Survival Arts

Seasteading: an introduction

Like many libertarians, I've always wanted to live someplace free, and have been unhappy at not finding one. I've followed the nation founding movement with interest, and quite a bit of skepticism. In fact, my critical webpage about the Freedom Ship earned me my first threatened lawsuit. I also have a page of collected nation founding links, (which may be a little out of date at this point).

I am passionate enough about the subject to have considered trying to start my own new country project. My plan was to watch, gather information, learn useful skills, and eventually join or start a realistic venture. I didn't expect that to happen for a decade, but after a couple years I found Wayne Gramlich's first seastead paper. I was struck by the practicality of his thinking, which stood in stark contrast to most of what I had seen. Conveniently, he lived a couple miles away, and we began collaborating, along with Andy, an engineer.

The project is still in development, but I'll provide a quick sketch here of what makes seasteading realistic. There are several keys: proven technologies, scalability, and size, each of which is related to lessons learned from other failed ventures.

We are depending on proven technologies, not OTEC (which is currently experimental and requires huge plants to attain net positive energy generation) or seacrete (which is quite expensive when you use the correct figures, 0.1 lb/kwhr, not 4.2). The hull is made from ferrocement, power is generated by a combination of wind turbines, PV panels, and gas generators. This design turns out to be relatively inexpensive per unit area.

Lack of scalability is a classic mistake made by projects such as the Freedom Ship. Their structures are huge and monolithic, which means that in order to make them happen, vast capital is required. It also means that they are vulnerable to destruction by natural or human means. Big things usually appear in this world by growing from small things: "Rome wasn't built in a day". The way to make a tremendous vision happen is to bootstrap it and make sure that each level can create the next, like an inductive proof in mathematics.

Finally, modesty in goals of size is another strong factor in realism. Some other projects have looked for 100 - 1,000 times as much money as our first self-sufficient design is projected to cost. Frankly, we find them ludicrous. The only place you'll find the word "billion" used by seasteaders is in talking about other ventures. In order to have a sea city, we must start with a sea village.

Our research and designs are still under development, and we want our plans to be solid before we start with the mailing lists and fancy websites and all that. Check back in a few months, and be assured that we are plugging away in the meantime. Our first prototype will not be huge, but it will be buildable. We think actual implementation is the most exciting part of any vision.

Posted by Patri Friedman at November 19, 2002 12:05 AM | TrackBack