Floating city project
seasteading.org
seasteading.org
They discovered that 1) the county-owned small boat harbor at Half Moon Bay wasn't going to support them by building the on-shore facilities they needed for ferries, 2) Half Moon Bay isn't a US port of entry; anyone coming in from the boat would have to go through San Francisco, and 3) if people are going to work remotely, who needs a boat?
The reason we failed to get anywhere was that we couldn't find any viable path forward without raising $30M, and our team had neither (a) deep SV success & connections or (b) deep maritime experience and connections, so were unable to raise that money.
Finding the right MVP for seasteading is both extremely difficult and absolutely necessary for success.
Why did it seem at all realistic to execute a plan involving long-term boating stuff, without that maritime experience?
Of course the trick to solving any huge problem you have no experience in solving is to line up a list of all the things you would have to know before you could be successful and knock them off the list. In this case I'd expect first on the list would be to get a ship pilot's license.
The way the parent poster makes their situation sound, it'd be like saying "I'm starting an internet startup. I don't have anyone on my team who knows anything about computers or the tech industry, but....."
Vessels that are intended to house people but not go anywhere are called "accommodation ships". Most of them are barges intended to be moored in a protected harbor.[1] There are only a few deep-sea accommodation ships.[2][3] Those exotic ships have cranes for deep-ocean replenishment and refueling, and station-keeping thrusters so they can be stationary in deep water. Except for offshore construction and drilling operations, there's not much demand for housing people in the middle of the ocean.
There are used cruise ship brokers.[4] Amusingly, one of their ships is marked "This vessel is not for start up companies". Cruise ships are intended to make port regularly and be serviced and replenished in port. They don't have the cranes and station-keeping thrusters for routine deep-ocean replenishment. Navies do deep-ocean replenishment when necessary, but it's dangerous to bring two large ships close together. Here's U.S. Navy refueling at sea:[5]
The Seasteading scheme seems to avoid the problems of deep-sea operations. But if they're in waters shallow enough to build a breakwater, it's easier to fill or build on pilings.
The "offshore independent libertarian country in the ocean" scheme has been tried at least four times.[6] The concrete barge scheme in the 1970s sank in a hurricane. Building up a reef with barged-in sand was tried off Tonga in 1972. Tonga invaded and took it over. A platform on piles off Italy was tried in 1968; the Italian government sent four cops and took it over. And, of course, there is Sealand, an old tower off the coast of England, which continues to pretend it is a country.
This whole thing comes across as something from people who read Atlas Shrugged and took it too seriously. Then again, the Koch brothers might go for it.
[1] http://www.cfbv.com/accommodation-barges/ [2] http://eddaaccommodation.com/?fleet=eddafides [3] http://www.ulstein.com/Kunder/ulstein/cms66.nsf/pages/newsli... [4] http://cruiseship.homestead.com/cruiseships.html [5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAlATn4xm4I [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micronation#New-country_projec...
This is a potentially interesting project, if it can be done in a serious manner... a credible hulk, if you will.
>They had the idea that developers could live on the ship and freely visit Silicon Valley.
I am the one who helped them migrate their old WordPress theme to Layers (http://www.layerswp.com). I haven't quite finished yet, but I am pretty close.
Let me know if you have any feedback!
btw, I also helped them migrate their forum from bbPress to Discourse: http://discuss.seasteading.org
While I don't necessarily think that seasteading is worthless as a concept, this project is pie in the sky. You don't build cities. They grow. And if you want to grow a floating city, you have to build floating homes.
Build a seastead that supports just one person--one!--without logistical support from any landmass, and keep it afloat for a few years, and I might consider that you would one day be capable of a floating hamlet. But a whole city in 5 years? I call bullshit. Reichee Sowa did more with Spiral Island, and he couldn't even raise $15k on Kickstarter for life jackets and fire extinguishers.
Due to the proximity to (warm) water, storms would be much worse than on land - and there would be nothing to affix large structures to.
But TBF it's far easier to move what's essentially a giant fancy boat than it is to uproot a structure on land. When it comes to really massive (predictable) storms, I'd rather be living on an easily movable boat than a small island.
To build a structure that can withstand category 12 storm and above would require ridiculously good engineering. Water isn't wind, it's fucking heavy, and it hits like 100 trains.
The costs to build something like that must be in the billions. Heck, modern cruise ships cost more than a billion dollars.
I wonder what's the more challenging engineering: a submersible city or one that can survive cat 12 storms.
There's one guy on the forums who built a couple of concrete teardrop hulls and used them as yachts. He said they were pretty comfortable.
