• Question: Do you think we could end up living in a kind of underwater city that is reasonably self sustaining when we run out of room for everyone?

    Asked by smint to Mike, Pip, Tianfu, Tim, Tom on 29 Jun 2012.
    • Photo: Tom Lister

      Tom Lister answered on 29 Jun 2012:

      I think there are other options, like building more land or living in Central Australia, that we would consider first.

      Places like Japan are already making more land over the sea. I hear once that an American billionaire was planning to make his own country by building a giant oil rig type island.

      Thinking about it, the Romans were doing this too. Norfolk is almost entirely made of land reclaimed from the sea.

    • Photo: Tim Stephens

      Tim Stephens answered on 29 Jun 2012:

      I think it’s pretty unlikely. Living underwater, we’d not be able to have plants to make us oxygen because the sunlight wouldn’t make it through the water so that they could photosynthesise, so the people living there would struggle to breathe.

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