The book you are reading is in draft form (perhaps eternally). We believe in transparency and immediate feedback, so we’d rather make something imperfect available right away then wait until it is polished. Also we’d rather work on adding ideas and content than on making it look perfect, so it will always be a little rough. If you’d prefer a slick presentation, there are lots of failed and inactive projects listed in the Review section which were better at hiding their warts. Some of them even still have websites up.
The first version of this book was written in 2002-2003, when the primary author (Patri) had neither a job nor a family. Since then, our thinking has evolved, based on reflection, discussion, and new information. Some of these changes have made their way into the text, but due to limitations on the time available for writing, many have not. Patri is now Executive Director of The Seasteading Institute (as of 4/15/2008), which means more time available for writing, but also a more rapid evolution of new ideas. We believe that the text will catch up quite a bit during 2008, but it will always be a bit behind our latest thinking. Fortunately, thanks to modern Print On Demand technology, new printed copies will always reflect the latest text.
Some of the key things we’d like to change when we get more time are:
Structure Designs: Talk about 2 structure designs: dumbbells and flat boxes (the later either in the doldrums or protected by breakwaters). We no longer believe that dumbbells are the best structure, we think there is a lot to be said for flat boxes in the doldrums, even for early-stage ocean settlements.
Making It Happen: Modify to reflect the creation of TSI and our latest thoughts about realistic business models and incremental paths.
Making Money - Emphasize aquaculture more strongly as a top business model, as events in the past 5 years have made the case for it even stronger. Add algae for biofuels as an important potential revenue source, given the high price of oil and importance of finding alternative fuels.
by Patri Friedman, Wayne Gramlich, and Andrew House
Work in Progress, 2002-2008
This edition is dated April 20, 2008 10:31 AM.
Abstract
A seastead is a structure designed specifically for permanent living on the ocean’s surface. There are many aspects to designing such structures, including motivation, engineering, infrastructure, and project planning. The primary motivations for living on these structures are a desire for political and/or religious freedom, a more environmentally sound way of life, and the sheer adventure of it all. A seastead must be able to withstand strong waves, winds, and currents. We describe previous attempts at ocean occupation and several possible designs. Our top choice is based on a hollow vertical tube, called a spar. A ballasted flotation hull is attached at the bottom and a living platform is attached at the top. The spar keeps the hull well below the waves and the platform well above them. The residents will also require food, water, and energy. Energy comes from a combination of solar, wind, wave, and diesel generators, water comes from collected rainwater, solar distillation, and reverse osmosis, and food from hydroponics and high density “victory gardens.” We advocate an incremental development model based on niche markets and prototypes, rather than a single large and financially risky project.
In this paper, we’ll demonstrate that a combination of technologies has finally given the lie to Mark Twain’s famous line about the real estate business. Imagine the tremendous possibility of being able to create new acreage on the vast and empty oceans. The environment may be less friendly, but the increased freedom will appeal to a motivated minority who are fed up with terrestrial politics. These aquatic pioneers will settle civilization’s next frontier through the unusual merger of green technology and free enterprise. Once there, they will experiment with new social, political, and economic systems, adding much-needed variety and innovation to the stagnant business of government.
As the earth’s population steadily increases, so does the pressure to open new frontiers. While the oceans have long been used for transportation, this book is an extended thought experiment about how they could support permanent settlements. Considering these issues will be invaluable no matter which way humanity next expands. In particular, the ocean bears some definite similarities to space: the final frontier, which will surely be an important part of our near future.
For background, we’ll review the conventional water-based lifestyles like floating homes, sailboats, cruise ships, and oil platforms. You’ll also learn about some of the other ways people have successfully leveraged international waters for political freedom, like the european pirate radio movement of the 60’s and 70’s. We’ll describe some of the scores of colorful new-country projects proposed and attempted over the years. While the ideas are wide-ranging, including ships, reefs, spars, hexagonal cells, reeds, and tetrahedrons, they all share one thing in common - utter lack of success.
While this is an unfortunate trend, we’ll explain how we’ve learned from these past mistakes. Far from being dreamy-eyed utopians, we are serious planners with realistic principles for bringing this strange vision to life. This realism dictates an incremental approach, modest political goals, reliance on mature technology, self-financing, and a willingness to make compromises.
While we’re practical-minded and most of this book is dedicated to the how of seasteading, it’s crucial to also explain why people are interested in small-scale sovereingty. In perhaps the most vital section, we’ll outline the simple economic theory which suggests that ocean-based societies will actually work better than terrestrial ones. The relative ease of moving around entire buildings on the water means that political units will be dynamic, and so governments must be responsive and efficient or they will lose citizens. This effect will work automatically to improve institutions, regardless of the specific political system chosen. The ocean is not a booby prize.
Before planning such a venture, it behooves us to understand the ocean environment. This includes fearsome waves like the so-called rogues, known as the “Monsters of the Deep”. Scientists are finally acknowledging that this deadly phenomenon is not just an old sailor’s tale. Contrary to what you may expect, tsunamis, high winds, and small-scale pirates will prove to be little danger. The tangled morass of international maritime politics and law is a far greater concern. While current nations are likely the greatest challenge to this new way of life, we’ll sketch some promising solutions. We can’t reassure skeptics completely, but there are reasons to be hopeful.
Once our goals, motivations, and obstacles are understood, we can examine designs for meeting them. We’ll cover a wide variety of structures for living on the ocean, from boats to oil rigs to undersea habitats. We’ll also examine some of the basic design choices which must be made. These include whether a seastead should be free floating or fixed in one place, whether to use breakwaters or pillars to stop the waves, how to make floating-cities modular, and whether to purchase new or used structures. With these considerations in mind, we’ll present more detail on our preferred design, the spar platform. This structure avoids the massive energy of ocean waves by keeping its platform above them and its flotation below. In between is a thin pillar which presents little cross-sectional area to the waves.
For the engineers and home power hobbyists, we’ll outline how to provide the amenities of civilization on a floating platform. From our unique angle, we’ll review the field of self-sufficient technology like solar panels, wind turbines, reverse osmosis, satellite internet, and hydroponics. Along the way, we’ll debunk the myths that floating cities can be cheaply and effectively built from a material called “seacrete” or powered by OTEC generators.
However, solving these engineering challenges is meaningless unless we can solve the substantial business challenges as well. Sure, with enough money the ocean can be made habitable. But where will it come from? How will seasteads make money? Who will want to live there? Is there a big enough market? The lack of a good incremental plan has been a major flaw in other ventures, so we must address these crucial questions with a plan for getting from here to there through a series of realistic steps.
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 are realistic. The world is full of visions, but making them into reality requires spending a lot of time on the mundane.
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). Our thought was that this book is already targeting a niche market, and if it 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 we are starting a business and hiring engineers.
While the authors come from 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 philosophies the autonomy to experiment with their theories. And 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. Rather than getting annoyed when you see political beliefs you disagree with, try to understand 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. 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 and early 2008, we transitioned to a new website and a new authoring system for the book, and during this period comments are disabled. Rest assured that we are working to integrate the new version of the book to our new community site at http://seasteading.org/ and re-enable commenting.
We hope that many readers will immediately see the appeal of seasteading, but we expect some to be mystified, asking: “Why would anyone want to go live on a platform in the ocean?” Until you understand why we believe this to be a promising path towards a better future, the details are likely to be of little interest. Thus we will start by answering these questions:
We’ll answer them in very different ways, however:
We’ll mainly punt on this. After all, who doesn’t get frustrated sometimes with government or politicians?. Instead of discussing the failures of democracy in detail, we’ll just provide some brief evidence that many different groups are dissatisfied with current societal options and looking for a new frontier to try new things. We’ll also provide some references for those interested in digging into the details of why government so often works so poorly.
Here is where we believe we can make a real contribution, with a new way of looking at government efficiency which suggests simple reasons why politics sucks now and how it can be made to suck less. This theory suggests that the ocean-based societies can have the least sucky governments the world has ever seen. However, they must leverage the ocean’s unique qualities, otherwise they will fall into the same pitfalls as current countries.
While we will have plenty to say here, none of it will be very profound. It’s merely the application of common sense to an area (founding new countries on the ocean) where it has been sadly lacking. While our approach seems obvious to us, each of our tenets is something which we have seen violated by other proposals and movements, so we feel they are worth laying out.
The Pioneer
“Another great project, destroyed”, sighed Carl, as he tossed the last 2x4s from his 3-story observation tower into the bonfire. His campmates, clad in paint and luminescent wire, danced, drummed, and drank in a circle around the blaze. It was the night of the Burn, and as always, he felt down. He knew some people loved the ephemeral nature of the festival, but to him it seems like a waste. So much creativity, so much hard work, all to be burned or torn down or at best packed and taken back to be put into a garage until next year. It had been so much fun to put the camp together: make showers and tents and set up generators and solar panels. But he wanted to build things that lasted, have art and creativity and vision and community be a lifestyle, not just a vacation. If only there was someplace where Burners could build a permanent Black Rock City and bring that spirit of art and adventure into their everyday lives…
The Environmentalist
Judy felt frustrated as she left the city council meeting. Her proposal to levy fines on recyclables left in ordinary trash seemed to her like such a reasonable idea, why did it ignite so much argument? Americans generated such sickening amounts of trash - all she wanted was to help cut down on it a little bit. “For a town that was supposedly environmentally conscious, they are awfully close-minded around here”, she thought. She remembered that article she’d read about a Costa Rican ecovillage. It would be so relaxing and inspiring to live somewhere where everyone was of the same mind about not polluting the Earth. They could serve as an example to the rest of the world that you didn’t have to damage the environment to live. But it ? If only there was a place that was sustainable and civilized…
The Pacifist
Glen clicked off the news angrily. Another day, another half-dozen deaths from that quagmire in Iraq. And that was just US soldiers - who knew how many innocent Iraqi citizens had died? What he hated most was that he was paying for those bullets, paying for those bombs. Sure, he hadn’t voted for Bush, but the IRS took his tax dollars anyway. And not like the damn Democrats were doing much about all that military spending. It seemed like everyone in DC was on the take. One person just couldn’t make a difference in a country this size, not unless he was a billionaire or some kind of internet-activism genius. If only he could live somewhere where he only paid for things he approved of, or at least got to choose where his money went, he’d be so much happier…
Do people like Carl, Judy, and Glen really exist? The natural pioneers need only a mirror to answer that question, but others may take more convincing. So we’d like to briefly cite some actual groups which seek the autonomy to live under and experiment with different political, social, and economic systems than currently exist. There is a longer list in the Review chapter.
