(dramatic music)
We can only imagine the Singapore of 2065,
but we do know that by 2065,
Singapore must be a very different place than it is today.
In its second half century
Singapore will face daunting challenges.
A rapidly growing and aging population,
a battle for economic survival,
and accelerating climate change.
How Singapore meets those challenges
will decide its future.
Today, our most innovate architects and urban planners
are envisioning radical solutions
that will transform the way we live.
(techno music)
(tense music)
The Singapore of the future
will be the city of our dreams.
In part one of Futuropolis,
we envision what Singapore would be like
on its hundredth birthday in the year 2065.
Faced with twin challenges of an expanding population
and accelerating climate change,
many of Singapore's most innovative planners
and architects are convinced that the only way
to meet these challenges
will be to create a smart, sustainable
vertical city soaring hundreds of meters into the sky.
Building up will be essential,
but it my not be enough.
By 2065, Singapore may have no more land to build on.
The only other place to expand will be out to sea.
And some think that's the future.
(tense music)
If the surface area of the world is 2/3 water,
I think that's a very clear indication for Singapore
that we could be exploiting the water
as a means of further urbanization
rather than just trying to
urbanize in central locations.
A bit of diversity doesn't hurt.
Architect, academic, and author
Jason Pomeroy founded Pomeroy Studio in 2012.
His idea for creating new living space
regenerates Singapore's old port areas
with self-sustaining communities
that would literally live on the water.
Could this actually be the new vision?
But how would a large urban population
live on water?
Boardwalks that provide an opportunity for people--
Jason calls his solution the POG,
or Pod Off Grid.
What we wanted to try and achieve was a self-sustaining
community that could be floating on water
that would also be generating its own energy source.
A POG, Pod Off Grid, is a series of self-sustaining pods
that clip together, be that residential pods,
working pods, hospitality pods,
food and beverage, retail, so on and so forth,
that can all be clipped together like a giant
LEGO kit of parts that can be floating
dynamically on the water and completely self-sustaining.
But Jason foresees his POGs
as being more than just living spaces.
Just as the vertical city combines work and play areas,
so will his floating city.
He's convinced that future Singaporeans
won't be just living in the sky,
they'll also be living on the sea.
Think about it, this sort of expanse of water.
What is it really being used for right now
or in the future?
Rather than trying to create more urban density,
why don't we actually expand out into the water?
This central hub is effectively the central focus
for the community, it has an amphitheater,
it has food and beverage,
it has civic administrative functions,
and from this central hub, we can then see
its connection back to the mainland via the spine.
The spine providing an ease of movement
from the mainland out onto the water.
But with that central hub, you also have
the ability to live, work, and play on the water.
What we can see is those towers providing
a means of the Singaporean people living
very close to the offices that they may be working in.
We see the food and beverage and the hotels
also floating on the water,
being in synergy, if you will, with the marina bay sands
as a center for tourism and leisure.
They're not just living spaces.
This is an opportunity to create
fully-sustainable communities.
The ability to create places that would allow you
to live, work, and play in one area
is very important to the sustainability of the city.
By creating mixed-use developments that allow you
to live, work, and play, you could walk to work,
cycle to work, you can live and breathe
and experience the city in its full glory.
(tense music)
Living on POGs in the sheltered waters
of port areas could provide future Singaporeans
with some of the new living space they'll desperately need.
But could the idea of living on water
be taken a step further?
Could future Singaporeans actually live
not just along the shores, but on the open sea?
(tense music)
When the waves come, how would this wave
pass through this system of storage modules?
Engineering professor Wang Chien Ming
thinks it's possible.
We like to study the rise of this water level,
which is, they call it the sea effect.
He and his student team
have been studying the effects of wave action
on floating structures,
exploring the possibility of living on offshore mega-floats.
(dramatic music)
You know, our Earth is covered by
70% of ocean in terms of surface area.
To me, it's a matter of time before our city
will sprawl over onto the water.
If you imagine yourself on land,
your land is actually floating on, well,
you have the huge plates underneath you.
Actually we are, there is nothing really fixed,
everything is moving, but in the sea, of course,
you can imagine if I cover the sea
with a huge artificial land made of concrete or steel,
and I'm talking about covering to the order of
tens of kilometers by tens of kilometers,
very, very huge area, it will appear to you
just like normal land.
