The four pillars of Neptune's temple

UNESCO Courier, August-Sept, 1991 by Jacques Ferrier

The new Atlantis

The sea begins and ceases and then again begins

And when after thought I long rest my gaze

On the calm of the gods, I have here my reward....

But the wind is rising! ... I must try to live ! (Paul Valery, Le Cimetiere Marin)

The imagination and the sea have been closely linked ever since the legend of Atlantis. But is it really a legend?(3) Whatever the case, it may be converted (or restored) to reality. More and more people dream of lotus-eating on tropical islands, and holiday clubs and leisure centres of all kinds are proliferating. Offshore oil platforms could already serve as models or embryos for earthly paradises.

We must aim higher and settle in ever more remote locations. Today it is possible to build offshore and even way out to sea, far from the dirt and noise of cities islands dedicated to the higher pursults of humanity. Habitations can be built above the deep blue waters, looking out over a vast expanse, the inviolate horizon and "the calm of the gods", but above all in the freedom of the open sea, subject only to international law. The "serene temples of the sages" which Lucretius imagined in the marine environment (Suave are magno), the ideal scientific city which Francis Bacon called the "New Atlantis", could thus emerge from the limbo of the mind.

Philippe Tailliez, another pioneer of underwater exploration, has been cherishing this idea ever since his first dives in 1937 with Jacques-Yves Cousteau. He has worked out an outline Archipelaego Project and in 1981 founded an association whose aim is "the design, construction, and experimentation of a floating inhabited archipelago extending from the heights to the depths, by means of spatial and underwater structures. Such an archipelago, dynamically anchored to the seabed, is being planned for the Pacific Ocean, outside those areas which have already been or are being appropriated by the nations of the planet for economic exploitation."

Described as "a symbol and affirmation of the common marine and spatial future of the human race, in line with the concept of the common heritage of humanity", the Archipelaego Project was favourably received by leading divers and astronauts who met at Miami in 1985, in Tunis in 1986 and in Japan in 1990, under the auspices of the World Confederation of Underwater Activities (CMAS). It is still no more than a project, perhaps even a pipe-dream. But it is not too late, nor perhaps too soon, to start to build this "last shore".

1. La croisiere aux abimes, cited by Georges Houot and Pierre Willm in Le bathyscapbe, Les Editions de Paris, 1954.

2. Tokamak: an apparatus for the magnetic confinement of the reacting matter (plasma) involved in nuclear fusion.

3. One recent study suggests that an Atlantis civilization may have existed in the North Sea 10,000 years ago. Jean Dequelle, De la prehistoire a l' Atlantide de, megalithes, France-Empire, publishers, Paris 1990.

JACQUES FERRIER,

Commissioner General in the French Navy, is honorary president of the Academy of the Var departement in France and a member of the French Academy of Commercial Sciences. He is the author of many scientific papers, and recently published a study on the French Revolution and the Var (Academie du Var, Toulon 1990).