Topic

• ❑ Intro
  • ❑ Seasteading

    Hi. I'm Patri Friedman, and this is a talk about Seasteading. Since this is a new word, I should probably tell you what it means.

    • ❑ Mission Possible: How and Why to Create New Sovereign Territory in Ocean Waters
    • ❑ by Patri Friedman
  • ❑ So...what is "Seasteading"?

    Its a word coined by Wayne Gramlich to describe the idea of homesteading the oceans. It refers both to this general idea and to our specific project.

    • ❑ Definition: "To Homestead The Oceans"
    • ❑ Term coined by Wayne Gramlich
    • ❑ Also refers to our specific project and approach
  • ❑ Two-Part Talk

    This is going to be a two part talk about Why and How to seastead. There are lots of reasons to settle the oceans, but I'll focus on the strongest, which is the effect this technology will have on the business of government. I'll also talk about why we've chosen our particular approach. How is a big topic, I'll talk about some engineering areas like structure design, some of the basic infrastructure elements, and then business topics like how to make money, and how to fund the project.

    • ❑ Why
    • ❑ How
  • ❑ For more detail, see the book

    For more detail on any this, you can check out the book we're writing, which is currently in draft form. The text is online at the website, and it features a commenting system so that you can give us feedback.

    • ❑ "Seasteading: A Practical Guide to Homesteading the High Seas"
    • ❑ Draft available online at http://seastead.org/
• ❑ Why Seastead?
  • ❑ Many reasons

    So why seastead? There are a lot of different reasons, its the next obvious frontier, it'll let us use more of the earth's surface, and its good practice for settling space. But there is a key effect of seasteads which is kinda non-intuitive, but I think has the potential to really change the world, and that is the way it affects governments. Now, I have to confess to being a libertarian, and government inefficiency is a bit of an obsession of ours. But you don't have to be a libertarian to see that governments waste a lot of resources, you just have to read the newspaper, and if we can reduce that waste we can add a lot of wealth to the world. One of the reasons why govt. waste is so important is that government spending reduces the exponential growth of wealth. This graph is from a recent study of OECD countries by Gwartney, Holcombe, and Lawson. On the horizontal axis is government spending as a percentage of GDP, on the vertical is the average annual rate of GDP growth. So the average growth rate in countries whose govts spent less than a quarter of GDP was 6.6%/year. For governments that spent 40-50% of GDP, it was 2.8%/year. Now because this is an exponent, the effect compounds over decades. A person in the high-spending country will on average be about 4 times as wealthy as his grandparents. A person in the low-spending country will be about 27 times as wealthy as his grandparents. [Scope of government and the wealth of nations, Gwartney, Holcombe, and Lawson] And the problem goes far beyond economic waste. Governments are huge and out of touch with their citizens. There is little experimentation, innovation, or novelty in our political systems, and minority voices are not heard.

    • ❑ Settle the next frontier
    • ❑ Use more of the Earth's surface
    • ❑ Practice for space
    • ❑ Most important: make government work better!
  • ❑ Why is government inefficient, and why are seasteads a solution?
    • ❑ Note: more detailed explanation at http://patrifriedman.com/projects/socs/commented/drawer/dynamic_geography.html
    • ❑ Why Do Governments Suck?

      Alright, so why do governments suck so much? We actually know a lot about this. There's the public choice school of economics and various ideas like the rational ignorance of voters, that concentrated interests tend to win out over dispersed ones in the political marketplace, and so forth. I have a slightly different way of looking at things which consider government as an industry, and analyzes that industry. Either way, it's all about incentives. One of the basic tenets of economics is that people respond to changes in incentives, and the problems with government, no matter which way you look at it, stem from bad incentives. One important facet of this kind of analysis is that we blame the system, not the participants. Different systems with different incentives elicit different behavior from people. Rather than blaming voters for not spending more time understanding the issues, which is human nature, we should consider different systems which will work better with the people we have. This also casts doubt on the idea of fixing things through proselytizing, spreading the word about your pet philosophy. Changing people's opinions has limited use if they are still working within the same flawed system. Thinking through the logic of these systems helps us to realize that they are really quite resistant to rhetoric, and we need actual structural change. So lets examine the current system.

      • ❑ Its the system, not the participants
      • ❑ Public Choice Theory, Dispersed Interests, Rational Ignorance....
      • ❑ Its all about incentives
    • ❑ The Industry of Government

      Think of government as an industry. Citizens pay taxes, for which they receive government services. Each government has a monopoly over one geographic area, but citizens can switch providers by moving to other countries. This industry has two main features that make it horribly uncompetitive.

      • ❑ High cost of switching providers:

        The first is the cost of switching providers. Because of the geographic monopoly, in order to change governments, you have to change countries. That means you have to leave your job, sell your house, pack your possessions, leave your friends, apply for new citizenship, get a new job, buy a new house, and so foth. This cost is enormous compared to any other service provider switch (cell phones, car insurance, even employers). Because of this people are unlikely to do it very often. For it to be worthwhile to move, the difference to an individual between two governments must be higher than this huge cost. This dramatically reduces market feedback for providers of government services. So its natural for govts to exploit the current customer base, because of this huge barrier keeping them from leaving.