In fact, when you stand on it,
you won't even feel that you're on water.
Professor Ming imagines that by 2065,
giant floating platforms known as VLFSs
or very large floating structures
could be anchored off Singapore's shores,
providing artificial living space
for a country running out of the real thing.
But how would these floating communities
fare in the open ocean?
As it turns out, Singapore's equatorial location
makes it a great place to experiment with offshore living.
First of all, the coastal waters of Singapore
are so benign in terms of wave forces as well as wind
forces, so it's very ideal for floating structures.
In this particular spot, we can consider putting
a floating golf courses as well as floating parks,
and they'll be kilometers long.
(tense music)
Very large floating structures
could help solve Singapore's future land crisis.
But by the year 2065, another crisis
could threaten Singapore.
90% of Singapore's food is imported.
What would happen if some day those imports stopped coming?
How would Singapore feed itself?
(dramatic music)
As it imagines itself in the year 2065,
Singapore is confronting a series of challenges
that could threaten its future.
Architects and urban planners dream of cities in the sky,
and suburbs on the sea.
Radical but possible ideas for creating new living space
for an expanding urban population.
But there's another looming threat
that Singapore can't control,
a future worldwide shortage of food.
Climate change will mean more and more droughts
and crop-destroying storms
while the world's population grows.
Singapore imports 90% of its food.
If there's not enough to eat worldwide,
Singapore's food supply will be threatened.
Our food imports are highly dependent
on the regions in which the food is grown,
so that's one potential vulnerable point in Singapore.
One of the features of future climate change is that
there might be more intense and more frequent severe storms
like typhoons. (tense music)
These tend to occur a lot in the Philippines,
as well as in Vietnam.
There's gonna be a lot of negative impacts there.
There's also a possibility of more variable rainfall events.
You could have more floods that occur
because of intense rainfall.
This will be extremely disruptive
for agriculture, for instance.
At the moment, a huge amount of import is taking place
in order to sustain the mouths of the Singaporeans
and the people living on this small city state.
Singapore needs to become more self-sufficient,
but where in this urbanized island
can Singaporeans grow their own food?
Some envision future farmland on the sea.
Jason Pomeroy believe his pods could be
an innovative way to grow more locally and import less.
At Sky Greens vertical farms, he sees the future.
A vertical farm is very much the farm of the future,
because with urbanization,
the land prices are gonna go up, so why use it for farming?
Put the farms on the water,
create vertical floating farms.
Vertical farming is basically taking some of the
traditional methods of horizontal farming,
but turning it 90 degrees.
You're getting that even distribution of light
to allow for the plants to grow
by actually having them on this kind of rotating track,
and what we're able to see here is that you're able
to get still high densities of growth
because it's actually reaching up for the sky,
meaning that it does become far more efficient
and less land-guzzling.
Vertical farming not only saves land,
but rotating the crop upward toward the sunlight
and controlling the interior environment
to deliver consistent temperature and humidity
increases production by 50%.
Using micro sprinklers reduces water consumption by 70%.
At your conventional farm, maybe using 300 to 400
liters of water to grow a kilogram of root crop.
Here what we have is an example where
the kilogram of root crops would only need
about 12 liters of water, so you're saving on water.
But farming on POGs won't begin
to meet the needs of an expanding urban population.
Only much bigger farms can do that.
Could farming out at sea on very large
floating structures be a solution?
The very large floating structure
is designed for coastal waters.
Could VLFS farms survive on the open sea?
Professor Wang Chien Ming believes they could,
if they're built right.
The challenge is how to assemble
very, very large floating units
to make into one monolithic structure
of the order of tens of kilometers by tens of kilometers.
The floating food storage will have to go into
water depths of maybe about 50 to 150 meters.
Obviously you can't build it as one piece,
you have to build in smaller pieces.
After building it, you float it out to site
where they assemble.
We'll create a wave and the wave will hit
these floating bodies so you can see
the response of the floating bodies
due to wave action.
Another challenge is to really create a very economical
mooring system to ensure that it's robust
and be able to withstand the test of time,
to hold the floating structure in position.
In other words, holding the structure
in the horizontal plane, but of course,
this mooring system that you have will allow
the floating structure to move up and down
in the vertical direction to allow for different payloads,
as well as for different tidal variation.
