book_beta

Seasteading Book

From Patri’s blog:

Since hiring nthmost, eelcoh, xleste, radiantsun, and Max to work for TSI (offices are a bit busier these days!), I’ve been able to delegate lots of major projects and get lots of writing time in on the book, yay!

As a result, I’m getting close to the point where I’ll be ready for feedback on the new version of the seasteading book. If you’re highly interested in the topic and motivated to read rough prose and give substantial feedback, read and summarize relevant books in our area, that sort of thing, …

Why we aren’t going to recycle the North Pacific Garbage Patch

The suggestion of recycling the North Pacific Garbage Patch into building materials gets made a lot. While creative and elegant, with a little examination it turns out to be completely economically unfeasible, and actually wasteful of resources.

Think of it this way. Suppose it were possible to profitably turn trash into building materials. The most efficient way to do this would be to buy a landfill and recycle it. Compared to this strategy, using trash from the garbage patch has a number of major disadvantages:

1) Operating at sea is very expensive.

Suggest and vote on key sections for the book revision

One of my major projects during the summer and fall of this year will be getting the seasteading book in shape for publication (initially via POD). I have a giant pile of links and ideas about little sections to write – there is an arbitrary amount of nuance, fun speculation, and neat technologies that could go into the book. But I don’t have time, and even if I did the final result would be hugely bloated. So I need to start by 80/20ing the book – nuance and fun can be added later.

I want your help.

Suggest and vote on key chapters for the book revision

One of my major projects during the summer and fall of this year will be getting the seasteading book in shape for publication (initially via POD). I have a giant pile of links and ideas about little sections to write – there is an arbitrary amount of nuance, fun speculation, and neat technologies that could go into the book. But I don’t have time, and even if I did the final result would be hugely bloated. So I need to start by 80/20ing the book – nuance and fun can be added later.

I want your help.

Openness

A new section for the Extended Q&A in the book:

Related to transparency is openness – being public about our existence, goals, and methods.

A number of TSI community members have expressed concern about our policy of operating openly, stating our goal to create new governments on the internet and in public interviews. They worry that it could bring us to the attention of governments before we are ready, allowing them to quash our nascent movement, and suggest that it might be better to keep everything quiet until a large seastead community is operating.

Trip thoughts, ideas, comments

Wed: Yale – good. Had dinner w/ ~12 students beforehand, ~25 came to talk (during midterms week, not bad). Seemed to like it. Several enthusiasts who want to come to Ephemerisle. New parts of talk (what does TSI do, ranting about libertarianism) went over pretty well. Should have an MP3 up sometime.

Thu: NYC. Met w/ book agent, I got the feeling she gets pitched at a lot. She had some good advice – the wider the potential audience, the more publishers will be interested, and pioneering will sell better than politics.

Open Source World Library

 Here’s a new section from the book beta, a topic I’ve been enthusing about recently.  Comments are welcome, as are pointers to any existing open-source projects which are similar to the idea.  If there are no such projects, well, someone should get cracking on writing one!  Oh, and if someone wants to make the logo described, that would be cool too 🙂 (thanks to krustad for the logo).