From: Skye Howard (skyezacharia@yahoo.com)
Date: Tue Jan 11 2000 - 16:47:33 MST
Interesting things you can do with water....
I remember once reading out of a book my first grade
teacher gave me- she saw I was interested in science
fiction novels, and so she gave me this book on the
future, confiding that she hadn't actually expected
there to be anyone who would be interested in it...
that you could simply place an iron cage into most
places in the ocean and it would magnetize bits of
organic debris that contained magnetic minerals and
cement them on the outside of the cage, forming a
thick cement-like layer.... if your robots are fairly
big, you could make a nice hull of some kind with
this, I suppose.... maybe you could even make it a
flat metal surface with no perforations and sort of
scrape templates off of the outside... that way, you
could reuse the same frame a lot of times... all
you'd need to do is put in some of the other parts...
let's see... I think you could build wires by some
sort of magnetization process also, if you can
chemically sift the influx somehow... possibly you
could have a sort of rotor device cutting everything
up, with no outlet except the walls, which would be
magnetized grids... so everything but the conductive
metals would stay. I'm sure somebody out there has a
better method, I'm not familiar with oceanic refining
processes, since I had heard that most of it was in so
loose a concentration that this wouldn't work, though
it occurs to me that if you can accrete a solid layer
of fairly durable cement-like structure then maybe it
wouldn't be incredibly difficult to filter... glass is
easy... sand. It's all just a matter of equipment...
most of which we seem to want to grow. Which may
prove difficult.
What if we built the whole thing underwater, or
simply created the island out of "sea-ment" and buoyed
it upwards, anchoring the whole thing with chains...
there's a lot of fun ideas when it comes to ocean
based design.
--- Ken Clements <Ken@Innovation-On-Demand.com> wrote:
> Robert Bradbury wrote:
>
> > I prefer the "grow your own island"
> > approach ...
>
> I am continuing to think about ways to do this.
> Lately, I have been considering
> dumping some mountain tops through underground
> tunnels that come up under the
> ocean. It has some advantage because you can run
> the thing off the difference in
> gravitational energy, and do not have as big a
> cooling problem as my last
> suggestion. Of course, you have to pick a mountain
> that people will allow to be
> moved, but this may be offset by the nice flat land
> you can give them where the
> mountain was. For a small island, you may only need
> a small part of a mountain (or
> just hollow out a part) given that you can
> restructure the material to have just as
> much strength at a much lower density.
>
> I remember thinking about this stuff back in the
> early seventies, long before the
> promise of MNT. I was considering what it would
> take to build a robot harbor
> dredger. This machine would swim into a harbor and
> dredge up a load of silt from
> the bottom and then swim out and dump it in deep
> water. My design allowed the
> machine to recharge its batteries from the
> gravitational energy of lowering the
> silt. This way it could work 24-7 and would have to
> surface only to replace worn
> parts. After working on this a while, I realized
> that a fleet of these could be
> used to build a deep water island out of parts of
> the undersea shelf. The surface
> part of the island would go slowly, because the
> robots would need to dump most of
> the load in deep water to get the energy to put a
> small part of the load on the
> surface, but it could be done. All of the above is
> not very practical (i.e. would
> cost too much) unless you can "grow" the robots.
> (Anyone know how much we could get
> paid to dredge a deep channel up the Mississippi?
> The Gulf is a nice place to put
> an island.)
>
> One of the problems with MNT is that it makes too
> much possible. When it gets here,
> I fear I will find myself in the position of the
> proverbial centipede who could not
> decide which foot to move first.
>
> -Ken
>
>
>
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