Underwater
work has come a long way since someone had the idea of dropping a
watertight shed to the bottom of the sea back in the '30s.
Today, divers and robots are busy building and maintaining oil rigs,
cables, pipelines, and all manner of constructions, but it's all a
pale shadow compared to what the visionaries of the '50s and '60s had
in mind for the future of the sea.
If things had gone according to plan, the undersea navvies of the 21st
century would have been putting in some major overtime as they moved
on from laying pipelines to building factories, mines, research
centres, hotels, and, finally, vast permanent colonies beneath the
waves.
Take this oil rig featured on the top of this page. Divers do a
lot of work on oil rigs today, but they're pretty much surface
installations with as little as possible sunk underwater, but in
Future Past, not only is the entire oil rig built on the seabed, but
so are the storage tanks, divers' living quarters, an
entire domed oil refinery, and a docking station for the oil tanker
submarines that visited periodically to pick up the finished product.
Underwater
work has come a long way since someone had the idea of dropping a
watertight shed to the bottom of the sea back in the '30s.
Today, divers and robots are busy building and maintaining oil rigs,
cables, pipelines, and all manner of constructions, but it's all a
pale shadow compared to what the visionaries of the '50s and '60s had
in mind for the future of the sea.
Take this oil rig featured on the top of this page. Divers do a
lot of work on oil rigs today, but they're pretty much surface
installations with as little as possible sunk underwater, but in
Future Past, not only is the entire oil rig built on the seabed, but
so are the storage tanks, divers' living quarters, an
entire domed oil refinery, and a docking station for the oil tanker
submarines that visited periodically to pick up the finished product.