The residents of these future cities, throughout the world, will show by exemplary actions that people of different races and divergent political, religious, cultural and social beliefs can live and prosper together while also being good stewards of the earth, respecting, and thereby benefiting all inhabitants and ecosystems of the planet.Celestopia
There are tax benefits: no federal tax on coroporate profits, no state corporation tax, no social security tax. And any open sea facility is a free port. You can bring in any raw materials and ship out any finished products, without paying tariff duties. Outside government jurisdiction on the open sea, there are no regulatory agencies to contend with. You can dispense with the expense and bother of excessive paperwork, forms, and reports. You won’t be ordered to waste your time appearing before government bodies. Licenses and permits will be things of the past. Government litigation and harassment, and the uncertainty caused by changing laws, regulations, and interpretations will be eliminated.
[Fisher1985, pp. 48-49]
If we are going to colonize space, it is best to colonize the easiest space first…Living in colonies at sea will teach us many crucial lessons about life in space. The isolation, self-sufficiency, and political autonomy of sea colonies are the same as those of space colonies. Both types will impose many of the same requirements on their inhabitants…The Moon is a harsh mistress; we would be wise to learn these early lessons while still in Earth’s gentle lap. [Savage1992 pp. 23-24]
If humankind is to survive, I see no alternative to expanding outward into space. And this doesn’t just mean settling on other planets and moons. They will be just as vulnerable to doomsday weapons as the Earth, and there aren’t enough of them to insure that some will survive an Armageddon. Only a large number of communities well dispersed in the volume of space seems likely to have a chance…The establishment of such communities space would constitute a Golden Age of new-country formation in the next few centuries. Those who gain experience in the new-country field now are the most likely to be ready to seize the new opportunities when they arise – or to see their children and their children’s children in a position to do so.
[Strauss1984 p. 47]
Drug users care deeply about the freedom to ingest whatever chemicals they desire [Island]. In many current societies, they are subject to arrest, jail, and the confiscation of their property.
Individuals who are Environmentally Intolerant (EI), such as those suffering from Multiple Chemical Sensitivity, seek environments with minimal contamination from human chemicals:
Waterfront property offers some of the cleanest air anywhere by virtue of the high rate of ambient air exchange afforded by ocean or lake breezes. Even regions with relatively bad general pollution levels enjoy orders of magnitude cleaner air along the shore, as long as there are regular breezes. Unfortunately, few people can now afford such property -especially those who need it most. A floating home offers a potentially unlimited amount of waterfront real estate with no land cost. You can have as much as you can afford to build. There are no surrounding lawns and trees to generate pollen, no roads with cars to generate pollution -though, of course, boats are still a pollution issue albeit far less than automobiles. [Hunting]
Perhaps at this point you are wondering where this book falls on the list. Personally, your author’s views definitely match the “libertarian” label. But don’t be deceived into thinking that seasteading is just a means to libertarian ends. While we began exploring it as part of trying to achieve our own vision of an ideal society, it turned out to be a much, much bigger idea.
There are many perspectives on what would make a better world and how to get there. Not surprising, since people have different dispositions, experiences, culture, and ideas. Yet current political systems are few in type and number, because they don’t currently allow these different perspectives to be tried out. Instead, the ideas just get endlessly debated. Seasteading is nothing less than an enabling technology for allowing people to try all these ideas about new forms of social organization. This will result in a diverse ecosystem of alternative societies (as we’ll explain in more detail in the next part of “Why?”)
The ability to experiment with a new system will produce both internal and external benefits to the pioneering seasteaders. First, they’ll be able to pick a society and live in harmony with their values. Second, each society will serve as an experiment, to see how its system works in practice. So individuals will be able to live their personal ideal lifestyles, while increasing our collective wisdom about social organization. Talk about a win-win!
Nor is this a small benefit. Government is one of the largest sectors of the world economy, yet it has benefited the least from technological development. The last major breakthrough was representative democracy, with the early adopter being the USA in 1776. Think about it - we get new car models every year, new electronic devices pop up every time we go to the store, but we only get new types of government every few hundred years! We’ll discuss why this is in the next section, but for now, just think about what an enormous drag this moribund industry is on the world, and how vastly our lives could be improved if government became more local and innovative.
Cast your mind back to the stories of Carl, Judy, and Glen. Each of them (and many of the real groups we listed):
It’s easy to dismiss people like this as dreamers or whiners, but that would be unfair. Whiners are people who only have 1. Dreamers have 1-2 (although their visions are often impractical). But we cannot call merely dreamers or whiners those who see problems in society, have specific proposals for how to build a better society, and who would (if given the opportunity) join a group of like-minded people to create such a society.
These visionaries deserve better, for they are the pioneers of social innovation, who band together to start new communities with new rules. They are much like business entrepreneurs, but launching new social systems rather than companies, which makes them a key part of the evolution of human society. They still exist in the modern world, and they still have plenty of ideas about what ails society and how it might be cured. But there’s a problem.
What we lack is a place for them to experiment. The original intention of the founders of the United States was for the states to serve as such experiments. But the idea of federalism is long dead, since nowadays most of government is implemented at the federal level, and even the states are far too large for easy experimentation. The main alternative, frontierism, is suffering from the lack of any modern frontier - every bit of land on the globe has been claimed by an existing government.
So society’s valuable pioneers1 are left expressing their ideas uselessly in bars, blogs, and books, proposing better systems that will never be. Many turn their talents to business or academia, where good ideas are (sometimes) rewarded. A few become successful activists, and have some tiny positive impact on our fundamentally broken political systems. Most get frustrated and burn out, and then learn to focus on their own lives, where they can make a real difference. But deep within them still lurks the urge to blaze a new path, their pioneering spirit dimmed but not forgotten.
Them’s our peeps, and they’ve had it rough. But we got their back.
1 This reminds us of the current situation vis-a-vis public education in the United States, where creative, active, playful children are labeled as “ADD”. Trapped in the factory schooling system, doing obviously useless tasks, the energy and impatience that can make a great entrepreneur or scientist leads kids instead into trouble. Sometimes they recover (Patri did). Sometimes they do not. Either way, a system that treats something valuable as a dysfunction is a system that could use some tweaking.
See gmail draft notes
We initially chose the ocean as the best place to experiment with new social systems because it is the only unclaimed area left on earth - and space is still a bit expensive. (You can read about more in the Politics section). After considering the matter, however, we were led to the unexpected conclusion that the ocean’s unique features will lead to a revolution in the quality of government, producing many small governments which are response to their citizen’s needs. We’ll first analyze why terrestrial governments are so unresponsive, and then show how things are different on the ocean. These ideas were first explored in Patri’s Dynamic Geography paper [PFriedman2004].
The threat is greater than the execution
There are two important caveats we must make before presenting our theory on why terrestrial democratic governments perform so poorly. The first is that this is by no means a complete taxonomy of the failings of democracy. There are other significant, endemic problems, such as those analyzed by the public choice school of economics. We have specifically chosen to explore the reasons below because they are things that we can change. Since they represent only some of the causes of political problems, we admit that our proposed changes will only alleviate some of the suffering caused by unresponsive, inefficient, and occasionally murderous governments. We hope only to show that these reasons are significant enough that there is hope for seastead societies to be a substantial improvement over terrestrial ones. Second, it is truly said that democratic government is a terrible system, worse than any other except all those which have been tried. . So, before dissing democracy, we want to first acknowledge its rightful place as the reigning king of political systems. Our exploration of its flaws is not meant in any way to oppose its current widespread support and adoption. Yet democracy is a relatively recent invention, and it was only a few centuries ago that it was radical and viewed by many as a hopeless utopian dream. It would be foolish to let our acknowledgment of its superiority over past methods blind us to the possibility of it being superseded by future forms of political organization. Experimentation with these forms must be done cautiously, incrementally, and consensually, lest it result in the mind-numbing body count of the 20th century’s failed experimentation with communism. Yet to do no such experimentation would be to resign ourselves to never improving one of the areas central to human progress and happiness. We see no reason to be so precautionary.
WIth those disclaimers, let us consider government as an industry like any other. Citizens pay taxes, and in return they get government services. While there are a variety of reasons why this industry does a terrible (and sometimes horrific) job at serving its customers, we will focus on two of them.
