Seasteading Institute blogs - full entries

The Seasteading Institute March 2010 Newsletter

nthmost — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 18:35:08 -0500

The Seasteading Institute March 2010 Newsletter

A mountain is composed of tiny grains of earth. The ocean is made up of tiny drops of water. Even so, life is but an endless series of little details, actions, speeches, and thoughts. And the consequences whether good or bad of even the least of them are far-reaching. Sivananda

Highlights
- Double Your Donation
- Engineering Research Published
- 2010 Ephemerisle: Save the Date!
- Hired! Two heavy hitters join the TSI team
- Ephemerisle Community Advisory Group
Poseidon Project
- Platform
- Commercial
- Residential
Awareness & Community
- Events
- Media
- Book
Hiring
Membership
Special Thanks

Highlights

Double Your Donation

Double your donation today! Board member, donor and all-around good guy Peter Thiel has generously agreed to match your donation dollar-for-dollar. Every donation will be matched up to $100,000.

If you've already given, thank you and please consider an additional gift. If you've not yet given, please consider doing so now.

By making a gift today you will make the dream of seasteading that much more of a reality.

Engineering Research Published

Our first major research effort, an high-level seastead engineering paper spearheaded by Eelco Hoogendoorn, is now published in a preliminary form on our website. Considered a draft open for community discussion, the research covers a wide variety of topics basic and important to seasteading, from ocean condition contingency planning to platform manufacturing. A future paper will examine specific seastead designs in more detail.

You can find this and all future reports on our newly established Research page on seasteading.org

Download this paper directly [PDF].

Ephemerisle 2010: Save the Date!

Had a blast at the first Ephemerisle last year? Were you or your friends "totally thinking of going", but didn't? Here's your chance to start planning now to come to our second annual Ephemerisle festival, held in the Sacramento River Delta.

Save the Date!

Ephemerisle 2010 starts at noon on Thursday, July 22nd, and ends at noon on Sunday, July 25th.

An exact location is still being pinned down. While the water levels last year ranged a rather tame 3 to 10 feet, this year, waters may vary from 7 to 37 feet in the areas we are considering. Weather is expected to be rather warm, reaching 90 degrees F during the day and staying reasonably warm (though occasionally meriting sweaters) at night.

Tickets will be limited this year and are expected to sell out, based on last year's attendance and this year's expectations. We'll be inviting TSI members, artists, volunteers, and builders first before opening registration to the general public.

If you'd like to make sure you're among the first to know when tickets are available for Ephemerisle 2010, go get on the Ephemerisle Announcement List, a Google Group we use to release event information. And if you're already on it, good work! Notices will come more often as we plot out the event in earnest.

Think you might like to help out? Many hands make light work! Volunteers of all kinds are always needed and warmly rewarded. If interested, send an email to volunteers@ephemerisle.org with the word "Ephemerisle" somewhere in the subject line.

New Hires: Dana Harrison (Ephemerisle Event Manager) and Kris Jensen (Director of Development)

In February, we focused our attention on bringing new talent and experience into our midst. The Seasteading Institute is pleased to announce that we have an excellent Director of Development now with us and an absolutely fantastic Ephemerisle Event Manager, both of whom are as brave as they are bold.

Kris Jensen: Director of Development

Kris comes to the Seasteading Institute with over 10 years of successful fundraising experience. Prior to the Institute, Kris worked at Swords to Plowshares raising money to assist veterans in their transition from combat to community. As the Vice President of Development for Avenidas, Kris raised money to support older adults on the mid-Peninsula and as Director of Development for the Alameda County Community Food Bank in Oakland, Kris worked to ensure that everyone had access to the food they need.

Kris’ interest in the Seasteading Institute stems from a passionate desire to, as Ghandi said, “Be the change you want to see in the world.” Kris believes that the status quo just isn’t working and that seasteading offers an opportunity for the exploration of multiple solutions. And, true to his Nordic roots, Kris is drawn to the ocean and the adventures that await.

A Bay Area native, Kris graduated from San Jose State University and lives deep in the woods above Cupertino with his wife, a family of deer, several coyotes and a couple of bobcats. When not at work, Kris enjoys cooking for family and friends, wood working and gardening. Kris is also working toward a certificate in Permaculture Design.

Dana Harrison: Ephemerisle Event Manager

Dana Harrison comes to The Seasteading Institute as Event Manager of Ephemerisle based on her lifelong interest in creativity and innovation in different forms and contexts. In the first 18 years of her corporate career she was the first manager to automate a department at the Bank of America, and was part of the team that invented the electronic brokerage industry at Charles Schwab & Co., Inc. She then moved into the more alternative world, where she served as a core organizer for The Burning Man Project for 8 years, co-founded a nonprofit (Planet Care) which provides humanitarian and medical relief to refugees from Myanmar, established a live-work and performance space in Oakland called the Oakland Noodle Factory, and produced an original rock opera called "How to Survive the Apocalypse: A Burning Opera" -- all while maintaining a business consulting practice on the side.

Dana is excited by the opportunity Ephemerisle offers to create an experiential bridge to the long-term future of seasteading, to help build a new creative community from the inside, and to play with the balance of freedom and structure. Her person mottoes are "Be clear about your intent, and align your action with your intent", and "If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution".

The Seasteading Institute is proud and excited to have Dana and Kris aboard!

Ephemerisle Community Advisory Group

We held out first-ever Ephemerisle Community Advisory Group meeting on Monday, March 1st, inviting a small group of 2009 attendees to come and share their thoughts about how TSI and the community together can make Ephemerisle 2010 the most fun, interesting, and rewarding event it can be.

Lots of great ideas, stories from the 2009 Ephemerisle, wishes for 2010, and hopes for the character of our fledgling festival were all aired, resulting in excellent discussions and emerging imaginings. Dana Harrison pointed out likely locations on our map of the Delta, as everyone floated their ideas of how best to structure the next Ephemerisle event for best mobility, opportunity, and community integration.

One opinion was unanimous and unmistakable: Ephemerisle 2009 was too short! Of course, we at TSI think so too, so we're stretching the festival to 4 days this year -- Thursday, July 22nd through Sunday, July 25th.

