Given that skyscrapers seem to describe buildings of 40+ floors, losing 3 is less than 10% of the total floors, possibly a little more of the total floor space given that upper floors may not have the same dimensions, offset by possibly fewer elevator shafts beyond certain points. If the bottom can be retrofitted to be very secure in water (extra concrete?), then I don't see why you would abandon it. It's not like you're constructing a whole new building and have to forego three floors, it's already existing and it's just a matter of putting the work in to make sure it's still usable.
These things are all anchored into bedrock anyway, so it's not like you should have to worry about the material under the foundations shifting or eroding.
Most of the things that skyscraper needs in order to be a viable structure - electricity, data, water, sewage - lie underground in systems that will not survive extended submersion beneath seawater.
Kim Stanley Robinson has this problem in general. It's as if he just doesn't care about the science in his sci-fi. Engineering problems just get hand-waved around whenever they're inconvenient. Terraforming Venus? No problem! Ten kilometer tall spiral launch structures? Sure! A service corridor that goes all the way around a planet? Easy! I might be more inclined to forgive him if he could write a halfway interesting character, or manifest some semblance of a theme, but I'm just constantly disappointed. His work seems more ambitious than spaceships and rayguns, but it always comes up short. I'd rather spend my limited leisure reading time on mindless space potboilers like The Expanse.
that's interesting to hear your opinion. Mine couldn't be more different. To start with in 2312, the science has largely been explained in the Mars Trilogy - whereas 2312 is more detective novel set in space than sci fi. I'm not sure why the service tunnel (or the rail system and city of Terminator itself, actually) are so far out there given just how far off things we are talking. You've got thousands of hollowed out terria and genetic engineering of humans where sex changes to one side and back again before settling in the middle are commonplace, and it's the metamaterials that defy your belief?
Part of good literature and movies is being sold the story so as to suspend disbelief. This has always happened with KSR's books for me. Funnily enough, it didn't happen with Breaking Bad - I couldn't finish it.
Anyway, diversity makes the world an interesting place!
I didn't think that dichotomy was all that ridiculous. It was always pretty clear that terraforming was still a blunt instrument in his setting. With Venus, they blocked the sun and slammed the surface temps so low that the CO2 was freezing, and on Mars it was pretty much just "Pump as much heat into the air as you can lol"
A planet with a huge human population and associated infrastructure is way more fragile. If you threw a lens in front of Earth, all sorts of frightening things would happen to circulation in the air and seas. In the books, Mars got some batshit crazy dust storms in the middle of its process, and Mars' atmosphere had wayy less energy capacity than Earth's at that point.
I guess my point is this didn't hurt my suspension of disbelief. Presupposing the orbital lenses are possible, it's not utterly insane to conceive them as imprecise tools that would make a mess of a full fledged biosphere.
As usual, it's someone that has questions about a theory in fiction that instead of looking for a way it could be right, assume they are correct and easily find a way it could be wrong.
The same reason the future is so hard to predict is the same reason outcomes that don't necessarily make sense at first should be given the benefit of a doubt and reasons should be looked for, not discounted.
Not only does it make things more enjoyable, but you end up learning a lot more. It does take admitting you may not be the genius you thought you were though, so some people have trouble with that...
With Venus, they wanted the CO2 to freeze because they wanted to sequester it. They had plenty of ability to fine-tune the temperature of the planet to whatever they wanted, and indeed they do so over the course of the book.
It's obviously fatuous to suggest that, oh no, 4 degrees of global warming is a huge problem but also, given the ability to finely control global solar influx with essentially infinite variability (they are, after all, suggesting that they'll use their sunshade to give Venus a day-night cycle, so they can open and close the damn thing every 24 hours indefinitely), you can't find a solution to Earth's global warming problem that's better than four degrees of global warming. A perfect solution? Perhaps not! But better than their status-quo.
And what was their amazing solution? Literally air-drop animals everywhere. Think that might have some unintended consequences?
The whole thing was absurd. KSR seemed to have no ability to stitch together terrestrial problems that were plausible within the framework of the rest of his solar system.
The point isn't reincarnation -- that's just an excuse to have similar characters in different eras. The point is to think about how different (better in some ways, worse in others) the world would have been if Western Europe hadn't been as dominant as it was in our history.
Isn't much of Manhattan's subfloors already below sea level? I imagine there are already sump pumps in all of them that have subfloors. Cementing off the exterior of the first few floors and/or raising the street level with landfill (as your sibling comment tpurves suggests) seems like it would be sufficient.
One thing to consider, though, is that this flooding would have taken place slowly over decades; it would have started with flooding during storms, which became more frequent over time until the sea slowly moved in. So they had plenty of time to move or waterproof that infrastructure.
Though that calls into question the premise of the book, because they would have likely either filled in the land or built levees sometime in the half-century or so that the sea was rising.
The interview mentions "the catastrophic flood in 2100" in the context of the book, so it sounds like the book includes a runaway problem at some point.
In many coastal cities sky scrapers extend far below the water table. One architect in Houston described the city's sky scrapers to me as more floating platform than traditional building.
(Flooding them could never happen, but sealing them against 50 feet of sea level rise seems like a comparatively minor feet.)
You aren't taking into account the degradation sea water has on infrastructure. The pounding waves and salt would most certainly make the buildings unsafe.
Well, the concrete that actually takes all the load would be safe; that's how pretty much any caissons or foundations in water are built anyway. Electrical delivery would have to be completely re-thought and redeployed. There wouldn't be 'pounding waves' since the rest of the city would be diffusing large waves.
Simpler solution would be to bring landfill to raise the ground level of NYC. The first floors of buildings would be converted to extra levels of sub-floors and new lobbies/entrances built higher up. Or other buildings could be potentially jacked up to new higher up with new subfloors built inbetween to keep them connected to their old foundations. Or lastly, tear down the old structure and build a new building at the higher level. A lot of cities today are build on top of fill on top of remains of old or ancient cities still below ground.
I thought I heard once that quite a bit of Manhattan is already landfill (and many of the subfloors are already below sea level). If so, this sounds like it would be the obvious chosen solution.
I don't know how much is in total, but the west side was expanded with landfill in the 19th century, and Battery Park City is made entirely of excavated dirt from other construction projects, mainly the Twin Towers.
Two problems: the ocean and the Hudson river. The sea approaches NYC from two directions. To the south is the passage between Long Island and Staten Island, and to the east is the passage between the mainland and Long Island.
If your goal is to protect all five boroughs of NYC, you have to protect Brooklyn, which faces the open sea directly. So a huge seawall south of of Brooklyn, crossing over to Sandy Hook. That looks to be closer to 10 km straight across.
The east is also tricky, because the Bronx reaches so far north and east. Your best bet is probably a dam at Sands Point, but it will have to be a good 4 km long. That should be fun.
Finally there is the Hudson river, which flows north to south. You are going to have to divert that somewhere, or it will just pool up in New York harbor until it finds a way to the sea. A Yonkers-New Rochelle canal perhaps?
If this is your plan, you will have the gratitude of an entire generation of civil engineers, construction workers, and financiers. Your taxpayers may be less enthusiastic.
These things are all anchored into bedrock anyway, so it's not like you should have to worry about the material under the foundations shifting or eroding.