London, Nov 12 (IANS) Humans in the future could be living in floating mini cities that drift across the Pacific Ocean as if on giant water lilies.
The startling new concept has been thought up by Japanese technology firm Shimizu and is designed to be a way of harnessing green technologies and creating carbon-neutral cities.
The Green Float concept involves a number of cells, each one kilometre wide, that house between 10,000 and 50,000 people.
Each individual cell would be free to float on the Pacific Ocean near the equator but could also be joined together with other cells to form larger towns and even cities, the Daily Mail reported here.
A group or modules, a collection of cells, would become a country in its own right.
Most people in this brave new world would live in a kilometre-high ‘City in the Sky’ at the centre of each cell. More people would live in residential areas around the edge of the cell.
The central towers would be surrounded by grassland and forests and be self-sufficient in terms of food, while livestock and other farming would take place in ‘plains’ also surrounding the tower – all built on a lattice of 7,000-tonne honeycomb pontoons.
The towers would be built from super-light alloys with the metal deriving from magnesium in seawater, the paper said.
The imaginative plan is designed to create a future carbon-neutral society and the
Shimizu developers claim that living on cells in this way would cut carbon emissions by 40 percent.
The floating cells, each with a City in the Sky structure at its centre, can join together to form larger modules.