There is so much more to explore in the coming months. If you are interested in receiving an invite to the next Ephemerisle Community Advisory Group, please send an email to info@seasteading.org with "Ephemerisle volunteering" somewhere in the subject line. We'd love to have your input.

Poseidon Project

The Poseidon Project is our medium-term strategy to build the world's first independent seastead by 2015, which we unveiled at the 2009 conference. We are still iterating on strategy, budget, timeline, and pitch. The strategy consists of three areas of focus:

Platform. The "Platform" track is the physical and legal foundation for the project, including the location, engineering design, legal research, and diplomacy.
Commercial. To be economically successful, there needs to be demand for our commercial real estate and jobs for people who live on the seastead.
Residential. We need pioneers!

Here's a report on the main areas of progress on the Poseidon Project towards building SeedStead:

Platform

We've published a rough draft of our first engineering document, covering high-level considerations for seastead engineering, such as requirements, ocean conditions, and so on. A future paper will examine specific seastead designs in more detail. Community feedback is welcome!

We've also opened a new Research page on our website. Check back occasionally to see it fleshed out with more papers and talks both from The Seasteading Institute, from our collaborators, and from seasteading-inspired colleagues around the world.

Going forward, progress will hinge on the hiring of a Director of Engineering to sculpt the next phase of research.

Commercial

Work continues on the analyzing the medical tourism business model, as well as developing vital relationships in the medical world. More news and developments next month.

Residential

Thanks to dynamo Dana Harrison, we had the opportunity to put Ephemerisle and seasteading on display at the recent Burning Man Convectional Caucus held in San Francisco on March 5th, 2010. With the help of Matt Bell, an artist and volunteer at Ephemerisle 2009, our display captured the attention of hundreds of curious conventioners, come to indulge their curiosity and leave with a brand new sense of play.

We see Ephemerisle as a powerful outreach tool, capable both of directly acquainting people with the novel idea of living on the water, and of inspiring the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things. As such, we have aspirations to booth-dom at the next Maker Faire in San Mateo (May 22-23).

In the broader TSI scope, we're gearing up community groups, social events, and special activities in the Bay Area, holding an average of two events per month of different types. We are also forming alliances with self-sustaining communities such as WindWard, who embody a valuable form of enculturated survival knowledge that will be essential for the first pioneers aboard seasteads.

We encourage seasteading social groups to regularly meet across the world to share inspiration and ideas for the future of seasteading. If you'd like help forming a group in your own area, please contact info@seasteading.org

Awareness and Community

Awareness and Community: Events

Check out the The Seasteading Institute public calendar, where we list all TSI hosted and sponsored events, both singular and ongoing. You'll find casual meetups, speaking engagements, conventions, workshops, and other intriguing community events.

And there are lots more ways to keep in touch listed on our Seasteading Social Networks page.

If you'd like to hold an official Seasteading social event or workshop in your area, send an email with your idea to info@seasteading.org

Bay Area Socials

Upcoming:

March 14th (Sunday): Film on a Sail. Courtesy of the captains of the free yacht (This boat is real!), we'll be throwing our next seasteading social on a boat! Even better, we'll be projecting a couple of films on to the sail of the ship. To find out more and RSVP (very important -- attendance limited!), check out the Bay Area Seasteading Meetup page.
March 26th (Friday): Special sailing adventure hosted by Mollie Hagar of Modern Sailing School. Patri Friedman will be filmed by Jason Sussberg and his crew on this all-afternoon sailing adventure which will include a visit to an offshore oil platform. We are pleased to be able to invite a maximum of 6 current TSI members along on this outing. Please contact info@seasteading.org with the subject line "TSI sailing event" to get more information and request an invite.

Feb 23rd: Aquarium of the Bay Afternoon
Feb 13th: Seasteading Simulation Game

Talks

Upcoming:

April 6th (Tuesday): Patri Friedman will be speaking at the University of California at Berkeley. For more information and to find directions, check out the events page of Students for Liberty, UC Berkeley

March 5th: Patri Friedman gave a talk at the McLean Marine Science Center, University of Virgin Islands.

Awareness and Community: Media

Statistics

1691 mailing list members, from 1645.
860 members in our Facebook group, from 807.
678 fans on our Facebook Page, from 632.
452 followers on Twitter, from 450.

Press

Viver no Mar: Seasteading, o projecto viável do futuro (portuguese) - March 1, 2010 - English Translation

Blogs

Selected blog posts from December and January:

Awareness and Community: Book

Your input is still needed! Cast your vote for the most important topics in seasteading, and help shape the canonical seasteading book by Patri Friedman and Will Chamberlain.

Hiring

We are seeking a Director of Engineering to lead The Seasteading Institute's marine engineering research ($1000 referral bonus).

We have an opening for an Oceanography Intern to immediately begin work on the Poseidon Project, helping us research promising locations to place to first SeedStead ($500 referral bonus).

Membership

Today is the day to join a movement that will change the world! Become a member of the Seasteading Institute and know first-hand the inner workings of a life changing movement. You'll be joining 120 other pioneers in this effort and help bring Seasteading that much closer to reality.

Special Thanks

To our donors and members, who continue to astound us with their generosity, their volunteered insights, and the quality of their characters;

To our forum participants, who have been keeping discussions lively, fresh, and civil, helping to further the cause of seasteading on all fronts;

And to you, for reading our newsletter!

See you next month!

Viver no Mar (Living in the Sea)

nthmost — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 20:15:25 -0500

Recently, Portuguese reporter Vitor Hugo Alvarenga contacted us to find out more about The Seasteading Institute, as part of a feature for high-profile news outlet TVI24.pt about the seasteading movement. Entitled "Viver no Mar", the three-piece feature focuses on The Seasteading Institute, on SeaLand, and on the concept of seasteading in general.

From the article (translated):

The idea of a community that is installed on the sea is generally associated with libertarianism, political philosophy which advocates absolute freedom for mankind, something like anarchy-minded free-market competition. The Seasteading Institute, the project more viable for the future, is no exception to this trend.

