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Aquarius



View of Aquarius from above.


As the calendar approaches a new millennium, humanity and our home planet, the earth, are confronting some serious problems. The world population, which was under one billion less than two centuries ago and well under two billion at the start of this century, will pass six billion by the year 2000, climbing steeply. We do not want to wait for starvation, war, or pestilence (such as AIDS) to "solve" this problem. But we seem to be running out of room (not just elbow room but high-quality living space), energy (renewable, non-polluting), food, and the wealth to build and sustain a comfortable and ecologically sane infrastructure (for travel, communications, recreation, etc.).

How does the Millennial Project view these problems? Are there solutions? We believe there are. And we believe that humanity's first goal in reaching for the stars should be to get our home planet, the earth, back to a healthy state in balanced equilibrium with us, its human seed.

The problem of living room -- of high-quality space for work and play, for privacy and social activities, and for all the many settings that make life rich and full -- can be solved, we believe, in two stages. The first is colonizing the oceans with floating cities -- countries, really -- that grow down into the depths as well as up into the atmosphere and outward across the surface. There is room, without disturbing the vast openness of the oceans, for thousands of such floating "countries," each with gardens and forests, varied living and working facilities, fields and mountains -- beaches, of course. And each comfortably providing living room for hundreds of thousands of people.

But providing quality living space, for a few billion more people is only an interim solution. The Millennial Project has a second phase, over the next couple of centuries, of colonizing the moon and Mars -- building cities or "countries" on those now-alien worlds (based, to some extent, on what we have learned from building "countries" on and in the oceans), and of sending huge space ships ("countries," really, with hundreds of thousands of inhabitants) off to explore and colonize distant planetary systems, even in distant galaxies.

What about renewable, non-polluting energy to provide a comfortable, high quality of living for earth's vast and rapidly growing human population? It turns out that there are vast energy resources tucked away in the ocean depths. A peculiar property of water is that it is most dense (heaviest) at a temperature a few degrees above freezing. Anywhere that the ocean is more than a half-mile or so deep, the temperature at the surface is much warmer than in the depths. From an engineering standpoint, about one-fifth of the ocean surface has enough temperature differential to make energy extraction feasible. And once the huge Ocean Thermal-Energy Conversion (OTEC) units are built, the energy available is vast -- many times larger than the total present energy requirements of humanity -- and it is non-polluting (in fact, as we shall see below, it can contribute to the carbon sink and to reversing the greenhouse effect) and endlessly renewable in the normal cycles of the seasons and of ocean currents.

What about the problem of providing food for a hungry and expanding human race? This, too, seems solvable as part of the Millennial Project's plan, because the ocean depths not only hold vast untapped energy, but also a wealth of organic nutrients. For millions of years, the ocean's surfaces have teemed with life. These represent complex food chains starting with photosynthesis by ocean plants, mostly phytoplankton which are tiny organisms in vast, diffuse clouds throughout the oceans. The phytoplankton are eaten by many organisms, with nutrients moving up the food chains to larger and larger scavengers and predators. However, many ocean creatures -- especially the larger ones higher on the food chains -- die and are not consumed by other creatures. Their bodies sink to the ocean floor. The cold, sterile ocean depths have built up, over millions of years, vast stores of nutrients. When these are brought to the surface (as part of raising cold water for energy conversion at an OTEC plant), the surrounding ocean surface explodes with new life. This "mariculture" provides many forms of seafood (such as oysters, clams, crabs, tuna, salmon, trout, etc.) as well as nutrients for land fertilizers, human nutritional supplements, and other uses.

An abundance of cheap, ecologically healthy energy (from OTEC) is the key to wealth sufficient to provide a good standard of living for all members of the expanding human population, and also to build (and rebuild) the infrastructure of transportation, communications, sanitation, education, health care, and all the many other complex (and expensive) systems that are part of modern (and future) life -- including launching our species off into space. The ultimate goal of the Millennial Project is colonizing the galaxy.


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