The Seasteading Conference

The Seasteading Conference was held at San Francisco’s luxurious Le Méridien Hotel, May 31 to June 2, 2012. The conference highlighted budding business opportunities in the seasteading movement, technological advances, and policy issues that may affect seasteaders.Attendees met fellow entrepreneurs, investors, engineers, ocean law experts, maritime professionals and other forward-thinking individuals, and discovered where they fit into the up-and-coming for-profit seasteading sector. They experienced some of San Francisco’s finest accommodations and amenities, and got a taste of “life on the sea” as we closed the conference with a sunset dinner cruise around the bay. We held a benefactor’s dinner at historic Forbes Island on Friday, tickets for which supported the continued success of The Seasteading Institute.



Download the program and speaker bios

Videos of Conference Talks
You can find all the videos in this playlist.

Alexander D. Wissner-Gross, who is an Institute Fellow at Harvard University Institute of Applied Computational Science, gives a talk at the Seasteading Conference 2012 about Liquidity on the High Seas: Financial Seasteading.

Ricardo Radulovich presents the possibilities of Sea Farming at the Seasteading Conference 2012. Ricardo Radulovich is an agricultural water scientist (PhD UC Davis) who is convinced that the sea holds the key to solve mankind’s growing food and water problems. Since becoming a marine farmer 12 years ago, Ricardo has worked on a variety of issues, from caged-shrimp/shellfish polyculture, seaweed cultivation, and production of floating horticultural crops, to production of freshwater through distillation and rainwater harvesting, and its storage in semi-submerged plastic bags.

The audience got a chance to ask each other questions regarding seasteading at the Seasteading Conference 2012.

Neil Anthony Sims presenting the Velella Project at the Seasteading Conference 2012. Neil Anthony Sims is co-founder and co-CEO of Kampachi Farms, LLC, based in Kona, Hawaii, and in La Paz, Mexico. Over the past two decades, Sims has led teams that have accomplished a number of breakthrough developments in pearl oyster culture, offshore aquaculture legislation and regulation, marine fish hatchery technology, open ocean mariculture systems, and most recently, untethered open ocean “drifter pens”: the Velella project.

The Big Picture

Joe Quirk gives a talk about how ocean cities will change world and talks about the book he’s writing on seasteading – at the Seasteading Conference 2012.

Charlie Deist, staff writer at the Seasteading Institute, Baoguang Zhai, algae research intern at the Seasteading Institute and a sophomore at Tufts University, and Ryan Larsen, volunteer researcher at the Seasteading Institute and a mechanical engineering student at The Maritime Academy, give a talk about the Oasis (Ocean Algae for Seastead Intergrated Solutions) Project at the Seasteading Conference 2012.


See the other videos on Vimeo