Our "official" responses to the questions were shortened quite a bit (I really am not that terse!), but the feeling and message carry well enough. Vitor did a lovely job of packing lots of concepts into the small space he had to work with.

Links to all three articles in Portuguese follow, with a link to English translations.

Viver no mar: um pequeno passo para a liberdade (about SeaLand) [Translation: Living in the Sea: Sealand, the project viable in the past]
Viver no mar: Seasteading, o projecto viável do futuro (about The Seasteading Institute) [Translation: Living in the Sea: seasteading, the project viable for the future]
Viver no mar: um pequeno pass para a liberdade (about the seasteading movement) [Translation: Living in the Sea: one small step for freedom]

If you are a speaker of Portuguese, try hovering over each paragraph in the translated pages to see the text in its original language. Google Translate does an okay job, but it's far from perfect. If you can contribute a better translation, go for it! Contributing better translations is a great way to help connect more people to more information around the web.

Addendum: Mystery! We've never before seen this video embedded in the article about us. Have you? It's kinda cool! Got the TSI logo in there and everything.

Countries & Cruise Ships

Patri — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 13:54:20 -0500

I was checking up on T-Mobile's website to see what their roaming rates are by country, as I'm doing some international travel this weekend.

I was delighted to see that their list of "countries" you can check coverage on starts with all the countries in the world...and then continues on to list individual cruise ships, sorted by cruise line and ship name! Given how important the notion of ships as semi-sovereign countries is to seasteading, I gotta say, it was totally awesome to see cruise ships and countries appearing on the same list as if they were the same thing!

Here's the page.

Research Update: TSI Engineering Assessment Report (part 1) released

nthmost — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 20:41:58 -0500

Thanks to Eelco Hoogendoorn and a host of valuable community support, our first offical Engineering report is now available for general parusal. You can pick it up from our new (and still in-progress) Research page, or download the PDF directly here.

From the Preface:

This document is a high-level analysis of the engineering challenges involved in homesteading the high seas. The aim is not to provide a detailed design of a specific seastead, but rather to find answers to general questions, such as the cost per unit area of functional real estate.

Note: This is a first draft of this report. It is being publicly released for community feedback. Due to still being in a state of considerable flux and expected changes due to feedback, polishing is not yet high on the agenda. Please send any feedback you might have regarding content to eng@seasteading.org.

Seoul, South Korea, Launches Floating Island

nthmost — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 19:07:23 -0500

This past weekend, the city of Seoul, South Korea, launched the first piece of a floating island called "Viva", one of three floating islands destined to take their place in the Han River next to the Banpo Bridge this summer. Part of the Seoul Metropolitan Government’s plan to revitalize recreation areas and the ecology, the floating islands were made possible by an investment of $83.9 million from the city of Seoul and a consortium of construction companies.

Weighing about 2,000 tons, the overgrown buoy launched on Saturday spent its first day covering a total distance of 60m to the water's edge, rolling at a snail's pace across inflated rubber logs. As of the time of this blog post, it will have reached its destination on the river to become the first anchor point of the three-island construction puzzle. According to JoongAng Daily, Viva (3,271 square meters) will be completed first, followed by its sister islands Vista (4,737 square meters) and Tera (1,200 square meters) in July. The Floating Island installation will be opened to the public in August.

An artist's conception of the completed Floating Islands project in the heart of Seoul.

The Seasteading Institute February 2010 Newsletter

nthmost — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 21:23:04 -0500

The Seasteading Institute December 2009 Newsletter

Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.

Andre Gide

Highlights
- 2009 Conference Videos
Poseidon Project
- Platform
- Commercial
- Residential
Donor Profile: John Chisholm
Awareness & Community
- Membership Program
- Events
- Media
- Book
Hiring
Membership
Special Thanks

Highlights

Second Annual Seasteading Conference Videos

We're pleased to announce that all of the videos from the 2009 Seasteading Conference are now available on Seasteading.org's 2009 Conference page. It's taken a fair bit of effort to adjust for sound and lighting discrepancies; each one needed a different sort of love and care. Thankfully, Jason Sussberg, videographer at the conference and all-around-awesome documentarian, took it upon himself to painstakingly correct these problems, improving some issues with audibility and slide legibility. We took the delay in stride and posted a writeup about each and every one of these presentations; some of these blog posts seem to have inspired some pretty interesting discussions in our community forums, too.

If you're new to these presentations, you can start by watching Peter Thiel's keynote, to understand why one of our key backers, in his technological and entrepreneurial wisdom, feels that seasteading has an important role to play in the near future. Follow that up with Patri Friedman's opening for the TSI Executive Director's-eye-view. Many of the speakers make reference to these two presentations in their own talks.

Our 2009 Conference played host to many fascinating thinkers and engineers from around the world. Politics, technology, business, and all-out futurism were all roundly represented. TSI is proud to have hosted such a successful event, drawing over 80 attendees from around the world -- some of whom became speakers as well through the un-conference proceedings.

To find all of these videos in one place, visit the 2009 Seasteading Conference page.

You can also find many of the presentations embedded in blog posts -- see below for titles and links to the ones posted in December and January.

Poseidon Project

Platform. The "Platform" track is the physical and legal foundation for the project, including the location, engineering design, legal research, and diplomacy.
Commercial. To be economically successful, there needs to be demand for our commercial real estate and jobs for people who live on the seastead.
Residential. We need pioneers!

Here's a report on the main areas of progress on the Poseidon Project towards building SeedStead:

Commercial

Having completed a round of inquiry into the business of medical tourism on cruise ships, analyst Max Marty now reports that we've succeeded in connecting with experienced medical professionals in the field of cosmetic surgery. "With their help, we're getting closer to creating a viable plan for cosmetic surgery at sea," says Max.

For more conceptual insight into this entrepreneurial pursuit, you can find Na'ama Moran's presentation on ship-based medical business, aka MediCruise, from the 2009 Seasteading Conference on our main blog.

Engineering

TSI's Engineering intern, Eelco Hoogendoorn, has been compiling the research produced in the last half of 2009. At the Seasteading Conference last year, Eelco presented an Engineering Overview talk, which at the time of our last newsletter was not available online.

