McKinley Conway

The Futurist Sept-October 2008 Vol. 42, No. 5

McKinley Conway is an engineer and founder of Conway Data Inc., a firm involved in research, publications, and telecommunications, specializing in futures studies, global megaprojects, and site selection. The Futurist interviewed him on the future of ocean habitation

FUTURIST: Crescent Hydropolis has gotten a lot of fanfare for its plans to open an underwater hotel later this year in Dubai. It hopes to open other hotels afterwards in other locations around the world – London, New York City, and the Isle of Man among them. It's a fun tourist gimmick – lots of people might pay good money for the experience of looking outside their hotel windows to see fish swimming past and coral beds surrounding them. But might this be the start of a bigger trend? Might humankind be officially seeing about a colonization of the world’s oceans?

Conway: As we know, there’s a lot of pressure on the development in coastal zones. And we have people who really want to live in the water and engage in water sports. And a lot of people are interested in marine life. We have a pretty extreme situation in Dubai with the subdivisions. Since ancient times there have been floating villages and villages on water. So I think it’s a pretty logical step.

FUTURIST: Do you see this interest in the ocean increasing in the next few decades?

Conway: There are a lot of reasons for living offshore. The Japanese have proposed a number of community developments offshore. Such developments would not be bothered by changes in sea level. A floating community would just rise up regardless of what the shore is doing. Of course we might not be too happy, for example, during a hurricane. But those are the risks we take.

FUTURIST: Is building closer to the surface more feasible than building underwater?

Conway: There is a lot of activity right now to develop energy using the oceans. One is turbines below the surface. I feel sure that that is going to become more important over the next couple of years, that we’ll develop an impetus for building underwater. That might be the prelude for something more permanent.

There is considerable interest in Florida right now in tapping the energy of the Gulf Stream. Look what happened in the wind industry with the wind turbines. You can place turbines underwater with the ocean currents and derive quite a lot more energy from the water using turbines because the water is more dense.

Water turbine possibility looks more feasible when compared with wind. It looks like it might be more efficient in some cases. The whole idea is to connect it to a grid. The opportunities that exist in front of us now, we have three sources of renewable energy that look awfully good–the sun, the wind, and the water. They’re plentiful, they’re cheap, and there are opportunities for business groups to develop them. We have a fair expectation that renewable energy could replace fossil fuels and leave us in a much healthier position.

FUTURIST: Nuclear energy seems to be very popular right now.

Conway: Nuclear energy is well-established and well-known. The ocean energy is not yet well-known. It still has to make a name for itself. Over the years, people will be given a choice, and I hope the choice will be for the three safest. They all will be connected to the grid.

FUTURIST: By a grid, you mean power lines?

Conway: Yes, an interconnected system for electricity. Since the light bulb, we haven’t had an adequate means for storing electricity until recently. You could only use solar energy on sunny days and then it shut down at night. Wind systems, they’re great as long as the wind is blowing. If the wind is intermittent, then they don’t work well. Both solar and wind are not considered consistent enough that you can be wholly dependent on them.

But if you have wind, water and solar, it’s unlikely that they will all shut down at the same time. And they will work better interconnected.

One of the more controversial energy projects is offshore wind farms. There is often a lot of opposition of locals to what they would see above the surface. They don’t want to see it.

The underwater turbines, they have that merit in that they don’t interfere with the view along the coast.

There isn’t any large-scale development of any kind, though, that won’t bring forth some kind of negative reactions. But everyone is trying to minimize the public reactions against the projects.

FUTURIST: In addition to power generators and grid systems, what might we be seeing in the way of permanent living stations in the ocean?

Conway: That may come. But that is looking quite a ways ahead. That gets into the realm of pure speculation. We’ve ventured quite a way with communities. One example is domed communities and using domes to control climates.

Several decades ago I was traveling in northern Burma. I came across a small community on a lake I was taken out in a small boat and was showed the village’s stilts. It was supporting itself on stilts. And they had hydroponic floating gardens for the vegetables. You see things like that on the outer Amazon basin. People are adventurous and surprise us with what they are willing to do. I hope that whoever is our president next year and in the years to come will put a lot of chips on renewable energy. We need to have a strong national program to develop energy from wind, water, and solar energy. That will become important to us.

FUTURIST: But colonization, on the other hand, is not something we’re likely to see?

Conway: I wouldn’t think it would be near term. There are rare occasions, like tourist hotels. You see things like the ice hotels in Scandinavian areas. There are no limits to what tourists will subject themselves to. The Dubai people have used a lot of creativity and imagination. I commend them.

FUTURIST: We could stay on land indefinitely, at least for the foreseeable future?

Conway: The biggest problem we have is population. I think most people agree on that. I believe the key to handling that problem is lead time. If we were given enough lead time, we could solve just about any problem. It’s the ones that surprise us that give us a lot of trouble. Knowing that we have a population crunch I think we could find ways to manage it.

Interview by Rick Docksai