        • ❑ Move jobs, houses, possessions, friends, citizenship...
        • ❑ Result: Little market feedback
        • ❑ Result: Exploitation not innovation
      • ❑ Huge barrier to entry

        Now the second problem with this industry is that government has a HUGE barrier to entry. Even something like designing a brand-new operating system or car from scratch seems almost easy compared to creating a new government. Consider the current situation in Iraq as an example of the tremendous difficulty of regime change. We've spent a hundred billion, and we're still not done. On land, you can't just start fresh because all land is claimed by some current country, and sovereignty is not for sale at any reasonable price. So in order to enter the market, you basically need to win an election or a revolution, both of which are really really hard. Basic economics tells us that with a high barrier to entry, you get an oligopolistic market with few firms and limited competition.

        • ❑ Consider Iraq
        • ❑ All land is claimed, and sovereignty is not for sale
        • ❑ Result: Few firms
        • ❑ Result: Little competition
      • ❑ Not a good industry!

        Taken together, we can see that government is a very uncompetitive industry. Its difficult for new competitors to enter the market, and its even hard for customers to switch between the few existng firms. Just Imagine if, in order to switch long-distance telephone providers, you had to pay twenty-five thousand dollars. Imagine also that the FCC was charging $100 billion for new licenses to phone companies. Think you'd have very good service? What would happen would be that prices would get jacked up until it was almost worth it to pay the huge cost to switch to some cheap provider - but not quite - and firms would become devoted to maintaining control of their pool of subscribers, and focus most of their energy on bitter infighting about access to these monopoly profits. So its really no surprise that governments perform so poorly, its a natural characteristic of their industry structure.

    • ❑ Government on Modular Floating Cities

      So now lets think about how the technology of modular floating cities changes these two factors. First, the cost of switching governments. Now this hinges on the "modular" part. Floating cities can be modular, meaning re-arrangable, because transportation on the ocean is *so cheap* that we can move whole buildings around. Just think about cruise ships and oil tankers - they're as big as a decent sized building, and they spend most of their time moving. Until we invent anti-gravity, this is just not possible on land. So because of the magic of water transport, we can re-arrange entire political units - districts, cities, states, whatever. If a group of residents are unsatisfied with the local government, they can detach their module and leave. When its easy for the population to leave, taking their homes and offices with them, its a lot harder to exploit them. If the city tries to impose an unpopular tax on Monday, by Tuesday there may be nothing left of it but the capitol building, looking out over empty ocean. Now this is not a new idea - its quite similar to Federalism, the motivation for our union of states here in the United States of America. But because states are fixed in place, a strong central government has been able to grow and reduce their autonomy. And because its still pretty expensive to move between states in the same country, the market feedback is limited. Seasteading is an enabling technology that makes the idea federalism more effective. Floating cities also change the other aspect, by greatly lowering the barrier to entry. Mark Twain once said "Buy land - they've stopped making it". Well, floating cities prove him wrong, . Instead of fighting over the current, fixed supply of sovereign territory, we can build brand new aquatory, which makes it much cheaper to get into the governing business. Not only do we not need to win a revolution or an election, but we don't need to acquire a large, contiguous territory at once. We can build a new country piece by piece as funds and interest become available, which greatly simplifies financing. Instead of needing millions of votes or billions of dollars to take over or splinter off a government, we can do it for a few million dollars a pop. This literally orders-of-magnitude lowering of entry cost is sure to bring in a wide variety of new competitors.

      • ❑ Low cost of switching
        • ❑ Territory can be dynamically re-arranged
        • ❑ Entire buildings can move between political jurisdictions
        • ❑ Easy to leave => hard to exploit
        • ❑ Federalism resurgent!
      • ❑ Low barrier to entry
        • ❑ "Buy Land, They've Stopped Making It" becomes false
        • ❑ Don't have to win an election or fight a revolution to have a new country
        • ❑ Build piece by piece as necessary
    • ❑ Result: Government Becomes a Competitive Industry

      So for these reasons, the technology of modular floating cities has the potential to drastically alter the industry of governing. Where on land we have a few large, static providers of crappy service, on the ocean we'll get many small, dynamic, innovative firms. What sort of governments will we have? Well, who knows - like any competitive industry, it will produce useful innovations and serve niche markets that we'd never dream of in advance. One neat aspect is that seasteading a politically agnostic technology. While my personal interest is in radical libertarianism, this has great potential for all minority political views, who are currently disempowered by our gigantic winner-take-all system. And as seasteading brings new options, a lot more people may discover that they have minority views. And even the majority should benefit from the experimentation with new and untried options, as they can draw from those which seem to work best. And we're changing politics through technology, not through rhetoric, so its much more likely to work. We don't have to convince anyone of a philosophy, just shift the fabric of incentives, and the world will naturally change. So this idea of building floating cities is not just some crazy idea. I mean, it is definitely a crazy idea, but its not one whose potential market is just for a few hermits, pioneers, or utopians. It has the potential to truly revolutionize one of the few areas of modern life which has not been dramatically improved by technology, where the insights of the past few centuries have had unfortunately little impact. And its a huge area - governments control a significant fraction of all human wealth, so improving it is a pretty big deal.

      • ❑ Land: a small number of large, static service providers who poorly serve customers
      • ❑ Ocean: Many small, dynamic, innovative firms competing
      • ❑ Competition will make government more efficient and effective - even though we don't know how
      • ❑ Technology, not political conversion.
    • ❑ Wait, is this optimistic or pessimistic?

