Last month, government officials in the island nation of the Maldives officially unveiled plans to build the first fully floating island city of its kind. Could the ambitious experiment be a blueprint for how we’ll live in the future as climate change continues to raise the global sea level?
As “arguably the lowest-lying country in the world,” according to NASA—the average elevation is just 3.3 feet above sea level—the Maldives, an island republic in the northern Indian Ocean, will soon have to rely on sustainable housing. In virtually any simulation of the near future, the over 1,000 individual islands that make up the Maldives will be some of the first to disappear below the rising sea level.
Enter the floating city, appropriately called Maldives Floating City (MFC), which will be built in a lagoon just minutes from Male, the capital of the Maldives. MFC’s designers—the Netherlands-based Dutch Docklands, the global leader in floating infrastructure—say the floating city’s shape, a series of honeycomb-like hexagonal maze rows is supposed to resemble coral.
Suppose aliens existed, and imagine that some of them had been watching our planet for its entire four and a half billion years. What would they have seen? Over most of that vast timespan, Earth’s appearance altered slowly and gradually. Continents drifted; ice cover waxed and waned; successive species emerged, evolved, with many of them becoming extinct.
But in just a tiny sliver of Earth’s history—the last hundred centuries—the patterns of vegetation altered much faster than before. This signaled the start of agriculture—and later urbanization. The changes accelerated as the human population increased.
Then came even faster changes. Within just a century, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere began to rise dangerously fast. Radio emissions that couldn’t be explained by natural processes appeared and something else unprecedented happened: Rockets launched from the planet’s surface escaped the biosphere completely. Some spacecraft were propelled into orbits around the Earth; others journeyed to the moon, Mars, Jupiter, and even Pluto.
If those hypothetical aliens continued to keep watch, what would they witness in the next century? Will a final spasm of activity be followed by silence due to climate change? Or will the planet’s ecology stabilize? Will there be massive terraforming? Will an armada of spacecraft launched from Earth spawn new oases of life elsewhere?
Queenstown is a resort town in Otago in the southwest of New Zealand’s South Island. It has an urban population of 16,000 (June 2020).
The town is built around an inlet called Queenstown Bay on Lake Wakatipu, a long, thin, Z-shaped lake formed by glacial processes, and has views of nearby mountains such as The Remarkables, Cecil Peak, Walter Peak, and just above the town, Ben Lomond and Queenstown Hill.
The Queenstown-Lakes District has a land area of 8,704.97 square kilometers (3,361.01 sq mi) not counting its inland lakes Hāwea, Wakatipu, and Wānaka. The region has an estimated resident population of 47,400 (June 2020). Neighboring towns include Arrowtown, Glenorchy, Kingston, Wanaka, Alexandra, and Cromwell. The nearest cities are Dunedin and Invercargill. Queenstown is known for its commerce-oriented tourism, especially adventure- and ski- tourism. Wikipedia
When NASA astronauts return to the Moon in a few years, they will do so inside a lander that dwarfs that of the Apollo era. SpaceX’s Starship vehicle measures 50 meters from its nose cone to landing legs. By contrast, the cramped Lunar Module that carried Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin down to the Moon in 1969 stood just 7 meters tall.
This is but one of many genuinely shocking aspects of NASA’s decision a week ago to award SpaceX—and only SpaceX—a contract to develop, test, and fly two missions to the lunar surface. The second flight, which will carry astronauts to the Moon, could launch as early as 2024.
NASA awarded SpaceX $2.89 billion for these two missions. But this contract would balloon in amount should NASA select SpaceX to fly recurring lunar missions later in the 2020s. And it has value to SpaceX and NASA in myriad other ways. Perhaps most significantly, with this contract, NASA has bet on a bold future of exploration. Until now, the plans NASA had contemplated for human exploration in deep space all had echoes of the Apollo program. NASA talked about “sustainable” missions and plans in terms of cost, but they were sustainable in name only.
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In the future, what might lunar exploration look like if NASA can send multiple Starships there each year? This SpaceX rendering offers a vision of one such future.
With a revolutionary new heat exhaust system, scientists in England might have just found the key to unlocking a cooler future for nuclear fusion—and brought the world one step closer to actually realizing the long-promised next frontier for energy.
Scientists have worked for decades on different tokamak reactors, or donut-shaped chambers in which atoms are combined (fused, for fusion) to generate plentiful energy. The white-hot plasma can reach 100 million degrees Fahrenheit or more, causing heavy wear and tear on all the components of these reactors.
There are downsides and controversial elements to fusion research. So far, no tokamak reactor has “recouped” its own energy cost—not even close!—so no one has demonstrated that nuclear fusion even works as an energy source, let alone the plentiful source its advocates say it will be.
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U.K. Atomic Energy Authority/Culham Centre for Fusion Energy/EUROFusion
Gold Butte National Monument is a United States national monument located in Clark County, Nevada, northeast of Las Vegas and south of Mesquite and Bunkerville. The monument protects nearly 300,000 acres of desert landscapes featuring a wide array of natural and cultural resources, including rock art, sandstone towers, and important wildlife habitat for species including the Mojave Desert tortoise (a threatened species), bighorn sheep, and mountain lion. The area also protects historic ranching and mining sites such as the ghost town of Gold Butte, although little but mine openings, cement foundations, and a few pieces of rusting equipment remain. The monument is managed by the Bureau of Land Management.
The monument consists of 296,937 acres (120,166 ha). The Gold Butte National Monument fills a gap between Lake Mead National Recreation Area and Grand Canyon-Parashant National Monument, creating a continuous swath of conserved land and establishing a wildlife corridor. Significant wildlife within the borders of the park includes Mojave Desert tortoise (a threatened species), bighorn sheep, and mountain lion, as well as Gambel’s quail and chukar partridge. Important cultural and natural resources within the monument include rock art and sandstone formations. Within the park, “weather-chiseled red sandstone is incised with ancient rock art, and the remains of rock shelters and hearths, agave roasting pits and projectile points” may be found. Wikipedia
Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have recorded some highly unusual data that could point to an entirely new force of nature, which would mean a whole new area of physics. The secret lies in an elusive, unstable particle called a B meson, which isn’t biodegrading according to plan.
The scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) call B mesons “tantalizing tensions,” since the particles break apart into different amounts of electrons and muons than the standard model of physics predicts they should.
B mesons are paired quarks that move together and rapidly decay. While scientists have noticed several previous anomalies in B mesons, this latest observation in decay mode is an even bigger deal. As the B mesons decay in the LHC, there are more electrons and fewer muons than there should be.
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
Maldives Floating City/Handout
In the future, what might lunar exploration look like if NASA can send multiple Starships there each year? This SpaceX rendering offers a vision of one such future.
James' World 2 