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It is worth discussing what facilities are needed and or desirable on a seastead, as well as what special problems these facilities may pose.
Being an isolated environment, a seastead will need some facilities for medical care. The larger the seastead, the larger these facilities can be. Elaborate trauma, burn, or IC units and surgical facilities will not be possible on smaller seasteads. Serious injuries will have to be transported to land by airplane or helicopter, which may be dozens to thousands of miles away. Contrary to popular impressions, while quick medical care at the paramedic level is certainly important, the need for quick medical care at the surgical level is rare. People rarely die quickly in ways that could have been saved by surgical facilities, and even serious accidents usually allow enough time for transportation. Paramedic level facilities can easily be incorporated in Seastead Lite, and perhaps a minimal ER.
One way of looking at medical emergencies on a seastead is that it is similar to life in rural or remote areas. While urban dwellers may be accustomed to a high concentration of hospitals, many people, even in the first world, are presented with the same set of options. Deal with it yourself, go to someplace nearby with poor facilities, or face a long drive or expensive chopper ride to a real hospital. Seasteads will have advantages over rural dwellers in that they can guarantee that trained personnel and lower-levels of care are much more accessible than places where the nearest doctor might be dozens of miles away. And seasteads can have airplanes and/or choppers ready, where rural dwellers must wait for them to be dispatched.
If drug laws are lax on seasteads, and especially if drug use is one of the selling points, the infirmary will wish to be prepared for drug-related emergencies, and the staff trained in handling them.
The infirmary will not need much additional infrastructure. It will need oxygen hookups or simply oxygen tanks, which may be able to be refilled during electrolysis. { ?? pressurizing issues ?? }. It will need sterilizing facilities such as an autoclave, and distilled water rather than R/O or rainwater.
Part of being self-sufficient is the ability to fix things which break and make new things yourself. Thus a good shop will be necessary. We’ll need a small machine shop (lathe + mill + bandsaw + drill press), some welding capability (both arc welding, oxy-acetelyne, and probably TIG (Tungsen Inert Gas), and probably some wood shop tools (table saw, radial saw, belt sander). Lastly, we’ll need compressed air for a bunch of compressed air tools.
Shops tend to be noisy and sometimes smelly, and they should be located with that in mind. We’ll also need to conserve space, so we may want put the tools on wheels, they can be stored in a compressed format when not being used. There will not be enough room to have all the tools out in a static layout. Instead, they will be moveable, and we can deploy whatever set is necessary for the current job.
It may be useful to have a small foundry as part of the shop. Whenever some tool is needed, it can be rough cast out of aluminum, and machined to final form. When the tool is no longer needed or breaks, it can be thrown back into the scrap heap, melted down and reused. All hand tools such as shovels, rakes, screw drivers, etc. would be candidates for this level of reuse. This allows a modest amount of metal to be reused over and over again.
Anything to say? Energy efficient appliances (if frequently used), small space, efficient storage.
{ Does this seem like a good place to have a discussion of “community”? - P}
A seastead will consist of like-minded individuals sharing a small space, thus it will be a community. Having many facilities be communal reduces their cost and the space used. The land-based pattern where everyone has their own kitchen, their own tool shop in the garage, their own TV/movie setup, their own boat and so forth is just not suited to seastead life. Fortunately, as with many of the problems we face, we can draw from solutions which other groups are finding in other contexts.
The Cohousing and Intentional Communities movements have been experiencing a resurgence in the past few decades. Cohousing started in europe and has been spreading to the US. ?? The FIC listing has hundreds of communities in the US??. This movement has experience in architectural designs which provide reasonable and efficient combinations of private and public space. The CoHousing Company [ref], located in Berkeley, CA, USA, offers advice on all stages of community creation. We feel that it would be desirable to hire them as consultants on the interior layouts and designs of the seastead. They are used to working alongside traditional architects and engineers, although working with marine engineers may be a new experience.
Seasteads whose residents are paying first-world prices will certainly be able to have private space for individuals. (If poorer people wish to seastead, they may not get private space, which is a sacrifice that they will need to make, and may be used to making in their land-based life.) However, especially with early seasteads, most facilities will be shared. Kitchens, lounges, workshops, gardens, and so forth will all be common. This has some definite advantages. It should be easy for a seastead to amass quite a large library of movies and music, for example.