      This theory leads to both optimism and pessimism about governments and freedom. It raises doubts about how well government can ever work on land, and how effective reform will be there. On the up side, note that the geography of space is even more fluid than the ocean. So the necessary characteristics hold for not only 71% of the earth's surface, but 99.999....% of the universe. *And* the theory suggests that societies in these places will have more efficient governments, no matter what their political persuasion. So while things look bad for the landlubbers and groundhogs, they look pretty good for everyone else.

      • ❑ Maybe we'll never have economic freedom on land
      • ❑ But space has dynamic geography too
      • ❑ So the necessary feature holds for 71% of the earth's surface and 99.99999% of the universe
  • ❑ Why do things our way?
    • ❑ Other ways don't work

      So for those of you who are to starting to think that this floating-city-nation-founding stuff is interesting, there's some bad news. There have been a lot of previous ideas about nation founding, and they pretty much all have one thing in common: utter and complete failure...So the second part of Why is, why we've chosen our particular approach, and how it's different. The root causes for these other project's failure pretty much all stem from lack of realism, which manifests in many ways. The problem is that nation-founding tends to attract idealistic, impractical people, so its no surprise that their ideas never get anywhere. Books like "How to Start your own country" and websites like the amusingly named "Footnotes to History" document hundreds of projects like this: <ah-hem> Antarctic Homesteading: A 60-page prospectus for this project was forwarded by the editor of Free Country Newsletter...The basic concept is for people to settle...in Antarctica [brrr]. A scenario is laid out to start unfolding in 1981, beginning at a Southern California conference, with growth from 1,000 people to 4,000,000 by 1985, but nothing ever happened. The financial base was to be concerts by John Lennon (who was probably unaware of their existence), films in the Jacques Cousteau genre but of Antarctic sunrise and sunset, and international conferences (Vegas...Antarctica...Hmm....Somehow I think showgirls are more popular than penguins]...This is a typical example of new-country projects that are mainly used as vehicles for the organizers' daydreams, with little regard for the harsher realities of the world [Strauss1984, p. 54-55]

    • ❑ Our general philosophy

      So the good news is that we don't need to be *completely* discouraged by this litany of failure, because these projects generally made basic mistakes that we've learned to avoid. We want to be as realistic and pragmatic as possible. Let's contrast our approach with previous approaches in several areas:

      • ❑ Incrementalism

        A lot of the proposals for floating cities start at sizes like 10,000 people. This is ludicrous. Large successful things like cities, start out small and expand organically. If you make the first step too high, you'll never even get started. We'll detail our plan later, but it relies heavily on the idea of incrementalism: a series of small steps, each moving naturally into the next.

      • ❑ financial realism

        ? How many of you have heard of The Freedom Ship? Its a proposed mile-long city at sea with a price tag of ten billion. Well, there is just no way that anyone is going to fund such a novel, chancy idea for that much, especially when the only condo cruise ship, the much smaller Residensea, was a financial failure. A realistic project has to be able to start small, and demonstrate to potential investors that it can work. No one is going to invest 10 billion dollars in something unless a 2-billion-dollar version worked out pretty well. You can see that financial realism goes hand in hand with incrementalism. We want to take small steps and start with small, inexpensive platforms. They may not be as cool, but we'll take small and real over gigantic and imaginary any day.

      • ❑ Political realism

        Political realism. Other projects talk about getting recognition from the United Nations, acceptance of their passports, and signing international treaties. This is ridiculous. Right now, seasteading is about pioneering, not about international diplomacy. The only politics that matter is how we can get left alone. that other stuff comes way later.

      • ❑ technological realism (no seacrete, no OTEC)

        We think its very important to focus on mature technologies. When you're already doing something hard, the less innovation, the better. New technologies are very sexy and exciting, but they aren't actually necessary to colonize the oceans, so its dangerous to be distracted by them. There are some in particular, like OTEC and seacrete, which are very impractical, yet have been counted on by many floating city schemes, for example those proposed in Marshall Savage's book The Millenial Project. OTEC, or Ocean Thermal Electric Conversion, is a technology which uses the temperature difference between warm surface waters, and cool deep waters, to generate power. There are a lot of advantages to this, it works night and day, it brings nutrient rich water to the surface, and it produces fresh water as a side effect. However, it takes a large temperature difference to work, so pipes must reach deep. This creates high pumping costs, with the result that only a very large OTEC plant can generate net positive power. Only a few OTEC plants have been built, they've been funded by the government, and they often operated at a net power loss. The technology just doesn't scale down, and a working plant will cost at least tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars. It may be a good technology for a big floating city in the future, but it doesn't help us make the tough transition from here to there. Seacrete is a substance invented by Professor Wolf Hilbertz, who discovered that if you submerge an electrified wire mesh in seawater, a cement-like substance forms by accretion. Books like The Millenial Project cite the figure that 4.2 lbs of seacrete can be created per Kilowatt-hour of electricity. Well, this number is wrong. Rather than integrating power used over time to get energy, the instananeous power was used as the energy figure. Since the process took about 40 hours, its off by a factor of 40. The actual demonstrated efficiency makes this process much more expensive than just buying boring old concrete. There's no such thing as a free lunch. There's another problem. The major power loss is resistive heating of the forming seacrete, because the electricity has to get from the mesh to the water. That means that the thicker it gets, the worse the losses are. So its very important to not be over-optimistic about technologies when you're planning this sort of venture. We do hope to use some exciting technology on later seasteads, but we don't want our plan to depend on it, and we don't want to innovate in the beginning.

