Seasickness is a problem with boats, not seasteads.
In a 2017 National Public Radio interview on the popular show Living On Earth, host Steve Curwood and Joe Quirk engaged in the following exchange.
CURWOOD: Joe, I enjoy being on the ocean, but you know there are times, may I say, when it’s a bit choppy. I mean, how comfortable are people going to be living at sea …?
QUIRK: You absolutely need to solve the seasickness problem if you’re going to create civilization on the sea … I call it the “martini test”, where if I can sit on the dock and order a martini, and they can pour it right to the brim, and it doesn’t spill, then I am in civil society.
CURWOOD: Although after the third martini you might not care.
QUIRK: [LAUGHS] I can create my own seasickness, but I’d rather the oceans not do it for me.
A year-and-a-half later, when a big storm struck the first seastead in international waters, Chad and Nadia were eager to pass the martini test … until they realized they didn’t have the elements to make a martini.
But they had red wine, which they declared a better test, because you can see ripples on the surface of red wine in a wine glass.
Nadia turned on her camera and triumphantly passed “the wine test,” which is immortalized in the final seconds of The First Seasteaders 3: Lifting the Stead.
In 2020, they passed the wine test again on their triple-spar prototype in Panama, showing off the fact that the wine didn’t ripple in waves as motorboats pass by at 20:00 in this video: Ocean Builders Deep Water Prototype
