The Seasteading Institute

Reply To: livefreeortry

[quote=livefreeortry]Ratteler, I totally subscribe to the frontier spirit. But keep in mind that frontiers are not won without tools, resources, weapons etc, and these need to be bought at least to begin with, and to pay for these, we need an income. Romantic ideals need to be mated with realism.[/quote]

I'm glad to see you agee with me. :-)

The romantic goal is surburban neighbothood floating on the sea.

We aleady have an income to live on land and sustain us here. We are part of several nested economies ranging from local to global.

The reality is that without a source of income to support us on the seastead, we are stuck with our land based jobs to support our seastead. I for one have no interest in paying extra to communte back to land. If I'm going to work harder than I will on land, I want to be free of it's influence as much as possible.

Initially, no service dominant economy will be able to self sustain a comminuty on the ocean. In fact.. something that land based culture in America is coming to grips with is that a serivce dominant society can't exist on land either. America is a great model of what NOT to do.

America came to dominance when it was a producer physical goods. It was not just cheap labor that pushed our products across the world, it was a rich amount of resources to draw on.

We moved to a mostly service dominated society that imports he vast majority of it's goods, and relys on other nations resources.

Add to that our huge centralized industries. Our food is grown predominatly in the mid west, our gas lines criss cross the nation originating at a few sparce locations.

In the event of any major cataclysm, the entire U.S.A. is at risk because we rely on transportation of what we need to survive. Impeed our ability to transport good for over 2 months, and the death toll will hit millions quickly.

This why Wind and Verticle Farming are such good ideas anywhere. They decentrialize the resources and localize the transport problems. This is not only environmentally helpful, but afford any culture a ability to sustain a catastrophic "hit" without jepordizing the entire culture.

Like the internet, if you take down half the computers on it, the net will still function with only theareas effected being lost.

In fact... that's a great model for our seasteads. Each seastead should be considered a "server" with a defined number of clients that any given server can serve before the need for another server is built. Given his model, even a massive storm of sunami is unlikely to take out any entire community.