First, the cost of switching service providers is very high, since it involves moving to another country. An expatriate must usually leave their job (and find a new one), sell their house (and find a new one), leave their friends (and find new ones), and deal with a new culture. Compared to the cost of switching cellphone providers, ISPs, cars, or insurance agents, this is gargantuan. So even if one feels poorly served, it’s a great temptation to stay and hope things get better, or perhaps try to change them despite slim odds. The expense of moving reduces the potential impact of jurisdictional arbitrage (a fancy name for changing the system by voting with your feet, taxes, and/or citizenship). The result is that governments don’t compete to do a good job, because they don’t need to. Their citizens are trapped, which means their actions result in little market feedback, so they focus on exploitation instead of innovation. Besides making sense theoretically, we can find evidence for this hypothesis in the real world. For example, tax rates on capital are generally lower than those on labor, because capital is more mobile. Switching cellphone providers is more difficult in the US, where handsets are “locked” to one carrier, than in Europe, where unlocked phones are the norm. The result is that Europe generally gets better handsets, sooner (with rare exceptions like Apple’s iPhone), and its cellular providers are more innovative (cite needed). Gamers can switch console systems much more easily than companies can switch office software, and so Microsoft’s Xbox is considered much more innovative and user-friendly than its Office product suite. One potential solution to the cost of moving is an information economy with digital cash, where people can work and maintain social networks from anywhere. This idea has been championed by hi-tech libertarians, and was described in the book The Sovereign Individual [DavidsonMogg]. While it has worked for a tiny number of individuals, most people’s jobs involve some hands-on component. And current economic research suggests that the importance of physical colocation is increasing, not decreasing (hence why the newfangled tech industry is concentrated in Silicon Valley). And even when the information economy frees us from job-based geography, the other problems with moving (family, house, face-to-face contact with friends) remain.
The second problem is that the cost of entering the governing industry is incredibly high. To create a new government you basically have to win an election, a revolution, or the right to secede. These are rare and difficult things. Economists call this a “high barrier to entry”. While industries with low barriers to entry tend to be very competitive, with innovative firms competing to provide the best product, those with high barriers tend to consist of a few entrenched firms taking advantage of their position (an oligopoly). This is good for the firms (Warren Buffett, for example, specifically looks for such “trenches” when investing) but not so much for the customer. Currently, the difficulty of getting into the government industry dwarfs that of almost any commercial industry. The only comparable one which comes to mind is that of desktop computer operating systems, which is not exactly known as a competitive industry. Besides the general lack of efficiency and accountability which comes with an oligopoly, these barriers to entry are particularly hard on minority groups. If the cost of getting into the governing business is very high, it will only be done for large groups of people. Contrast this with the ultimate New Economy business of creating websites, whose miniscule barrier to entry results in a vast array of options serving every conceivable niche (along with some unimaginable ones).
Taken together, we can see that governments do a poor job of serving their citizens, especially minority groups. it’s an industry with little market feedback, little competition, little reason to perform well, and little opportunity for incremental improvement.
It is important to note that both of these are arguments about incentives based on systems-level thinking, and that they apply regardless of the political party in charge. One could argue instead that governments and websites are different industries because they attract different types of people, or have a different culture around them. While this viewpoint is natural, we think that in general such explanations are weak, and that the first place to look for the causes of differences in people’s performance is in the systems that organize them and the incentives they provide. The debate is important because the different explanations lead to different recommendations for change. If the problem with democratic governments is just that the wrong group is in charge, the solution is to kick out their bums and replace them with our bums. If the problem with governments is that they are run by politicians and bureaucrats (of any party), the solution is reform that encourages other types of people to enter public service. But if the problem, as we claim, is that democratic governments have a set of systemic incentives to perform poorly, neither of the above will suffice. We think the empirical evidence is on our side. The reins of power have passed through the hands of many bums of many careers, personalities, and parties, but little has changed since Mark Twain wrote To improve democracy, we must improve these systemic incentives. Fortunately, we can.
When we build countries from modular seastead groups, however, everything changes. Moving around huge buildings on the water is cheap - just look at cruise ships and oil tankers. On the ocean, you can expatriate and take your house, friends, family, and office with you. This dramatically lower cost of switching providers promotes market feedback. If the government announces an unpopular policy on Monday, by Tuesday there may be nothing left but the capital building. This is true for any pet topic - libertarians and taxes, drug users and drug prohibition, pacifists and military expansion, environmentalists and pollution.
Furthermore, the barrier to entry is dramatically lower. Instead of the hundred-plus billion dollars it’s taking the US to enact a new regime in Iraq, any group with a few tens of millions can start a new country. They don’t need to get it all at once either, they can add structures as resources and people become available. The result is to empower minority viewpoints of all types. Instead of huge, monolithic, unresponsive governments, we’ll have many small, dynamic, innovative ones. Power will move downward towards the level of the smallest economically feasible platform (something like 10-100 people). We don’t claim this will result in utopia, but it should increase the efficiency of any type of government.
These differences are intimately related to the difference between static and dynamic geography. You can grab dirt and hold it. Try to grab water, and it tends to fragment into tiny pieces and swirl away. What little you capture will slowly evaporate. This metaphor is an accurate one. Terrestrial governments control people because they can control territory and the immobile structures on top of it. On the ocean, control of the foundation has little relevance - a seastead can float anywhere.
One of the great things about this idea is that it’s a technological solution to a political problem. Humans are no good at changing human nature, and human nature, plus the nature of political systems, is why governments function poorly. Yet we are fabulous at solving engineering problems. Well, dynamic geography shows us that we can dramatically improve government merely by solving the engineering problems posed by seasteading. As cryptography makes it almost impossible to censor free speech and communication, seasteading will make it very difficult to exploit a trapped citizenry.
So as it turns out, the ocean is not a booby prize.
There is no single “right” approach to seasteading. Thus we will present you with many ideas, exploring those we think are the most viable in the most detail. However, it does seem like there are some “wrong” approaches, as we can see from the many failures of projects with the same goal. What we’ve learned from the movement’s (admittedly dismal) history has to a large degree shaped our philosophy. Because of this, explaining our approach goes hand-in-hand with identifying common points of failure and indicating how we think they can be overcome.
The root cause of most of these failures seems to have been lack of realism. So our solution is simply to be as pragmatic as possible about our vision. Realism is our philosophy’s foundation, and more specific polices are just the application of realism to various areas. Important areas include incrementalism, politics, technology, and finances.
One problem with doing things all at once is that there is a substantial “stone soup” aspect to seasteading.
We believe that a realistic approch to the difficult problem of nation-founding must be incremental. Large, successful things usually start out small and expand organically, rather than springing forth full-formed like Athena from the brow of Zeus. Rome wasn’t built in a day and a successful business leverages each stage into the next. Big things (cruise ships, skyscrapers, factories) do get built all at once at times, but they are almost always proven concepts that were first demonstrated successfully on a smaller scale. For example, we bet that the first multistory building had exactly 2 stories. In our case, if there was a nation-founder with the financial resources to jump the intermediate stages and create a vast floating city, it would already exist. After all, there are plenty of people ready to design and build one as soon as the multi-billion dollar check gets cut. Since no such deus ex machina appears to be forthcoming, we recommend humbler methods.
There are plenty of grand conceptual ideas out there, but we see a key link between being grand and staying conceptual. We find the notion that the first sea-city will be for ten thousand people is ludicrous. If you make the first step too high, you will never even get started, as the many participants who became frustrated with and dropped out of new-country projects can attest. Instead, we believe that almost all the focus should be on the current and immediate next stage, not on far-distant visions. Watch the path in front of you, not the sky.
There is an inherent difficulty in getting people involved in something that has value only if people are involved in it. How do you start? Contingent contracts help, ie all participants sign something which says “I will pay for my share and move onboard if 99 other people also sign this contract”. This approach is working for the Free State Project in its quest to get 20,000 libertarians to move to New Hampshire. In our case, however, there are difficulties. We think that it’s best to try out this new way of life with fewer people at first. Also it appears difficult to get enough interest for even contingent signatures on floating-cities without demonstrating viability. 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 vision many have proposed [Atlantis1994, Nexus, NewUtopia, VenusProject].
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.
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.
Several potential ventures [Savage1992, Celestopea, Nexus] have focused on the combination of two problematic technologies: OTEC and seacrete, which we feel exemplify the unrealistic “science-fiction” approach to floating cities.
OTEC, or Ocean Thermal Electric Conversion, is a technique to generate energy from the temperature difference between warm surface water and the cold depths. Unfortunately there is little practical experience with the technology, and it scales down very poorly. It’s a promising technology for the future, perhaps for governments soon, but not at all applicable to small ventures now. Some projects have treated OTEC as practically free energy for ocean cities, when it is quite expensive indeed. We discuss it further in our Infrastructure - Power section.
If you dip a wire mesh in seawater and run electricity through it, a cement-like substance forms. Known as seacrete, many floating-city designs have been based on this wondrous source of free building materials. Unfortunately, there is a catch. The common cited figures for energy requirements are off by a factor of 40, and the electricity costs far more than just buying concrete. There are additional problems, as we describe in the design materials section.
Seasteaders will not make the mistake of counting on an impractical technology to make their vision happen. Our concept is a big enough jump already, and the fewer jumps we make along with it the better. So while necessity has prompted some novelty in our designs, they are firmly rooted in standard engineering techniques. You’ll see us examining a number of cutting-edge technologies, yet planning to use very few of them on early seasteads. Our power will come from solar panels, wind turbines, and fossil fuel backup generators, not OTEC plants. Reinforced concrete is an extremely cheap construction material, and we’ll buy it from standard terrestrial sources. In short, our philosophy is to plan our initial designs around mature technologies and save the innovation for later iterations.
