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We must note that this book was not only written to entertain and inform, but as a practical guide and a compendium of our research. These two purposes require very different levels of detail, and so we’ve had to compromise.
At some points, the casual reader may find the level of detail high enough to only interest those who are actually designing or implementing such systems. Rather than getting bogged down in the numbers, feel free to skim. While we know it can be boring at times, please reflect that our diligence is an indication that our ideas have been well-researched. The world is full of visions, but making them into reality requires spending a lot of time on the mundane details.
More technically inclined readers may find our level of detail inadequate. Calculators at the ready, they cry “Forget Review and Motivation, where are the blueprints?” (or perhaps DXF files nowadays). If this book consisted of a complete design for every system onboard, no one would read it (if it was ever finished). Such readers must console themselves with the thought that a more readable book will hasten the spread of our ideas and thus the progression to a stage that involves DXF files.
Our main goal is simply to make sure each potential problem can be solved and get a feel for the solution. Detailed design can wait until someone starts a business and hires engineers.
While the authors have a libertarian viewpoint, we want to stress that seasteading is politically agnostic. We’re attempting to describe (and create) an enabling technology for small-scale sovereignty. This will give many different groups the autonomy to experiment with their theories. We find it very satisfying to be empowering all minority political groups, not just advancing our own vision.
Since this technology enables many alternative societies, some of them will be very, very different from each other, so we’re mostly trying to give an overview of the common elements. We do have to make some occasional assumptions about the type of society to do this. Being libertarians, it is most natural for us to make libertarian assumptions. For the non-libertarians, rather than getting annoyed when you see political beliefs you disagree with, try to focus on the fact that this technology will give you too a chance to show that your ideas can work in practice.
This book evolved from the internet tradition of collaboration and many:many communication, rather than the traditional one:many paradigm. Rather than simply being written and then published, drafts have been available online at every stage. For most of the book’s lifetime, it had a mechanism for adding user comments (written by Patri). Thus the book has been a continuous dialogue between authors and readers, and many changes have been made as a result of commenter feedback.
In late 2007, we transitioned to a new website and a new authoring system for the book, and disabled commenting (which by that point had attracted a lot of spam). Our priority right now is to revise and publish the book, but we also intend to re-enable comments at some point, using a third-party commenting system.
In this book we tend to focus on smaller seasteads, thus giving short shrift to technologies like nuclear power plants and OTEC. That’s because getting started is the most important stage, and it’s the challenge we face right now. By the time there is an ocean city big enough to need an OTEC generator, the seasteading movement will be big enough to have plenty of ideas of its own - some borne from experience which we don’t yet have. We just want to get the ball rolling and seed the discussion with some initial thoughts and research, so we can someday get to that point.