        • ❑ OTEC - does not scale down
        • ❑ Seacrete - more expensive than buying cement
• ❑ How to Seastead

  Now that you've seen why floating cities are desirable, and heard about our general approach, I'll try to show a little about how we think they'll actually be built. This will be somewhat rough, since there are a lot of engineering details. So I'll just give the very basics about the ocean environment, structure, infrastructure, and business strategy.

  • ❑ "How" includes
    • ❑ Environment
    • ❑ Structure
    • ❑ Infrastructure
    • ❑ Strategy
  • ❑ Ocean Environment

    Henry David Thoreau wrote: "The ocean is a wilderness reaching round the globe, wilder than a Bengal jungle, and fuller of monsters, washing the very wharves of our cities and the gardens of our sea-side residences. Serpents, bears, hyenas, tigers rapidly vanish as civilization advances, but the most populous and civilized city cannot scare a shark far from its wharves." Let's talk about a few of the important areas of the ocean environment.

    • ❑ Waves

      An obvious element is waves. There are several kinds of waves. Many people think of tsunamis the most fearsome wave, but that turns out to be wrong. They are virtually unnoticeable in the deep ocean, where they have very long wavelengths and very low heights, usually less than a meter. Its only when they reach a shallow waters that they pile up, becoming shorter and higher. Even then, they are more like strong fast tides than huge waves. So even a seastead close to shore can just rise with the water level. Rogue waves, on the other hand, are a real danger. Lawton writes: "They were struck by a rogue wave - a monstrous wall of water that rose out of nowhere and slammed onto the deck like the fist of god. Ships often don't survive an onslaught like that. Many sink before anyone on board knows what's hit them." A rogue wave is a wave that is significantly taller than the prevailing wave height, and there are various theories about why they exist. They tend to be unstable and break quickly, and sometimes come from odd directions. You can see one of the only photographs of a rogue wave here. It swept out of calm seas to hit the oil freighter Esso Languedoc in 1980. Amid waves of 15-30 feet visible in the background, this monster was at least 60 feet, perhaps as much as 90. While scientists used to dismiss rogue waves as folklore, accumulated observations have led to plenty of evidence for them. A recent study by the European Space Agency used satellite photos from a 3-week period in 2001, and found 10 waves around the globe above 75 feet in height. Clearly a permanent ocean habitat must expect to face a few of these. Knowing that they exist, however, is a big step towards dealing with them. Rogue waves are not dangerous just because they are big, but because they are *unexpectedly* big, and so structures weren't designed to handle them. In this case, knowing is at least half the battle. So here are a few of the many ways to avoid waves: You can build your habitat on tall pillars. You can protect it with huge breakwaters. You can choose a location where there are not big waves. Or you can be mobile, and use the advance warning from the global network of weather satellites to stay out of the way.

      • ❑ Tsunami
      • ❑ Rogue Waves
      • ❑ Avoiding Waves
        • ❑ Pillars
        • ❑ Breakwaters
        • ❑ Safe Locations
        • ❑ Active Movement
    • ❑ Currents

      Currents tend to consist of large cyclical formations with opposite direction of rotation in the northern and southern hemispheres. While they vary widely and have many eddies and transient features, this map gives a general idea of their usual flow.

    • ❑ Wind

      First lets look at the general circulation. You can see that the wind generally blows in circular patterns, like the currents. Hot air rises at the equator, then moves towards the poles, cools, and sinks, forming a classic convection cell. The coriolis effect adds a component of east-west motion relative to the Earth's surface. These steady trade winds are quite useful for generating energy. Also note that because the air is rising at the equator, there are few horizontal surface winds there, which means few waves, this area is called "the doldrums", and might be a good place to put a seastead. [slide] An obvious worry is hurricanes, like those which have devastated the southeast in recent months. It turns out that we have don't have that much to worry about. While it used to be thought that high winds and pressures caused damage to buildings, it turns out that storm surge and windblowne debris are the main culprits. Storm surge is the rise in water levels caused by a storms pressure, and it causes flooding on land, but will simply lift up a floating structure. Since wind is quite thin, it can carry off small things, but it doesn't really damage buildings unless it can throw debris like tree branches at them. We plan to build seasteads out of concrete, which is a bit heavy to be affected by wind. Really, we don't have to go any further than fairy tales to see how winds will affect a seastead. Although the wolf huffed and puffed, the third little pig's brick house was not blown down. The main worry from storms is that they increase wave height, and waves are a real danger. This must be taken into account in structure design, as you'll see later.

