Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

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Really dumb idea here.

> Seasteading is building floating societies with significant political autonomy. Nearly half the world’s surface is unclaimed by any nation-state, and many coastal nations can legislate seasteads in their territorial waters.

> The Seasteading Institute is a nonprofit think-tank promoting the creation of floating ocean cities as a revolutionary solution to some of the world’s most pressing problems: rising sea levels, overpopulation, poor governance, and more…

Seasteading is not a solution to any real problem. It's like colonizing Mars or the moon - human bodies aren't evolved for either of those environments, and it won't make sense until we're post-biology to inhabit those places at any appreciable population volume.

Seasteading actually makes less sense than visiting Mars. Beyond living on an oil rig or research platform, there's only downside to life at sea: upkeep of the rig, importing resources, lack of fresh water, medical, and sanitary supplies. What you do have are rusting, corrosion, barnacles, bad weather, sea sickness, etc. There's nowhere to go and nothing to do. Just ask oil rig personnel how much fun their lives are.

What about trash and refuse? I imagine that's dumped right back into the ocean. Or damaged, partially submerged rigs that serve as shipping hazards? There are so many negative externalities.

Humans are terrestrial, and we're suited to live on land. All of our advantages are here.

It's like the 70s returned and they want people to live in biodomes. There's no point! No rationale worth any of the innumerable downsides.

We're not facing overpopulation. If anything, population growth in the 1st world needs to accelerate to match declining replacement rates. The earth has a much larger carrying capacity, and we're not even close to hitting it.

Sea level changes aren't stopping people from moving to Miami and investing in real estate there.

We're not going to see millions of people living "Principality of Sealand" style. It's as obtuse an idea as NFTs.

Uhh, we also weren't evolved to read books. We're post-evolution, even if we're not post-biology. There are plenty of people thinking through how we could have a sustainable society on Mars, not really sure why people couldn't do the same thing here. You're assuming negative externalities without seeing what people could think up. Also, as far as the Earth's carrying capacity goes, the footprint per-individual is much larger than it used to be. The traditional statement of carrying capacity seems to need some reassessment, because there's a really good argument to make that global climate change is evidence that we are past our current carrying capacity.

I personally don't find the idea of Seasteading compelling.

> Uhh, we also weren't evolved to read books. We're post-evolution, even if we're not post-biology.

Reading doesn't pose a challenge to our basic needs (food, water, shelter, clothing, sanitation), whereas Mars and seasteading do. The hill climbing barrier was considerably lower for our species.

Outside of the accomplishments for science and engineering, there is likely little benefit in building up Mars as a habitable destination for humans to live at scale. Unless the economies of space mining can support it, there's really no reason to be there beyond a thousand or so individuals.

I don't buy the astroid survival argument either. In the near term, putting humans on Mars does not de-risk the potential for an asteroid to cause human extinction. Mars colonies will likely still be reliant upon Earth for survival for a hundred years to come as they will not have adequate resources, support, or manufacturing capabilities for self-sustenance let alone growth. It's unlikely that a small colony could Matt Damon themselves back from the brink without a large industrial civilization backing them.

Research into enhancing human lives here on earth and protecting our environment will pay greater dividends. I'd even wager that advances in AI/ML, BCI, and biology outpace space colonization tech due to their immediate applications and inherent venture capital fundability. (SpaceX will be funded because of the DoD, NASA, and terrestrial communications. Mars not so much.)

> global climate change is evidence that we are past our current carrying capacity.

The current economic and political regime doesn't curtail dumping carbon into the atmosphere. The correlation with population is complicated. China and the United States, two of the largest contributors to CO2 emissions, have slowing population growth if you discount immigration.

I'm convinced he biggest benefit to colonizing Mars if we have the technology is that there won't be as many people there. If you can make Mars livable you can make anywhere on Earth livable even post climate crisis. The real thing that goes away is there won't be 7ish billion other people who also want to keep living trying to copy the tech and competing for those resources.

> Mars colonies will likely still be reliant upon Earth for survival for a hundred years to come as they will not have adequate resources, support, or manufacturing capabilities for self-sustenance let alone growth.

It'll take a hundred years after we start for the asteroid survival argument to be valid. A hundred years is too long, so let's never start.

Indeed. There are better things to spend the money on right here and now.

In a hundred years, we may be able to solve the problem with far less cost and effort.

But if not, it's two hundred years until Mars has a self-sustaining human population.

