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 general idea of homesteading the oceans. We also use it to refer to our particular approach, which you'll soon hear more about. - [ ] Definition: "To Homestead The Oceans" - [ ] Term coined by Wayne Gramlich - [ ] Two-Part Talk This is going to be a two part talk about Why and How to seastead. There are a lot of reasons to settle the oceans, and different ones will appeal to different people, so I'll outline several. I'll also go into detail about what I think is the strongest, which is how much more efficient and responsive governments will be on floating cities. How is a big topic, I'll talk about some engineering areas like the ocean environment, structure design, some of the basic infrastructure elements, and then perhaps most importantly, business topics like how to make money, and how to get things started. - [ ] Why - [ ] How - [ ] For more detail, see the book For more detail on any this, you can check out the book I'm 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 to open, which gives us more room to live, and can help reduce the conflicts due to limited space. And speaking of space, it's good practice for settling the stars, which is surely in our future sometime. Both are isolated, resource-poor environments which will be challengng to live in. We can take this vast, empty area and make it productive - harvest renewable enery from the sun, wind, and waves, build giant fish farms to help feed Earth's growing population. In addition to these, there is a key effect of seasteads which is not really obvious, 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. - [ ] Settle the next frontier - [ ] Use more of the Earth's surface - [ ] Practice for space - [ ] Most important: make government work better! - [ ] Government spending and economic growth 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. That's a big difference. And this is true even if you don't value material possessions - that extra wealth means you can spend more on maintaining your family's health, on helping the less fortunate, on choosing more expensive but more environmentally sustainable ways of doing things. And of course, economic waste is just the tip of the iceberg. Most governments today are gigantic and out of touch with their citizens. Our political systems have little experimentation, innovation, or novelty, and minority viewpoints are not heard. - [ ] Why is government inefficient, and why are seasteads a solution? - [ ] Note: more detailed explanation at http://patrifriedman.com/projects/socs/commented/drawer/dy namic_geography.html - [ ] Why Do Governments Suck? Alright, so why do governments suck so much? We actually know a lot about this. There's a whole school of economics called public choice, 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 kind of a unique 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, however 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 make people act differently. Rather than blaming voters for not spending more time understanding the issues, which is just human nature, we should consider other systems which might work better with the people we have. This also casts doubt on the idea of fixing things through proselytizing, spreading the word about your philosophy, whether it be republican, democrat, libertarian, environmentalist, whatever. Changing people's opinions has limited use if they are still working within the same flawed system. If you think through the logic of these systems, your realize that they are really quite resistant to rhetoric, and in order to change how the system works, you need to somehow change the rules. Let's consider government today. - [ ] 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, a particular tpye of business. 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 there is just one government in each country, 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 normal business switch (cell phones, car insurance, even your school or job). 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. Being able to switch a provider doesn't just help a person get the best deal, it also gives feedback to a business about how much people like it, as well as a reason to switch. When the cost is so high that people rarely switch, the business doesn't know whether its doing a good job or not, and doesn't have that much reason to care. Basic economics tells us that in this sort of industry, its natural for the businesses to exploit their 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. Consider the current situation in Iraq as an example of the tremendous difficulty of changing a change. We've spent , what, hundreds of billions, and we're still not done. Now, regardless of whether you think it was worth it to go in there, we can pretty much all agree that it was freaking expensive! And you can't just start fresh, on land, at least, because all land is claimed by some current country. As you can see from the strife constantly occuring in separatist regions around the world, countries don't seem too keen on letting other countries be formed. So we have a market where in order to enter, you basically need to win an election or a revolution. That's one well-protected market! Much more so than even well-protected industries like operating systems, cars, or airlines. Again turning to basic economics, with a high barrier to entry, what you expect is an oligopolistic market with few firms and limited competition. And that's what the world's governments are. - [ ] 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 are inefficient and unresponsive. Its not because of which party is running them, or what philosophies are currently prevailing, or corruption that can be rooted out. It's the natural result of the structure of the industry. - [ ] Government on Modular Floating Cities So now lets think about how the technology of floating cities changes these two factors. First, they greatly lower 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 an entire territory at once. We can build a new country piece by piece as funds and interest become available - the ocean has plenty of room to expand - which greatly simplifies financing. This literally orders-of-magnitude lowering of entry cost is sure to bring in a wide variety of new competitors, all trying to make places where people will be happy to live. Next, floating cities reduce the cost of switching governments. This hinges on how exactly they are designed. Floating cities can be made modular, that is re-arrangable, because transportation on the ocean is *so cheap* that we can move entire 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 or something, 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 policy on Monday, by Tuesday there may be nothing left of it but the capitol building, looking out across a stretch of empty to ocean to the new city across the way. 