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Here are some specific examples of areas which call for incremental paths. We will keep each path general, not putting them together into a complete plan until the Making It Happen chapter.
The most general area in which we must be incremental is the size of each project, in terms of cost and number of people. For these reasons, our plan includes a series of distinct stages, each involving a greater number of people.
First we complete a design, and build an aquarium-sized model. Then a pool-sized version. Next we build a habitable Baystead prototype for 5-10 people, anchored in sheltered waters within US boundaries, to demonstrate our seriousness and our design. This is the first point at which we need other people’s participation. We just need to find 5-10 people who are willing to live together, and don’t mind the level of creature comforts that can be achieved on a fairly small platform. While it will require a rare level of dedication to the concept to join this group of aquatic pioneers, we don’t have to find very many such people.
Next we need to find 25-100 people (or the equivalent in timeshares) who weren’t quite sure if seasteading was legit before, but seeing the demonstration by the first group, find it worthwhile to participate. They build the first deep-water, self-sufficient seastead. Next we find the 100 people who weren’t quite convinced by the small group … and so on. Smaller steps can be added if necessary.
There is plenty of historical precedent for this strategy of zealots seeding settlements. North America, for instance, was colonized mainly by members of minority religions such as the Puritans seeking to escape persecution. These dedicated folk were willing to put up with the discomfort of pioneering in exchange for religious freedom. The result of this passionate committment to a cause was, eventually, an increased level of civilization, and a beachhead for the less dedicated to follow.
At every step in incremental development, the standard of living increases due to economies of scale, refinement of techniques, and the network effects of the larger community. Rather than convincing 10,000 people from the beginning, you just keep bringing in those at the margin, who needed things to be just a little bit better to get involved. As interest in seasteading steadily grows, more units are steadily built. Each may cater to a slightly different audience, or experiment with different engineering designs and social systems. They will be modular and eventually cluster together into the grand visions many have proposed.
With advanced technology, the pioneering cycle is much shorter nowadays. It doesn’t take centuries to go from Conestoga wagons to skyscrapers, and we’ll get to start out with electricity, hot running water, and satellite telephones. But at the beginning, we still must be pioneers. We aren’t focusing on these humble first steps because we lack imagination, or don’t think a huge luxurious floating city would be amazingly cool. That sea city is our ultimate goal, but it is our firm belief that a sea village must come first - and a single sea house before that.
Although few people are devoted enough to drop everything and go found a new society (or even propose doing so), we think that everyone is, to some degree, a revolutionary. After all, who was the last person you met who was completely happy with everything about their society? While utopia is not an option, we do believe there are some fundamental reasons why seastead societies are likely to work better than terrestrial ones. As experimenting with new social systems becomes cheaper and easier, it will be a viable alternative for an increasingly large segment of humanity.
While our passions and preferences will dictate exactly where along the adoption curve you fall, in the next section we hope to at least convince you that a world with seasteads is a world worth working towards.
Many proposed ventures are impossibly large in scale. While grand visions are inspiring, they are difficult to make into reality, especially when the idea is novel and unproven. The Freedom Ship is a classic example. Their proposed mile-long design will cost ten billion dollars ($10,000,000,000.00). That sort of funding is not easy to get, to say the least, especially for a piece of property that might be destroyed by a storm (imagine the insurance premiums!). Things are made even worse because the only previous floating condominium ship, ResidenSea, lost a substantial portion of its quarter-billion dollar cost, even though it had sold many of its units in advance. It seems pretty unlikely that an investor will put up 40 times as much to try again.
Our designs are much smaller, and thus the path to funding them is much clearer. Our current estimates suggest that a complete, viable seastead for around a hundred people could be built for one one-thousandth of the Freedom Ship’s proposed cost, or about $100,000 / resident. Our platforms may not be a mile long, but which do you think has a better chance of getting built? We’ll take modest and real over huge and imaginary any day.
Past attempts to raise money from the community of nation founders have demonstrated the folly of depending on this small group. Those with substantial assets, usually older, are generally unwilling to drop their lives (homes, businesses, families) and move. Those with time and mobility, usually younger, rarely have the necessary cash. A viable project must find ways for both of these groups to participate. More importantly, it needs to draw interest from a much broader market. To put substantial effort into a nation-founding project, one must be a zealot of some type, and it is easy to ignore the less-zealous masses. The new territory must be interesting to more than the few eager separatists.
We believe that seasteads will appeal to a large group of customers, for reasons explained in detail in the Market section. One key device is a timesharing system, which lets people participate without having to lay their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor on the line right from the start. We think a graduational transition from traditional ways of life to our pioneering one is required for it to appeal to a significant number of people.
Sovereignty
A major issue facing prospective attempts at autonomy is obtaining sovereignty, which terrestrial governments are notoriously reluctant to sell, or recognition, which they are reluctant to give. Some examples discussed in the Review section include Minerva, Cortes Bank, and Laissez-Faire City. Thus we don’t think a realistic project should depend on obtaining sovereign land.
