Improving the stability fo shipping

this idea is heavily inspired by a proposal to make oil tankers more energy efficient by reducing the sloshing of shippoed oil by using air bags to keep the liquid in place.


For large volume mailers like amazon and USPS there is a risk that packages will tumble if not stored correctly, this is part of the reason why amazon sends you a large box with not much inside sometimes,  instead of mailing empty boxes through the full lifecycle, instead have an air sac that would fill into hold packages in place.  For the airbag solution for fuel tankers, a single large bladder is used to fill the entire volume of the tank, which works as the liquid would be all at one level (assuming the tanker was on flat ground).  The packages would be a more complicated affair, the collection of boxes would invariably be uneven, and would therefore require a more complicated airbag system.  At this time it would be difficult to say what the final design would be, but the technologies of softrobotics could be a cool place to start (or maybe I just really like the tech). 

One approach that might be used would be a grid of air bags that would expand themselves to create an inverse of the topology of ther boxes being shipped.  The grid pattern is unlikely to perfectly secure the items being shipped, but it would be better than just a hope and a prayer. 

Integrating Pykrete and Daytime Blackbody Emitters

During World War 2 a shortage of steel led inventor Geoffrey Pyke to suggest to the British government the development of an ice based carrier to aid in the war effort.  The  carrier was made from simple water ice and deemed too weak to serve as a proper launching platform.  The need for a stronger cheap material to make into a carrier led to the development of what is now called pykrete, ice that has been mixed with sawdust, cheap to manufacturer and much stronger than simple water.  By 1943 government interest waned on the development of the ice carrier as the tide of the war shifted in the favor of the Allies and pykrete became a historic curiosity.  

A big weakness of pykrete as a material for fabrication stems from its need to be kept cold to maintain its strength, while steel and concrete are more expensive they benefit from working in temperatures above freezing.  With research and development into daytime blackbody cooling technologies, pykrete might have its day in the sun at last.  New research into blackbody cooling surface coatings have already acheived materials that according to papers, are affordable to manufacture and provide the ability to cool surfaces by 8.2 degrees C (about 15 degrees F) from ambient air temperature.  By combining these passive coolilng films on the outside of a pykrete structure, it would be conceiveable to create a floating iceberg capable of surviving year round (in the right latituteds).

These permanent ice masses could have tremendous applications at extreme latitudes, providing a working platform for weather stations and communications relays.  The design of the ice platform would be complicated to say the least, it would be unlikely that you could make a year round ice block just by making a cube of pykrete and wrapping it the cooling film.  The corrosive nature of sea water and limited surface area would minimize the benefit of having a cooling surface coating in the first place.  The most likely design (broad strokes) would be a large mass of pykrete, internally permiated with tunnels for refrigerants to be circulated through the system to keep it from melting.  The side of the platform that would be exposed to open air would be covered in a complex topology of cooling fins, designed to maximize the surface area of the system capable of disipating as much heat as possible. 

Realistic use cases:

Long term research station for you know northern scientsits

Radio relay:  create a network of these platforms above the Arctic circle and use them to connect the various parts of Europe, North America, and Asia

Platforms for telescopes  As the North Pole only needs to compete with Santa Clause's workshop with respect to light/radio polution, these pykrete platforms could be used to make a really massive array of radio dishes to get a unique perspective on the galaxy.

(the really real option)
Russian missile launch platforms, why waste a fully fledged submarine when you could make a passive block of ice with a radio receiver awaiting launch codes.

Pros
The artificial land masses could be used, in a small way, to shore up icemasses in the Arctic and Antarctic, their material properties and cooling characteristics could help other ice masses stabalize year round



Cons
Limited range of use.  By requiring such relatively low temperatures to remain structurally sound there would be a relatively small number of regions on the planet where you could make these platforms 

Who actually likes their upstairs neighbor?

I have yet to meet anyone who lives in an apartment/multi-family home who actually likes their upstairs neighbor.  More often than not this is not the fault of the upstairs neighbor, but the building designer/builder, without sufficient accoustic insulation it becomes that much more likely that we will hear our neighbor's music and footsteps.  While the "simple" solution would be to simply increase the amount of insulation between floors modern alternatives should also be considered.

A)  Build true mixed use buildings where you alternate floors between office space and residential capacity.  By alternating the use case of floors you add additional accoustic insulation that is valuable to developers.  During the day time the majority of the residential units are likely to be minimally occupied and act as a sound barrier between office floors.  At night the reverse would be true, the office floors would be mostly empty and the residents of the alternative floors would benefit from there being a full layer of unused volume above and below.

B)  Vertical farming, while less immediately profitable (heck you'd probably need a big tax incentive), way cooler sounding.  Similar in approach to idea A) above you could insulate apartments by having small 'half floor' grow rooms filled with plants.  These small spaces would again deaden sound while providing volume for crops to be grown.  These vertical growth volumes would not necessarily need to be only half a floor in height (I just think it would be cute, it also might help to limit the cost of building the structure as you don't need to build as many floors)

To make the grow floors work with the limited height and to minimize the complexity of the overall system engineers could take advantage of the shelf moving robots that are used in industrial warehouses (similar to what you would see in an Amazon fulfillment center)

The long term goal would be a smart system where the vertical farm not only was used to produce residential food calories but was used to filter the water and air of a building.  For cleaning up air most people would be pretty happy to know that their air is being "naturally filtered" (well if not most people at least yuppies).  Now waste water filtering would be another story, people aren't as comfortable with the idea of food being grown in their waste.  Worst case scenario the plants used to filter waste water could be used as a feedstock for some other organism, or maybe some other clever use like making mycelium into packaging and insulative materials

Here are some articles that I read while looking into writing this

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/09/the-vertical-farm  

gives some great background on vertical farmland development, one big detail is that the Island of Manhatten under ideal circumstances could produce about 2% of its food calories if every roof was turned into farm land.  If alternatively you had specialized buildings used for crop growth (about 200) you would be able to produce enough calories for all of the island, assuming a vegetarian diet.  Personally I like the idea of this mixed approach to building design as it give residents that sweet sweet sound protection (that being said I acknowledge that there might be some design requirements that make mixing vertical farming and other building needs undesirable)

The mycelium article 

https://www.nsf.gov/discoveries/disc_summ.jsp?cntn_id=126288  

Basically you grow mushrooms from waste materials and use that to package items, instead of using foam.