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. - [ ] 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 here is that seasteading is 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 political views. And even the majority should benefit from the experimentation with new and untried options, they can draw from those which seem to work best. This idea is so powerful because its a way to change politics through technology. Humanity has a really bad track record at reforming human nature, and not such a good record with regard to sweeping political change. But we are really good at solving engineering problems, and seasteading transforms the problem of making governments smaller and more responsive into an engineering problem. So before I explain how the oceans can be settled, I hope you can see why we should settle them. This idea of building floating cities is not just some crazy or utopian idea. I mean, it is definitely a crazy idea, no doubt about that, 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. And its a huge area, since governments control a significant fraction of the worlds resources. So anything we can do to improve them will have a big impact on the world. - [ ] 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 the freedom and responsiveness of governments. It raises doubts about how well they can ever work on land, and how effective reform will be there. But looking to the future, note that space has similar characteristics - a low cost of switching, and someday it will have a low barrier to entry. So the necessary characteristics hold for not only 71% of the earth's surface, but 99.999....% of the universe. *And* my theory suggests that societies in these places will have more efficient governments, no matter what their political persuasion. So while things don't look so good for where we've currently built civilization, they look great everywhere 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 there is one thing that they pretty much all have 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 really no surprise that their ideas never get anywhere. Books like "How to Start your own country" and websites like "Footnotes to History" document hundreds of projects like this: Antarctic Homesteading: A 60-page prospectus for this project was forwarded...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 (Hmm...would I rather go to a conference in Vegas or Antarctica?]...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 can avoid. We want to be as realistic and pragmatic as possible. Let's contrast the approach that we suggest in our book with previous approaches in several areas: - [ ] 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 needs 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 being able to try out some new ways of living, and being left alone. That other stuff comes way later. - [ ] Incrementalism A lot of the proposals for floating cities start at sizes like 10,000 people. I think its going to be awful hard to get 10,000 people to all move somewhere. You're much more likely to convince 100 people to move on to a small version, then 1,000 to join them, and then 10,000 to join them. Cities usually start out small and expand organically. The problem is that if you make the first step too high, you'll never even get started. Later we'll detail an incremental plan, where each step moves naturally to the next. However we should note that it partly depends on your financing. If the business plan is attractive enough, you may be able to skip some of the early steps. - [ ] 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 actually dangerous to be distracted by them. There are some in particular, like OTEC and seacrete, which are fairly 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 sometimes 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. There are new techniques to reduce costs, and OTEC may be a key 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 a wire mesh in seawater, and run electricity through it, 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. For those of you with a technical background, 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. Its a good technology for restoring coral reefs, which is how it is used now, but not so good for making big structures. 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 in the beginning we want to innovate as little as possible. - [ ] 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, and there are a lot of different ways you can go. 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, the recent Asian disaster being a good example. But 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 near the coast that they pile up, becoming shorter and higher. Even then, they are more like strong fast tides than huge waves. So a floating structure will just rise with the water level. Rogue waves, on the other hand, are a real danger. 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. 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." 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. Some of the methods for dealing with waves are: You can build your habitat on tall pillars, like oil platforms. You can protect it with huge breakwaters, like a harbog. You can choose a location where there are no big waves, I'll mention where in a minute. Or you can be mobile, like a ship, 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 are mostly big cycles that turn opposite directions 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. Air is heated at the equator, rises, 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 could prove quite useful for generating energy. Also note that because the air is rising at the equator, the wind there is vertical, not horizontal, which means few waves. This area is called "the doldrums", and could be a good place for a floating city. It also has frequent thunderstorms to supply fresh water. [slide] An obvious worry is hurricanes, like those which devastated the southeastern US last year. It turns out that floating cities 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, like with a tsunami. Since air is quite thin, wind 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. The main worry from storms is that they increase wave height, and waves are a real danger, as mentioned earlier. - [ ] 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. I takes an international maritime lawyer to fully understand the area, and that's not me. So this is going to be a quick sketch of some of the basics, please don't think this is the whole picture. It's most likely that seasteads will qualify as ships. The jurisdiction for ships is admiralty law, under which each ship must fly the flag of some existing country, and it is their territory, much like an embassy. 