Now, however, you can watch the video and catch up on TSI's engineering direction as of late 2009: Eelco Hoogendoorn's Engineering Overview presentation.

In his production of 2009's research documentation, Eelco has come to rethink and question his initial assumptions of the best path for the Poseidon Project's Engineering. In particular, he has made some discoveries regarding the modularity of his proposed structures as well as the probable human comfort levels resulting from the connected-modules scenario. In an engineering blog post on seasteading.org, Eelco writes, "I am somewhat disappointed by these discoveries, as it nudges up the minimum scale of open-ocean seasteading which I believe to be plausible, but as someone commented, ‘that’s progress’, and I suppose it is."

Residential

The Seasteading community worldwide has been expanding steadily, both with and without TSI's direct influence. In December and January, we heard from several regional Seasteading groups, from Singapore to northern Europe to Honduras. We're pleased at the initiative of these groups and happy to support them (meaning, YOU) in any way we can.

Last month, 10 members of the Baltic Seasteading group ("including 3 Swedes") met in Copenhagen and discussed such topics as the Free State project and buying boats as a bridge to seasteading and a tool of realistic and approachable incrementalism. Group organizer Lasse Birk Olesen, a longtime Seasteading Institute supporter and presenter at the last conference, also appeared in Copenhagen on Jan 17th to give a presentation. They have expressed earnest interest in forming a European Ephemerisle event in the near future. If you're interested in supporting the growing northern European seasteading movement, you can sign up for their mailing list through their website and also become part of the Baltic Seasteading group on Facebook.

As we ramp up business and engineering research, The Seasteading Institute will be fostering the growth of many more such regional chapters of seasteading supporters.

Donor Profile: John Chisholm

John Chisholm is a pioneer of high-tech industry. In 1992 he founded Decisive Technology, publisher of the first desktop and client-server software for conducting surveys via email and web (now part of Google). He went on to found CustomerSat in 1997, a leader in Software as a Service enterprise feedback management systems, where he served for a decade years as CEO/chairman (now part of MarketTools). He is the author or co-author of two patents in online polling technology, a graduate of MIT as a Master of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and holder of an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Chisholm believes in strong foundations, smart innovation, and solid logistics. In addition to creating new charitable remainder unitrusts to benefit students of music, mathematics, and theater at MIT, his interest in fostering entrepreneurship has led him to volunteer as a mentor with the MIT Venture Mentoring Service to help young entrepreneurs start new high-tech businesses.

Says Chisholm of The Seasteading Institute, "As governments grow bigger and less efficient, and reforms of any kind have less and less impact, Seasteading is a hopeful breath of fresh air. Few organizations try to affect political change on such a fundamental level; fewer still have concrete, incremental plans for success. I admire the TSI team's strategy, realism, and diligence. Their initiative has the potential to profoundly improve the human condition. I am excited to support it."

An avid mountain climber, Chisholm has summited Mounts Rainier, Shasta, Whitney, St. Helens, and live volcanoes in Chile and Indonesia.

Awareness and Community

Awareness and Community: Membership Program

Since our Membership Program was launched on April 15th, 114 pioneers (up from 102 in December 2009) have signed up! Please join them to support the long-term future of seasteading.

Awareness and Community: Events

We now have a public shared Google Calendar to help you keep up with Seasteading Institute events both singular and ongoing, which you can subscribe to from your own Google account as well as export to many compatible formats.

As always, you can find numerous ways to keep in touch via our Seasteading Social Networks page.

Upcoming Bay Area Socials

Feb 13th: Seasteading Simulation game. Did you miss playing this live-action role-playing game about seasteading at the 2009 Seasteading Conference? We're running it again in a large space at Stanford University. Find out more on the Bay Area Seasteading Meetup page.
March: we have something really special planned, but it will be limited to just 20 TSI members! Keep an eye on the Seasteading Meetup group or the Bay Area Seasteading Facebook group for info.

Talks

Patri Friedman presented at the ISIL Retreat 2010 in Phoenix Arizona this past month.

Awareness and Community: Media

Statistics

1645 mailing list members, from 1553.
807 members in our Facebook group, from 776.
632 fans on our Facebook Page, from 471.
450 followers on Twitter, from 404.

Blogs

Selected blog posts from December and January:

Awareness and Community: Book

Patri was successful in forming a small group of volunteers to assist in editing and to provide comment on its content and direction. As a result, some rethinking has gone into the new draft. Patri is intent on creating an introduction and fully-realized explanation of seasteading in a manner that has broad, positive appeal. Work continues.

Hiring

We have an opening for an Oceanography Intern to immediately begin work on the Poseidon Project, helping us research promising locations to place to first SeedStead ($500 referral bonus).

We have existing openings for Director of Development and Director of Engineering positions, each with a $1000 referral bonus.

Membership

If you haven't already joined TSI, start your year off with a pioneering contribution via a tax-deductible membership.

We've been developing special rewards and bonuses for membership at various levels. Be sure to check the next newsletter for more information, and look out for special "members-only" events in the near future.

Special Thanks

To our donors and members, who continue to astound us with their generosity, their volunteered insights, and the quality of their characters;

To our forum participants, who have been keeping discussions lively, fresh, and civil, helping to further the cause of seasteading on all fronts;

And to you, for reading our newsletter!

See you next month!

How inappropriate to call this planet Earth when it is quite clearly Ocean.

Arthur C. Clarke

Na'ama Moran - Medical Tourism on Ships

nthmost — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 19:09:39 -0500

Na'ama Moran's presentation on the business of Medical Tourism on Ships, given at the 2009 Seasteading Conference, can now be viewed online:

Na'ama Moran, entrepreneur and TSI collaborator, believes medical tourism on cruise ships is not just the next big thing, but the next logical step in the health care industry. Using the existing hospitality afforded by modern cruise ships, the political advantages of location outside of any government's EEZ (Exclusive Economic Zone), and the growing trend of medical tourism around the world, Moran intends to build a business to provide revolutionary levels of hospital care to patients of all kinds.

Medical tourism is "an emerging, growing industry that is already well-estabalished in many countries in the world," says Moran. Reputable US health care providers and medical universities have been forming alliances with foreign provider groups and medical travel planners to lower the logistical barrier for patients and increase reliability and authority in foreign providers.

