The Seasteading Institute

Reply To: @PastorJason:

@PastorJason: Sure, I get that reducing operating costs is a contributor to economic viability. I don't think I had my thoughts very well-organized (much less well-communicated) in my previous post. In terms of operating a seastead-oriented ocean-based venture (whether on a ship or an actual seastead), my sense was that there is more potential leverage on the revenue side than the cost side, simply because the cruise ship industry has been working on the cost side for years, but we're talking about some pretty innovative business ideas to explore the revenue side. That said, livefree makes a good point that current cruise ships have some pretty different goals than a residential, non-luxury ship/seastead, and so there will probably be good opportunities to improve our operating costs in ways that wouldn't have been applicable to the cruise ships industry. For example, people on a luxury cruise expect a very wide variety of tasty foods at their meals, but seasteaders would probably be happy to eat locally-harvested seafood all the time to make ends meet. @livefree: The other thought that comes to mind with regards to your proposal is that I'd really love to any first ocean-based venture be economically self-sustainable. Seasteading will take off so much more quickly if it generates wealth for people instead of consumes it. That said, if we can't get there right away, I think the sort of community-driven research/grants you propose is a good way to accelerate things. We've thought of similar things for designing single-family seasteads, and there is no reason the same concepts couldn't apply to supplemental seasteading technologies & processes like power production, food production, etc.