Website doesn't give you much of an idea of what your life on a platform would be like

Syndicate replies to “Website doesn't give you much of an idea of what your life on a platform would be like” topic Thu, 05/22/2008 - 15:12 — JennyC

   I'm interested in this concept, but I'm having trouble picturing what it might be like to live on one.   Sure, you have lots of drawings of the whole platform, but I'm more interested in a person's daily life aboard than the structural engineering.  Forgive me if these questions are addressed somewhere and I missed them.

    Is your home a windowless concrete box?  

Would the top be a public area like a park?   If so,  then don't you have to move away from the Libertarian model, because all of the sudden you have to start enforcing rules of behavior to avoid abuse?

     How many people do y'all envision living on the early models?

   Enough to support restaurants and stores and a hospital?

   What if there is a medical emergency?

  What about school for the kids?

   Would there be jobs available besides Internet based ones? 

   How does one go ashore?  How far out at sea would they be?

  Would it be expensive to go ashore?

  How do you buy your groceries?   Wouldn't your little country be totally dependent on relationships with land-countries for food?  

-Jenny

 

 

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Thu, 05/22/2008 - 15:30 — Jesrad

My little laundry list

"If so, then don't you have to move away from the Libertarian model, because all of the sudden you have to start enforcing rules of behavior to avoid abuse?"

Libertarianism is perfectly compatible with enforcing rules preventing abuse. In fact, libertarianism can be understood as enforcing a single rule: don't harm others. Libertarian societies are meant to prevent harm between human beings, as much as is possible. It's really that simple.

Regarding relationships with the shore: all sorts of transportation are considered, from seaplanes to helicopters to boats. Most shipping of cargo and passengers will be by boat, presumably. This importation will be costly at first, but then most, if not all, the islands of the world are in the same situation. Besides, there are many methods that might be used to harvest and grow food, and reduce reliance on foreign supply.

As for the other questions, well, they have no definite answer because they depend a lot on what YOU will do. Your home on a seastead will be what you build it to be (you'll have a windowless concrete box if that's your fancy). It will have a school if anyone wants to run a school there. There will be the jobs for any type of activity people want to conduct there. Your seastead will be as far out to sea as you want it to be.

Thu, 05/22/2008 - 16:16 — JennyC

>As for the other questions,

>As for the other questions, well, they have no definite answer because they depend a lot on what YOU will do. Your home on a seastead will be what you build it to be (you'll have a windowless concrete box if that's your fancy). It will have a school if anyone wants to run a school there. There will be the jobs for any type of activity people want to conduct there. Your seastead will be as far out to sea as you want it to be.<

<p>

ok, but I wouldn't be buying my own seastead, I would be joining one that y'all would create.    What sort of life do the creators of this website envision in the early prototypes?   I understand there would eventually be all kinds of different seasteads, but I'd like to see some examples of what the active participants here think life would be like.

 

<p>Like how many people would be on one, what people would do for work and fun, and what daily like would be like and how it differs from what we have here in the US.    My point is that there is a lot of material here on structure design and political discourse, but I still can't imagine what my life at sea would be like.

<p>

 I don't understand why when I post it removes all my blank lines and runs all my sentances together into one paragraph, even if I put <p> between paragraphs.

 

-Jenny

 

Thu, 05/22/2008 - 19:27 — Carl Pålsson

A lot of things will

  • A lot of things will probably be similar to how they work today. I can´t imaging shopping for groceries changing in any revolutionary sense for instance. Other things might work differently. But since the whole point of the project is to enable different people to experiment with different forms of society more easily than today I guess nobody knows how seasteads will work. Time will tell what works and what doesn´t. Maybe all seasteads will become libertarian utopias. Maybe some will become socialist collectives. Others might be highly religious communities.
  • Use the bullet list to make line breaks.
  • -Carl

 

Thu, 05/22/2008 - 22:08 — Tuk

A Typical Day(?)

Here's my "vision" of what a day on a seastead may look like. I've never really been out to sea, but I'm basing off of what I've read and understand from books, internet, and TV series' (like Deadliest Catch on discovery).

