Seasteading anyone?

[Southpaw]

http://kernelmag.dailydot.com/issue-sections/headline-story/16550/sean-ironstag-oceanus-great-pacific-garbage-patch/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=digg

Sean Ironstag’s quixotic quest to build a society of plastic floating cities to clean up the ocean

Five years ago, Sean Ironstag got on a friend’s yacht without knowing where they were going or how long they’d be gone. “It turned out we went straight out into the middle of the ocean,” he remembers. About a week later, they dropped anchor and went for a swim. “And when I came out,” he says, “it looked like my body was covered in glitter.”

and

The “glitter” on his body was tiny pieces of floating plastic, broken down by sunlight in a process called photodegradation. The resulting fragments, small but persistent, are nearly impossible to clean up. As scientists have learned, these small pieces, some of them microscopic, crowd out the natural sea life near the ocean’s surface: There are swaths of the Pacific Gyre where the ratio of plastics to plankton is on the order of 100:1. That’s thrown the whole ecosystem out of whack. How that affects humans is the subject of ongoing research, but it is clear that these microplastics are sponges for pollutants and that they’ve entered the food chain. They get eaten by zooplankton, which mistake them for phytoplankton. The zooplankton get eaten by fish, which get eaten by larger fish, which get eaten by humans...

and

Still, Ironstag learned a lot along the way. Finally, he says, “It all just fell into place and just clicked.” He devised a radical plan: floating platforms that would pull plastic from the ocean, then recycle it into building materials to further expand these cities on the sea. Or, as he puts it, “The solution to one of humanity’s greatest problems right now is harvesting that plastic and recycling that plastic on-site, then running it through mobile 3D printers to create these hexagonal modular platforms that connect together using electromagnetic technology and are powered by waveplate generators beneath them, and then building on top of those."

Helluva concept.

 

[Linderbee]

That's really awesome.

 

[puckhead]

Is it too late for #Ironstag4President2016? This guy could even be better than pinestraw!

 

[Southpaw]

Cheaper and just as feasible as colonizing Mars. Took me awhile to figure out what "seasteading" meant. Global warming, rising tides, etc. Ultimate recycling.

 

[Southpaw]

http://www.alternet.org/environment/massive-tragic-trashing-our-oceans-there-still-time-do-something-about-it?akid=14217.47049.9FlEHD&rd=1&src=newsletter1055746&t=2


The Massive, Tragic Trashing of Our Oceans: Is There Still Time to Do Something About It?
For sure there is sobering news about marine health. But it is not too late to change our behaviors.

“A disposable diaper takes an estimated 500 years to break down while plastic six-pack rings for cans take 400 years and a plastic water bottle can take up to 450 years to degrade,” said Genevieve Johnson, education director and marine coordinator of the Voyage of the Odyssey, a five-year program launched in 2000 by the oceanographic research nonprofit Ocean Alliance to gather the first-ever data on synthetic contaminants in the world's oceans.

“However, this does not mean they will disappear, all remain as plastic polymers and eventually yield individual molecules of plastic too tough for any organism to digest," Johnson says...

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[BigRedRage]

Ill run for president of plastic island

 

[jf-08]

That's a pretty ingenious concept.