The rise of medical tourism is already changing the health industry landscape. Rather than buy into expensive U.S. insurance plans that lock patients into a near-monopolistic hospital system, patients can choose instead to have the operations they need at significantly lessened expense, even including the costs of travel.

And the need has never been higher. 47 million Americans are uninsured, and 18% of the 250 million insured Americans are ineligible for insurance coverage of certain procedures, resulting in huge out-of-pocket expenses.

Operating outside of US jurisdiction, a medical cruise ship can offer equivalent cost savings to the services offered by foreign health care providers, but at increased levels of comfort and accomodation one would expect of a modern cruise vessel. As for the acquisition of a vessel, Moran notes, "this is the best time to get a cruise ship," echoing Mikolaj Habryn's research on cruise ships as residential seasteads.

A lively, energetic speaker, Moran seeks to assemble a team of business builders, seed funders, and analysts, particularly those with domain-specific experience in medicine, hospitality, insurance, and cruise industries, to kickstart her vision of MediCruise.

Nice EEZ layer for Google Earth

Patri — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 20:03:53 -0500

Color-coded EEZ data layer

Will Chamberlain - Thinking Structurally About Government

nthmost — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 22:13:57 -0500

Will Chamberlain's talk at the second annual Seasteading Conference, "Thinking Structurally About Government", is now available online:

"Everyone is frustrated with the fact that government never seems to work the way it should... that reform seems impossible."

Will Chamberlain, research fellow for the Seasteading Institute and co-author of Let A Thousand Nations Bloom, asks the root question of modern governance, applicable to individuals around the world of every background and belief: why is there so much broad-based dissatisfaction with the way things are run?

Chamberlain presents his answer, and it is wholly non-partisan in nature -- indeed, it can be seen as an emergent natural phenomenon irrespective of political system or cultural tradition. With the help of public choice theorists such as Mancur Olson, Chamberlain describes the environment of human activity that leads time and again to intransigent governments of all descriptions that incite their neglected citizenry to dissent and revolt.

In an environment that provides no internal or external pressures on government to stay competitive for citizens -- in other words, to practice "good customer service" to prevent loss of citizenry -- the ostensible stability of the system cascades into sclerosis. Special interest groups, once they are formed, are nearly impossible to break apart. The system develops more and more to serve the special interest groups, who in turn control the legislature. Reform then becomes impossible, as the laws reinforce the entrenched groups and disregard (or even criminalize) those who long for reform.

Revolution becomes the only recourse, but expecting any coup to happen in a peaceful and nondestructive way is a naive and highly unlikely outcome. The powerful tend to want to stay powerful; even if the power rests in abstract administrative groups rather than individuals, all entrenched entities are motivated by self-preservation. "Nobody ever gives up," quips Chamberlain, echoing the observation that has been made of tyranny many times over since classical Greece.

In Chamberlain's view, Seasteading has a real shot at solving these large, intractable government problems. Rather than a doctine of direct reform, of fixing what can't be fixed, the multi-micro-nation "strategy" (if the emergent system resulting from many independent actors striving for their own benefit can be said to have one) embodied in unleashing thousands of new governments into the world, all with a far greater Power of Exit than afforded by a traditional nation, has the most probability of producing social structures subjected to enough competitive stress to exist in "bloodless instability". In such a scenario, dynamic reorganization becomes necessary to stay competitive for citizens, inducing change in governments when and where needed, but without the danger and destructiveness of revolution.

Referring back to Mancur Olson in his first book, the Logic of Collective Action, Chamberlain observes that "smaller groups are more effective than larger groups". Perhaps here is an advisory towards the future of seasteading, where it may be wise to resist agglomeration even when there may be gains in security and stability. Keeping tension between dynamism and stability will be key to the avoidance of a future in which seasteads could become sclerotic nations full of entrenched special interests just as the traditional land-based nations that came before them.

Engineering Parallels Between Ephemerisle & Seasteading

Patri — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 16:20:28 -0500

There are a wide variety of opinions in the seasteading community about whether Ephemerisle is a plausible path to full seasteading. Here's my pre-event pitch of why Ephemerisle is useful. Post-event, I have an additional thought.

Our Ephemerisle structure and setup basically worked as plan, with a few exceptions. One is that it took longer than we expected, and was not completed by the noon Friday starting time (although everything did come together for Saturday evening). Besides that, the biggest technical issue had to do with anchoring (ie location control).

Ephemerisle Saturday morning,
platform moved to the shore,
houseboats not yet moved

Friday night, much of the main platform was together, but the huge sea anchor our platform engineer brought didn't work in the Delta mud. He made some gravity anchors out of concrete and rebar which were sufficient to hold the platform, but he was not comfortable docking all the houseboats and homemade structures to the central platform and having the whole collection moored by the gravity anchors. We also had concerns about anchoring the collection of houseboats as one unit, as mooring 9 houseboats with 1 or 2 houseboat anchors risks an anchor or line giving.

The obvious solution is to parallelize, but anchors don't parallelize well, for two different reasons in two different setups:

First, suppose all your structures are one unit, and you drop multiple anchors, each of which is individually too weak for the whole unit. The constant motion of the structure (in the wind, waves, and currents) will pull different anchor lines taut at different times, and you can't easily maintain tension on all of them at once, so they'll pull out one by one. That's why many small gravity anchors on the main platform did not constitute a solid anchorage.

Second, suppose you anchor each structure (or group of a size that a single anchor can hold) separately and then try to have some kind of flexible bridges. Each structure has what's called a "watch circle", which is the area on the surface that it moves over as wind, currents, and waves change. Because of how anchors are set, anchor lines run diagonally, not vertically, and so the watch circles are several times the depth. Each structure also has a "mooring footprint", which is the area spanned by the anchors and lines. Again, this is several times the depth. And unfortunately, neither can overlap - when watch circles overlap, structures may bang into each other, and when mooring footprints overlap, anchor lines can tangle. So this means the structures must be widely separated, which would make Ephemerisle not be a single community.

