The Seasteading Institute

Reply To: Premises ?

Should surface necessarily be in such a short supply on a seastead ? The ocean is the vastest place on Earth, it's not gonna run out of place before LONG. Building there should take advantage of this fact. A lot of problems faced by seasteaders may be solvable by the application of more useable surface. There are a few ideas on the Wiki that go against the premise of artificial floating land being necessarily small and expensive: Joep's Disposable land and Mud curtain, for example. Even temporary extension of land using, say, a large roll of thick bubblewrap that can be deployed and retracted as needed, may be very doable, and at slightly higher scales hard breakwaters may turn those from temporary to permanent. For example the inhabitants of Lake Titicaca in South America went with this solution.

Lately I've been thinking about building more basic seasteads at higher scales, extending horizontally instead of vertically, and it just seems to make sense. Or maybe I'm just trading the infrastructure problems you mention (concentrating power and food source and robustness into small surfaces) for structure problems (cost of raw material in such vast amounts, mobility) ? I understand you and Patri already have a preferred design and that the marine expertise bought from professionals should not be wasted, but I just don't think we should prematurely close any door at that point. Unless there's a good reason I'm missing (as usual :D) ?