In the past, pioneers and malcontents would head to the frontiers, but few remain. The oceans, which make up 71% of the earth’s surface, have always been a place for those seeking new ways of life. They are the last great unclaimed region. Ships are not well suited for permanent living (although there is a subculture of live-aboard boaters [Hill1993]), but by creating new land on the oceans we can attain a reasonable combination of freedom and comfort.
Freedom of movement and self-sufficiency are both intimately connected with political freedom. Fixed locations such as seamounts, islands, and atolls are much more vulnerable to the whims of nearby governments, but a mobile seastead can always move if the political climate becomes unsuitable. While a seastead is likely to import many goods, being able to supply its own basic necessities will also add greatly to its independence. This is why seasteads are to some degree self-sufficient, and either roving or at least movable if necessary. This approach to nation founding reduces - but does not eliminate - the difficulty in finding sovereignty by operating in international waters. Further discussion of maritime law can be found in the Ocean Environment - Politics section.
A crucial part of our political realism is modesty in our goals. We won’t start out demanding recognition from other nations, acceptance of our passports, or a seat in the UN. We’ll asl only to be left alone to experiment with our pioneering lifestyle in peace. Frankly, we think it’s absurd for projects in the planning stage to focus significant effort on these matters. it’s like an american pioneering family who are planning their move west to an unsettled region thinking about how to get formal recognition as a state, when they should be worrying about cabins, crops, and packing their Conestoga wagon. The trappings of statehood can come later (if ever) when it is obvious that a group of seasteads qualifies as a country by any reasonable definition.
As you’ll read about under Ocean Environment, the farther one is from shore, the harsher the conditions. The waves are bigger, you are more remote, and further from help. Thus we recommend the following steps:
Early experimentation with seasteads should be done in sheltered waters, such as bays.
Next comes part-time presence in the ocean, such as prototypes that live in bays but venture out to the ocean for testing. Ships also go in this category, as they are designed to shelter in harbors.
Permanent coastal presence is another possible step, although it is not likely to be used much.
Permanent presence outside territorial waters (12nm) will be a big step towards independence. This is still within the EEZ, which means that only ships are autonomous, and artificial platforms are regulated.
Permanent presence greater than 200nm from land, outside the EEZ, will be the final step.
All of these can even be followed by the same structure! See the CoHousing Seastead path discussed below for an example.
TODO: Update this with current thinking. Advantages of coaststead (large potential scaling). Importance of breakwater stage. Baystead / Single-Family Seastead
Large things tend to grow organically, rather than being monolithically designed and built. We believe that focusing on grand results has two detrimental effects on a project: it distracts people with fantasy and it intimidates them from doing real work. By dividing our vision into workable chunks, each of which builds on the last, it has a much better chance of becoming reality. By keeping the initial costs low, it is possible to build the initial versions and show potential investors what they are getting into at each step of the way.
We see the succession of seasteads as something like:
Bathstead
This is little more than a small model that floats in a bathtub or an aquarium. It is useful to provide people a visual model of what is being attempted. The total platform area is about 100 cm2. It can be brought to talks and conferences. If there is interest, a number of small models could be produced and sold to enthusiasts.
Poolstead
This a 1-2 m2 platform that floata in a pool. It demonstrates basic stability and flotation principles. Wayne and Patri have experimented with building a Poolstead, although the design has since changed.
Baystead
This is the first habitation-sized platform, which is designed to live in sheltered waters such as the San Francisco Bay. While it would generate its own power and water, and grow some food, the residents could still buy propane and go to the grocery store for food. It is small enough to be easily funded by the residents ($25K-$100K each), and will serve as a demonstration of the concept. This is big enough to get signifcant publicity.
Coaststead
This is a tall, multi-level platform that can be towed out to the coastal regions of the ocean (international waters). In the event of a major storm, the owners may elect to have the device towed back into sheltered waters. It does not need to be fully self-sufficient. We expect it to cost between $400K and $1M dollars, and have room for 5-15 people. Coast may not be necessary along the path to autonomous territory, for there is a good chance of going from Bay directly to Lite. However there will be locations and uses for which Coast is the best size, so it will eventually be a seastead model. (Caveat: Our design for coaststead has changed considerably since this was written!)
Seastead Lite / Medstead
Locations such as the Mediterranean and Caribbean Seas are partially sheltered, and an excellent place to build a stead that is large, but not able to handle the 100+ foot waves that sometimes occur in the deep ocean. These areas are large enough that a large floating community could form, but small enough that trade with many other nations is quite feasible. Lite has a top deck of 5,000 m2, and will cost $3M - $15M.
Deep-Seastead
This is the final version with a column hundreds of feet long and lots of living area, intended to live out in the deep ocean. It should be almost entirely self-sufficient for necessities, and able to withstand any storm.
