The Blue Millennium

Through much of the current millennium, the oceans connected the world and shaped the global economy. The past few decades saw a surge of progress in air travel, and outer space began to occupy the dreams of mankind. With the end of the Cold War, however, save for an expected expansion of jet transport and satellites for communication and entertainment, the ocean has again come center stage as our hope for next-generation food commodities, sustainable energy, green chemicals, ideal habitats, and, possibly, maybe even environmental remediation. The upcoming millennium, thus, could well become "The Blue Millennium". While the 21st Century shows promise for introducing a transition towards development in harmony with the natural environment, looking further into the future, can our oceans serve as the critical difference in providing for a world of more than 10 billion people? Can we this time be wiser and more responsible? Colonization of the open ocean has been predicted many times over, but the time has now come to seriously initiate the stage of true exploration. The authors have more than a century of experience-in industry, government, and academia-on topics ranging from autonomous undersea vehicles, to marine biotechnology, to floating cities, to sustainable marine resources. The paper will trace humanity's progress and project the shape of things to come over the next thousand years. Starting philosophically with the truly important challenges facing our civilization-so that greater confidence can be placed on more attainable objectives-focus will be placed on formulation of a blueprint for the coming millennium, where the prospects are intriguing for a constellation of grazing plantships surrounding the equatorial belt, creating next-generation fisheries and marine biomass plantations, harvesting the seafloor for metals and methane clathrates, spawning hundreds, if not thousands, of new floating nations, and, perhaps even adjusting surface temperatures to prevent the formation of hurricanes and inducing an exquisite biological balance through upwelled fluids and the possible addition of extra nutrients such that carbon dioxide can be captured from the atmosphere and converted into a variety of solid compounds for disposal at the bottom of the ocean. The state of the technology in very large floating structures, ocean applications and marine trends will be reviewed. The essence from our works and dozens of ocean conferences and workshops will be gleaned and synthesized to provide the framework for The Blue Millennium.