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The Float Lab, its advocates argue, has a unique advantage over that project and other artificial reefs: It is mobile. That’s key because “this could offer a more agile and more flexible, more customizable and scalable alternative to the kind of huge defensive barriers that many cities are thinking about, or even many cities are building, right now,” Marcus said.
As currently designed, there isn’t much inherent to the Float Lab’s structure that would blunt a wave. But to help with that, the team plans to attach long tubes to the bottom of the structure, making it look like a windchime — or perhaps a giant jellyfish. It adds a new dimension of utility so that “when you place the columns or the tubes close to each other, like let s say six to eight to ten inches apart, the invertebrates attach on all sides,” Marcus says, explaining, “they just kind of create this giant sponge of animals.” Scientists from Moss Landing’s Benthic Lab plan to dive below the Float Lab every month for the next three years to assess whether these columns actually soak up wave energy.
Tissot sees clear ecological benefits to the columns. He says, “adding more structure that’s vertical would definitely increase the likelihood that you re going to get a lot of fishes that will come in there. They love that kind of habitat.” But he’s unsure how far they will go towards absorbing wave power, saying “my guess is that’s pretty small to actually have much of an effect.”
Marcus acknowledges that how well they will work is still unknown, explaining that “in order for it to develop significant wave attenuation capacity you would need many of them kind of arrayed in a necklace or a network parallel to the shore.” The full Float Lab team plans to plug the data they gather into computer simulations to project the impact a whole fleet of Float Labs might have. Renderings imagine them clustered together in threes, blooming over a body of water like a field of clover.
Despite the modest near-term ambitions behind it, the Float Lab prototype bobs along in the wake of a long and controversial history of schemes to create utopias out on the water. Many have centered around the concept of seasteading, the idea of establishing new floating societies that exist outside the jurisdiction of national and international law. In fact, the most notable and best-funded of these groups, the Seasteading Institute, is also based in the San Francisco Bay area. Founded in 2008 by libertarian activists Peter Thiel, the billionaire co-founder of PayPal, and Patri Friedman, a grandson of Nobel-prize winning economist Milton Friedman, the non-profit’s vision of “freedom on the high seas” is as much about building a new society based on the free-market ideals of fewer regulations and lower taxes as it is about grappling with the impacts of climate change.
“We do distance our work from that,” says Marcus. “There is a big difference in agenda. One is about tax havens and cryptocurrencies. Ours is about multi-benefit solutions for both humans and animals.”
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原文来源：https://undark.org/article/floating-lab-future-climate-change/
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