So we ended up using the shore as a fallback - we tied the main platform to trees on shore, tied the houseboat collection to separate trees on shore (so both had solid moorings and tiny watch circles), and we built a rope barge to go the short distance between them. One of our major goals for incremental progress for Ephemerisle 2010, of course, is to solve this anchoring problem without cheating by using the shore.

In the months since the event, Eelco has been working at TSI on an overview of seasteading engineering considerations and solutions. And the single biggest challenge he's found, besides the obvious one of dealing with the waves, is...location control! While the situation is more complex, the exact two same anchoring issues we encountered at Ephemerisle still come into play. The fact that anchors attached to the same structure don't parallelize (so how do you anchor a city?), and that moored structures have large mooring footprints and watch circles and so you can't just individually anchor multiple structures. (Watch circles are proportional to depth, so moor in 1000m water and you're talking about a footprint of a square mile or more separating each structure - not much of a city!)

There are several potential solutions to this, but I'll save them for Eelco's paper, because my main point is not to explore location control issues. My point is that even the first Ephemerisle, in the protected waters of the Sacramento River Delta, brought up significant engineering challenges which directly apply to open-ocean seasteading. Even I, as an avid proponent of Ephemerisle as a viable incremental strategy, did not expect this much of an engineering parallel.

Now, I'm not pretending this is a complete argument for the viability of the Ephemerisle strategy as a path to true seasteading. Perhaps it is merely a coincidence. But I think it's a striking data point, and I'm glad that Ephemerisle is one of the parallel paths we are pursuing, along with academic research, professional engineering, developing real businesses, and more.

Dominique Roddier - Clubstead Engineering

nthmost — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 15:42:09 -0500

Dominique Roddier's presentation on Clubstead Engineering from the second annual Seasteading Conference is now available online:

Dominique Roddier - The Seasteading Insitute 2009 from The Seasteading Institute on Vimeo.

Dominique Roddier has vividly imagined the process of manufacturing and deploying a Clubstead, a seastead that is not simply seaworthy, but also home-worthy, and presents a Clubstead suitable for a 20-year life. Offshore platforms may be stable, but they "aren't very pretty," quips Roddier, before launching into the design goals for Clubstead. "Can we get it to look cool?"

Nevertheless, this presentation is a highly practical one. Roddier has been researching the manufacturing constraints of producing seasteads, and finds, for instance that not many (if any) plants can fabricate something that's 400 feet in span. To address this, the Clubstead project aims to design steel fabrications in modular 40-foot spans, which any facility should be able to produce. Each span would then be towed to the site and assembled in the ocean using time-tested principles of bridge engineering.

Roddier dreams of a Clubstead that is physically and economically self-sufficient, and provides as a first milestone the goal of being able to exist for a month without any extra-seastead interaction. Most of the holistic concerns of such an operation, from business to construction to costs to quality of life (like abating seasickness!) are covered in this talk.

Find out more about the Clubstead project and see some of the preliminary designs here on the seasteading.org website.

Seasteading is the cure for post-Avatar Depression?

Patri — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 22:31:31 -0500

LA Snark reports on post-Avatar Depression (complete with television news report), and how to deal with it. Solutions include:

Make some real life friends.
Stop hanging out with negative people
Be interesting

And finally, most relevant to us:

Get outta Dodge. Seriously, pack up and leave. This is easier for some more than others, but if you’re bored out of your mind in your current life, sometimes sticking your roots (or tail) in a new, unfamiliar land can be exactly what you need.

Hmm...

James is ready to move!

Patri — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 17:19:20 -0500

TSI Director of Operations James Hogan heads to the ocean (well, Shoreline Lake) in this fun image from a recent TSI staff photoshoot.

Jorge Schmidt - Legal Aspects of Seasteading

nthmost — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 20:09:53 -0500

Jorge Schmidt's presentation of research on the legal aspects of seasteading is now available online:

Jorge Schmidt set out to discover the freedom of the seas, researching the extents to which the law of the sea could help define an existence on the ocean as a ship or platform free of another nation's influence, and came to the 2009 Seasteading Conference to report his findings.

"There is no such thing as the freedom of the seas, at least as I used to imagine that it existed," says Schmidt.

In other words, under international law as it exists today, to break away from one's nation into the ocean presently means only one of two things: flying the flag of some state, under whose jurisdiction you agree to become, or becoming subject to the real freedom of the seas -- the reality that a warship of any state may board you. "That is the main consequence of not having a flag," a consequence that presently extends to all structures: ships, platforms, and artificial islands.

But distinctions between various types of structures affect other freedoms. "Being a ship is very important", says Schmidt, because the law of the sea was developed to deal with vessels that serve as transport, flying the flag of their jurisdictional state. "Ships" are generally afforded right of passage to waterways even within the EEZ, whereas platforms (such as oil rigs and research stations) cannot claim this right by default.

Yet few international legal precedents exist to regulate not just how to proceed in situations involving platforms, but also the very foundations of what constitutes a "platform" in the first place.

Schmidt refers to one landmark case, a dispute over a bridge set to be built by Denmark which blocked a vital throughway for Finland's oil platforms, which came before the International Court of Justice and had the potential to set a useful precedent as to the status of platforms as ships in their own right.

"The effect of this project, and in particular of the planned high-level suspension bridge over the East Channel, would be permanently to close the Baltic for deep draught vessels of over 65 metres' height, thus preventing the passage of such drill ships and oil rigs manufactured in Finland as require more than that clearance." --ICJ, 29 July 1991, CASE CONCERNING PASSAGE THROUGH THE GREAT BELT

Says Schmidt of the outcome, "Unfortunately for us -- for me as a lawyer, because I like to know the answer to things -- they settled the case, and the court never pronounced itself on whether these very large oil platforms would be considered ships."

Thus, seasteading stands not just at physical frontiers of lifestyle and engineering, but also at legal frontiers. The rules of the nationhood game have been more or less well-defined for land that has stood well before human history. For man-made structures physically and declaratively unattached to any existing land-based state, however, the field is an open one.