Umm... unlike cities on land, which never have problems with those?
Three main solutions have come up so far:
* Build above the surface, like an oil rig or a spar buoy
* Build under/go under the surface, like a semi submersible
* Brute force, using floating breakwaters
TSI is currently running with option three, although they were looking at option one a few years back.
This is one reason that in the US's early history, only land owners were allowed to vote.
Granted this faces the same issues that any other utopian social movement has faced in the past (reaching critical mass, working out the kinks in a new legal, political, and economic system, avoiding tyranny etc.) but at least it has an escape hatch built in.
If someone can figure out how to make these vessels as fool proof as a car (reasonably hard to ruin, owner operable, easily stocked with energy, affordable) they'll have no shortage of disgruntled citizens waiting to try one out.
You mean... mobile homes. John Steinbeck, in Travels with Charley, was very positive about the motorhome's possibilities. But we know how that dream turned out.
I do agree that prognostication is very rarely correct but the uses for the technologies in question go far beyond the political pipedreams of the seasteading society. If you could produce something equivalent to an RV for the sea you would absolutely have a market but with the major difference that the upper size limit on floating vessels is several orders of magnitude larger than that on land based vehicles.
There is already incentive to use structures like this in cities limited by waterfront. Their uses recreationally as a summer home are extremely evident if you've ever seen a lake filled with houseboats [1], floating data centres [2] also come to mind as well as those barges that Google built.
The biggest issue would be transportation to and from the mainland or between these structures but if they can be joined together at sea this problem quickly disappears as the number of connected structures increases.
Beyond that, there is still the very real possibility that this could open up the last and widest frontier on Earth and we'll have gone from prairie schooners to seasteads.
Also, with the increasing mobility afforded by a cell connection for phone and internet, there is a growing movement in the same vein as the original dreams for the future of the motorhome [3] I'd expect a seastead to more closely resemble a tiny house than an RV i.e. more house than vehicle, since people want to live in a house not a boat.
[1] https://youtu.be/HZJL5kry4UY?t=2m56s [2] https://www.google.com/patents/US7525207 [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_house_movement
[1] http://www.freightfarms.com/ [2] http://teslapowerwall.com/
You need something that can easily be restocked at sea.
The ship has to be able to never make port, because all ports are potentially controlled by potentially unfriendly government regimes, and defended by armed navies. The ideal of a seastead is to live indefinitely on the high seas, outside the jurisdiction or interference of any nation, as an unflagged vessel.
But the stride from here to there is so long that even Jean Claude van Damme would pull a groin muscle trying to make it in one step.
Operating a retrofitted extended-stay cruise ship under the flag of a disinterested landlocked nation would provide very valuable maritime experience. Even Carnival Cruise Lines, a company specializing in cruise operations, has had some trouble operating regular cruises. I can only imagine the sort of unmitigated disaster these guys could brew up if given enough cash.
Keeping a ship afloat at sea is not as easy as everyone seems to think. I'd like to see these guys keep a regular ship out of Davy Jones's locker, running experiments and proving concepts for a few years before I'd find them credible operators of colossal floating concrete platforms.
The Floating City Project combines principles of both seasteading and startup cities, by seeking to locate a floating city within the territorial waters of an existing nation. Historically, The Seasteading Institute has looked to international waters for the freedom... However, there are several reasons we are now seeking a host nation:... b) it will be easier for residents to travel to and from the seastead, as well as to acquire goods and services from existing supply chains; and c) a host nation will provide a place for a floating city within the existing international legal framework, with the associated protections and responsibilities.
[1] http://www.seasteading.org/2015/04/podcast-is-seasteading-be...
Arguing against government services while still using them is not in any way hypocritical, precisely because you have already paid for those services with taxes. For example, I am not a fan of social security and how it is managed, but you can be damn sure I will use it once I reach the required age, because I have already paid for it. I will be trying to get the money that was taken from me back.
I think socialized medicine is a huge, clunky band-aid on top of a broken healthcare system already made worse by government intervention, but I won't stop going into hospitals if the US adopted a fully socialized healthcare system.
But the whole point of building a city on a ship was to avoid any national law. If you want to partner with a real country, then might as well build the city on sparsely populated piece of land, and save on the expenses and inconveniences of ship based living. Charter cities and special economic zones seem like a promising idea to me, but seasteading always struck me as very silly.
I think they are trying to eventually become independent. I think of this as a kind of bootstrapping procedure, where they start off inside the waters of a nation, and eventually move into international waters once they are established. Indeed, staying inside a nation's waters indefinitely would be counter to their stated goals.