      • ❑ General Circulation
      • ❑ Storms - dangerous?
        • ❑ Wind - No
        • ❑ Storm Surge - No
        • ❑ Windborne Debris - No
        • ❑ Big Waves - Yes
    • ❑ Politics

      So the most complicated, difficult, and potentially important area of the ocean environment is the complex set of regulations and treaties governing it, which even we don't fully understand. So this will be a quick sketch of some of the basics. The most important rule is admiralty law, under which each ship must fly the flag of some existing country, and it is under their jurisdiction, much like an embassy. Fortunately there exist so-called "Flag of Convenience" countries which just sell their flag, and pay no attention to what flagged ships do. A flagged ship has the right to travel pretty much anywhere. The basic rules for boarding and search of a ship are that permission of either the captain, the owner, or the flagging country is necessary. Any country can search a flagless ship.

      • ❑ Admiralty law
        • ❑ Flags
        • ❑ Boarding
      • ❑ Political Zones

        The ocean is divided into a number of political zones. The territorial sea and contiguous zone, extending for 3-24nm, are basically part of the coastal state. Next comes the Exclusive Economic Zone, which has only been around for a few decades, and is part of the coastal state's push to control more of the energy and mineral resources of the ocean. The EEZ stretches for up to 200nm, and gives the coastal state rights to regulate nonliving resources, living resources, economic resources such as producing energy, artificial islands, marine research, and pollution. Unfortunately, this covers several aspects of seasteading. Fortunately, some states claim only more limited Exclusive Fishing Zones. Also, it should be much more practical to get a treaty to exist in a nations EEZ, harvesting some energy, than an actual treaty of sovereignty. Finally, we get to the High Seas. While there are some caveats regarding seabed resources, all States have the right to construct artificial islands, although international law naturally says nothing about the rights of non-States. So the case for seasteads is much better if they are 200nm from any country. Of course, this is burdensome for trade and tourism, so we want to be closer if we can.

        • ❑ Territorial Sea
        • ❑ Contiguous Zone
        • ❑ EEZ / EFZ
        • ❑ High Seas
      • ❑ Approaches

        So there are several approaches a seastead could take. The simplest and least novel method would be to buy a FOC, and count on apathy to minimize restrictions. Another possiblity would be to obtain a flag from a country which formally agreed to a hands-off policy for internal affairs. While this would be attractive, and we can choose any nation in the world because flagging is essentially virtual, this sounds suspiciously like a sovereignty treaty, and so may be hard to get. More daring seasteads may choose to go flagless, trying to carve a new niche in maritime law. This differentiates seasteads from ships right from the beginning, making clear that this is a new way of life which requires new legal categories. While this is a good point, we'd recommend a less aggressive strategy. Whatever route is chosen, it will take quite awhile to work out the legal ramifications, and the only clear prediction we can make is that some maritime lawyers are gonna make a whole lot of money.

        • ❑ Flag of Convenience
        • ❑ Flag from hands-off country
        • ❑ Flagless
    • ❑ Pirates (Arrrr...)

      Next we'll talk about Pirates. Arrrr! It turns out that they aren't much of a problem. Most piracy is very small scale - for example, of the 335 attacks reported in 2001, only 73 even involved guns. 16 ships were hijacked, and 21 people killed (all but one in the dangerous southeast asian waters). Seasteads are going to be a difficult target for petty thieves. Now, some piracy is done by large organized groups who capture entire cargo ships and their goods (often tens of millions of dollars worth) to be fenced. But given that seasteads don't have neatly packaged cargo, and will be defended by those who live there rather than hired sailors, they again seem like very unattractive targets.

      • ❑ Mostly small-scale
      • ❑ Rarely dangerous outside southeast Asia
      • ❑ Occasionally large and organized
  • ❑ Structure

    Next we'll talk about some of the possible structural designs for a seastead, and some details on our favorite. Basic requirements - handle waves, provide living volume, provide solar area. We'll consider three basic locations: underwater, on the water, and above the water.

    • ❑ Requirements
      • ❑ Handle waves safely
      • ❑ Provide living volume
      • ❑ Provide solar area
    • ❑ Many possibilities

      While there are some neat benefits to an undersea structure, you lose wind and solar power, and you greatly increase the engineering costs and worries. if other designs fail, the residents end up on top of the ocean. if an underwater structure fails, the ocean ends up on top of them! The scenic benefit can be achieved by just having a small portion of the structure underwater. So we don't think this is the way to go. Next comes on the water. Now you really have to worry about waves. Sailboats or cargo ships are one possibility, and they can avoid big waves by being mobile. They have the advantage of being an established technology, with lots of used models, repair facilities, and so forth. Unfortunately, boats are optimized for movement, not for living volume, solar area, or comfort. They use expensive materials in order to be light and fast, and tend to be cramped. Even a houseboat is really like an ocean RV, where we want an ocean house. While this approach may be viable, we don't think its optimal. Another possibility is to build simple platforms protected by breakwaters. These platforms are very cheap. The breakwaters, however, will be quite expensive if they need to handle big waves. One option would be to build these platforms in an area with few large waves, like the equatorial doldrums. While this structure design is not suitable for many locations, it is a reasonable approach for calm areas.

