the second, the first two pay for the next two, and on and on. In an unbelievably short amount of time we can cover the entire ocean!
In fact, maybe we’ll be collecting way more power and water than we actually need. So maybe some of our lilypads will be devoted to agriculture (hydroponics?) instead. I mean, what great fields, all perfectly flat, no nasty hills and mountains to work around.
Now, I imagine there will be some side effects of doing this. For one thing, Earth will no longer be the “Blue Planet.” It’ll be some mottled version of black (solar cells) and green/golden (the agriculture fields, depending on season and what crops we crops) but I guess we can rewrite the necessary references.
Will this affect our planetary temperature? Yeah, we’ll be collecting a bunch of solar power, but it’s not like all that solar power isn’t hitting the oceans and being absorbed already. On the other hand, that sunlight won’t be causing water to be evaporated from the ocean, which I think tends to cool the water. Maybe the two changes will balance out?
And the water should balance out: every drop that gets collected before it lands in the Pacific will be pumped somewhere else on earth to be used and eventually evaporate into the air or drain back into the ocean.
I suspect it would totally crash the ocean biosystem. No sunlight for algae to grown on, no algae for animals to eat. Huge ‘dead zones’ beneath our lily pads. Oh, well, I never liked seafood all that much.
OTOH, once the paddification proceeds far enough, the world is no longer chopped up by oceans. A New Zealander with stamina and ambition can hike from his home to anywhere else on the planet, just walking across the pads and leaping over the foot wide gaps between them.
Hmmm. It’ll also muck up ocean travel. I guess we’ll have to plan in some open channels for boats to get between the old continents. “The Transatlantic Channel” and so on. Should be doable.
The future is so bright!
