Transcriber: OMAR AL-Shateri Reviewer: sawsan alhalaseh
This is how a floating city could be looking.
Looks great, doesn't it?
Would you like to stay in a place like that?
What do you think it would feel like living in a floating city like this?
Try to imagine that this conference is in such a place.
But also try to imagine that you heard there was a storm coming,
and someone told you that the highest waves
would be higher than the hotel next door.
My grandfather was a structural engineer,
my father was a structural engineer,
I am a structural engineer and a marine engineer.
So when I see this, I think of the beauty;
I think of the opportunities,
but I also think about safety.
Now, the last decade has been a period of astonishing engineering developments
within the maritime and the marine areas.
Norwegian engineers have created structures
taller than the Eiffel tower standing on the seafloor.
The ultimate one is perhaps the Troll A Platform
that's the heaviest object ever moved by man.
These are structures designed to operate
and keep people safe in 20-meter or 30-meter-tall waves.
That's equivalent to a ten-story building.
In St. Ives ocean laboratory, we test structures like that
to determine what are the forces from the waves
and to make sure that the engineers design structures that are safe.
What is fascinating is that the knowledge we have gained
from working on oil and gas structures and harsh environments like the North Sea
can be applied to floating structures
serving very different purposes and under very different conditions,
like floating cities.
There are three drivers
behind the development of floating cities now:
One is need for space.
As a Norwegian, I am used to abundances of space.
I've been hiking up in the mountains,
days and days on end,
without meeting one single person.
In other regions, the picture is radically different.
Space is precious.
I've recently been engaged to develop floating structures for Singapore.
Singapore is an island city-state that needs space to support growth.
Other coastal megacities have seen a boom in their population over the last decades,
really growing out of their borders.
To create space, cities are growing upwards.
Some of them are boasting world-record skyscrapers.
To create space, cities are growing downwards,
developing the underground,
first, for transport, then for other functions.
Now to create space,
plans are being made to exploit the sea surface.
The second driver is climate change.
Island communities like Tahiti, like the Maldives,
will be facing significant challenges due to rising sea level.
One solution for them
may be to establish floating cities in the shelter of their lagoons.
And the third driver is the dream itself.
Visionary groups, architects,
have presented their perspectives on floating cities.
Some look like Utopia,
but some very intriguing and inspiring sketches have been presented.
So three trends are driving the development of floating cities.
First, need for space for coastal megacities,
then, climate change threatening island communities,
and lastly, visionaries wanting to establish their communities at sea.
Now, where in the world would such a floating city survive?
Old sailors had names for the different latitudes on Earth
from Antarctica and up to the equator.
60 degrees south, the screaming sixties,
50 degrees south, the furious fifties,
40 degrees south, the roaring forties.
Does that sound like a place for a floating city?
No.
Then what about the North Sea?
Or the Atlantic west of Shetland?
Where you can have waves equivalent to a ten-story building?
No.
And you really do not want to place a floating city
in areas with tropical hurricanes.
Just think about the devastation caused by recent hurricanes
impacting Caribbean Islands or the mainland US.
But there is this band around the Equator
from 5 degrees north to 5 degrees south of Equator.
There, sailing ships in the old times could be trapped for weeks
because there was no wind.
And if you look at a world map of wave statistics,
you will see that in this region 5 degrees north, 5 degrees south,
the highest waves are in the order only one to two meters.
And that's very manageable.
But you still need to create a structure that keeps people safe.
Norway and other maritime nations have learned the hard way what happens
if you do not respect the forces of the ocean.
It's less than two years ago
that one person was killed and four persons injured
when one large wave slammed into an offshore structure.
You need knowledge to control and to survive in the ocean space.
And the biggest threat to living at sea
is the sea itself.
To survive, you must make a structure that is robust and durable
but yet flexible,
a structure that moves with the sea instead of fighting against the sea,
and a structure that moves at a different rhythm
than the biggest and most threatening waves.
This is an oil and gas structure
that we have tested in St. Ives ocean laboratories
under the worst storm conditions it could possibly be exposed to.
This is an example where the structure is made strong and sturdy,
standing up to the waves -
kind of dramatic, isn't it?
This kind of testing is routinely done on all oil and gas structures
to make sure safety is sufficient.
In this case, the tests showed that safety was not OK,
and the operator decided
that this platform could not be operated the way it was in the test.
This is a different principle.
This is a floating fish farm, designed to be strong and flexible,
moving with the waves instead of fighting them.
This is the third principle.
This is the new offshore fish farm
that was just installed offshore Freyja.
This is not flexible like the previous one.
It lets the waves pass through it, rather than fighting them.
So any floating installation is this compromise
between standing up to the sea and moving with the sea.
The first one can be quite expensive to build.
The last one can make you really seasick.
(Laughter)
So what about our dream floating city?
This cannot be realized without knowledge and technology.
It's not easy, but I know it can succeed.
And the cost of not succeeding is too high, in my view,
both in terms of money,
in terms of life,
and in terms of environment.
But most important for the highest cost are perhaps the opportunities lost.
To me, this is a great opportunity.
It can create space for people to live,
it can help threatened island communities,
and it can answer our dream of living at sea.
My dream is that
in 10, 15 years time,
we will all be invited to a TED phone conference like this
on this kind of floating city.
Wouldn't that be wonderful?
Thank you!
(Applause)