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.
A solid, realistic plan can stand criticism and review. It is the scams, the half-baked, the grandiose but insubstantial, which must hide behind a facade of mystery. In our experience, the less you see up front, the less there is behind. Sure, it’s possible that behind the curtain lies a complex and well-considered plan which is being hidden for some legitimate reason, but the odds are heavily against it. If it looks like the emperor has no clothes, he’s probably got goosebumps.
There is nothing wrong with playing the micronation game, imagining a country for fun. But the line between Micronation and genuine venture is a blurry one, in the minds of the principals as well as on their websites. Hinting at complex negotiations with mighty powers for far-off territory adds spice to projects on either side of the line. Yet the countless cycle of promises and failures cannot help but turn interested participants into weary cynics, exhausting the enthusiasm of each new generation. We’d much rather be open about what we have (now, a realistic plan, a rough design and a little financial commitment, later, we hope, a small but habitable prototype). We are trying hard to minimize the faith necessary, but there will be some, and we think honesty, not puffery, gives us the best chance to get it.
While our goal is to change the world, we believe that compromise is an important part of the process. We accept that seasteads will not have full freedom to choose their own laws. There will be substantial limitations on what the rest of the world will tolerate. Like it or not, the first seasteads will be tiny fish in huge ponds, and if they make the sharks angry, they’ll never grow big enough to put up a fight.
For example, Libertarian seasteads will probably be allowed to have low taxes and low regulation, but genuine bank secrecy may not be permitted because of worries about terrorist money laundering. We think it’s far better to get what freedom is possible than to fail because of a refusal to compromise. Environmental regulation offers another example where compromise will be necessary. Our political goals are a compromise as well in that we simply wish to be left alone by other states, we aren’t seeking recognition, embassies, passports, and a seat in the UN like some projects.
This willingness to compromise does not mean that our new way of life offers no improvements on the old. it’s just that focusing our efforts on a few changes at a time is the most effective way to succeed. Even with the limitations of reality, there are still plenty of incremental improvements that can be made to current social systems. In our next section, you’ll see the fundamental reason why life at sea may be an improvement of life on land.
The problems facing prospective nation-founders are undoubtedly difficult, as evinced by the movement’s historical lack of success. They can be overcome if and only if we rationally consider our options, then produce a design which is politically, technologically, and financially feasible. For the reasons which we will outline in this paper, we believe that seasteading meets these criteria. While there is a lot of planning and hard work ahead, there are no substantial leaps of faith required. We think that this makes our vision unique.
We cannot over-emphasize the importance of the economic analysis in Dynamic Geography. If one is trying to build a better (or different) society, it would be a great shame to boldly homestead the ocean frontier and have it turn into the same quagmire one was trying to escape. The other parts of our philosophy, and the rest of our paper, all deal with implementation, with the how of seasteading. It is Dynamic Geography that tells us why this new way of life will be different than the old. We are realists, and we expect that living with the same humans will result in many of the same human problems. But different systems can result in quite different results with the same people. While we will never reach utopia, we think we can make some fundamental improvements to current social systems, and in the real world, that is plenty to strive for.
So if you are interested in its details, please continue reading. Just don’t expect any “artists renderings” of sprawling sea cities, budgets using the word “billion”, or dependence on impractical new technologies. Instead, you’ll learn fundamentals like how we plan to put together old techniques in new ways, how we keep our costs down, and how to make seasteading financially viable. By the end, you should have a good grasp of what is involved in making this vision a reality. And perhaps, (we hope) an interest in being part of the process.
In order to set the stage, we’ll discuss some of the previous projects and schemes for living on the ocean. These will range from the real to the attempted and the merely imagined. We’ll also explore some of the previous precedents for people using the high seas for freedom.
Here are some of the current aquatic lifestyles from which seasteading can draw inspiration. They are a varied group, none quite like what we are imagining, but each with enough overlap to be worth studying.
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A floating home is exactly what its name implies – a house built on a floating platform. Typically these structures don’t have any on-board propulsion, they consist of a home built on a hollow concrete box. There are many floating home communities in the USA, like Sausalito’s Richardson Bay FloatingHomes. Patri attended one of their annual tours, and has a report with pictures [FloatingHomesTour]. The Netherlands, a country which is 50% below sea level, also has a large number of floating homes. We were unable to find market statistics on how many floating homes there are worldwide.
This lifestyle typically start out as a clever technique for avoiding the high cost and restrictive codes of some housing markets, but inevitably the various government agencies figure out what is going on and start to enforce building codes, property taxes and the like. Eventually, the floating homes cost just as much as any other form of real estate in the area, although they remain much more picturesque.
Floating homes are designed for sheltered waters, so they don’t need to worry about big waves. You might think this makes their design unsuitable for the ocean, but we will see later that there are some circumstances where this model is appropriate. Also, while many floating homes are built in conventional fashion by companies like [IMF], there are some unique and interesting exceptions.
In his original seasteading paper, Wayne Gramlich suggested building floating homes using two-liter bottles for flotation [Gramlich1999]. This would provide a very cheap foundation, although it is suitable only for calm waters. It turns out that Rich Sowa had already used this method to build a small island off the coast of Mexico which he operates as a tourist attraction [MotherEarth2001], [Sowa].
Artist Andrea Zittel built a concrete island home called the Pocket Property, and anchored it off the coast of Denmark. She describes the experiment in an interview:
I guess when I was working in New York I found that I was mostly drawn to these very small, contained capsules that would go inside of preexisting architecture. Moving to L.A. completely changed the scale of my thinking, and I started to become much more interested in creating environments, and much more sensitized to exterior spaces. So although it’s kind of a leap, this piece really came out of the entire experience of moving back into suburbia. I started to think about how important it is, when you’re living in that kind of an area, or when you live outside of the city - your land is so important to you. When I was looking for a house, it was much more important - the plot of land, and how big it was, and how it was situated - than the actual house itself. And I’ve also been really interested in how we create these little private universes.
When I drive down the street in my neighborhood, every single person’s yard is landscaped to represent some fantasy of where they live, whether it be an alpine fantasy or a tropical fantasy or a desert fantasy. And they’re all these totally separate little universes or environments that are completely honed in. So I’ve been thinking about that a lot, and how I could actually create a design for a feasible living environment that reflects the most important things that people look for. I guess the other thing, too, that I’ve been thinking about a lot is this whole sort of capsule living, and how especially out there it’s more and more about creating your own bubble, your own capsule. You’re in your house, on your property, and then you get in your car and you drive. And I go for the drive-through; I don’t even want to get out of my car to eat or to go to the bank. Everything’s drive-through, and it makes me feel very, very safe. But I also think that there’s a certain sort of sadness to that too, a certain loss of civic life. It’s a prototype for a particular type of lifestyle. But if I were to extend that vision I would say that it’s possible that some day something like this might exist, and that people would live in these community spreads. I’ve been doing drawings of these, all lined up, almost like cars in parking lots. Almost like a suburbia floating out in the ocean, so you’re completely alone, you’re completely autonomous, but you have also this sense of community within that. [PBSZittel]
Sailboats
An ocean worthy sailboat is defintely large enough to live in. Rather than buy a house on land, some people choose to purchase a sailboat and live onboard. Thus, when you go to a marina, there is a good chance that some of the boats in there are being used as full time residences [Moeller1977]. In many US marinas, live-aboards are limited to ten percent of all berths.
When the boat owner has the time and resources, they can undock from the marina and go sailing. Indeed, with enough savings, they can live on the interest and spend all their time traveling [Hill1993].
By carefully managing energy needs and using the right mix of solar cells, trolling generators, batteries, and a backup generator, is possible for a sailboat to be completely energy self sufficient [Rose1979].
The next step, of self sufficiency for food, is much more difficult for most sailboats due to limited solar area. However, using a combination of growing small amounts of food and scavenging local seaweeds it is possible to reduce the amount of food you need to buy Neumeyer1982.
While a carefully outfitted sailboat is capable of surviving months at a time on the open ocean, eventually some consumable resource will near depletion, and the sailboat will have to return to land. Also the cramped spaces and human need for social contact make most people desire periodic visits to port. We’ll discuss the pros and cons of this method in more detail later when considering designs.
In this category we also include [HouseBoats]. While they may not have sails, they are (unlike floating homes) designed to be mobile, although they are usually operated in sheltered waters so that they do not have to cope with significant waves. Most houseboats have all of the amenities of a modest sized recreational vehicle – kitchen, living room, bedroom, bathroom, etc. They are in fact the aquatic equivalent of RV’s.
While most houseboats are used for recreational purposes, some people have moved into them on a permanent basis. For example, there is a small houseboat community called Knight’s Landing on the Sacramento River. Discovery Bay and Redwood Shores, both in Redwood City, are two more marinas where houseboats moor in the San Francisco Bay. Europe, with its large network of navigable waterways, is home to many houseboats as well.
Cruise Ships
The cruise ship industry has been growing rapidly for decades. There are a number of different companies that provide vacation packages for people to board a cruise ship for a week or two. While the budget accomodations are pretty spartan, the deluxe accomodations are luxurious. Extensive food and entertainment are provided. Many cruise ships have on-board casinos so that patrons may gamble, an example of profiting from the freedom of international waters.
While cruise ships are large, ocean-worthy vehicles that can stand some serious weather, most customers do not like rough seas. Thus, a cruise ship will typically change its itinerary to visit alternate ports of call in order to sail around or entirely avoid a bad ocean storm.
