Paypal Founder Puts a Half Million Dollars Into Seasteading

eldavojohn writes "Wired is running an informative article on Paypal Founder Peter Thiel's investment in seasteading. There's a great graphic indicating how the spar design helps platforms weather rough seas with a ballast. There's a lot more than just Thiel throwing the half million towards this and they hope to pitch this to San Fransisco for a bay pilot. Ocean colonies can be both liberating and also downright human-rights-lacking scary."

Comments

Best current bet for utopia

[solweil]

It is clear by now that we will not have the possibility for independent space colonization anytime soon. Seasteading is the best bet for those of us who feel that the status quo of society is not good enough.

Re:Best current bet for utopia

[Bombula]

I'm not sure seasteading is necessarily the best bet. Creating artificial islands might be more feasible than creating floating platforms. There are a vast number of seamounts just under the ocean's surface (ie: within 20 meters) that lie well outside any territorial waters of nations, particularly in the southwestern Pacific and the mid-atlantic. I'm not sure the advantages of mobility offered by seastead platforms outweigh the advantages of building up from the seafloor itself. And don't get locked into thinking this could only be done by building a tower down from the surface. For a a relatively modest cost (hundreds of millions), artificial islands make from deposited rubble just like the projects in Dubai could be undertaken in hundreds of locations worldwide.

Re:no thanks

[pjt48108]

My bet is that these colonies can be the next Atlantis if someone finds a cheep way to use the local resources to make sturdy building material (something like nanites that turn the sand into quartz). However that is a LONG way off. Once upon a time, I read a book which addressed this issue, albeit for a different seafaring concept. It involved using manganese (I seem to recall) bars in a mesh, which, when electricity was run through it, would accrete calcium carbonate to it from seawater. Eventually, this would create a shell on which the colony would float, and from which further accretions could expand it.

The concept also involved leveraging temperature differentials in seawater to generate electricity, and using the immediate vicinity of colonies to farm algae, etc. Using these colonies as a hub of a hydrogen economy was also envisioned.

These ideas made it into a website for the Living Universe Foundation, but I don't recall if the book had any connection to them or not.

Great Pacific Garbage Patch

[dazedNconfuzed]

Here's a crazy idea...

Word is there exists the Great Pacific Garbage Patch which is the accumulation of seaborne trash into a blob somewhere on par with Texas in size.
Now work with me here ...
That's a whole lotta floating stuff already in a relatively stable position (occupying a major ocean current vortex); surely an inventive aspiring frontiersman could turn that mass of materials into an inhabitable floating island. Material acquisition & relocation is already mostly taken care of, as there's a Texas-sized mass of it already there. Much of it is plastic, which should be easily (for the "news for nerds" crowd) reformed on-site into more suitable structures. It's already in a stable vortex, so it's not going to be unmanagably mobile, and remains well outside any nation's claimable waters. There may already be sufficiently compacted sections to stand on & start work from.

Thoughts?

This absolutely boggles the mind...

[BobMcD]

The first thing that came to my mind was this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._Peterbus_Unum

While he article touches on a lot of the obvious issues (piracy, sovereignty, etc), they seem to have missed this episode of Family Guy.

For the purpose of discussion, here's a short list of other issues that don't seem that trivial to me:

1) No natural resources. Or in other words, there's nothing there that anyone wants. You might be able to grow your own food and harvest the necessities from the sea, but you can basically forget about having any exports. This would be a deficit economy just about any way you shake it.

2) Environment is fatal to humans. Should the platform sink, everybody dies. Few of the places on earth with this level of lethality house humans for any real length of time without some really compelling reason to be there (see above...)

3) 'Nation problems'. Without any allies, any nation can declare war on you and sink you. You're a nation now, so you're expected to play at that level. Likewise, your neighbor on his own platform can declare war on you - he's running a nation, too. PirateBay platform, meet the RIAA platform... Do you plan to appeal to the United Nations? Can you even do that if you're not a member? What about trade agreements? There's really a LOT to consider here.