      • ❑ Underwater
      • ❑ On the water
        • ❑ Sailboats
        • ❑ Big Boat
        • ❑ Simple Platforms
      • ❑ Above the water

        Finally we have our preferred category, which is to build above the water. The most obvious method is to put a platform on long pillars reaching to the seafloor. This is the approach taken by the Troll A gas platform, which at 1500 feet is the tallest structure ever moved across the surface of the earth. The platform and pillars were built separately, and assembled near Norway, then towed 174 miles to its operating location. Howeve, there are some problems with fixed pillars. They are quite expensive in deep water and they don't allow for much modularity, which is key to to making floating cities different and better. There is also less political flexibility because you are fixed to one spot, you can't move away if nearby countries are becoming a problem. So instead, you can just use hollow pillars, supported by their own buoyancy. [SLIDE] Marc Piolenc called this a spar buoy. Ballasted at one end, it presents a narrow cross-section to the waves. However, this doesn't have much solar area or living volume. It's natural to add a cantilevered platform to the top to get more space. Unfortunately, this requires more flotation and ballast to compensate, which makes the spar really long. Well, the point of the spar is to present a thin front to the waves, so once you get below the bottom of the waves, you don't need to stick to that shape. You can widen out into a larger flotation chamber. The result is our preferred seastead design, which we call a spar platform.

        • ❑ Pillar Platfom
        • ❑ Floating Spar
        • ❑ Spar Platform
    • ❑ Our choice: Spar Platform

      In case anyone is wondering how this could be stable, there is a huge amount of balance at the bottom of the flotation hull. This moves the center of gravity down below the center of buoyancy to make the structure stable. Living quarters are on top, and they're separated by the long spar. * We very little cross-sectional area to the waves. The spar is long enough so that waves will never hit the platform or flotation, just this narrow column. Not only does this help the structure withstand the waves, it means that it will not move or rock like a boat, so no seasicknesss. { explain } * Its free-floating, so it can go in any depth of water (anchored if you want it to stay in one place). Mobile * Each of these platforms is a separable module, which is important because of the ideas presented earlier. They can be connected in a hexagonal grid. * Built from ferrocement, which is very cheap and durable Cost - Very preliminary, but something like $25-$150/ft^2 (labor, materials, infrastructure). Which is quite low because ferrocement is so cheap.

      • ❑ Flotation submerged
      • ❑ Living area lofted
      • ❑ Spar presents low cross-sectional area to waves
      • ❑ Doesn't rock like a boat
      • ❑ Multiple platforms can be connected
      • ❑ Made from ferrocement - cheap and durable
      • ❑ Cost: $25-$150/sq. ft. (labor, materials, infrastructure)
    • ❑ Future: breakwaters / simple platforms

      We need to avoid the waves, and two good ways of doing that are breakwaters and spars. We chose spars for the initial design because breakwaters for huge ocean waves need to be big, and are expensive, whereas a single spars is cheap. But as a city gets bigger, breakwaters become more efficient. This is because in a circular city, area goes up with the square of the radius, but perimeter, which is the breakwater size, goes up linearly with radius. So the ratio goes down with 1/r. Ocean real estate is plentiful and free, so we don't want to be limited to the more expensive spars with high marginal cost for area. Breakwaters will let larger ocean cities have a much lower marginal cost.

  • ❑ Infrastructure

    Providing the basic amenities of civilization definitely presents some challenges, but we don't need to innovate. If you've ever been on a cruise ship, you've seen sewage, power, food and water provided at sea - its just a question of cost. Many things will be imported, since we don't need to be self-sufficient. There are usually multiple solutions to all these areas, with different levels of cost, environmental acceptability, etc. We expect a wide variety of seasteads, so in the book we consider a lot of options. The solutions I'll outline are what we feel is the best balance, but others may make different choices, that's what seasteading is all about!

    • ❑ Already a solved problem (think cruise ships)
    • ❑ Many things will be imported.
    • ❑ Lots of options
    • ❑ Water

      Water - Rain is free and somewhat plentiful, so the platform will be designed to capture it. Reverse Osmosis is decently priced, the main cost is for the electricity, but we can use that electricity to do other things as well, and run RO when there is excess power. Later solar distillation may be good, all the plans we've found are quite expensive.

      • ❑ Rain
      • ❑ Reverse Osmosis
      • ❑ Future: Solar distillation (maybe)
    • ❑ Food

      Probably import a lot of food, because farming has low value per unit area, and seasteads have high cost per unit area. Just like urban areas import food from rural ones. But there are tech options for high-density growth, ie hydroponic greenhouses. Spirulina algae. Fishing / aquaculture which don't use up surface area. Aquaculture is the marine equivalent of farming and ranching. Aquaculture has some truly revolutionary potential. If we look at the transition from hunter/gatherer to agriculture/farm animals, we have a huge gain in efficiency which allowed human population to skyrocket, with all the benefits that provides. Current ocean fishing techniques are in many ways like hunting. There are major property rights issues with fish, and so effort goes into technology to make harvesting better rather than technology which increases the number of fish. Aquaculture removes the tragedy of the commons problem because fish are privately owned, and those changed incentives may well lead to drastically higher output. Probably also protests about the cramped living conditions on fish farms, and a movement to eat "organic free swimming" fish instead of farm-raised ones.

      • ❑ Import
      • ❑ Grow in hydroponic greenhouses
      • ❑ Future: Aquaculture
    • ❑ Power

      Main initial power sources will be solar panels, wind turbines, and fuel-powered generators. Solar & wind are expensive, but these resources are fairly plentiful in the ocean. Generator cost depends on transportation cost of fuel and oil prices, may be cheap. Definitely for backup power. Disadvantages of generator include noise, pollution/environmental cost (reduces appeal of seastead to environmenalists). In the future we think wave power will be big. As wind power is concentrated solar, wave power is concentrated wind, and there are some good systems for taking advantage of it which aren't currently used because they only work way out in the ocean.