If a volcano emerged from the ocean, creating a habitable caldera, the conventions of this world are relatively clear on what may happen: any one of us with the means to bring a permanent settlement to that new scrap of land, defending it as necessary, could conceivably declare nationhood in the global community.

The same affordances are by no means granted to "artificial islands", however. The UN law of the seas specifically denies the affordance of an EEZ, or any other consideration beyond a small safety buffer, to artificial islands on the high seas. With a goal of independent sovereignty, should the seasteading movement adopt artificial islands as a strategy for habitation, an uphill battle awaits.

All this is not to discount, of course, the challenges of engineering, which will need to navigate the rough waters of international law with finesse. The more areas denied to a potential seastead, the greater the constraints that a potential habitation must be able to accomodate, and the constraints that Schmidt believes a successful seastead must operate under increase the baseline difficulties in many ways.

We'll be exploring more of the latest seasteading engineering thinking in upcoming video blog posts. Stay tuned!

Ephemerisle Documentary

Patri — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 15:09:55 -0500

Just in case you haven't seen it yet on one of other feeds, check out the awesome 9-minute documentary Jason Sussberg made about Ephemerisle:

Ephemerisle Documentary by Jason Sussberg from The Seasteading Institute on Vimeo.

Share it with your friends, and consider Digging it and upvoting it on Reddit.

M.U.L.E. - steading

Patri — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 15:07:07 -0500

Peter Boothe writes about this classic computer game from the mid-80s:

a nonviolent economics game with both zero-sum and positive-sum aspects where people compete to be the best possible homesteaders in a scifi environment made me think of you. The game is quite fun, and I recommend it.

The game can be downloaded free, and played online. Enjoy!

Engineering talk

Eelco — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 14:44:33 -0500

The talk I held at the 2009 Seasteading conference is up! Thanks everyone who was there, for the interesting discussions we have had afterwards.

Some comments on the then and now: I unfortunately no longer have the confidence in this concept I had back then, for the reasons explained below:

Connecting seasteads in such a manner is more difficult than I supposed, because the horizontal forces involved are much larger than I anticipated on an intuitive basis. To get a bit technical: the horizontal forces on a submerged body can be estimated by Morrison’s equation. Not only does it contain a drag component, being a function of the relative velocity, but also a component proportional to the acceleration of the water. It’s a little bit harder to see why this must be so, but if one considers the boundary of the displaced water, and the fact that this is the acceleration the displaced water would have experienced had it still been there, a body of non-water on the same position would either undergo the same acceleration, or would have to be held in place by a force proportional to it.

I had looked at these issues before, but committed a fallacy ‘ad linearisatum’: the effect is small for short waves, and the effect is small for long waves, so at the time I supposed it was probably reasonably small for all waves. Unfortunately, not so. Under worst case conditions , these horizontal acceleration forces are of the same order of magnitude as the weight of the entire structure itself. the components required to withstand such thousands of tons forces get a little bit out of hand; perhaps it is not impossible, but taking this effect into account, it simply no longer feels like a conceptually elegant solution.

Secondly, I underestimated the effect of heave motion on comfort. I had been reading some literature that suggested heave is not that bad as long as it is not combined with any significant roll motions, but it appears the rest of the world does not agree. Given that heave suppression for this concept is not very strong, its comfort characteristics will not suffice in the open ocean.

I am somewhat disappointed by these discoveries, as it nudges up the minimum scale of open-ocean seasteading which I believe to be plausible, but as someone commented, ‘that’s progress’, and I suppose it is. Its unfortunate that progress doesn’t always come in the direction you wish it would, but such is life. There are still other options which are being explored at the moment that I feel confident about, so no lack of work ahead!

A happy new year to you all,

Eelco

Mikolaj Habryn: Residential Shipsteading

nthmost — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 14:40:58 -0500

Mikolaj Habryn's presentation entitled "Residential ShipSteading" is now available online:

"You could do this right now."

Seasteading is typically thought of as a feat of complicated coordination involving the construction or purchase of an anchored platform. But cruise ships are veritable floating cities already. So why not just get a group of 500 of your closest friends together, refurbish a cargo or cruise ship, and set sail for freedom?

Google engineer Mikolaj Habryn set out to answer this question, and discovered that while long-term habitation in a cruise or cargo ship may not not be as easy as buying an apartment building, in many ways it could be easier than previously thought.

For one, the residential cruise ship scenario has actually been done. The floating luxury condominium residence dubbed "The World" has been housing jet-setters since March of 2002.

The question is, can The World be called "seasteading in the TSI sense"? Not really, if permanent settlement is the qualification, since the majority of residents spend around 3 months or less on the boat. As Habryn explains, the people who can afford the costs to live aboard the world typically are not willing or cannot afford the time to live there. The World fails to create a real community, since no one has long-term stake in the settlement.

If the goal is to create a permanent settlement with a real community, therefore, positioning costs and comforts to attract a certain demographic of people who can spend long protracted amounts of time in residence should be a primary consideration.

Habryn has done much of the work of understanding the accounting behind the operation of a cruise ship, and lays these numbers out in detail. Interestingly, the main advantage of a shipstead would be its cost: both up-front purchase and maintenance are far more advantageous than that of any platform ever designed to date.

Questions remain about the length of time a cruise or cargo ship could sit in the ocean before needing to come back to shore. Fresh water capacity, waste water capacity, and other supply / maintenance concerns will likely be resolved differently per ship. Indeed, unresolved is whether large vessels, which are designed for movement and delivery rather than continuous occuption, could be relied upon to sit at all -- perhaps it will be necessary for safety and/or regulatory standards to keep moving, come to dry dock, and receieve yearly survey and inspection.

Nevertheless, achieving a functional, permanent settlment by ship stands to improve the outlook for seasteading in general. Government? Trade? Commercial accommodation? Internet access? Cabin fever? Ocean madness? These are wide open questions for any seastead. A shipstead would be able to rely on the time-tested strength of its construction, spending its efforts on developing solutions to those external problems without the additional challenges of managing an experimental platform.

Happy 2009 From The Seasteading Institute!

Patri — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 07:06:56 -0500

2009 End Of Year Email

Happy Holidays from The Seasteading Institute!

