UTILISING THE SEA
Except for a small tribute in the shape of fish food and certain
salts the ocean is to-day almost a dead loss to the world, and what
is worse, the greatest of all obstacles to progress. It separates
us from our kin, wrecks our ships, claims a yearly toll of dead, and
is barren, fruitless, a mere receptacle for garbage. A hundred years
hence we shall have awakened to these facts and found means to make
"the caverns vast of ocean old" something better than a subject for
the poet and a resting-place for the dead whom it murders.
Not every dream, however, can be realised--not even the
engineer's. Some years ago certain ardent spirits in France announced
that the desert of Sahara lay below the level of the sea and could be
flooded with the Atlantic or Mediterranean. The effect of this, it was
considered, would not merely be to inconvenience certain Arabs, but to
change entirely the climate of the rest of equatorial Africa. Laved by
the beneficent waves of ocean, lands at present uninhabitable would, it
was declared, become fertile and salubrious. The project was dismissed
or shelved as impracticable from engineering difficulties. Shall we,
a hundred years hence, have met these difficulties?
Probably not. To work such changes in the distribution of land
and water will be a thing not indeed beyond the power of the next
century's engineers, but beyond their daring. The accomplishment
of them might, if at all rapid, be attended by frightful disasters,
some of which can be readily estimated, but of which the worst would
probably remain unforeseen and unimagined until the irrevocable moment
of fulfilment. To increase to this extent the area of the world's
oceans, without increasing (as of course we could not increase)
their mass, would perceptibly lower the level of the sea everywhere,
and in accordance with the well-known hydrostatic law things would
"right themselves" on a cataclysmal scale. Every narrow strait in
the world, every oceanic canal would become, for the time being,
a roaring cataract. The Mediterranean would rush tumultuously out
through the Straits of Gibraltar and the Suez Canal, and the overflow
would flood the adjacent lands. The Straits of Dover would roar like
Niagara, and all Kent, and the low-lying north-east corner of France,
would be devastated. The isthmus of Panama might at the same time
be swept away, for the narrow banks of the completed Panama Canal
would certainly give way before the weight of the two oceans. All
the rivers of the world would rush down in spate until they ran
nearly dry from the increased outfall. The sea would recede from
all the coasts. Along with this fall in the level of the sea would
come tempests such as, since the appearance of man on the planet,
the world has never known. For the sea-supported atmosphere would
suck into its vacuum the whole weight of the over-lying air until
pressure was equalised. And the climate of all the world would be
reconstituted in new and probably inconvenient ways.
No. We cannot venture thus to change the face of creation. What we can
and shall do is to make the best of it. In a hundred years' time many
countries at present undeveloped will be rich and populous. Canada, for
one example, has an area greater than that of the United States, with a
population smaller than the population of Greater London. And Canada,
endowed as it is with almost every source of wealth, will before long
become perhaps the richest country in the world. By this time next
century it will also be one of the most populous. Siberia, again,
with many fertile and salubrious tracts, will certainly have been more
intelligently utilised than by making a vast prison of it. But when
all the regions available for human habitation are populated and made
use of, the centres of civilisation will probably lie very much where
they lie now; and here the congested populations will have found that
they can no longer tolerate the waste of a neglected ocean. As we push
outward from the centre of the continents, the seaboard will have to
be utilised and extended. There is nothing to daunt the engineers of
a hundred years hence in the project of erecting on the sea a vast
floating city, fully as convenient as the present cities of terra
firma, and, while vastly more healthful, quite substantial enough to
resist storm and every motion of the sea, except the tides on which
the city will rise and fall--tides which will no doubt furnish the
motive power of many conveniences in ocean cities.
There are great advantages in a city thus founded, as compared with
those we at present inhabit; and we certainly shall not be able to
neglect them. There will be no particular reason for economy of space
or for insalubrious overcrowding (since the sea has no landlord), and
breadth would make for stability as well as for convenience. Urban
traffic will employ an entirely new light vehicle, the skimmer. It
has been mentioned as a thing beyond doubt that the ships of a hundred
years hence will no longer float in the sea, but ride on its surface,
thus evading both the instability and the resistance at present so
troublesome to marine engineers. As soon as the necessity arises
for providing street traffic in the ocean city--when "the sea is in
the broad, the narrow streets, ebbing and flowing, and the salt weed
clings to the marble of her palaces"--invention will meet the demand,
and light street waggons and carriages will everywhere glide about,
performing the daily needs of the inhabitants. Something in the nature
of break-waters will provide against wave-play and form an unequalled
exterior boulevard; and by means of an invention which will long
since have been called for by the requirements of other localities,
the air of dwelling-houses in the ocean city will be wholesomely
freed from damp.
For we shall certainly not have failed to act upon our knowledge of
the fact that irregularities in the proportion of atmospheric moisture
are responsible for the unhealthiness of certain areas; and we shall
have learned, by means of the anhydrator, to provide any place with
exactly the degree of damp or dryness necessary to health. The same
apparatus, by desiccating the air to the extreme point, will keep
the houses of an ocean city dry and thus do away with an objection
which would make homes built on the water insufferable to-day.
If we have not wholly reformed throughout the world our system of
land tenure, the conquered ocean will unquestionably relieve the
tension which is created by it, and perhaps a radical change of this
character will only become possible when the enormous advantages of
it have been practically exemplified.