Here it comes, look at how beautiful the wave is.
Right around here.
Yes, oh there, you ask.
That's why I wanted to put the model here,
so it's right on this.
Yes, that's where the wave breaks, here.
I'm very optimistic that we could design
floating structures that could last 100 years or even more.
Professor Ming doesn't see ocean waves
as a threat to a very large floating structure.
He's convinced a VLFS could provides its residents
with a stable living platform.
If you have a floating structure of a mega-size,
the structure is so large that the wave lengths
that hits the floating structure is so small
compared to the dimensions of the floating structure
that it's like little ripples in a pond.
To give you a nice analogy, consider the fact that
you are a little fly standing on the back of an elephant.
Would the elephant know that you're on his back?
So it is something like this.
Places like The Maldives, Marshall Island,
and Solomon Islands, they all face the possible
inundation by the rising water level in the ocean
due to global climate change.
So one possibility is perhaps we create
a huge floating platform,
creating a new country for them
and housing all these people on these islands
on this huge floating structure.
Housing people on the sea
is closer to reality than we might think.
Made up of over 100 islands and fearing rising sea levels,
the south Pacific territory of French Polynesia
has recently commissioned California's
Sea Steading Institute to develop a concept
for a permanent floating community at sea.
One of my ideas perhaps create a floating prison
out in the middle of the ocean where you can
put the most wanted criminals or terrorists there
and it'll be a great place
to house them in and I don't think there's any way of escape
if you have a floating structure
right in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
(tense music)
But climate change isn't only
threatening land grown food.
Rising sea temperatures are also having
a devastating effect on fish stocks.
In 2015, off Singapore's coast, a plankton bloom
in part triggered by a rise in sea temperature
killed a massive number of fish.
Could future fish farms on board very large
floating structure help feed the nation?
Professor Ming believes they could.
We can have very large floating fish farms
such as the one we are now standing on,
but we can have much, much bigger and more advanced
type of design incorporating latest technology
to create a greater production of fish than never before.
This fish farms, I believe that given sufficient space,
we can enlarge as big as you want.
We just have to maintain quality of the fish
in terms of oxygen level and also supplying them
with the proper food, so if we have all that in place,
we can have a very, very mega fish farm.
(tense music)
Highly stable and versatile, very large
floating structures could assist with farming food.
But food isn't the only thing essential to life
that will soon be threatened by an increasing population.
There's also water.
Singapore is a small island with no natural
aquifers or lakes, so it will be particularly vulnerable.
Its future depends on guaranteeing a supply
of clean, drinkable water.
And that won't be easy.
So if you compare us to New York, Tokyo, Bangkok,
those cities have a huge land
from which they get their source of water supply.
(upbeat music)
Singapore is so small that we don't have enough
land here to collect and store the rainwater
that falls onto the island.
To overcome that handicap,
Singapore created an artificial hinterland
by reaching agreement with its neighbor, Malaysia,
to draw up to 946 million liters per day
from the Johor River.
But that agreement is due to expire in 2061,
and with its population steadily increasing,
Singapore needs greater sufficiency in its water supply.
To achieve that, Singapore has already come up
with innovative solutions.
It's constructed the Marina Barrage,
a dam at the confluence of five rivers and the sea.
It created a massive freshwater reservoir
in the heart of the city.
While an innovative new water system
filters waste water through a fine polymer membrane
to remove impurities, creating purified water
that is ultra clean and safe to drink.
But the nation currently consumes 1.9 million
cubic meters of water a day,
and by 2060, that number is projected to double.
Working to meet that projection,
Singapore's national water agency,
the Public Utilities Board or PUB
has built five new water plants and two desalination plants
with another three in the pipeline.
2/3 of Singapore's land area is engineered
for water catchment.
Water that falls there is channeled into 17 reservoirs.
The ultimate goal is to cover 90% of the nation,
and Professor Want Chien Ming has a radical idea
that might make the national water supply even bigger.
I was thinking that perhaps in a reservoir,
we can have a two-tier reservoir
where we use lightweight concrete tanks,
elevate above the water level of the reservoir
to collect the rainwater,
and so increasing the capacity of our reservoir.
These tanks could be, you know,
make into the shape of kind of inverted mushrooms.
Professor Wang's idea
could help increase Singapore's water supply
along with new water and desalination.
