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Comment by jotm | Hacker News Reader

But that's exactly it - if you build a seastead, you will also have to abide by some country's laws. Otherwise you'll most likely find it very difficult to do business and acquire anything from anywhere, and if you do anything illegal in say, the United States or Spain, they'll send a vessel to take you into custody... so what's the point of spending a ton of money on a ship that is always in the same location?

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Perhaps I'm ignorant, but the major problem with seasteading I find is when you have your first pirate attack or your first natural disaster. Defense/rescue are expensive and would increase the daily costs significantly. In my biased opinion, seasteading sounds neat until you let reality get in the way.

While with enough force you could pirate a sea-stead, bear in mind that it would be a lot harder than the piracy you hear about in the news. Part of the reason dirt-poor Somalians can have success pirating is that technology has made it possible to staff a massive sea-going structure with the outline of a skeleton crew, possibly under a dozen people, which can be overrun by six armed guys on a boat. Piracy against a sea-stead would be more like mounting an armed assault on a remote village at the very least, with an existing police force, one probably created with awareness of the possibility of piracy. You can't just grab a gun and clean out your local downtown without encountering some... issues.

And if the floating sea-stead is a libertarian paradise, everybody's probably armed in which case your cost/benefit odds are pretty bad....

The real threat is less random piracy than sovereign invasion. The good news is that the list of countries with a credible ability to mount a military assault on a seasteading platform is short. The bad news is that it is also basically the exact list of countries that the seasteading effort is trying to get away from. To me, that's the biggest problem with the idea, it is intrinsically based on the sufferance of the very entities you are putatively trying to avoid, and that's basically true regardless of the politics of the platform.

Presumably any pirates need only make a credible threat of doing costly damage to or destroying the seastead in order to extort payment. Damaging a seastead seems easier to do than damaging a city-state atop a hill.

Maybe, but presumably pirates could do that now to deepwater oil rigs or cruise ships, but I haven't heard of it.

Oil rigs and cruise ships are high-risk targets because both have the implicit protection of some extant nation-state. Which is the point here, I think.

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I meant specifically a "credible threat of doing costly damage" to extort payment. I'm not aware of any oil companies or cruise lines that pay tribute to keep pirates from blowing them up.

There have been plenty of cargo companies paying ransom to get their ships back, but those ships were crewed by a handful of people and taken over.

The royalties oil companies pay are a form of tribute that's been formalized into law.

Further, oil companies and cruise lines benefit from the protection of nearby navies as well as deterrence via international law enforcement. Would a seastead be provided the same?

Considering the kind of boats pirates are likely to possess a seastead militia could likely provide equivalent localized protection. Naval vessels are expensive b/c of the scale of battle they are fighting.

Less than a millions dollars or so of equipment and a few dozen militia would be enough to repel any pirate incursion to date. Pirates are in it for the money, they aren't going to be willing to accept large casualties.

Oil rigs are generally closer to populated areas and tend to move very far in their life time, making them an easier asset to defend. The reason piracy has been so difficult to stop for cargo is because the ships have to move such a long distance and seas are so expansive it's difficult to defend. So I guess the question becomes: will seasteading be more like oil rigs or more like cargo ships? But even if they are more like oil rigs, if they aren't going to associate themselves with a particular nation-state, what is their defense going to be?

IMO, a natural disaster is a bigger concern for a seastead though.

>what is their defense going to be?

A few 3" naval guns should handle any pirate incursion. It wouldn't really cost very much to arm a seastead enough to make it a very costly target for non-governmental attackers.

I agree though that they have much bigger issues than pirates.

hm. I think oil companies usually pay the money to the local powers that protect them rather than directly to the terrorists [1] - but I don't think there is a way around paying your protection money; you pay the government, or you pay the criminals [2] or you maintain your own private army.

[1]http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/24/world/africa/24qaddafi.htm...

[2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiquita_Brands_International#P...

Agreed about the overriding concern of sovereign invasion, and the motivations for a potential invader are myriad: claimed "humanitarian" intervention, desire to repatriate lost citizens, trade disputes. The fact a seasteading vessel will have to trade with conventional nation states exposes it to the risk of invasion, since eventually one nation state may decide that benefits to invasions are not outweighed by its counter-arguments (international UN-style law, ethics, etc).

Perhaps a comparison may be drawn to China's ongoing desire to repatriate Taiwan.

Please refer to the book linked to above, the seasteaders are pretty good at anticipating every possible critique and presenting the counterargument, which is often pretty well thought out.

Off the top of my mind, I would say the pirate attacks wouldn't be a big deal. Advanced detection and defense systems could be put in place to warn of uninvited vessels approaching. Remember piracy is a big deal precisely in those places least likely to have seasteads (why would someone build a resort, hospital, or tech incubator off the shores of Somalia?).

Natural disaster is of course and issue, but I don't know if the probability of natural disaster would be any higher on a seastead versus on land. Natural disasters frequently aren't natural at all, at least the consequences aren't. Just compare the consequences of the Haiti earthquake versus Fukushima. When there are incentives to protect property, it will be protected. The probability of a disaster is uncontrollable anywhere you live, the extent of devastation is controllable.

I will look into the book linked above.

> Natural disaster is of course and issue, but I don't know if the probability of natural disaster would be any higher on a seastead versus on land.

It's not the probability of a natural disaster happening that is a problem, it's the impact. One of the main reasons for a seastead from what I've heard of seasteaders is to avoid paying taxes they don't believe in. But it costs money to rebuild these things and/or to have another nation-state evacuate them. My impression, admittedly not based on in-depth research, is that seasteaders are after all the benefits that nation-state can offer without paying the taxes for it. But I'll be happy to be proven wrong because I think the idea is really cool.

Cruise ships already face these issues successfully.

No doubt in part because they benefit from the protection afforded by nation-states. Cruise ships tend to be filled with the citizens of powerful countries (or countries allied to powerful ones).

Mostly governments have done very little about piracy in Somalia.

Also at the scale you're talking about, small fast boats, a well armed private militia would be just as effective, as a billion dollar destroyer.

A few 3" guns will stop anything a pirate can throw at them.

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