One thing you have is, plenty of water.
Water water everywhere, but not a drop to drink.
Its a Quartz dome over a titanium/carbon fiber structure - essentially a spaceflight helium pressure tank invented.
That is true, but I haven't yet seen a spacecraft pressure vessel the size of a house. :lol:
Also radiation. The only way you could possibly insure that residents of a mars or moon colony will not receive sterilizing or fatal doses of radiation is to drill down and house them under a good amount of rock and soil. With that in mind why not do it on earth instead? Far easier and could house billions over centuries.
Radiation does not mean you have to dig halfway through the lithosphere- around 1-5 meters of regolith will do fine.
And that regolith will not crush you like water at the bottom of the ocean will- 5 cubic meters of 3 g/cm^3 material over a 1 meter area produces roughly 55 kPa on Mars, and even less on the Moon.
But under those cities is where the magic can happen. Dangerous yet good jobs going down and working to extract minerals from the sea floor. And to get it up is a mere floating module or tube away not a hours long VASIMR burn and then 6 months before a carefully planned reentry.
Hours long? Must be a pretty strong VASIMR...
I never suggested trying to mine interplanetary resources (even mining very valuable resources is difficult with modern or near-future abilities), and indeed, it only really makes sense to utilise bulk resources on a planetary scale, at most- unless you have some sort of unfortunate disabundance in a certain element.
There are a lot of problems with deep ocean mining. For one, it's at the bottom of the deep ocean. Already operating there is more difficult than operating in space. Then you have ecological issues; the real rich deposits are at volcanic vents, which are coincidentally teeming with life. A lot of people would get up in arms about destroying sites like those. Elsewhere on the ocean floor, mineral composition might be pretty mundane (flat areas could be covered in deep layers of organic material too- the remains of plankton and other aquatic creatures- but it is important to remember that the seafloor is by no means a featureless flat plain- it might be pretty boring close up, but on a planetary scale, it's quite striking down there). Maybe you could mine that organic material for... something, but it wouldn't help much if it was covering a layer of something more useful.
And silt down there doesn't settle or blow away easily because currents are quite weak, so you'd need... I dunno... mega gigantic industrial aquafans to make sure you didn't get blinded by clouds of silt. And of course, mucking about on the seafloor could have unintended consequences for the ocean system in general.
Still, it has advantages- there must be a really huge amount of resources down there. The difficulty is it's very hard to work in that environment. I'd say it'd be easier to mine resources on Mars; easier to mine there than it would be on the deep seafloor, but of course much harder to ship those resources back to where they're needed (unless they're needed on Mars, in which case)...
For supplying the ever growing human population and maybe getting to the point of preserving areas of earth for the continued growth of other species. The use of the Oceans is a nearly no brainier.
Before we go any further I think we need to fix the problem that's going on right now with population growth, and that is bad patterns happening in bad environments. We need to get rid of those bad societal environments so we can have better patterns- not women having on average, 7-8 children, with high infant and child mortality rates, poor reproductive and children's rights, and a generally bad standard of living. Improve things, improve economics and education in those areas, and you can hope for fewer children being raised far, far better. Which is pretty much the core concept of the human life strategy: have few offspring, but invest in them greatly.
Space is the "Final Frontier" For a reason. To colonize space will require technology we can only dream of today.
Our understanding of space is far more advanced than our understanding of the deep ocean, we've operated for thousands and thousands of hours in space whereas only few people have been on short, limited trips to the deep seafloor, and it is already an environment that is easier to operate in (even though it's harder to get to).
I could say the same of the equipment needed to mine the deep sea-floor...
Why would they make a website for something they wont do? That would really harm Virgins image.
Maybe it's a joke. Remember Virgle?
I doubt it is, but still... it would be nice if they told us enough that the whole thing would make sense.
I think humans are doing enough damage to the little solid surface of this planet already. But also to the oceans and atmosphere as well. The oceans should be safed and not populated.
I think the whole point of ocean population is to minimise ecological impact.
The oceans are big and only a small part of them is bio-rich... the continents are smaller and we're encroaching on the bio-rich areas that are left (and neglecting the bio-poor areas for good reason). Of course nobody is planning to... demolish the Great Barrier Reef, or dump crude oil in whale breeding sites, or something like that...
There is plenty of space, in space
There is also plenty of space in the oceans... the
surface of the ocean is an environment which is far more hospitable than space, far easier to visit, and far more advantageous in the near-term. And it's an environment that we've been traversing for thousands of years, an environment that we travel over regularly and exploit for trade and industry... it is certainly something that must be looked at.