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, or in our case a city, 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 push of countries 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 practical to get a treaty to exist in a nations EEZ, harvesting some energy that its not really using. Finally, we get to the High Seas. While there are some caveats regarding seabed resources, which are so valuable that they've all been divvided up already, 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 those international 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, in 2001, there were 335 attacks reported, of which only 73 even involved guns. 16 ships were hijacked, and 21 people killed (20 of them in southeast asian waters, which are particularly dangerous). An entire floating city, or even a floating village is 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. The payoff to difficulty ratio is just too high. - [ ] 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, its hard to tap 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 can be made very cheaply - some designs are even built on plastic 2L bottles! 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, or to make a city large enough for a breakwater to become affordable. In either of these cases, this is a good approach. - [ ] 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 one of the things which makes 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] If you just have a hollow pillar, you have what's called 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. This also gives you more resistance to heaving motions from the passing waves. The result is our preferred seastead design, which we call a spar platform. - [ ] Pillar Platfom - [ ] Floating Spar - [ ] Spar Platform - [ ] Our choice: Spar Platform First, in case anyone is wondering how this can be stable, there is a huge amount of ballast at the bottom of the flotation hull. This moves the center of gravity down below the center of buoyancy. Living quarters are on top, and they're separated by the long spar. * We present 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. { Advance slide, explain) * Its free-floating, so it can go in any depth of water (anchored if you want it to stay in one place). * 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 to stop the waves and spars to rise above them. 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 size of the breakwater you have to build, 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. How many of you have been on a cruise ship? Well, you guys have all seen sewage, power, food and water provided at sea - its just a question of cost. Because the city will be small, it will probably need to import a lot of things, like a cruise ship. 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 different 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, we'll talk more about it as a business idea. - [ ] 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. Diesel burns cleanly and is safe to store. 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 who doesn't expect a return on his money. Trying to get investment or even donations with no proof of concept. Trying to tackle too big a problem at once, like starting with a city instead of a village. - [ ] 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 political freedom and low regulation, 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 - NEEDS OWN SLIDE For those not familiar with the term, aquaculture is the process of raising sea creatures like fish or oysters. 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, giving us the enormous specialization and wealth of the modern world. Current ocean fishing techniques are in many ways like hunting. Fishing has a major tragedy of the commons problem. This is when each individual gains from depleting a resource, and no one replenishes it because other people would get most of the benefit. Ocean fish are migratory, and we don't have good property rights in fish, (although some novel schemes have been used in coastal areas). So naturally effort goes into technology to make harvesting better rather than technology which increases the number of fish, and so you have have overfishing. The standard way to solve this problem is to make the commons privately owned, by someone who then has reason to replenish the resource and use it sustainably. And that's what aquaculture does, since it basically involves raising fish in huge nets. Just as the transition from gathering fruits and berries in the forest to raising them ourselves led to vastly more efficient methods, and drastically higher output per unit land and per unit effort, it seems likely that these changes incentives in the ocean will lead to much higher output as well. And there is a huge demand for aquaculture. Not only is the world's population increasing, but people are eating more fish as their health benefits become more widely recognized. There is no other way to meet this demand. Production by fishing is expected to remain flat at best, due to overfishing as mentioned. Freshwater aquaculture has to compete with all the other demands for freshwater by our growing population. Most seawater aquaculture occurs in coastal regions, which are also in high demand. So offshore is the only way to go, and this is a very promising business opportunity for seasteads. - [ ] Comparative advantage: Low regulation Now come the riskier business ideas. One example is 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 scuba diving / underwater resort, environmental tourists who want to live entirely from renewable energy (while getting stoned), plus the fact that floating platforms are just...cool. 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. The medical industry in first world nations is heavily regulated. There exist some methods to fast-track promising new drugs for people who are dying and can't wait for the FDA, but they are still quite slow. 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 most recent James 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 IIIa: 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 IIIb: Fish Farm! An alternative for Phase III involves starting an offshore aquaculture operation - a fish farm. This choice would be based on a business analysis of the profit potential, and whether sufficient capital can be raised. Offshore aquaculture has some benefits, but it has substantially higher capital costs, so it takes a large operation to be profitable, hence a lot of money is needed. But since aquaculture (unlike floating time share resorts) is a reasonably mature industry, it may well be possible to raise such capital. Most of the details, like size cost and location would be dictated by the business needs. Politically, this has a lot less risk and less gain, but that's fine. The experience of building an operating an offshore operation of any type is going to be very useful for later residential developments. Also, the business will bring infrastructure and at least the beginnings of an economy to some ocean area, which makes it easier to add more stuff later. - [ ] Size/cost/location dictated by business needs - [ ] Less politically risky - [ ] Cost depends on size, provided by investors - [ ] Goals - [ ] Make money doing something uniquely suited to the ocean - [ ] Get experience with the tech, and advance it - [ ] Establish infrastructure for a larger, more residential city. - [ ] Start a local economy - [ ] 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/fish farm. - [ ] 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. - [ ] Jared and the Flatirons Review for inviting me to talk.