If You Were to Colonise Antarctica, How Would You Do It?
Antarctica is as challenging an environment for a sustainable human colony as any land on Earth. The beautiful video above, revealing Antarctica in all four seasons, comes via Colonize Antarctica, a new website.
In yesterday's posting, Colonize Antarctica looked at energy supplies for the proposed colony. In my opinion, the list provided was much too short.
Geothermal and wind are certainly both good choices. Nuclear fission power--particularly newer, safer, cleaner modular designs would seem to be custom made for an Antarctic colony. Certainly if anything comes of Bussard's electrostatic confinement fusion project, such a device might very well serve as the nucleus of a well-rounded power system.
Remember, there is no sunlight for at least 4 months out of the year. It gets very cold in Antarctica--despite what Al Gore and James Hansen might have you believe. If you lose power in Antarctic winter, you are human popsicle. How would you start?
;-)
Labels: Antarctica, energy, extreme colonies, polar science
posted by al fin at 12:31 pm
2 Comments:
The list was a bit short, yes. Of course staying compliant with the Antarctic Treaty limits the number of technologies available for an Antarctic colony.
As for Bussard's research into electrostatic confinement of fusion. I have been familiar with Farnsworth's original research into that. I'm also aware that Farnsworth and those who continued on with his research after his death were never able to achieve break even efficiency. Personally, I do believe that electrostatic containment may offer the best hope of achieving sustained controlled fusion power within this century. However, the aim of the Colonize Antarctica project is to design and develop an Antarctic colony with existing technology. So, even though breakthroughs in fusion and nanotechnology may eventually make colonizing Antarctica much easier, the purpose is to make it possible now, without having to wait for those future breakthroughs.
Thank you again for your input and I shall endeavor to be more detailed in future posts.
what about polar cities? google the term? could they be sited in Antarctica in the future for survivors of glo warming, maybe year 2500 or so? email me at
danbloom
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