      • ❑ Photovoltaic panels
      • ❑ Wind turbines
      • ❑ Good old diesel generators
      • ❑ Future: Wave power
    • ❑ Transportation

      Anchoring is technically possible, even in great depth, but cost is proportional to depth, and very expensive. Seasteads will not be able to afford it at significant depth. Hence they need to anchor in shallow areas, use active positioning (motors), or just drift. Remember that currents are generally circular, so a seastead should be able to drift in a circle, or simple sit in an area like the centers of those circles, or the equator, where there is little current. Getting there: cheap boats, more expensive helicopters / small planes.

      • ❑ Moving
      • ❑ Staying Still
      • ❑ There and Back Again
    • ❑ Misc infrastructure

      Have notes for these, and talk about them if there is time satellite. Eventually, LEO, but for now, geosynch and its high latency. Also could anchor over a fiber interconnect. Or lay fiber if close to shore. As we've mentioned, stopping pirates is easy easy (emplacements on underside, big guns), but stopping navies is really hard (they can blow up column, strafe top deck). Prevention, not cure. Instead, don't get them mad. Be redundant. Compromise. Be useful. But some defense is still worthwhile as a deterrent. By increasing the cost of attacking a seastead, we make it less likely to happen. While our budget will be vastly lower, money will be spent more efficiently - no $600 toilet seats. There are many options, with varying costs and environmental safety. Ranging from dumping overboard (dilution is the solution to ocean pollution), to recycling/composting everything. Because trash is a big political issue, we recommend leaning somewhat towards the green side.

      • ❑ Communications
      • ❑ Defense
      • ❑ Waste disposal
  • ❑ Strategy
    • ❑ How Not To Make It Happen

      Next we'll talk about the strategy of making this stuff actually happen. This is where most ventures fail. As mentioned earlier, we have lots of data points to see what not to do. Common mistakes include - depending on nonexistent technologies like OTEC or seacrete. Depending on money coming from some mysterious angel. Trying to get investment or donations with no proof of concept. Trying to tackle too big a problem at once, like starting with a city for 10,000.

      • ❑ Depend on undeveloped technologies (OTEC, seacrete).
      • ❑ Depend on a mysterious angel investor.
      • ❑ Try to get money with no proof of concept.
      • ❑ Try to tackle too big a problem at once.
    • ❑ How To Make It Happen

      How to make it happen is just to be more sensible.

      • ❑ Stick to realistic and mature technologies.
      • ❑ Have reasonable ideas for funding.
      • ❑ Demonstrate the concept before expecting outside money.
      • ❑ Incrementalism: a series of small, reasonable stages.
    • ❑ Business ideas

      So, basic economics tells us that we should look for business ideas based on the comparative advantages which a seastead has. These floating platforms are going to be somewhat remote and they'll certainly have more expensive utilities, food, and labor than on land. They're in an area with few resources, so we really shouldn't expect them to be able to compete in many markets. However, they do have two significant comparative advantages: The regulatory environment (or lack thereof), and their ability to provide stable land in the middle of the ocean. While there are many ways these could be used, we'll give a sampling of ideas. Several cities such as Hong Kong have gotten incredible wealth from being in convenient locations for cargo transshipment. Well, we can put a seastead pretty much anywhere. So we just identify the ocean location where it would be the most useful if such a port existed, and build it. Fishing boat support and/or processing and/or aquaculture Would be a great tour base for exploring a remote area where there is no developed land. Our infrastructure technologies are generally pretty green, so a seastead could function as a demonstration of completely off-grid living. Marine science platform.

      • ❑ Comparative advantage: New islands
        • ❑ Cargo Transshipment
        • ❑ Fishing Base
        • ❑ Tour base
        • ❑ Green Living
        • ❑ Marine Science
        • ❑ Aquaculture
      • ❑ Comparative advantage: Low regulation

        Now come the more exciting business dieas, like a resort. Think Las Vegas taken to more of an extreme. Cities like Vegas and Amsterdam demonstrate that low-regulation tourism is a market. The gambling, sex, and drug tourism industries are all quite profitable, and require relatively little capital investment. There are other draws like the scuba diving / underwater resort aspect, environmental tourists who want to try living entirely off renewable energy (while getting stoned), plus the fact that floating platforms are just...cool. Manufacturing - This is a huge market, although it will specifically need to be restricted to processes which don't require much inputs (or inputs that can be shipped in cheaply). It could take advantage of low-regulation by implementing a patented process, or doing something people just don't want close to land. Another possibility is a World library - Arrr. A seastead, not bound by copyright laws, could amass a huge digital library - books, periodicals, movies, music. This provides an additional attraction to the resort - not only in having entertainment materials available, but for researchers in being able to do research more easily than a modern library, with full-text search and instant access to all materials. Advanced medical treatments. As you can learn from Professor Klein's FDA review website, the medical industry in first world nations is heavily and stupidly regulated. Since people are suspicous of third-world medicine, there may be a niche market for high-quality, low regulation medical care. Like that little island off Cuba in the Bond movie Die Another Day, except hopefully with better security.

