Wayne had an awesome idea today for a demo device we could build in the Bay, we call it the sea-elevator (sealevator?).
Here’s the motivation. Imagine you have a bunch of really big seasteads floating near each other, and they don’t want to actually be directly connected (maybe they are very independent and want to be able to leave at a moment’s notice, maybe it’s a big storm and that’s tough on connections, maybe a consultant tells us you just can’t connect these things). But of course, you want a way to get between them without going all the way down to the ocean’s surface, or having to deal with waves. And you want a way to get from boats up to the platforms, and back. There will probably be an elevator in the spar on each big seastead, but this is more fun…
Imagine a “seastead” with a really really long thin pillar (say 200′ long), and a little tiny platform on top (10′ diameter). It has a propeller below the water’s surface (maybe on it’s buoyancy, maybe on a floating collar so it’s always just below the surface). And you can pump water into the floatation chamber to reduce/increase buoyancy of the sealevator to make it go up or down (this has always been our plan for seasteads).
So you could get onto it from a big seastead, and it would motor you over to another big seastead. Or you could lower it all the way to the water, get from a boat onto the sealevator platform, and then inflate the buoyancy and zoom! Shoot up to the level of the big seasteads.
In other words, it’s a horizontal and vertical elevator!
The best part is, we can build one of these in the bay relatively cheaply, because it doesn’t have many parts or materials. So you take a boat out to this thing, and you see a little platform floating on the water, and you get on, and zoom! You go up 100′ in the air. You get a great 360 view of the bay, maybe you do something crazy like rappelling down (for fun), or jumping off with a hang-glider, or you bring it down to just 30′ and dive off into the Bay, I dunno. Wouldn’t that be a rad demo? Plus a good test of some of the basic technology.
NOTE: This post was originally made on the old blog, where there are some comments.
Make this wave-powered, by having two blockable valves under the water level. Bobbing up and down in waves would power the pumping in or out of water and change buoyancy.
Of course it would be slower to rise and lower. But it’s free.
We must watch drag on the submerged hull/tower but it should work.
For everyone’s information I was involved with the original Oceania Project in a small way. I’m also in several space organisations. And I have a Degree in sustainable Development, sustainable agriculture and renewable energy, water and sewerage.
Sounds cost effective in using wave generated lifts in stead of elevators, however, making them mobile sounds much more inefficient than a boat. The seasteads are going to be mobile anyway, seems redundant to make the elevator/lift independant as well.