4) 'Hot button' nations. Can Osama float a platform and no longer be considered a terrorist, rather a dictator? What about those pedo-polygamists? Can't they just float a platform and go right on forcing marriage and sex on pre-teens? And if this is possible, wouldn't others want desperately to sink them? Or, if not sink you could they not simply blockade you, or otherwise apply pressure to cut you off from the outside world?

I guess what I'm trying to say is: Nations are nations because of where they are and what they have, not merely because of their desire to be independent.

Peter eventually caved. He didn't even manage to get an ink-pen for his trouble...

Re:no thanks

[StikyPad]

Exactly.. storms and quakes are dangerous enough on land. And while there may not necessarily be physical assets worth plundering (because rich people never keep their valuables on hand, I guess), there are still protection rackets, hostage/ransom situations, and random violence to contend with, and as a wealthy independent nation, you'd be ripe for all of the above.

You'd have low volume, high cost, and high reliance on imports, with little to nothing to export, except perhaps intellectual property (with no means to protect), assuming you even believe in IP as a libertarian. Satellite internet is high latency, low bandwidth, and most people would probably be dissatisfied with such limited connection to the outside world.

Cabin fever is all but guaranteed, and an active social life is basically out of the question. You'd have to worry about mutiny, sabotage, fires, fresh water supply, leaks, maintenance, and all the other concerns of a seagoing vessel, without the convenience of being able to pull into a port if things get hairy. In short, it seems like the disadvantages seriously outweigh any advantage of pseudo-independence (pseudo, since you're still reliant on the outside world to A) play nice, and B) supply you with durable goods and consumables).

But what do I know? I've only spent 6 years in the Navy, and 6 years living on a small island.. not like I've had any relevant experience.

Re:heh

[Ungrounded Lightning]

Also wondering about food, waste disposal and power.

The ocean is full of tasty critters.

The critters dump their organic waste into the water, where it is recycled by other critters. Why shouldn't the humans? (They already do it on ocean-going vessels. Blackwater is an issue on land and enclosed waterways, not in mid ocean.)

For non-biodegradable waste: Jetsam dumped overboard in deep water won't be an issue for geologic time. That leaves flotsam, which would have to be dealt with in more ordinary ways. (Fortunately, that's a small amount of the waste and mostly imported anyhow. So it can be shipped out to some place that can handle it.)

At most latitudes there's lots of wind available, with no mountains, trees, and buildings to slow it down. (Sometimes there's a bit more wind than you'd like.)

If you want to settle the "horse latitudes" (where there's rarely wind), there's plenty of solar power. And a handy way to tap it is to pump up cold water from deeper down and run a heat engine on the temperature difference between it and the upper-level water. Then you dump the nutrient-rich deep water locally and farm the resulting massive explosion of plants and critters.

The idea that purchasing a flag of convenience will providing meaningful protection seems a bit naive..

Flags of convenience are a protection against GOVERNMENT predation. (Which is essentially the point of this whole exercise.)

Will every citizen be a trained firefighter? Who will provide emergency medical services?

The same sort of people who provide such services on ocean-going vessels or in houses in very rural areas. These are already solved problems - with solutions that vary depending on the size of the community and the degree of its location's isolation.

Re:Sweet

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Pirates? Sex? Hell, the cabin boys are already trembling in fear.

The real scary proposition represented in these platforms is the further breakdown of human society. The haves and have-nots of existing bad urban planning will be magnified. "Haves" on clean, platforms with exploited labour imported sans regulation and protection from the Philippines. "Have-nots" on the toxic-waste dumps of continental land - allowed to degrade and suffer.

This is a vision from H.G. Wells "The Time Machine". The moral problem with "Transhumanists" is that they regard human beings as expendable - in much the same way that 19th-century industrialists viewed drayage horses.