Although a cruise ship can rightfully considered to be a floating city, they are far from self-sufficient. The modern cruise ship is typically only capable of cruising for a week or two before its consumables need to be replenished. So while cruise ships support a significantly larger population than a typical sailboat, they can do so only for a limited time before they must return to port and replenish water, food, and fuel.
Cruise Condos
A new development in the cruise ship industry is the idea of full time residency onboard. The ResidenSea Corporation has built a $265M cruise ship with 110 residences and 88 guest suites that allows wealthy patrons to live on the ship full time as it cruises around the world [ResidenSea]. It began cruising in March of 2002. Their waste policies are mentioned later. Unfortunately they targeted the ultra-luxury market just as the global recession hit, and for several years had troubles selling units. In late 2003 the residents bought the ship from the operating company to run it themselves. They report that sales have been increasing (although there are still many empty units). Still, it sounds as though the original financial backers did not get good results. Given that it’s already difficult to get funding for a new type of venture which requires substantial capital, the ResidenSea result makes it even harder.
Oil Platforms
Since an oil platform is towed into its final location, it is more like an artificial island than a boat. Oil platforms are currently quite expensive, sometimes costing as much as a billion dollars. This expense is reasonable since a single oil well can generate millions of dollars of revenue in a single day [Helvarg2001].
Since oil platforms are not permitted to move from their location, they must be designed to withstand some incredibly severe ocean weather. While they prove that it can be done, cost reduction by several orders of magnitude is required to make ocean living practical.
Islands
While not technically floating, private islands are often considered as a potential location for founding new societies. There is a substantial market for private islands [PrivateIslands], which can be found throughout the world. However, all of them are claimed by traditional jurisdictions, which have historically been loathe to part with their political control. As island real estate specialist Vladi Private Islands says:
_ There’s something special about a private island. An isolated piece of paradise, its beaches and forests yours alone to enjoy. A virtual private kingdom under the sun. While this is enough for most of us, for some, only a real kingdom (or republic, or principality, or ?) will suffice. For these folks, a private island is but a means to an end - the establishment of a new, independent country. But is such a thing really possible?
The short answer is a pretty conclusive ’ no’. Since the early 20th century, every square foot of dry land on Earth has been claimed by at least one country or another, which pretty much rules out discovering an unmapped tropical paradise, planting your flag, and setting yourself up as the local sovereign. Similarly, existing countries are more than a little reluctant to part with pieces of their national territory, no matter the financial incentives offered._
[PrivateIslands]
Sealand
The Principality of Sealand Sealand is arguably the most (perhaps the only) successful new-country project in recent history. It was founded in 1967, when Roy Bates, a pirate radio operator, moved into an abandoned WWII anti-aircraft platform called Rough’s Tower. The platform was located about 7 miles off the British coast, which was then in international waters.
Several incidents have supported the Principality’s claims of independence. Sealand fired warning shots at a nearby repair boat, who took King Roy to court over the matter. The ruling was that the tower was outside of the court’s jurisdiction. Later, some German men briefly seized the platform by force, and were captured in a helicopter raid. One was kept as a prisoner for several weeks, during which period the German government appealed to the British government for help. However, the British Foreign Office said that the tower was beyond their jurisdiction [Strauss1984, p. 132-138].
More recently, Prince Roy has retired, and Sealand was leased to a company called HavenCo [Havenco] for several years as a data haven. Unfortunately, the experiment was ended in 2003 because of worries about the country being blamed for aiding terrorism. There have been suggestions of expanding Sealand by damming off and then draining an area around it. It will be interesting to see if this upstart country can continue to maintain its independence, and whether it can turn sovereignty into business opportunities.
Those who do not learn from the mistakes of history are doomed to repeat them, and so we have studied what little material exists about attempts at seastead-like ventures. We find some of the following quite illustrative. Note that the distinction between “attempted” and “proposed” (the next category) is somewhat arbitrary. Since most nation-founding attempts don’t get past the drawing board, our standards for what constitutes an attempt are fairly low. Also, some of these attempts are still ongoing.
The Freedom Ship
The Freedom Ship [FreedomShip] is a proposal for a mile long “City At Sea” for 40,000 people. The chief architect is an engineer named Norman Nixon. The folks working on this one have managed to generate an extensive amount of press coverage (including Popular Mechanics and the Discovery Channel) and enlist dozens of volunteers. Construction cost, unfortunately, is in the neighborhood of ten billion dollars. While the large size makes the idea newsworthy, it also makes financing extremely difficult. This is especially true when ResidenSea, which was approximately 1/40th the cost, could not sell all its units. It seems fantastically unlikely to us that anyone will finance such a large project until smaller ones have demonstrated that the floating condo concept is viable.
Indeed, no signs have yet been seen of this staggering sum, although the company has built an 11-foot long, 400 pound model, which puts them well ahead of the average project. A lack of transparency has been notable from the beginning, with interested but skeptical people complaining that their criticisms have all been deflected or ignored [Patri_FS]. However, rumour has it that they’ll soon be selling copies of the huge amount of design work they’ve done. Only time will tell whether they can raise the funds for this gigantic project. While we are rather skeptical that it reach fruition in its current form, we would be delighted to be proven wrong.
Aquarius Project
Another well-publicized venture during the 1990’s was the Aquarius Project, based on the book The Millenial Project by Mashall Savage [Savage1992]. An organization was created called the First Millenial Foundation, which later changed its name to the Living Universe Foundation. Savage proposes building many large floating cities out of hexagonal cells made from a material called Sea-crete or alternatively Seament. They would be powered by OTEC generators, which operate on the temperature differential between surface and deep water. Income comes from mariculture, hydrogen, magnesium, and several other sources. Actually, only the first 100 pages of TMP are about Aquarius, and the remainder discusses the remaining 7 stages necessary to begin colonizing the galaxy. This is an excellent example of the viewpoint that ocean cities are a stepping stone to space colonies.
Unfortunately, while the book is stuffed full of technical information, the basic ideas behind Aquarius are at the very least ahead of their time. They may even be inaccurate. We discuss the flawed calculations behind seacrete Seacrete and the currently nascent state of OTEC OTEC in more detail later, when explaining why those technologies are not currently part of our plan. In addition, Savage is overly ambitious, focusing on huge cities without any plan for starting with small ones. Unsurprisingly, without prototypes to demonstrate that the ideas were sound, there was not enough interest to build an initial Aquarius settlement.
Minerva Reef
A seamount is a not-quite island, an underwater mountain without enough oomph to make it to sea level. Like land, seamounts are geographically stable but politically problematic. They can act as breakwaters if they’re close enough to the surface, which is quite useful since waves are one of the major dangers of the ocean. Also they can function as anchoring points or pillar foundations. However if they are raised above sea level, they are vulnerable to claim by land-based jurisdictions, as happened with the Minerva Reef. Since this incident exemplifies the reasons why free-floating sea structures are better politically, we will recount it here.
Michael Oliver, a Las Vegas real estate millionaire, made several nation founding attempts. At one point he focused on the Minerva Reefs, 260 miles southwest of Tonga, which were conveniently outside the territorial waters of any nation and below water at high tide. Quite large, they seemed perfect as a foundation for a new, sovereign territory. His plan was to build them up with sand and create a new island and a new country, and he hired dredges from Australia in 1971. After six months, he proclaimed the independence of the Republic of Minerva, which issued coins.
The only reaction he got was from the Kingdom of Tonga, Minerva’s closest neighbor. A box of supplies was dropped on the new land which said “supplied and maintained by the government of Tonga”, an action said to be supported by other nations in the area. His Majesty then ventured to Minerva with a gang of convicts and a four-member band. They planted the Tongan flag, played the Tongan national anthem, and claimed the sandy patch for Tonga. After they left, the forces of nature did their work, and the sand of Minerva returned slowly to the ocean from whence it had sprung. [Strauss1984 pp. 115-117].
This is a classic example of the lengths to which nations will go to preserve their cartel status - even a worthless patch of sand is seen as competition. If a new nation is created on land (no matter how small or undesirable), it is likely that the nearest traditional nations will claim jurisdiction. It may be possible to negotiate a treaty, but that is likely to be expensive and prospective nation founders are unlikely to have much to bargain with.
The Isle of Roses
The short-lived Isle of Roses offers another excellent example of the antipathy with which countries view nearby nation-founding attempts. As Strauss explains:
_ _
Giorgio Rosa was (or is) a professor of engineering in Bologna, Italy. In the early 1960’s, he built a tower in the Adriatic Sea, in water less than 20 feet deep, about 8 miles off the coast of the Italian city of Rimini. This first tower was wrecked by a storm on February 13, 1965. A new one was built, with an area of about 4,000 square feet. It had a bar, a restaurant, a post office, a bank and a store, all surrounded by a promenade. The Italian authorities took no notice (since they only claimed 3 miles from shore as their territorial waters) until May 1, 1968, when the platform was declared to be an independent republic, whose official language was the artificial one Esperanto. The Italians invaded 55 days later, speaking vaguely of such things as “national security, illegality, tax avoidance, maritime obstruction and pornography.” In the spring of 1969, Italian Navy frogmen dynamited the structure. At last report, Rosa did not plan to try again, saying darkly that “This country is all Mafia.”
_Mafia or not, this illustrates the extent to which existing countries are willing to brush aside written law if they think a new-country project has the potential to seriously inconvenience them.
