In 1995, a film called “Waterworld” postulated a future earth where the oceans have risen so high that everyone lives on boats. With floods in Iowa, China and India engulfing entire cities, it almost seems if that scenario as become a reality. As even entire nations drown, due to rising sea levels, scientists report that MOST of the earth’s extinctions were caused by the ebb and flow of the ocean. One architect thinks this scenario might be a real one for our future and has designed a solution.
If you are curious about Earth’s periodic mass extinction events such as the sudden demise of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, you might consider crashing asteroids and sky-darkening super volcanoes as culprits. But a new study suggests that it is the ocean, with its epic ebbs and flows of sea level over the course of geologic time, that is the primary cause of the world’s periodic mass extinctions during the past 500 million years.
Since the advent of life on Earth 3.5 billion years ago, scientists think there may have been as many as 23 mass extinction events, many involving simple forms of life such as single-celled microorganisms. In the course of hundreds of millions of years, the world’s oceans have expanded and contracted in response to the shifting of the Earth’s tectonic plates and to changes in climate. During the past 540 million years, there have been five well-documented mass extinctions, primarily of marine plants and animals, with as many as 75-95 percent of species lost. Are humans next?
Architect Vincent Callebaut has invented “Lilypad,” a luxurious floating nation for half a million residents. The Freshome website describes this as “covered in green walls and roofs, the top portion covered in grasses with the inner portion featuring a palm oasis, and the under portion serving as a bed for natural sea plankton and oceanic plants.”
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