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Inhabiting the Oceans
| Article
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20228 |
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Section : |
SPECIAL SECTION
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| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1992 |
2,124 Words |
| Author
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Athelstan Spilhaus
Athelstan Spilhaus, oceanographer and meteorologist, invented
the bathythermograph in 1938. He has been a physical
oceanographer at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
since 1936, and was dean of the University of Minnesota's
Institute of Technology for 17 years. He is now president of
Pan Geo, Inc., in Middleburg, Virginia. |
To the choice of where to live and work on land will be added the choice of living and working at sea. Within the next fifty years we will colonize the oceans and occupy them in the sense of going to sea to stay, living there, working there, and coming back to land only for exotic vacations.
Man speeds up everything. Evolution in nature is slow and thus it is very difficult to predict where it will go. But evolution of man-made devices goes so fast that it is possible to extrapolate into the future. Such extrapolation should be exponential. Linear extrapolation into time provides predictions that are generally outstripped by reality. The reason the extrapolation must be exponential is because the number of minds working on new choices increases with the number of minds on earth--with population--which increases approximately exponentially.
Future cities at sea and using the ocean as real estate for people's living are merely the logical evolutions of things that have gone before. For centuries, the Melanesians and Polynesians lived on atolls which, even though not mobile, provided a completely maritime existence. These people achieved some of the greatest feats of navigation among their isolated ocean-bound homes, driven by their need to expand their bartering, their fishing, and the circle of their friends.
The Indians of Bolivia living on Lake Titicaca spend their lives on the water on artificial floating islands constructed of totora reeds. In the Orient, many generations of river people eked out their living on sampans which they never left. These people had no pied-a-terre so they made their own pied-a-mer. Singapore, one of the most densely populated and best run cities in the world, is essentially a sea city.
Lighthouse keepers, although stationed on promontories and rocks, really led their lives at sea. Man-made evolution toward life on or near water continued from lighthouses to lightships and, during World War II, when crossing the Atlantic was a hop-hop proposition, to weather ships that reported conditions along air routes. There was talk of floating airfields at sea, but rapid and spectacular advances in aeronautics made these unnecessary.
Need
Necessity and invention are akin to the chicken and the egg. Necessity breeds invention but invention, in its turn, breeds further necessity. It is the need for space for a growing
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