_[Strauss1984, p 129-130]
Cortes Bank
Another brief example of the greed of traditional nations relates to the Cortes Bank, which lies off the coast of San Diego:
The USS Abalonia was a concrete cargo ship, constructed for the purpose of becoming an independent nation. The company which built it hoped to anchor it in rich shellfish beds on the Cortes Bank, 100 miles off the coast of San Diego, and claim jurisdiction over the area. Shortly after the Abalonia’s launch in 1969, it foundered and sank, nearly killing the crew. In the wake of the Abalonia fiasco, a second company began plans to build a platform on the Cortes Bank and declare it the nation of Taluga. The US government quickly gave notice that the Cortes Bank, as part of the continental shelf, fell within its jurisdiction.
[FootnotesToHistory]
This Ayn Rand-inspired project began as an attempt to found a modern-day Galt’s Gulch. The organizers placed a declaration of sovereignty and request for a host nation in several high-profile publications, including The Economist (6/10/95, 8/12/95). Media such as the London Times and BBC World Radio covered the story, and 3000 people from 108 different countries contacted the founding Trust.
Unfortunately, the response from potential sites was less enthusiastic. The principals followed several leads without finding an acceptable locations (although their standards may have been a bit high - the shallow shoals which LFC turned down would be more than sufficient for our purposes). With no land in sight, LFC transitioned to seeking freedom in cyberspace, developing tools for digital freedom.
Eventually, due to personality problems and poor business practices stemming from one of the founders and major financers of the project, LFC was dissolved. A long, detailed, fabulous review can be found in ScamDog2002 Their early experiences exemplify two of our claims about nation founding: that there is a large potential market, and that it is extraordinarily difficult to get sovereignty from existing nations.
Celestopia
Their webpage states:
_ Dedicated to creating ecologically balanced, floating ocean communities and terra-formed, permacultured islands, grown from the mineral-rich waters of the tropical oceans. We wish to share our creations and technologies to help expand the unity, prosperity and quality of life, of all the people of Earth. _
This currently active project is based in Costa Rica, and the fact that its principals were willing to relocate there suggests that they are serious. Their website contains a timeline, including the steps they have completed. They are currently in the stage where they are beginning to need financing, which is a very difficult time for any project. While they pitch the seacrete + OTEC combination which we later debunk, they also acknowledge that seacrete is not ready for prime time yet and plan to start with ferrocement. Their designs are partly based on the Monolithic Dome Institute [MDI], which is another good sign, as the MDI has helped construct hundreds of concrete domes. They believe, as do we, in teaching by example rather than rhetoric. Unfortunately they seem to be looking mainly to donations for initial funding. It seems to be the most mature environmentally motivated project.
Now that we have covered the existing strategies for living in the middle of the ocean, as well as some methods that have been attempted, it is time to visit some ideas that so far remain merely visions. Some of the designs listed below are more practical than others. This list could be quite long, and is merely a selection of some of our favorites:
Here is a comment on a floating city post somewhere on the internet that represents, to me, exactly what is not needed to advance the movement:
Floating city is very feasible. I am a naval architect designed a whole city that can float in very deepwater and do not heave for severe storms. I have a USA patent. My original design has eight wings each 100m x 600 m and it has a center of attraction at the middle with school, auditorium, police, hospital, city hall, court, what not. One wing is dedicated for aircraft landing. Wave energy is utilized for power; all cars are electrical with public transport system. There is fishing, water purification, gardens, agriculture what not. There is a Disney land and there is a Las Vegas on board. It is a cool place for vacation, stay, live and work. Micro Soft, Bill Gate, can keep their employee there and develop software industry there. All the best expert would be on board and live in a place of solitude and peace and enjoy and more productive. No crime and well balanced place. It is completely shelf sustained. Any one seriously interested can contact me at..
Now, his city may be very nice. It may even be a good design of an artificial island city. But our (very rough, very preliminary) cost estimates are $250/ft^2, which is about a hundred million bucks an acre, which puts a price tag on his 120 acre dream of twelve billion dollars. Even MSFT or Bill Gates is going to flinch at that number. A design like this is solving an irrelevant problem: that of designing a 120 acre city.
This problem is irrelevant, because at the point where there is enough money to build and enough people to fill a 120 acre city, the naval architects of the world will be lining up outside the door of whoever is organizing the project, ready to present their qualifications. Since the design cost is only a tiny fraction of the building cost, it is pretty much irrelevant whether the design exists already or not - it can easily be commissioned. It’s as if I said “I have designed the world’s largest aircraft carrier! It will have dozens of high-tech fighters and bombers, a crew of ten thousand, redundant nuclear reactors, and many other great features. Anyone want to build it?”
Now, I’m glad that there are people out there who are so excited about floating cities that they work on designs for fun. I want people to be excited and inspired, and I think that it’s great that the idea of a floating city is so appealing. I’d love to see a 3D model of this guy’s city, for inspirational purposes, a vision to work towards. But it is important not to get distracted and mistake such visions for progress. Progress is funding, it’s working prototypes, it’s functioning business models (pirate radio stations), it’s people starting a data haven on Sealand. Sure, pirate radio and Havenco both failed. But when floating cities happen, they will happen from a start like that, not from a thousand people drawing a thousand designs of a city that will never be.
This is one of the most recent new country projects Alexandisle. Created by Kevin Alexander, it is a haven for non-believers, where faith-based promotion is considered fraudulent. It has an unusual government structure: there are no taxes during an individuals lifetime, but upon death, no more than $200,000 can be left to any one heir (excepting spouse(s)). The remainder must be given to charitable organizations which perform all social services normally adminstered by modern governments. Anyone can found a new charity if they are unsatisfied with current ones. The founder believes that this prohibition on inheritance will appeal to independent, self-made individuals.
While we have serious doubts about the appeal and viability of this system, the strength of the small-nation approach is that people can experiment with many ideas and see which work. Thus we wish them the best of luck. Additionally, Mr. Alexander is writing an upcoming book Ten Thousand Nations, which suggests “that humanity is much better off with lots of small governments, rather than a few large ones” [AlexanderUnp]. As we wholeheartedly agree with this idea, we look forward to this contribution to the tiny niche of nation-founding books.
Pelagic: Adj. Free swimming, living in open ocean.
While Wavyhill’s time limitations have restricted this to a small (but informative) website [Pelagic] and a small scale model, we are still quite impressed with what we’ve seen. His philosophy is extremely realistic:
“This is a geopolitical experiment on life in a floating oceanic habitat with no mandated societal structure beyond that of a loose, employee owned and operated enterprise. … Many of these projects have been initiated by idealists, with no or vague business plan, expecting the rest of the idealists to rally to the cause and donate the required capital and effort. The pelagic project is not a utopian scheme, they never work. It’s based on profitable enterprise, gradual growth, and being prepared for the worst from people and political organizations
He has a well-thought out timeline based on an incremental approach, and discusses the problems of building, operating, and financing such a project. The basic structure is a large (50ft) ferrocement hexagon, divided into small interior hexagons using cellular concrete. We discuss this lightweight concrete in the design section. Since it floats on the surface, his structure is exposed to wave action, and without a breakwater we don’t think it would be suitable for the open ocean.
In 2003, Wavyhill actually made a 1/12th scale model of his design using a cheap homebuilt foammaker. This may not sound like much, but experimentation and a willingness to start with small prototypes is rare among nation-founders. This is unfortunate since we think it’s crucial to success. While this project is no longer active, we definitely recommend checking it out to see someone else’s version of the incremental, realistic sort of approach which we are convinced is the most promising.
The New Utopia NewUtopia project is a proposal to build a new country on an unused sea mount in the Carribean. Like the Freedom Ship, this project has been able to garner a significant amount of press coverage, especially at the beginning when it seemed viable. Former insiders report that there was significant business interest. Unfortunately, the leadership was not interested in tackling the hard problems that came up, preferring to sell a fantasy. Given what happened with Minerva Reef [Minerva], we are very doubtful that any sea mount raised above surface level will remain unclaimed by the existing sovereign nations for very long. More importantly, a number of more recent reports have suggested that the project has become little more than a scam [Patri_NU].
Floating Cities are one part of Jacque Fresco’s The Venus Project [VenusProject], which aims to redesign world civilization to be more in line with human and environmental concerns. This includes switching to a resource-based world economy. While we are a bit suspicious of their economic theories, Mr. Fresco has quite an impressive resume. He’s also designed and built a research center for the project, which puts it well ahead of the plethora of similar-sounding visions. Unfortunately, they said we could not use any pictures from their site in this entry because our description was too negative, which is a bad sign.
The Spar Buoy concept [Piolenc2001] is the brain child of F. Marc De Piolenc. The concept is to build a livable structure that is basically a long cylinder that is ballasted on one end to cause the cylinder (i.e. spar) to float vertically. Since the center of gravity is significantly below the center of buoyancy, it basically impossible to tip the structure over. In severe ocean storms, the cylinder bobs up and down with the waves and the cylinder occupants may get quite motion sick, but they should survive.
More recently, Dr. Robert D. Ballard (of finding the Titanic fame) has proposed building a modest ocean habitat that has many similarities to F. Marc De Piolenc’s spar buoy idea. The idea is to start with a ballasted spar and then place a somewhat larger habitat on top. Thus, the difference is that the living quarters are on top of the spar rather than on the inside of the spar. This proposal has the advantage of being quite modest and Dr. Ballard’s obvious oceanagraphic experience would provide a great deal of credence to any investors.
Enrique Perez has come up with a novel idea based on ancient reed ships [Perez2001]. The basic idea is to make the whole flotation system flexible enough that it just bends and sways in severe ocean storms. He has come up with scripts that allow you to compute the costs and buoyancies.