 

  • My wife and I wake up early in the morning before the sun rises in our cramped windowless room barely large enough to stand in. She wakes the children from their smaller compartments and begins preparing a breakfast of hydroponicly grown fruits. Meanwhile I'm in the common area of the spar (or the lower level of the deck?) checking the sonar for security threats. All is clear so I check the satellite feed for the day's weather. A large storm is moving in that will likely hit us, but we've seen it coming for a few days and the exposed areas of the deck have been secured and sealed in advance.
  • After breakfast I get to work checking on the floating farm near the base of the spar. My wife begins the day's lessons with the children, while possibly working on other projects such as maintaining the hydroponic gardens. Once I'm sure the sea hasn't washed our algea, kelp, ocean vegetables, (turtles, seals, otters?) away I return to the common area. I begin working on some freelance webdesign efforts to bring in some desperately needed income, and occasionally help explain things for the children. They watch some educational videos on the computer or HDTV (it's flat, it'll fit!) while my wife takes a break to chat with the neighbors, or call her family on the mainland. I check in with the nearby seasteading family to learn how Bob's journey is going. I learn that Bob should arrive in a few hours with our weekly shipment of supplies: land plants, canned foods, repair materials, batteries, sunblock, and the money he earned selling my exotic sea turtle shells and otter pelts.
  • Eventually the storm hits, but the sturdy structure barely sways as the hurricane-like winds pass overhead. I brave the storm briefly to fetch some vegetables from sealed greenhouse gardens on the deck, and we make a dinner with fresh land and sea vegetables, stored rice, and some leftover seal or tilapia cooked on our (ethanol?) stove. We also have a microwave, small refridgerator, etc. The rain from the storm is collected from spouts and gutters on the deck and then filtered for drinking and occasional short showers.
  • I then write up a blog of the days activities and record a short video with my webcam for people back on land to track our life and progress. Later the neighbors drop by for a visit and we discuss the day's events and any problems that may have occured. One of the wives is running for leadership of the community, and a vote will be held in a few days.  She, and several other families, are getting tired of the Smith family's behavior lately, as they seem to only drink and smoke their hydroponically grown marijuana, without contributing to the community.

 

Perhaps I'm waaay off base with half this stuff, since it's pure fiction. But you wanted a picture of what it might be like ;)

Thu, 05/22/2008 - 22:35 — JennyC

Thanks, Tuk! I really

Thanks, Tuk!
I really enjoyed your vision of a day in the life. :)
A couple things jumped out at me. 

1.) The cramped space 

2.) The commune-like feel to it, that the Smiths must contribute or apparently face some punishment. 

-Jen

 

 

Fri, 05/23/2008 - 08:21 — Jesrad

It's not that they Smiths

It's not that they Smiths have to contribute or "face some punishment", but that the rest of the people will stop dealing with them if they just keep with behaving like antisocial potheads. Nothing will be taken from them, and they won't be hurt in any way, but everyone else will have left and the Smiths end up stranded.

Fri, 05/23/2008 - 09:44 — thebastidge

Cramped space

Well, yes. Space on a Seastead (to borrow a better term from Sci-fi, we might use the term "cubic as it implies 3 dimensions rather than just area) is going to be very expensive in terms of construction, maintenance, and competing with necessary purposes. Although people keep saying "Seasteads are not ships", the facts of life would be very similar.

