This Guy Really Wants To Colonize Icebergs

March 5, 2011, 8:13pm

So I came across a paper written by this guy Alexander Bolonkin all about the idea of building a city on a big piece of ice. Said paper’s from 2008 and for all I know might’ve already been a meme, but it’s new to me and the good kind of dumb faux-scholarly bullshit. It’s interesting, I mean, especially if you’re a libertarian/Tea Party jerkwad. Why would you want to live on an iceberg? Well you hate government and you’re rich enough to buy into the fantasy that government doesn’t do anything for you that can’t be accomplished by some sort of non-tax collecting entity on an iceberg. It’s like an Ayn Rand theme park, in other words.

Here’s the idea: you head up to the Arctic in a helicopter, OK, and you find a big ol’ piece of ice. You then take a tractor up there and saw your big piece of ice off and tow it out into open water. If you were going to hang around the Arctic in your libertarian city, you might be fine just like this. But this particular sort of asshole tends to be attracted to warm climates—see: Arizona, Florida—so that won’t do.

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You need to insulate the iceberg. Hence:

One method of adding thermal protection of the ice is the following: The double film is submerged lower than the bottom of platform, moved under the platform (or the platform is moved over film) and filled with air. The air increases the lift force of platform and protects the bottom, sides and top of the platform from contact with warm water and air (fig.4b, pointer 3). Simultaneously, the coolant fluid (it may be chilled air) flows throgh [sic] the cooling tubes 4 (fig.4b) and keeps the ice at lower than melting, or indeed softening, point.

The author also suggests using pykrete instead of ice. Maybe you remember this stuff; it’s the mixture or sawdust and ice that was going to be used to make an aircraft carrier for the British Royal Navy during WWII, but proved to be an idea as stupid as it sounds. Supposedly, it has a melting temperature much lower than normal ice, an idea semi-debunked in an episode of Mythbusters two years ago. (The boat started to sink.)

Have you heard of “Freedom Ship?” I hadn’t. Freedom Ship is a massive barge-thing proposed in the ‘90s that would have been four times longer than the Queen Mary, a massive floating city that would never need to go into port. It’d have its very own airport and ferry service and duty-free shopping! Needless to say, the Freedom Ship never really came together for some reason. (The website is still active, but missing a lot of its images as of today.) But Bolonkin is way into the idea and thinks it could totally work.

Enjoy this video clip from the Discovery Channel on the Freedom Ship:

Me, I like things like dirt and trees and new people, so I’ll be staying put. But I also love the idea of getting the sort of person into micronation tax dodges out of the country. So, basically, we need to be subsidizing this as soon as possible. Freedom Ships, icebergs, mats of rotting organic matter—whatever, just not here.