Re: Village in a box

Aeroponics is an interesting technology.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeroponics

Here the water in hydroponics is replaced with a mist.
Liters of water per minute are reduced to milliliters per minute..


Imagine a spherical shell of transparent plastic 20 m in diameter.
Its got a volume of 4,188.8 cubic meters. It displaces 4,293.5 tons
of seawater With a surface area of 1,256.6 square meters and a mass
of
10 grams per square meter - the entire sphere masses 12.6 kg! So, it
would ride pretty high on the waves!

But fill it with a calcium carbonate concrete - extracted from
seawater
and that changes.


125 cubic meters of concrete - forming a hemispherical shell
20 cm thick around the bottom, and another 500 cubic meters
filling the bottom of the sphere - forming a floor.

Add another 750 tons of equipment fresh water and plant materials -
and it
rides with its equator submerged in the waves.

With multiple layers of growing things, it has an effective arable
area of
1,500 square meters of farmland. That's 0.15 hectare. Yields of 15
metric
tons per hectare per year are possible with enclosed agriculture.
That's
2.25 tons per year of food items from this ball.

At 15 kg per day that's a 150 day supply of food for one person.
Two units like this are needed per person.

A total of 16 billion units are needed to feed a planet of
8 billion people. Located on the Earth's equator, a strip of
floating balls 4 km wide would span the oceans! A high speed rail
system
built atop the system, with warehouses and processing centers located
conveniently - would deliver products to market. The rail system
could
also connect the continents. Canals would be arranged to let sea
traffic pass through.- the rail line would likely be in a pressurized
tube under
the water to avoid weather - and help stabilize the system Ditto
with the warehouses and processing stations..

Riding lower in the water the spheres would intercept light but they
would
be less affected by waves and weather conditions.

The world's agribusiness is $3.2 trillion per year. The US spends $1
trillion
per year on food. A world of 8 billion people that spent as much as
US
citizen on food per person would spend $26.6 trillion on food each
year.
This is about 1/3 of the world's economic activity, and assumes that
the
world is at least 11x to 22x as rich as it is today. But assuming an
ROI
of 20% per annum is acceptable then $134 trillion could be spent on
food production. Dividing by 16 billion units that's $8,300 per
unit. Which
in the quantities we're talking may be achievable. Just as we today
accept
the fact that supercomputers are commonly available at less than $1000
and color TV cameras are available for a few dollars - its reasonable
to
believe that with appropriate investments in production, telerobots
could
be built to replicate humans - using humans to control them over a
wireless global broadband - telerobots for less than $1000 each.. So,
each sphere would have its own tending robot and solar/laser power
supply.







.

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