Another project out there for awhile was the Atlantis project [Atlantis1994]. This project has an above average number of pretty pictures, created by architect Jim Albea [ShadowMasons]. Indeed, it was this site that got Wayne Gramlich interested in the concept of seasteading.
Many nation-founding projects and websites focus on pictures instead of planning. The Seascape Seascape site takes this to an extreme, as it consists almost entirely of pretty 3D rendered pictures and animations (along with a little flavortext). The result is to showcase artistic skills rather than present a practical proposal. As reader Glen Raphael comments:
_They never quite make it clear why having drink-dispensing robots following guests around the complex is an improvement over the usual alternatives. Sure, it could be cool in a sci-fi sort of way, but it’s ludicrously inefficient. Wouldn’t some combination of drink vending machines, water fountains and human waitpersons delivering your drink order to human bartenders work just about as well and be a lot cheaper, more energy efficient, and more reliable? … One really does get the sense this is more about creating an interesting science-fictiony fantasy environment than it is about making something practical. _
When asked for permission to use a picture with the text above, the project authors commented:
_The site you saw is only an inter-office overview. Seascape endeavors to provide an environment that is responsive to the individual- it makes no attempt to be practical (or impractical for that matter). Does your city know you? Is your city “interactive”? We urge you to “stay tuned” over the ensuing months to see if we distinguish ourselves. Good luck on your compendium of sea-faring environments. You may wish to re-read the “flavor-text”. _
Unsuprisingly, their website has not changed in the ensuing years. While there is nothing wrong with this approach per se, it makes it harder for those of us interested in the reality of floating cities to get taken seriously.
Buckminster Fuller designed a tetrahedronal floating city for Tokyo bay in the 1960’s. He wrote:
Three-quarters of our planet Earth is covered with water, most of which may float organic cities…Floating cities pay no rent to landlords. They are situated on the water, which they desalinate and recirculate in many useful and nonpolluting ways. They are ships with all an ocean ship’s technical autonomy, but they are also ships that will always be anchored. They don’t have to go anywhere. Their shape and its human-life accommodations are not compromised, as must be the shape of the living quarters of ships whose hull shapes are constructed so that they may slip, fishlike, at high speed through the water and high seas with maximum economy…Floating cities are designed with the most buoyantly stable conformation of deep-sea bell-buoys. Their omni-surface-terraced, slop-faced, tetrahedronal structuring is employed to avoid the lethal threat of precipitous falls by humans from vertically sheer high-rising buildings…The tetrahedron has the most surface with the least volume of all polyhedra. As such, it provides the most possible ‘outside’ living. Its sloping external surface is adequate for all its occupants to enjoy their own private, outside, tiered-terracing, garden homes. These are most economically serviced from the common, omni-nearest-possible center of volume of all polyhedra…When suitable, the floating cities are equipped with ‘alongside’ or interiorly lagooned marinas for the safe mooring of the sail- and powerboats of the floating-city occupants. When moored in protected waters, the floating cities may be connected to the land by bridgeways.
There are some similarities between Bucky’s design for a floating city and our current plan. Both have buoyancy was located below the wave action, and both use slopes to give residents more solar area.
The Ocean Technology Foundation has proposed an undersea habitat called Ocean Base One as part of its OASIS research project [OASIS]. 3D images of the design have been featured on Tech TV and The Learning Channel, as well as in several print media outlets. Its main purpose is research, and it is to be funded by foundations, oil companies, the government, and other sources [Behar2002]. They expect to complete funding and begin construction in approx. 2007-2010 [Rappaport2002]. While such claims should be treated with some skepticism, there are a number of points in its favor. OTF is an established foundation, oil companies and government departments have lots of money, and the $75M budget is modest compared to gargantuan proposals like the Freedom Ship.
This project has been proposed by US Submarines, which has succeeded in getting a fair amount of media attention for its personal and tourist submarines. For example, a $20M model was listed in one of Neiman-Marcus’s christmas catalogues. Poseidon is their concept of an undersea resort containing a restaurant, bar, kitchen, foyer, and 20 luxury suites. It would be in 30-60 feet of water, and locations being considered include the Bahamas, Uniated Arab Emirates, and Belize. The interior pressure would be maintained at one atmosphere.
While political sovereignty is our interest, many past projects have taken advantage of the ocean’s freedom in other ways. They demonstrate that “hacking the system” really can work. it’s important to have this empirical evidence to show that there our ideas are not just based on theory. Many political movements have failed because they misunderstood the difference between theory and practice, words and actions, vision and reality.
{ If you have any similar examples of using international waters to increase freedom, please let us know }
Anyone who has been on a cruise ship knows that gambling in international waters continues to the present day. Its history near the United States, however, is a bit rocky:
Earl Warren…decided to advance his career by declaring war on the gambling interests. The operators responded by moving the casinos onto ships keeping the old mother-ship stations off the coast. The first reaction of Warren was just to go out and break up the casinos anyway, never mind that his lawful authority ended at the territorial limit. This is yet another caution to new-country organizers not to place overmuch faith in the written law.
However, the operators then went into Federal court…Roosevelt’s Democratic Federal Regime wasn’t very interested in helping him with his crackdown…when World War II broke out. The “war emergency” and ensuing near-panic on the West Coast were used as an excuse to shut down the ships summarily. After the war, a Federal law was finally passed making it illegal for a United States citizen or resident to own a gambling ship, or for anyone to transport people between the United States and a gambling ship…such a ban could likely be defeated on a challenge. But then other measures to harass the ship doubtless would be taken. In any case, with the spread of legalized casinos onshore, the long-term prospects for casino ships appear limited.
Despite this pessimisstic outlook, gambling cruises are still an active business. For example, a 2002 article on gambling in the southern US reports: “FLORIDA: Numerous gambling cruise vessels, ranging from ships carrying 1,800 passengers to yacht-size boats carrying 150, sail from the East and West coasts into international waters where gambling is permitted. The boats offer roulette, blackjack, craps, video poker and slots, with some of the larger cruise ships offering additional games.” [McBee2002]
The offshore pirate radio movement is interesting both for its own sake and in relation to the ideas of seasteading. A summary appears in Strauss:
In the 1960’s, a new form of offshore activity emerged. Commercial radio as known in the United States didn’t exist in Europe at the time. With few exceptions, all that was to be heard were staid government stations. Then a ship named Veronica dropped anchor just off the Dutch coast, with a transmitter beaming programing filled with the latest popular music. Advertisers eagerly bought up all the available time at premium rates, and imitators soon followed in the Scandinavian and British markets…At first, there was considerable violence between ships; however, the practice of maintaining 24-hour watches soon reduced that greatly…
The governments of Europe were outraged, and applied the pejorative term “pirates” to the broadcasters, a term with which they weren’t entirely unhappy - due to its romantic connotations. Attempts were made to jam the ships’ transmissions, but the public outcry was too great…International agreements were entered into to ban broadcasting from ships, but the African country of Sierra Leone chose to offer its flag as a flag of convenience rather than subscribe to the treaties…
The British finally knocked their offshore broadcasters off the air by banning advertising on them by firms doing business in the United Kingdom…then the coup de grace was delivered: the opening of popular music stations on land.
Various snippets from another chronicle of pirate radio’s colorful history help fill in more detail:
“badly needed a way to break the ‘payola’ monopoly enjoyed by the ‘big four’ recording companies Decca, Philips, EMI and Pye.”
“Only three weeks after it started the pirate station had an estimated 7 million listeners “
“Tragedy occurred at Red Sands fort on December 16th when RADIO INVICTA co-owner Tom Pepper, engineer Martin Shaw and disc jockey Simon Ashley were drowned in very bad circumstances following the capsizing of their launch after having delivered supplies to the station “
“The start of 1965 saw some ‘big guns’ lining up against the pop pirates when, on January 22nd, the governments of Belgium, France, Greece, Sweden, Luxembourg, Denmark and Britain signed a Council of Europe Agreement that not only banned broadcasts ‘on board ships, aircraft or any other floating or airborne objects’ but also banned anyone from those countries from supplying the pirates with materials, supplies or equipment. The stations were forced to obtain new sources of supply from either Holland or Spain, neither of whom had been party to the agreement…Caroline’ was also in the happier position of being able to obtain supplies from Dublin or even the Isle of Man as the Manx government were reluctant to ratify legislation against the pirate ship due to the trade and tourism she brought to the island. “
“On May 12th at 5p.m. the entire Beatles ‘Sergeant Pepper’ was played by Radio London, two weeks before its official release date, despite the fact that no promotional versions had been issued by EMI. The origin of the music has never been explained, although Paul McCartney’s house had been burgled a fortnight earlier and among the items taken were two proof pressings of the disc….”
“At midnight on 14th August 1967, The Marine etc, Broadcasting (Offences) Act came into force, which effectively banned all U.K. subjects from being involved with offshore broadcasting within territorial waters and rendering all the pirate radio station operators and personnel open to prosecution as soon as they came within the ‘3 mile limit’…RADIO VERONICA, being off the Dutch coast, was unaffected by the British Act but had its own problems in the Seventies when the Dutch government finally got around to passing a similar law…The last of the legendary Sixties offshore pirates still operating in its original form, RADIO VERONICA, finally succumbed to the Dutch Marine Broadcasting Act on August 31st 1974. “
The history of pirate radio is fascinating and involved. While we’ve only briefly touched on it here, you’ve heard enough about pirate radio and gambling ships to see a common life cycle for such ventures. Government regulation creates a market. An offshore provider springs up to serve that market, and at first enjoys tremendous success. New regulations attempt to limit the industry, with mixed success. Finally, the onshore industry opens up - not as open as the pirates, but with a small enough difference that the extra costs and difficulties of offshore operation render the pirates uncompetitive.