If these ships are movable, then one advantage over a land-based city is they could even change nations when they felt like it.
Sure, but a lot of the reasons they list are essential. E.g., calmer waters near large bodies of land and therefore in sovereign water. Proximity to supply chains that lead to/from large land-based populations. Etc.
> If these ships are movable, then one advantage over a land-based city is they could even change nations when they felt like it.
notahacker's sister post is spot on.
Well, no. Being out on the open sea would put them within the international legal framework. They're piggybacking on some national legal framework, and a big part of the ideology behind the project is getting away from said national legal framework. That is ironic.
> precisely because you have already paid for those services with taxes
I somehow highly doubt that they'll get the concessions they want from a government to whom they've paid taxes for years.
And what does a Hussein or a Castro care about efficiency?
The state arose judged against the harshest fitness measure known, the actual world.
"They should not be denied nor forgotten, but neither should they be worshiped. The Earth is beautiful, and bright, and kindly, but that is not all. The Earth is also terrible, and dark, and cruel. The rabbit shrieks dying in the green meadows. The mountains clench their great hands full of hidden fire. There are sharks in the sea, and there is cruelty in men’s eyes. And where men worship these things and abase themselves before them, there evil breeds; there places are made in the world where darkness gathers, places given over wholly to the Ones whom we call Nameless, the ancient and holy Powers of the Earth before the Light, the powers of the dark, of ruin, of madness…"
If you look at human history over the long term, the role of the state has only expanded over that time. I'm not saying it's the only possibility, merely that it's the most successful we've ever come up with to date.
> If the state goes down tomorrow and chaos reigns, would it be reasonable to argue against trying to change the status quo because Mad Max had been selected?
Maybe. Ask me again when all states disappear entirely and fail to re-arise.
That is a very good reason to be cautious about throwing something out wholesale. But it is also a good reason to not fear experimentation, because the official story is that it will show the incumbent to he superior.
> Maybe. Ask me again when all states disappear entirely and fail to re-arise.
Rather than ask a question, I'll make a statement:impersonal emergent forces of the kind we are talking about use a very greedy algorithm, and are very prone to local optima. There is a place for human assistance in finding where they "ought" to be.
And to top it all off, it is deeply ingrained into our culture at this point. So much so that children, from a young age, are told the rules and made sure to spread them to theirs. Simple logic get's thrown out the window by usually smart/intelligent people when you discuss the ethics of the state with them.
Besides that, you can't say for certain that the environment is selecting for efficiency rather than some other factor for which nation-states have a competitive advantage over non-state societies.
Nation-states are undoubtedly best at force projection. So long as people were generally accepting of their state razing foreign cities to the ground, salting their earth, slaughtering their men, and enslaving the rest, no other political structure could compete with a nation-state, fielding a professional army funded by taxes and pillage, and secured by fortifications constructed by taxes and forced labor.
If the fundamental operating principle of the world is that "might makes right" or "political power flows from the barrel of a gun", the nation-state is dominant. If the fundamental operating principle somehow shifts to "that which is hateful to you, do not do to others" or to "money makes the world go 'round", other political forms may realize an advantage over states.
For now, though, states rule the whole world. The laws of the high sea are for their convenience, as TSI will discover the instant they get big enough to make their own waves.
For small nations countries in need of land like Singapore sucking out sand from the ocean and refilling it will still probably be cheaper safer and more valuable due to the low maintanance filled land requires relative to a floating one.
Last I checked people living in cities have a better quality of live than those who don't? We have the longest life spans and are happier than we have ever been in part thanks to cities.
> Dealing with the logistic and infrastructure of a floating city will most likely make it too costly.
I think you're missing the whole point of seasteading. It's about freedom from government. Which will include tax avoidance, even if it's 10 times the cost of a normal city it's still viable if the rich want to move there.
Precisely the point of the detached nature of the planned houses. If there are thousands of different (yet most likely similar) governmental systems in place, then there are two options in this situation:
1. Up and leave, travel to a new city which fits better with your current modality.
2. If a large swath of the population is disenfranchised the government must act swiftly in order to keep the city running, otherwise its state will fail and everyone will detach and live elsewhere.
We will no doubt see many more failed systems than long-standing ones, which is essentially part of the appeal in my opinion.
TL;DR: Ponzi scheme, involving environmentally protected land, no water rights, wage theft, lawsuits.
(I was given Snow Crash 10 years ago. It contained a note explaining that it would become an illegal novel if laws against fictional pedophilia were passed as proposed. They were.)