But there is another way in which the conquest of ocean ought to prove
a great economic boon to the world. Except in the case of a few coal
mines, with shafts sunk near the sea beach, we have hardly at all begun
to investigate the contents of the ocean floor. There is, so far as I
am aware, no particular reason to doubt that the constitution of the
subterranean world is in most respects very much the same under the
sea as under the land. Probably vast riches, as yet undreamed of, lie
below the surface of the ocean and beneath its floor. There can be no
question that the needs of the world will make us eager to tap them,
as we should already have begun to, if any way could be discovered of
overcoming the engineering difficulties involved. These difficulties,
in the present state of our knowledge, may well appal the stoutest
imagination. The problem presented by the immense and paralysing air
pressure in a mine at this great depth would have to be overcome. Even
in some great terrestrial excavations already made the problem occurs:
and where (as in river tunnels and elsewhere) men attempt to work
in great air-pressures artificially induced, the phenomenon called
caisson-disease occasions practical difficulty. But the mere fact of
an achievement being almost inconceivable in the light of present
knowledge and invention must not be allowed to put a clog upon a
forecast of what next century may attain. It is a hypothesis which
the reader has been invited to accept, not merely that discovery and
invention will go on, but that they will go at a constantly-increasing
pace. We must not, therefore, allow what may well seem, at the
present day, insuperable engineering difficulties to forbid the
belief that the undiscovered wealth of the earth below the sea will be
tapped for the benefit of the new age. What minerals may lie there,
a rich heirloom for the coming time, we can but roughly imagine. But
enterprise and the world's necessities will spur us on to search them
out, until the new people, deriving like a fresh Antæus constant
stores of strength from Mother Earth, will enter into possessions
which must vastly relieve their necessities. Individual enterprise
will solve the problems and reap its store of profits. But the ocean
is no-man's land, and the people--perhaps a world-people, for this
purpose at least not subdivided into antagonistic communities--will
beyond doubt take toll, for the relief of general taxation, from the
earnings of the new mineralogy.
In other ways, too, the sea itself will be made use of. We shall get
our salt from it, the process of separation being electrolytic. Fish
will probably be eaten later than any other form of animal food. But
the chief gift of the sea to the life of the future will be the two
gases of which water is composed--oxygen and hydrogen: and the other
gas, chlorine, which forms half the salt, as well as the metal sodium
which forms the other half, will probably have many new uses found for
them. Liquefied oxygen will no doubt be our sole disinfectant. It will
also replace the poisonous, noisome and destructive bleaching agents
used to-day. Hydrogen, the lightest of all gases, will be another
staple of commerce. It will (as we have elsewhere seen) probably be
the only fuel employed, for its combustion furnishes the greatest
heat terrestrially known, and its flame is smokeless and yields no
poisonous by-product. Moreover, the evaporation of liquid hydrogen,
by a sort of curious revenge, produces the greatest available cold. If
anything in the nature of balloons should survive the century hydrogen
will inflate them, and both our hydrogen and our oxygen will most
likely be got by preference from the sea. There are many reasons for
this preference. Probably there will be some advantage in the matter
of expense, since the salts of ocean water would be a by-product
of the operation, and it is conceivable that a use may be found for
the rarer among them, which could only be obtained in satisfactory
quantities by reducing to dryness huge amounts of water. And potable or
spring waters will perhaps be too precious a commodity to be consumed
unnecessarily. Distilled water could no doubt be used for drinking
purposes, and bacteriologically it is of course unexceptionable; but
there are certain objections to it, and though these may doubtless
be overcome, natural waters have a value which cannot be ignored.
Thus the oceans of the world, as yet mere watery deserts, useful
to hardly a calculable percentage of the people (and then only at
the expense of the rest) will have become the world's inheritance,
and its hoarded wealth will stave off the time--whose coming we must
not ignore--when our world-capital begins to be exhausted. For that
time must come. We are living upon the hoards which the womb of our
mother the earth has borne to our father the sun. But our mother is,
in respect at all events of mineral wealth, past the age of conception;
and every century brings us more rapidly near to the time when we
shall, like spendthrifts, have lived out our capital. Already the end
of coal is in sight. When, at the end of a vista however long, we begin
to be able to foresee the exhaustion of other minerals, we shall face
a problem appalling in its nature. Perhaps before our store of heat
gives out and reduces earth to the state of a dead world like the moon,
we shall already have exhausted our stock. No economies in the use of
scrap metal and the re-employment of the material of machines which
have been superseded can save us from ultimate metallic bankruptcy
in a future calculated perhaps in thousands (but not many thousands)
of years. Our only succour seems to lie in a conception for which
(despite the efforts of some lively thinkers who have been obliged
to ignore all but the least important difficulties of the subject) we
have no material--the conception of means by which the cold depths of
interplanetary space may be traversed. Even if we allow imagination,
untrammelled by the most evident necessities of the case, to suggest
a speed of transport computable only by astronomical analogies, we
still lag behind anything which could serve this purpose, unless we
concurrently believe that human life shall, by that time, be lengthened
into centuries. Otherwise, however recklessly we may conceive of speed
in interplanetary travel, man would almost require to live for many
centuries in order to reach and return from any destination which
would not inevitably destroy him by fire or cold when he arrived at
it. Most likely man is for ever destined to accept the bounds of his
own planet, and to be limited by its resources. In order that these
resources may be utilised to the uttermost of his needs, the contents
of the ocean floor must undoubtedly be laid under contribution, and
probably we shall not antedate this achievement if we consider that
it will have been at least entered upon a hundred years hence.