We’d like to point out that if the offshore provider’s goal was to stay in business and make money forever, being co-opted like this indicates failure. But if the goal was a social movement like increasing freedom, it is at least partial success. We’d consider it a victory if building seasteads becomes unattractive because traditional governments become more dynamic and flexible. However, we think this is unlikely because of some key advantages of water over land which we’ll talk about in the next section.
Although pirate radio history is definitely relevant, there are some important differences between pirate radio and seasteading. First, note that these broadcasts targeted sovereign territory, infringing the government’s right to control the signals on its land. This is a much more questionable activity than seasteading, and more likely to generate a strong reaction. Also, the government cracked down by making it illegal to advertise on pirate radio ships or sell them supplies. Advertising doesn’t work unless you know what the product is, thus it’s easy to crack down on. Also pirate radio ships were not in the least self-sufficient. So stronger economic levers were available against this business than will be for opponents of seasteading.
This was an internet server business run on Sealand, offering secure colocation facilities without government regulation. While it’s not clear exactly why the business failed, there are a number of strong possibilities.
In the beginning, they got a fair amount of publicity as a “data haven”. However, they had to compete with small countries around the world also eager to profit from a low-regulation environment. They were founded just in time for the dot-com crash and associated global recession. A few years later, when the War on Terrorism got going, the owners of Sealand become worried about anti-terrorist blowback. Furthermore, as a somewhat amateur venture, Havenco was plagued with business problems, at least according to cofounder Ryan Lacky, who spoke at Defcon about the experience [Defcon_Havenco].
From his report, most of the time was spent dealing with the large amount of press stemming from a Wired magazine cover article, rather than on sales and customer service. The business was disorganized, lacking proper capital, and displaying a much better face to the world than the actual situation. Eventually, the business problems, and the issues between Sealand and Havenco led to the end of the company.
Many of these are important points for prospective seasteaders. If they are building a business, not just a home, it needs to be run like a business - which means a reasonable amount of financing and business experience for the job at hand. The difficulties in being reliant on the whims of Sealand’s owners is an example of why it is better to find solutions that don’t depend on a cooperative host country. And on a more optimistic note, HavenCo found it quite easiy to get a huge amount of publicity, which would have been invaluable if they’d had the other pieces in place.
The reason we include the busines here, rather than among failed projects, is that nowhere in that list of reasons is “significant interference from other states”. Havenco successfully hosted online gambling sites through an internet connection to the UK, less than 10 miles away, which would not have been legal in that country. They were left alone, and not because they had a navy to match the UK’s (an amusingly laughable fantasy), or because no one had heard of them (quite to the contrary!). Instead they just chose a business they could get away with and a location with reasonable historical precedents to be independent.
Whether or not one agrees with their views, this pro-choice Dutch project is a good example of the potential for using international waters for political freedom. One of the founders of WoW had been a doctor on board the Greenpeace vessel Rainbow Warrior, and was influenced by offshore pirate radio. They traveled to Ireland in 2001 and Poland in 2003. In their own words:
Women on Waves is a non-profit organization concerned with women’s human rights. Its mission is to prevent unwanted pregnancy and unsafe abortions throughout the world.
Every year 20 million abortions are performed under illegal and unsafe conditions, resulting in the deaths of an estimated 70,000 women annually. In response to this medical calamity, Women on Waves has developed a mobile gynecological unit, the ‘A-portable’. It can easily be loaded onto a ship, which enables it to travel to wherever it is needed worldwide. The ‘A-Portable’ can also travel by truck allowing it to go to countries where reproductive health services are legal but largely unavailable, for example due to war.
With a ship Women on Waves can provide contraceptives, information, training, workshops, and safe and legal abortion outside territorial waters in countries where abortion is illegal . Working in close cooperation with local organizations, Women on Waves wants to respond to an urgent medical need, empower women to exercise their human right to reproductive health and legal, safe abortion and draw public attention to the consequences of unwanted pregnancy and illegal abortion.
An Australian doctor proposed a similar plan in 2000 and 2001 for a “euthanasia ship” to legally help end the lives of terminally ill patients [Batty2001]. However nothing further appears to have been done.
_ The ocean is a wilderness reaching round the globe, wilder than a Bengal jungle, and fuller of monsters, washing the very wharves of our cities and the gardens of our sea-side residences. Serpents, bears, hyenas, tigers rapidly vanish as civilization advances, but the most populous and civilized city cannot scare a shark far from its wharves.
[Thoreau1906, vol. 4, p.188] _
{ Does this seem like a good introductory ocean quote? Any other suggestions? }
A seastead needs to survive and thrive in the ocean environment. In this section we’ll describe that environment, its dangers, and our plans for avoiding them..
What is the ocean environment? Obviously, it consists of a great deal of salt water (about 3% solution.) The disolved salt causes two problems – first, it causes many materials to corrode and second, it renders the water unfit for drinking. In addition to the water, the ocean environment has weather. This includes temperature variation, wind, humidity, rain, etc. Convection and Coriolis effects cause movement of the air (wind) and water (currents) in roughly consistent patterns. The wind causes the growth of waves which can become quite significant.
The ocean is full of life, from tiny algae to the largest living creature: Balaenoptera musculus _, the blue whale. The most dangerous marine creature, however, is _homo sapiens, whose warships have teeth sharper than any shark. Correspodingly, the most complicated element of the ocean environment is the labyrinthine system of laws and regulations that humans have developed to govern it.
The high point of an ocean wave is called the crest, and the low point is the trough. The distance from crest to trough is of course the wave height, and the distance between successive crests is known as the wavelength. Waves are created by wind blowing on the oceans surface, which steadily adds energy to them. The size of waves thus depends on how hard and for how long the wind blows. Because waves can travel long distances without losing much energy, they may appear when there is no wind, having been produced by some distant storm.
While it may appear that waves consist of water moving linearly, in reality each water particle simply travels in a circle. The water transmits energy without being carried along. This is why small free-floating objects on the surface just bob up and down in waves. Even in huge waves, a piece of driftwood doesn’t get broken, just shaken around a lot.
However, our potential seastead designs are not like this. Objects that are large or heavy don’t just roll with the waves, they resist and must absorb some energy. For them, the ocean is a much more hostile environment. The amount of energy stored in a large wave is quite scary, hence why they occasionally pulverize large ships. You’ll first learn about the biggest waves, and then about our strategies for avoiding them.
Many people think of the tsunami as the most fearsome wave, but that’s a landlubber’s perspective. Generally driven by earthquakes, tsunamis are often unnoticeable in the deep ocean, where they have extremely long wavelengths and low wave heights (several meters at most, usually much less).
As this wave reaches a continental shelf, it piles up, becoming shorter and higher. Only then will it resemble the monsters of legend - and as usual, legend exaggerates. Tsunamis rarely result in giant breaking waves, but are more like very strong, fast tides [USGSTsunami]. While this is very dangerous for coastal structures (as the horror of the 2004 Asian tsunami demonstrated), even if a seastead was close to shore, it would just rise with the water level. The worst consequence would be the mooring system failing or being damaged.
Now we’ll see a case where the storytellers, not the scientists, turned out to be right.
[
]2
They were struck by a rogue wave - a monstrous wall of water that rose out of nowhere and slammed onto the deck like the fist of god. Ships often don’t survive an onslaught like that. Many sink before anyone on board knows what’s hit them.
[Lawton2001]
On the right is perhaps the only photograph of an elusive phenomenon known as a rogue wave. Not many people would reach for a camera when struck by such a monster, but that’s exactly what Phillipe Lijour did. He was onboard the oil freighter Esso Languedoc in 1980 when it was struck by a rogue. By his estimate, most waves were 5-10m, as you tell from the low seas in the background. The mast visible on the starboard side is 25m above sea level, and the wave is breaking from behind the ship. The wave was at least 20m high, perhaps 30m (since its trough, as well as crest, would be lower than other waves).
Scientists used to dismiss such tales of unusually large waves as mere folklore, like monsters or mermaids. But with the proliferation of oil and gas platforms, some of which record wave data, accumulated observations have finally led to mainstream acceptance of this seafaring “myth” [Lawton2001]. And recent data from the European Space Agency’s ERS satellites has not only re-confirmed the existence of these waves, but indicated that they may be fairly common. Researchers with the MaxWave project computer-analyzed satellite photos from a three-week period in 2001 during which two ships were hit by 30m rogues. They found “ten individual giant waves around the globe above 25 metres in height.” [ESA2004].
These rogue waves are the real dangers in open water. Towering above their neighbors, they are unstable and break quickly, thus containing tremendous power. They sometimes come unexpectedly from a different direction than the prevailing swell, which adds to the surprise and danger. Rogues have been known to ravage coastlines as well, sometimes coming out of calm seas to sweep away unsuspecting victims. Emergency services have warned beachgoers in some areas to be aware of this danger [RogueWarning].
Understanding rogue waves is clearly quite important for marine safety. Hence while their existence has only been accepted for a few decades, a decent-sized body of academic work has sprung up. There was a Rogue Wave conference in 2000 [RogueWaves2000]. Theories about their existence include interference patterns (refraction/diffraction), current/wind interactions, and normal variations in the height of wave groups. These