Each prototype will be larger, more expensive, able to deal with larger waves, and be more self-sufficient. While early ones may be built by volunteers, once we reach the Baystead or Coaststead stage, professional engineers and contractors will be hired. With enough interest and experienced engineers, it may be possible to jump directly to Baystead. While this may seem contrary to the succession idea, note that Baystead is still ten thousand times cheaper than the Freedom Ship - so we think it’s a reasonable starting point.
If we had to select an initial site for a prototype seastead to be anchored, we would probably select either the San Francisco Bay Area or the Puget Sound. Why? The computer industry has generated a simply astonishing number of individual multi-millionaires in the San Francisco Bay and Seattle areas. The future phases of seastead development could definitely benefit from the positive attention of a few millionaires. By locating the initial seastead prototype in one of these two areas, it is far more likely that one of these multi-millionaires will become interested in the seasteading project. Also two of the papers authors, Wayne and Patri, live in the SF Bay Area.
For credibility reasons, it is crucially important to have a large, self-funded prototype like Baystead or Coaststead before trying to attract people interested in larger platforms. There have been so many failed nation-founding projects that we must make a concrete demonstration that seasteading is different if we expect anyone to take us seriously. Such a prototype is likely to result in a lot of media attention. For example, Andrea Zittel described her [Pocket Property][refs.html#PocketProperty] experience in an interview:
_
AZ: Another problem was that I had fantasized about being completely alone on it in order to recover from a really hectic year. Instead, when I got out to the island, it seemed like every single boat owner in Denmark came out to circle my island while drinking a six-pack of Danish beer Every time I came out, they would all wave and ask what I was doing. After a while I just felt so overexposed that for the next project I’ve chosen a piece of land out in the desert, where no one will see me and I can finally be completely alone.
SB: You thought you were hiding, or going away to be alone, and all of a sudden you were on display and less alone than had you just stayed at home.
AZ:I was like a freak show out there!
_ [[Bomb2001]][refs.html#Bomb2001]
It is not only the seastead structures which will proceed incrementally. Part of the essential nature of a seastead is to provide infrastructure where it previously did not exist. But to build infrastructure takes infrastructure, so this process will also be incremental. By infrastructure we don’t just mean utilities, but all of the services which help a city to function.
Initially, the level of infrastructure on a seastead will be low, and services will be expensive. Thus it behooves the developers to start with the businesses which least rely on infrastructure, or benefit the most from the seastead environment. With these businesses operating, the seasetad can expand. Now experience and economies of scale will lower the infrastructure costs, allowing a wider range of businesses to be cost-effective. And so on.
This is the same organic way in which real cities grow. New York did not start with skyscrapers, it started with pioneers. Seasteads will be able to progress much more quickly, but they must still go through the same incremental process. If it sometimes seems like we focus overly much on the initial, rough levels of infrastructure, it’s not because we don’t want to build a floating Hong Kong. it’s because this is what’s required at the beginning, and the beginning of nation-founding appears to be very difficult. We believe it’s vital to focus on starting the process, and not be too distracted by visions of the end results.
Eric Hunting suggests an interesting strategy for incremental growth of a floating city. Rather than building the city all at once and immediately towing it into location, build it piece by piece close to a major city. Residents slowly and steadily move on-board, while still having access to the infrastructure of civilization, which serves to supplement and back up the developing infrastructure of the new colony. This allows people to get to know each other, get used to self-sufficiency technology, and steadily transition their work to the new economy. As various milestones are reached, the growing structure can be moved farther away. Eventually, when it is complete enough, the colony can be towed to its final location.[[Hunting2001]][refs.html#Hunting2001]
A possible variation is that instead of moving away the entire colony, the initial “seed” unit could remain behind, to start the growth of another city. People who were not yet ready to leave could stay with the seed.
The same ideas that apply to incrementally growing infrastructure apply to growing the seastead population. The initial seastead environment will be high in freedom but low in infrastructure. Thus we must start out with the few enthusiasts willing to trade comfort for freedom. They will create an environment of higher comfort, and can bring in those who need that higher level. The process repeats, with each expansion lowering the costs and increasing the comfort, and thus making possible the next expansion.
Similarly we anticipate that many of the initial residents will live onboard only part-time. (Many more people vacation in rustic cabins than live in them year-round). But their presence and economic contributions will allow the colony to grow, and thus make it more suitable for full-time residence. While seasteads are not terribly expensive compared to first world housing, timesharing aids with two potential financial roadblocks.
One is that mortgages will not be available for quite awhile, so individuals will proably need to pay up front. Timesharing means that they can steadily pay for more and more shares until they are full-time. This is not as convenient as a mortgage, since the person can only live there as often as they’ve paid for instead of moving in at the beginning and paying interest. But it’s still better than having to pay the whole thing before enjoying any of it.
The second is that the number of jobs onboard will be limited at first. This especially applies to high-paying jobs, which tend to be in specialized fields which require a large population to support. So the prospective full-time seasteader must either be independently wealthy or be able to run a business on board. While there will be some people like this, it’s a small market. Timesharing lets people earn their main income elsewhere while the internal economy develops.