The epic story of the First Seasteaders has closed one chapter and opened a new one. The roadblocks encountered by our friends at Ocean Builders have strengthened our conviction that the world needs seasteading immediately.
Today we planned to release Rüdiger Koch’s paper, revealing his plan to convert the cruise ship he co-owns with Chad and Nadia into a sustainable seastead. A sizable team was assembled that included the world’s leading water architect and his team of AI programmers for mobile units of the floating community. Twenty-seven people are already working at the first SeaPod 3D printer, more of which would have been floated next to the cruise ship. Thirty-seven crew members were hired aboard the MS Satoshi.
It was easy enough to get insurance to sail a cruise ship to Panama. Nobody predicted they wouldn’t be able to get insurance to dock permanently in Panama.
Late Friday night I sat in my walled garden in California, listening to my city descend into madness, while Rudy sat beneath the stars on his cruise ship with his radar revealing no sign of another ship for a hundred miles in any direction. The next day, Ocean Builders announced that the MS Satoshi will be sent to a scrapyard instead of forming the center of a new floating city off the coast of Panama.
“Building on land destroys habitats. Building on the ocean creates habitats. You can’t be an environmentalist if you live in land.”
That was my favorite line when Rudy called me from the middle of the Atlantic Ocean for a wide-ranging conversation that went on for over three hours until his phone died.
He plans to run his luxury Princess cruise ship aground on a beach in India. He sat alone in his café drinking one of the thousands of bottles of wine aboard and expressed regret that the fabulous hospital aboard he intended for medical entrepreneurs would have to be scrapped.
He is utterly unbowed.
“Build forward better,” Rudy quipped.
Let’s be honest with ourselves. If Chad, Nadia, Rudy, and Grant hadn’t pledged their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor, we would still be arguing and not seasteading.
Do we want to be part of history?
Today we planned to reveal Step One for seasteading. Since that is not permitted by legacy systems on land, Ocean Builders are working on blockchain insurance for Step Two, which was revealed to me late at night. I’ve barely slept since out of sheer amazement at the courage.
“I intend to sell the Model-T,” he explained.
SeaPods are still for sale. You can get your Model-T and help launch the future of human civilization.
One more quote from Rudy: “I require that seasteaders put skin in the game.”
I am pleased to share with you the plan for Panama that might have been for want of insurance:
The cruise ship industry has successfully painted itself green by first using scrubbers and then moving from heavy diesel fuel to Liquified Natural Gas (LNG). In this paper we will show that these measures not only did not change the immense carbon footprint of the industry, it even exacerbated this real issue and other problems.