        • ❑ Resort (+ amenities)
        • ❑ Offshore Manufacturing
        • ❑ World Library (Arrr...)
        • ❑ Medical Research/Treatment
    • ❑ Our specific plan
      • ❑ Phase I: Background research

        Includes writing the book

        • ❑ Book
        • ❑ Website
        • ❑ Resources
          • ❑ Required: lots of time, little money
          • ❑ Sources: Patri, Wayne
        • ❑ Goals
          • ❑ Learn enough to plan next steps
          • ❑ Raise interest/awareness
          • ❑ Build interest in next stage...
      • ❑ Phase II: Baystead Prototype

        This is a prototype of 2K - 10K square feet, suitable for 4-10 residents. It will be one of hundreds of floating homes moored here in the Bay, perhaps in Redwood City, or up in SF or Sausalito. Cost is around $200-500 thousand, and the money will come from initial residents, like buying a house. It may even be possible to get a mortgage, as there are banks which lend for floating homesm but perhaps not due to the unusual design. But its also cheaper than most real estate around here. We'll recruit those residents from the growing pool of people interested in the project. The goals of baystead are to test our design and our infrastructure, to provide a platform for experimenting with our ideas, and publicity, and most importantly, a proof of concept. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but it hardly compares to a million pounds of concrete. Establishing credibility is absolutely crucial given the poor record of most such projects. Choosing this moderate stage gets us a working prototype without needing to find money from a mysterious source, or to find anyone who is willing to move to the middle of nowhere.

        • ❑ 2K-10K sq. ft.
        • ❑ Moored in San Francisco Bay
        • ❑ Resources
          • ❑ Required: $200K-$500K, 4-10 residents
          • ❑ Sources: Recruit residents from publicity, pool of interested folk. Don't need many, they need some money
          • ❑ Sources: Money mostly from residents (who then own Baystead). A little from project supporters. Residents will recoup some money through tours.
        • ❑ Goals
          • ❑ Test design, infrastructure
          • ❑ Experiment
          • ❑ Publicity (give tours, get articles written about us, etc.)
          • ❑ Proof of concept - we are serious! This is real.
          • ❑ Build interest in next stage...
      • ❑ Phase III: Seastead Resort

        The next step is to raise interest in a full-sized seastead to be moored in international waters, perhaps the Med. sea. Exact size will depend on location and interest. A key part of this idea is that its a time-share resort, so there are a few enthusiasts and employees as full-time residents, but most people spend a couple weeks a year there. The fact is that not many people are willing to drop their entire lives and move to the middle of the ocean, but plenty are willing to come visit. From what I've learned talking to people, there are at least hundreds, if not thousands of times as many potential timesharers as full-time residents, so I think that tapping into this market is crucial for success. This also solves a common problem which faces these kinds of projects, which is that young people tend to be less tied down and have less money, whereas older people are less free to move but have more money. Insisting on full-time residence/ownership means that neither participate. Having the former be full-time employees and the latter timeshare vacationers lets them both participate. Yet another advantage is that with a timeshare resort rather than a hotel, its normal for members to pay before construction, so its self-financing. The way this phase would work is that we form a company which takes partial deposits on seastead timeshares. We use the publicity from Baystead to get people to sign up, with a committment only if we raise enough interest. Once there are enough people, we announce that we're ready to begin construction, collect the full payments, and go to work.

        • ❑ 20K - 200K sq. ft
        • ❑ International waters (perhaps Med. Sea)
        • ❑ Timeshare
        • ❑ Resources:
          • ❑ Required: $3M - $15M, 20-200 residents (mix of permanent, timeshare)
          • ❑ Source: Residents from publicity in previous stage
          • ❑ Source: Money from residents. Possibly some from real estate investors.
        • ❑ Goals:
          • ❑ Demonstrate that building new, sovereign land is possible.
          • ❑ Build interest in next stage...
      • ❑ Phase IV: World Domination!

        Pinky & The Brain pic Getting to this point of a single operating, independent seastead will be the hardest part. Once there, the movement can continue on its own steam. The economy will evolve beyond just a resort, as businesses come in that can benefit from the comparative advantages. As it becomes more viable to make a living onboard, the number of permanent residents will naturally increase. Eventually there will be enough interest to build additional platforms, and the movement can really take off. Now, this is the truly exciting stage, where the theory I explained earlier suggests that we may really be able to change the world, by turning the ocean into a laboratory for experimentation with social, political, legal, and economic systems. But it only gets one slide, because we'll never get there unless we focus most of our attention on the earlier parts. As many other projects have learned through failure, the hard part is getting the avalanche started.

        • ❑ Getting started (Phases I-III) is the hardest part.
        • ❑ Over time, economy will evolve beyond just a resort.
        • ❑ Number of permanent residents will increase.
        • ❑ Additional platforms/groups built.
• ❑ More information: http://seastead.org/

  This has been a quick sketch of a pretty large and complicated idea, if you're interested check out the book online. Its still a draft, but there's over a hundred pages of information and two hundred references fleshing out the details of what I've been talking about. All these slides and the handout will be up there too.

• ❑ Acknowledgements
  • ❑ Co-authors: Wayne Gramlich and Andy House.
  • ❑ Dan Klein and the Civil Society Institute for inviting me to talk.