COULD RAPTURE EXIST? - Bioshock Science Ep. 1

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To put it bluntly, Bioshock's Rapture is a technological nightmare to design, but in this video, we are going to assume that not only does Rapture already exist, it is designed and built the exact way it is portrayed in the game…

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Although the water pressure on Rapture would be extreme, if it was located a few hundred miles north-east, water depths could be manageable at around 760 meters. Manipulation of Archimedes's Principle at this depth could keep the whole city afloat. Take the Freedom Tower for example. Assuming it was water tight, Freedom Tower would actually float. In fact, the water pressure above the tower plus the force of gravity is only a little more than that of the buoyancy force. Not only would the structure not get crushed from the water above, it would actually be ⅔ lighter than if it was on the surface. Though bringing it down to the ocean floor and bolting it down is an additional problem.

I have been somewhat misleading however. Lateral pressure would be immense, causing it to crush like a hot can is cold water. There are design considerations that could be made, but at this scale, the effectiveness would be questionable. Not to mention, erosion would eat away at the metal and concrete, and joints would begin to leak. Basically, repairs would be a logistical nightmare.

For a modern city to function under water, a few considerations need to be made. Atmospheric conditions need to be maintained, food production needs to be sustainable and energy production needs to be stable. In the game, Hephaestus is a power facility that uses the real life, naturally occurring, geothermal vents found in the region to produce electricity. Geothermal activity can be a problem structurally, but in terms of heat and energy, it’s the only thing keeping Rapture alive. Geothermal activity is important to Rapture because at its depths, the water temperature can be sub-zero and no natural light can penetrate. Geothermal heat could be used to produce steam to run turbine power plants but it can also be piped to living spaces for space heating.

According to the game, Arcadia is the living, breathing lungs of Rapture filled with lush forests and abundant plant life tasked with generating the life-sustaining oxygen the city needs. In the game it’s noted that Arcadia is responsible for all of the oxygen for Rapture, but It’s unclear what the population of Rapture is. Assuming the population was around three million, that many people would exhale 2.7 million kilograms of CO2 every day which is equivalent in mass to about 540 fully grown elephants. At those levels, Rapture would needs over 45 million large trees to absorb it all. Even though there likely wouldn’t be enough plant life to sustain the environment, there are supplementary means for oxygen production. Looking towards the International Space Station for inspiration, electrolysis of water is the process of splitting water into its elementary parts of oxygen and hydrogen. The oxygen is used to breath and the hydrogen could be used in desalination plants to produce fresh water.

No utopia could survive forever and Rapture is no exception. Rapture could never survive, the ocean was always going to reclaim it. Although the signs of erosion are becoming more pronounced, Rapture was destroyed from the inside out. Rapture suffered from one fundamental flaw, a flaw that was intrinsic to it’s nature, Rapture was isolated. What destroys civilization faster than erosion are people in confined spaces with nowhere to escape. It’s no surprise that human nature got the best of Rapture, in fact there are numerous studies on the psychology of human isolation and confinement. Psychological health is a major concern for example on manned missions to Mars.