  • You don't have "walls", you have "bulkheads". Many of them will be curved.
  • You don't have "floors", you have "decks". The overhead on most decks will almost certainly be lower than the ceiling in your house.
  • You don't have "doors", you have "hatches".
  • Meals will be prepared ina  galley. Depending on the size of the seastead there may be multiple galleys, and they may even be lavishly appointed but it is very unlikely that every person or even every family will have their own. I could see the sort of arrangement where several living spaces share a central galley and head.
  • Oh yeah, your toilet facilities are called a "head". Your freshwater showers will always be limited. You get wet, turn the water off. Soap up and scrub, then turn the water on long enough to rinse. Done. You may be able to do more with seawater, but it will be much harsher on your skin and hair.
  • You may not have an easily defined "fore" and "aft" but you will almost certainly use those terms, because East/West and North/South have very little internal purpose on a mobile platform. They're for navigation outside the Seastead.
  • You'll probably refer to areas of the seastead by function: engineering, operations,  etc. I am not really familiar with all the sections of a large ocean-going vessel, or naval vessel, but I'm sure others here are and could fill in there.
  • Smells will be different than you are used to. The sea will dominate verything, but most likely with a very clean, salt/"tinge of iodine" scent, not swampy and marshy like the beach often is. It will probably always seem like there's at least a slight breeze. Occasioanly the wind will be fiercer than anything you've experienced, unles you have been in a hurricane/tornado.
  • Planning details of your life that you now take for granted would make things much easier. You won't just run to the market because you forgot to get milk. You'll plan your shopping ahead of time with care, because it might be weeks before you go again. People in remote places like parts of Alaska already do something like this, particularly in logging and oil sites far from civilization.
  • Some people will find watching the open ocean fascinating. Some will rarely let their visual frame of reference slip off of man-made objects. The sight of boats around you on the sea will probably be very comforting, knowing that there are people out there.
  • You'll probably have most or all of the communications options you have now. An Internet link allows you to not just send email, but shop online, chat via text, make phone and video calls, watch television or movies. You'll probably carry a radio rather than a cellphone, with the ability perhaps to patch through to a telephone call.
  • There will be a lot of metal in your environment, the quality of sound will be affected by this.

But then, most people on ships are only on them for work. Whether they are Navy personnel, or commercial shipping. they are there for a job. some of their jobs are to make the ship go from place to place. There won't be as much of that on a Seastead. But there are many jobs that involved harvesting the Sea's resources, maintaining the vessel, and deal with cargo and business. So there will be differences:

 

  • You'll probably enjoy fresh-caught seafood all the time. Sometimes the sameness of the fare may be wearisome, but inventiveness and the ability to get food from land will make up for this, much as people who get tired of eating pre-packaged crap will go out for a nice meal or cook a nice dinner from a new recipe.
  • Things won't be so grim as a naval vessel. There won't be "regulation" colours everywhere, simply what people find tasteful enough to agree on. Paint is relatively cheap as a decoration, easily transported and applied, and protects metal surfaces from the saltwater and moist salt air. I'm sure people will bring reminders of whereever they came from, as well as lots of sea motifs.
  • Somebody with experience/credentials teaching may use teleconferencing-type technology for virtual classrooms or at least as guidance to your homeschooling. 
  • Just like now, you will be busy most of the day. There are always housekeeping and maintenanc chores to be done, as well as whatever you do to make money.
  • Your hobbies, depending on what they are, may change. Reading will be one of the easiest hobbies to indulge. TV is still there. You're unlikely to play soccer/football, baseball or cricket, but many other games could be played, like basketball, maybe even field hockey. Gymnasiums of some sort would most likely be practical. Innovative solutions to exercise would be a challenge to rise to. Sailing, diving, fishing, etc are obvious.
  • Pets are almost certainly going to be there. Arrangements have to be made for their "business" but there have been dogs, cats, birds, and monkeys on ships for centuries. I would see an aviary as a nice, and fairly easy thing to set up on a platform. Maybe in combination with a greenhouse.
  • As a plus, you don't drive to work. No time in traffic, very little time wasted between enjoyable stuff like bed, breakfast, and important stuff like work and supporting yourself. It would be a lot like the agrarian societies of the past where familes had all their meals together, and had interaction during the work day. It would just be a bit higher technology trades, and more working from home at modern business endeavours. 
  • Kids would learn to be better adults because there would almost certainly be less segregation by age group- they learn from the examples of elders, not from bratty peers.

 

Fri, 05/23/2008 - 10:37 — Jesrad

LH meets GI aboard the LB

I would be inclined to think of life aboard early seasteads to be a lot like "Little House meets Gilligan's Island aboard the Love Boat". Does it make me sick ?

Fri, 05/23/2008 - 11:30 — thebastidge

LOL

Yeah, maybe just a little twisted. And definitely from a "TV generation". lol.