But these systems have a vulnerability,
they are dependent on energy.
(tense music)
Energy will become more and more precious and expensive
as the world's fossil fuel supply declines.
Singapore must find new and innovative forms of energy
to power its future.
By 2065, the worldwide decline in fossil fuel supplies
will have had a dramatic impact on Singapore's resources.
They will be in short supply.
None more so than energy.
(dramatic music)
Today, Singapore is committed to getting
80% of its electricity from renewable
or low carbon sources by 2050.
But fossil fuel still generates
70% of Singapore's electricity production.
Finding new and sustainable energy sources to keep fueling
the nation will be another challenge to future survival.
PUB is trialing solar panels on its reservoirs
to gather energy from the sun and generate power.
But they won't supply anywhere near what Singapore needs.
Rank upon rank of solar panels was the obvious answer,
but where could land-starved Singapore
build a giant solar farm?
Could the ever-versatile very large floating structure
again come to Singapore's aid?
Floating structures being out there in the sea,
we can put solar farms.
There will be no shadows on our floating structures
because it's way out in the sea,
so there will be no interruption,
and we can use the seawater to cool our
photovoltaic panels to make it greater
in terms of its efficiency.
The very large floating structure
could do more than just turn sunlight into energy.
There's more wind out at sea.
Very large floating turbines could be deployed
to harness that energy,
and the sea itself could be harnessed as a source of energy.
There's a lot of research now working towards
how we could use tidal variation, water currents,
and even waves to generate power for our new world.
Also whenever you have islands where you're separated
by straits or narrow channels, the currents are very strong.
What we can do is we can attach turbines
beneath our floating structure so that the water current
spins the turbines and generates electricity.
(tense music)
The local impact of climate change on
Singapore's resources isn't the only threat to its future.
The disastrous effects of climate change
far from Singapore's shores will strike
at the nations economic heart.
(dramatic music)
Today, Singapore is the world's
second largest commercial port.
Thousands of ships drop anchor in the harbor,
bringing goods to and from 600 other ports
in 123 countries spread over six continents.
And soon, the port of Singapore will be even busier.
(horns honk)
By 2027, all of Singapore's current ports
will be combined into a single mega-port
at Tuas on Singapore's west coast.
The new Tuas port will load and unload
65 million shipping containers a year,
but this key economic asset will soon be under threat.
Climate change will have a very significant
impact on sea ice in the Arctic.
Some projections say that by 2065,
the Arctic could be ice free in the summer.
Some more pessimistic scenarios state that
it could be ice free as early as 2050, if not sooner.
(dramatic music)
The opening up of the waters
north of Siberia will cut a third of the distance
ships will need to travel between
northwest Europe and the far East.
This shorter, faster, cheaper route
will bypass the shortest shipping route
since ancient times, the Straits of Malacca.
For seven centuries, Singapore's built its prosperity
as a shipping hub on its strategic location
in those straits,
but thanks to the Arctic ice cap melting, by 2065,
Singapore's sea trade may have dramatically declined.
Thousands of ships may no longer anchor
off Singapore's shores.
It seems incredible that a key element
of Singapore's seemingly-robust economy
could be vulnerable to environmental changes in the Arctic,
but Singapore's architects need to factor in
the very real possibility that some time in the future,
Tuas Megaport may need to be reinvented.
(tense music)
Professor Joseph Lim studies architecture and urban design.
See the spine is a giant green roof
that had huge urban spaces that were shaded,
much like versions of the base of the Eiffel Tower.
He believes that designing Singapore's
key urban projects to have only one purpose
is unsustainable in a rapidly-changing world.
And if we kept the spine building free
and located the buildings onto smaller footprints,
so then the open green roof
would be the cooling surface here.
His think tank explores
how existing infrastructure projects
could be retrofitted for another purpose
if changing environmental or economic
conditions make them obsolete.
I think this whole issue of never designing only for
one condition or one economic threshold of activity
is important for the survival of our future cities.
Interspersing all the residential spaces
with the business spaces allow a different
cross-flow of mobility.
Underneath the infrastructure of the spine,
we have huge arches which allow ships
and transportation networks to pass through.
We need to design them in such a way that
they're able to morph into different layouts
with one skeleton.
So back to this part that would be a mixed-use plate
about 200 meters wide, the full length of the pier,
it's four kilometers.