> Reading doesn't pose a challenge to our basic needs

Having had developed a -7 vision by 12 years old, I'd beg to differ. Because of books, I'm completely useless without contacts or glasses in human "natural habitat".

There is some limited evidence that a lot of close focusing (e.g. reading) may contribute to myopia, but it's hardly conclusive, and certainly at that magnitude is unlikely to be a single cause.

Last I read, researchers had pretty convincingly isolated the primary cause as insufficient intense UV-bearing light (so, sunlight) exposure during a handful of critical early childhood years, followed by genes as a distant second major risk-factor for near-sightedness. "Too much TV" or "too much reading" had been ruled out as meaningfully affecting anything, once isolated from the "too little bright light during certain ages" factor. The supposed mechanism is that intense light plays a role in getting the eye to stop developing and changing shape at the right time.

And why would a nerdy kid not get enough sunlight, how do you think?

> We're post-evolution

Definitely not.

We're post "natural" (for some definitions) selection. C-sections, pre- and post-natal care, life-saving medical advances, glasses/contacts, artificial limbs, ... Not to mention most people don't actually hunt or grow their own food, build their own shelters, or sew their own clothing.

But evolution is still happening.

(nit: I had this comment sitting in a buffer because downvotes on this thread and elsewhere subject me to the HN bad commentor rate limit.)

Yep, this is more or less what I meant by post evolution. We are clearly still changing by natural means, but for most of the existence of all living things in the world, change occurred by evolving. Humans change by using technology to intervene, and the rate of change of our intervention mechanisms is so massive that we’ll likely not notice evolution in any meaningful scale ever again.

There are still incurable diseases and cancers some are immune to and some are not due to genetics.

I don't think your parent poster would disagree with that statement. If different things kill you, natural selection shifts slightly.

What do you mean by "definitely"? Other than some evidence of evolving protection against HIV in Africa, I'm not familiar with any good evidence of modern day selective pressure.

Evolution is insanely slow and it will take a while for our bodies to catch up to us but it is a constant force that you're never "beyond". The only thing that might count as an end is detaching ourselves from the phsyical bodies that facilitate natural evolution (i.e. ascending to beings of pure energy or whatever) - and even in that case, we'd probably still constantly tweak and improve our existence, we just will have moved beyond natural evolution.

I think there's a thought that eugenics was a natural evolution of evolution[1] - and, as a society, we generally find that rather repulsive and don't do it... But just because we're aware of ways we can artificially speed up the process doesn't mean the process isn't continuing.

1. It's a thought, or conception - this isn't me endorsing eugenics in any way. I just believe that, mechanically, it could achieve a similar result just accelerated and with a lot of really important moral questions.

Consider Tinder profiles saying they'll only date someone over 6'. Sexual selection is one of the most powerful selective pressures.

It’s a game! What is not fun about the scenario?

This is a game, however the Seasteading movement itself is earnest in their desires/efforts to accomplish one or more of these scenarios or some variation of them.

Look at the main website.

They built a game to support and draw interest to their ideological cause.

Games are great because they are terrible propaganda tools. With a game it's no longer enough to write a compelling story: it must be self-consistent.

It may be a model that doesn't represent important parts of the world, but that's still better than a narrative.

That's an interesting thought. However, inconsistency in propaganda is real if you consider embellishments can differ greatly. The key is to control the conversation. You can easily censor an RPG chat, for example, to the same effect

Games are also bad propaganda because it costs little to try different things. So censorship, while possible, cannot be hidden behind plausible deniability.

Similarly, a game implies a set of rules that can be criticized and cannot be made vague on purpose -- as required by motte-and-bailey and similar rhetorical tricks.

> Games are great because they are terrible propaganda tools.

c.f. "Monopoly" (originally Georgist propaganda iirc)

Yes, the grandparent was implying games didn't make good propaganda because the flaws in their model are exposed by playing with it, as if propaganda needs to be dishonest or false, but it doesn't. Following their reasoning, and your example, games could be effective propaganda tools for a specific category of ideas; those that have the self consistency needed to be made into a compelling game.

Just in case Georgism is unfamiliar to folks here's a pretty good historical run down of the game[1]. I wanted to highlight that monopoly was very much intended to highlight the capricious and arbitrary nature of capitalism - rather than being an endorsement of using cut throat tactics to race to the top. I feel like the meaning the game has has undergone a significant shift societally.

1. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/monopoly-was-des...

I agree. They literally want to create floating cities spewing pollution wherever they drift under the excuse that nobody else can legislate what they do.

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