The McCluskey Blog

The future is BIG

We've seen the future, and it's very, very big. Two proposed projects give us a taster:

The X-Seed 4000 (left) is the tallest building ever fully envisioned. It would be 4 km high and 6km wide, with 800 floors. That's enough room for up to one million inhabitants.

It was designed for Tokyo by the Taisei Construction Corporation as a futuristic environment combining ultra-modern living and interaction with nature. The cost is estimated at $300-900 billion. You can get more detail at Wikipedia and Accelerating Future.

Freedom Ship is a concept for a floating city. With a design length of 4,500 feet, a width of 750 feet and a height of 350 feet, it would be more than 4 times longer than the Queen Mary.

Freedom Ship is proposed to be a unique place to live, work, retire, or visit. The proposed voyage would continuously circle the globe, covering most of the world's coastal regions. A large fleet of aircraft would ferry residents and visitors to and from shore.

More at the official Freedom Ship site.

Through, under, but not over

Three two feats of engineering made the news recently:

1. Nicaragua - whose people vote for a new government this weekend - has announced plans to build a waterway linking the Pacific and Atlantic that would carry bigger ships than the existing Panama Canal. The new route - which would cost $18bn (£9.5bn) and take 12 years to complete - is apparently needed for the rise in world shipping.

If built, the Inter-Oceanic Nicaragua Canal would cut time and several hundred miles off the route from China to Europe or North America. It would also carry super-ships of up to 250,000 tonnes, significantly bigger than the vessels that currently pass through Panama.

2. The excavation of a tunnel joining Europe and Africa deep below the Strait of Gibraltar could start as early as next year after Spain and Morocco commissioned preliminary engineering studies. Swiss tunnel engineer Giovanni Lombardi is to draw up a project outlining how to create the only direct physical link between the two continents.

Actual construction of the 25-mile twin rail tunnel could take 15 years. It is projected to carry 9m passengers in the first year, rising to 11m after 10 years. It could also carry 8m tonnes of goods.

If the tunnel to Africa was linked to the existing high speed rail line at the southern Spanish city of Seville the travel time between Madrid and Tangier could be as low as four hours.

3. Some grand plans are doomed to failure. Italian MPs recently voted to scrap the 30-year-old dream of a link spanning the Straits of Messina between Sicily and the peninsula. They decided that building the world's biggest suspension bridge of its type "did not represent a priority" for the government. Work was to have finished in 2011.

The €6bn (£4bn) bridge was planned to have a span of about 2 miles, with the journey across the bridge by rail to have taken as much as an hour. It was meant to have 12 lanes for vehicle traffic and two rail tracks.