I think that this is a sound safety procedure
to project for the future
how we could then in a fleet-footed way
adapt to changing conditions rather than
be locked into one structure.
People and commuters move through the upper deck,
they're able to see from the elevated skyline
the large mega-floats and houses like this.
By designing infrastructure
that can adapt to changing times,
Professor Lim's aiming to ensure
the long-term viability of Singapore's economy.
His team is currently brainstorming
how to repurpose Tuas Megaport.
I think here the idea that the port
can be used for more than a single purpose
becomes very important.
To provide that initial structure
to allow that changing future is crucial
when we start to plan very large structural entities.
But Tuas's initial structure
has been designed around four massive piers
separated by water to allow for the movement of shipping.
How do you retrofit this land and water footprint
to get alternative use?
So then if you like, you had a float-away port.
This becomes like a new model of the surface here.
Professor Joseph and his team
elect to deploy a massive framework over the piers
to repurpose areas for residential use,
featuring transport systems and services.
The open and ventilated framework
will create a cool atrium beneath,
reducing energy use for air conditioning.
Mega-floats will support residential,
commercial, and recreational areas.
What was once a massive container port
will be transformed into a small green city.
I think Tuas needs to be fully adaptable
to changes in use
and large tracts of land
should not be locked into purely
a particular kind of port activity or infrastructure.
But just designing a multi-use facility
at Tuas won't be enough to recover the revenue
Singapore will lose if climate change
reduces Singapore's shipping trade.
By 2065, urban overpopulation will be
threatening the whole world,
and a record number of Singaporeans will be elderly
and no longer working.
To support its aging and growing population to 2065
and beyond, Singapore will need to develop new industries.
(tense music)
Singapore's location on world shipping routes
has made it one of the world's great trading hubs,
and yet by the year 2065, climate change
may very well have severely damaged
Singapore's geographical trading advantage.
But there's another great advantage
to being located on the equator,
an advantage a future Singapore could exploit
if it can pioneer future trading routes in space.
(dramatic music)
By the year 2065, Singapore's role
as a major shipping port may well have declined,
and Singapore's economy may have suffered a major blow
unless Singapore can find a way to stay in business
as a global trading and transport hub.
The good news is some of Singapore's most visionary
thinkers are working on a plan,
a very ambitious one.
(relaxed music)
Mathematician, physicist, and computer engineer
Lim Seng is trying to use a hot air balloon
to send a Singaporean astronaut 20 kilometers
above the Earth to the very edge of space.
(graceful music)
He's hoping to spark a new vision
of Singapore's future possibilities,
and to vindicate his belief that Singapore's
economic future lies beyond the clouds.
(dramatic music)
What we're trying to do is to look for a niche,
so I think it's within our capability,
just like launching a person into space
using stratospheric balloon.
I think it is something that we can do.
First, you really must believe in it.
It happens that I really believe in it.
I believe in it enough to quit my good job to do this.
What we lack is people who dare to take the risk,
cross the line, make mistakes,
crash the plane, do it again and continue.
Lim Seng believes Singapore's location
on the equator will give it a competitive edge
and enable it to develop a viable space industry.
Singapore being on the equator has the advantage
of making use of the whole full swing of the momentum
of the rotation of Earth to swing the spacecraft
into orbit with less energy.
As the Earth rotates on its axis,
each point on the Earth takes 24 hours
to complete its rotation.
Because the Earth is round and the widest point
is at the equator, it means that the land
is moving faster at the equator than any other place
on the surface of the Earth.
A rocket launched from the equator
can take full advantage of this extra speed
to generate more thrust so it can carry less fuel
and a bigger payload.
Lim Seng is not alone in foreseeing
the opportunities space offers Singapore.
Singapore's office of space technology and industry
is exploring the commercial possibilities of space.
Look at a piece of technological advancement,
your hand phone is today more powerful
than all of NASA's supercomputer in 1969.
Launch costs continue to decline.
We believe that space is now accessible
to all nations, including Singapore.
And it is.
Singapore has already designed, built, and launched
a series of satellites, but not standard sized satellites.
Singapore has taken advantage of global technological
advancements in shrinking satellites
to create miniaturized nano-satellites.