It's been a fantastic journey together in 2009, and thanks to your involvement, commitment, and support, our small organization has continued its rapid growth.

Accomplishments

We've collectively accomplished these things to advance the frontier of Seasteading:

Learned a great deal about seastead engineering and shared it with the world by releasing all 100+ pages of documentation on ClubStead, the world's first professionally engineered and validated floating city design.
Spread the word about seasteading via coverage in numerous media outlets such as CNN.com, particularly for our Design Contest Winners whose global publicity ranged from National Geographic to Fast Company.
Achieved a critical organization milestone by getting our non-profit 501c3 status from the IRS, which is crucial for fundraising.
Developed our community through means like the Membership Program, and bringing people together for the 2nd Annual Conference which grew attendance by 75% and speakers 5-fold, and the First-Ever Ephemerisle - where 125 people converged on a combination of home-built platforms and boats to fully engage with the realities of living on the water.
Developed a medium-term strategy called the Poseidon Project to build the world's first independent seastead by 2015.

For more details on our wonderful year, you can browse all our monthly newsletters.

Plans

Some of the exciting things in progress that you can expect early in 2009 include Eelco's Seastead Engineering Overview, the public release of the Poseidon Project, the rest of the conference talk videos, and a re-designed Ephemerisle website featuring media from the event, including a 10-minute documentary by Jason Sussberg. Our bigger plans for the rest of the year including moving the Posiedon Project forward by hiring a Director of Engineering to do more detailed engineering designs, oceanography research to determine ideal location, and of course a conference and Ephemerisle that are even bigger and better!

Help!

We're excited about what we've done this year, but we are only at the beginning of this incredible journey towards diverse, competitive government, and we need your help to continue. We thank our 110 paying members for their generous support thus far, and ask that all of you please consider a tax-deductible contribution to The Seasteading Institute as you think about your year-end fiscal planning. This is your last chance to join as a founding member of TSI's membership program and be able to say that you supported this world-changing movement from the beginning! Contact our development staff if you'd like any assistance.

We understand that 2009 was a tough year financially for many, and we also appreciate contributions of time and mindshare by forwarding this to friends and joining our social networks:

Thanks fellow pioneers!

Patri Friedman, James Hogan, Eric Jacobus, Naomi Most, Max Marty, Gayle Young, Alexis Bright, and Eelco Hoogendorn from The Seasteading Institute.

Eelco Hoogendoorn: Seastead Engineering Overview

nthmost — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 03:25:13 -0500

Eelco Hoogendoorn's talk entitled "Seastead Engineering Overview" is now available:

Recent engineering graduate Eelco Hoogendoorn has done a lot of thinking about the technical pragmatics of seasteads. In his 2009 Seasteading Conference presentation, he lays out the fundamentals that a research plan must cover to begin to actualize TSI's Poseidon Project goal of putting the first working seastead on the water in 2015. And as Seasteading Institute's first engineering intern, this research plan is the one Eelco himself has been following, updating our Engineering Blog along the way.

Much of the engineering of feasible seasteads must revolve around economies of scale, as Eelco points out. Large platforms like cruise ships and flotillas (championed by Mikolaj Habryn and Miguel Lamas Pardo, respectively, whose presentation videos will be available soon) are proven living concepts, but will be better targets for business development, as the challenge will be to balance operating and maintenance costs to make them sustainable residences. Exotic projects like undersea hotels, while romantic, just aren't practical.

Small boats -- an ideal configuration for relatively cheap iterative development -- are nearly as old as culture itself; yet in all of human history there has never been a stable, long-term settlement on the water. "Perhaps Ephemerisle will bring some innovation and new ideas as to how boats can help us," Eelco muses.

The focus, then, will be on creating a "small hill" in the ocean, something of a compromise between the insecurity of the small vessel and the expense of the large craft, and developing compromises around wave drift, rocking motion, and maximizing the ratio of real estate to stabilization materials. Eelco's talk leads gracefully and conversationally through a wide range of engineering challenges, from vessel clustering scenarios to seasickness, and provides great perspective as to the frontiers of seasteading-related technological progress.

Last week, the Seasteading Institute bid Eelco a fond farewell as he voyaged back across the Atlantic, having completed his three-month term of research for which he is presently finalizing the documentation.

Seasteading Institute blogs - full entries

The Seasteading Institute March 2010 Newsletter

The Seasteading Institute March 2010 Newsletter

Table of Contents

Highlights

Double Your Donation

Engineering Research Published

Ephemerisle 2010: Save the Date!

New Hires: Dana Harrison (Ephemerisle Event Manager) and Kris Jensen (Director of Development)

Ephemerisle Community Advisory Group

Poseidon Project

Platform

Commercial

Residential

Awareness and Community

Awareness and Community: Events

Awareness and Community: Media

Awareness and Community: Book

Hiring

Membership

Special Thanks

Viver no Mar (Living in the Sea)

Countries & Cruise Ships

Research Update: TSI Engineering Assessment Report (part 1) released

Seoul, South Korea, Launches Floating Island

The Seasteading Institute February 2010 Newsletter

The Seasteading Institute December 2009 Newsletter

Table of Contents

Highlights

Second Annual Seasteading Conference Videos

Poseidon Project

Commercial

Engineering

Residential

Donor Profile: John Chisholm

Awareness and Community

Awareness and Community: Membership Program

Awareness and Community: Events

Awareness and Community: Media

Awareness and Community: Book

Hiring

Membership

Special Thanks

Na'ama Moran - Medical Tourism on Ships

Nice EEZ layer for Google Earth

Will Chamberlain - Thinking Structurally About Government

Engineering Parallels Between Ephemerisle & Seasteading

Dominique Roddier - Clubstead Engineering

Seasteading is the cure for post-Avatar Depression?

James is ready to move!

Jorge Schmidt - Legal Aspects of Seasteading

Ephemerisle Documentary

M.U.L.E. - steading

Engineering talk

Mikolaj Habryn: Residential Shipsteading

Happy 2009 From The Seasteading Institute!

Happy Holidays from The Seasteading Institute!

Accomplishments

Plans

Help!

Eelco Hoogendoorn: Seastead Engineering Overview