That's the big advantage for Singapore,
we have now been able to shrink a satellite
from the size of this room
to something that's a fridge,
and still make it as powerful and as useful
as what used to occupy the whole room.
Who on Earth or in Singapore has imagined that
we are building satellites in Singapore?
Why not take up the challenge, right?
Lim Wee Seng heads Nanyang Technological
University's satellite research center.
Right now we have actually in the beginning stage,
we are pretty young.
(dramatic music)
The satellite research center
is pioneering Singapore's fledgling space industry
by building and launching nano-satellites.
We actually go through just like what
the industrial space industries do,
go through all the tests, vibration, the shock,
the temperature, the vacuum test,
and finally go to launch and launch up to space.
Each satellite takes several years
to design and build.
Satellite that we have right now is more
on the low Earth orbits.
I mean somewhere about 400, 500 kilometers,
or maybe as high as 800 kilometers,
that's the space that is more comfortable for us.
(rocket fires)
Launched into space on board a rocket
from either India, Russia, or Japan,
Nanyang Technological University's satellites
carry out various tasks, from inter-satellite communications
to remote sensing and imaging.
We actually measure the temperature, humidity,
and pressure when we're going around,
so we're able to monitor every week, every month,
what the change is like for the whole year
and year after year.
Our industry today is also vibrant with over 30 companies.
Space brings many benefits to society
in Asia and Singapore.
Natural disaster coordination,
detection of forest fires, crop protection
and yield improvement, these are just some examples.
(tense music)
Sending satellites into space
is certainly forward thinking,
but Singapore's space visionaries
are already thinking way ahead of that.
To them, space is a rich resource
for growing Singapore's future economy.
For space entrepreneur Lim Seng,
it's a perpetual generator of sustainable energy.
When you have solar panels on Earth,
you are limited by the sunlight, the hours of sunlight.
Seven hours, six hours, and then the idea therefore
is to bring the solar panel into space
and point to the sun for 7/24,
so you will have sunlight all the time
and the idea is to then convert this solar energy
in space into laser or microwave
and bring back to Earth and change it back to electricity.
(graceful music)
In Lim Seng's mind, by the year 2065,
Singapore may have ended or reduced
its dependence on fossil fuels
by launching banks of solar panels into space,
and Singapore's vision of its future in space
doesn't stop there.
By 2065, Singaporeans could be flying into space.
(dramatic music)
The space plane is a powerful aircraft
that brings passengers to the edge of space,
about 100 kilometers above Earth.
Many companies, including Virgin Galactic
and Reaction Engines are working very hard
to make that a reality.
I believe that it is still early days,
but I'm sure the space plane will bring about opportunities
for Singapore's tourism and transportation industries.
If Singapore took the initiative to invest
in such a technology to be one of the game players,
and if we are aggressive enough,
if we are hungry enough, if we are entrepreneurial enough,
we could be one of the two or three
space ports in the world.
(rocket fires)
There's only one problem.
Round trip travel in a space vehicle is very expensive,
but in theory, there is a way to lower that cost
by building a gigantic link between Earth and space,
a space elevator.
It's really a crazy idea, okay,
whereby you have a tethered cable
and the Earth is spinning, and you tie to a station
that is even further that the geostationary satellite.
That is to say, beyond the 36,000 kilometer,
and everything should swing accordingly.
On paper, it looks good. (chuckles)
From a platform anchored in the ocean
somewhere along the equator, a tether of thick cable
with a counterweight at its end
would extend 100,000 kilometers above the Earth.
A giant cable might be held taut and stationary
by the pull of gravity at the lower end
and the opposing pull of centrifugal force at the upper end.
Elevator cars could travel up and down that cable,
delivering cargo and people into space.
(tense music)
Singapore's space industry is in its infancy.
Some of its visions might seem more sci-fi than science,
but in this country, impossible dreams
have a way of coming true.
(dramatic music)
200 years ago, Stamford Raffles stood
on the banks of a remove southeast Asian river
and imagined a prosperous city,
a wealthy global trading port,
and a world-leading center of learning and research.
By Singapore's 50th birthday,
that dream had come to pass.
Now our most innovative minds are imagining
what Singapore will be on its 100th birthday.
(dramatic music)
And the drive to succeed that made Singapore
what it is today must persevere
to make Singapore what it must become.
(tense music)
(cheerful jingle)
(graceful jingle)