Seasteading

https://www.seasteading.org/

by sanqui • 7 years ago

156 223 7 years ago

ceejayoz5• 7 years ago

A cautionary tale on how this is likely to turn out:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Foundation

Part of a reef, normally a metre below sea level at high tide, was piled high with sand and a small stone platform was erected carrying the flag of the Republic of Minerva—a white torch on a blue background. The 'President of Minerva,' Morris Davis, declared at the time: "People will be free to do as they damn well please. Nothing will be illegal so long it does not infringe on the rights of others. If a citizen wishes to open a tavern, set up gambling or make pornographic films, the government will not interfere." Tonga’s claim to the reef was recognized by the South Pacific Forum in September 1972. A Tongan expedition was sent to enforce the claim, arriving on 18 June 1972. The Flag of the Tonga was raised on 19 June 1972 on North Minerva and on South Minerva on 21 June 1972.

Macha• 7 years ago

For a more recent example: https://www.businessinsider.com/bitcoin-trader-chad-elwartow...

Elwartowski and Thepdet's seastead was part of an experiment led by the Seasteading Institute, a group backed by Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley billionaire behind PayPal.
The floating home of Chad Elwartowski and his girlfriend, Supranee Thepdet, was towed ashore by Thai authorities on Monday to be taken apart, and the couple have been accused of violating Thailand's sovereignty, an offense that can carry the death penalty or life in prison, Sky News reported.

imglorp• 7 years ago

Also that story about what happens when you claim an abandoned WWII platform, call it a sovereign country, attempt to web host some sketchy material, and fend off the British Navy.

http://web.archive.org/web/20050602082455/http://www.havenco...

https://www.worldcrunch.com/culture-society/the-curious-case...

https://www.sealandgov.org/

fredley• 7 years ago

Less than two weeks after a 'Seastead' got dismantled and towed away by the Thai navy:

https://www.theepochtimes.com/thai-navy-dismantles-floating-...

noonespecial• 7 years ago

A good illustration of why it might not be such a great idea to fly no flag and claim no nation: anybody who floats up with a gun bigger than yours can go right ahead and subject you to whatever "law" they feel like.

ryacko• 7 years ago

If you fly the US flag, but claim no subdivision, one would have the benefits of citizenship without having to pay state and local taxes. As far as I can tell, registering a ship only requires citizenship, but it would make any dispute complex.

Not a lawyer, but there was an era where citizens lived in US territories.

jascii• 7 years ago

Not quite, large part of international treaties get embedded into law that extents past just the treaty partners. Enforcement can be hard though..

october_sky• 7 years ago

The images here are charming, but there's not nearly enough population density in those to make them viable. The images display floating luxury homes complete with a yard.

sbt• 7 years ago

Something tells me these guys are more motivated by tax evasion than by saving the environment.

return13• 7 years ago

Seasteading is not motivated by environmental concerns , but mainly by libertarian concerns to escape regulations and governments. How would they evade taxes in international territory where there are no taxes?

[edit since i m blocked from replying]:

- US is unique in taxing worldwide income. I would assume the colonists would renounce any other citizenship anyway, and the colony does not have taxes.

- They could not move any financial assets or to the colony unless it is somehow recognized internationally. There is no way to evade taxes.

- The only possible way to tranfer assets is to convert them to cryptocurrency , which presumably would only be useful in the colony. And there 's probably not going to be a way to move large sums of money out of the colony, unless international banks agree to cooperate with it.

[and a tangent]

It's "interesting" to contrast the reactions of HN 2019 compared to 10 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=194028

CaptainZapp3• 7 years ago

They would evade taxes from moving from where they currently live (and pay those taxes, which they're not able to evade via fancy constructs) to "Nowhere Land" where they (apparently) are not taxed at all.

Alas, "Nowhere Land" may figure at one point that they need to generate income for basic maintenence and other necessary expenses. Basic maintenance, which can be very, very costly out at sea.

jdblair• 7 years ago

There are taxes in international waters. If you are a US citizen you owe income tax no matter where you earn your income. Hiding your income and not paying income tax is evading taxation.

https://www.irs.gov/individuals/international-taxpayers/taxp...

rufusroflpunch2• 7 years ago

The founder of the Seasteading Institute, Patri Friedman (son David Friedman and grandson of Milton Friedman), is a libertarian anarchist. So yeah, undermining the concept of the nation-state is really built into the DNA of the whole venture. It goes beyond tax avoidance.

jtms• 7 years ago

Sorry to detract from your main point, but how is it possible to be an anarchist and a libertarian at the same time? Those are fairly mutually exclusive based on my understanding.

KingMob5• 7 years ago

He's an anarcho-capitalist, which has little in common with most strains of historical anarchism, despite the name.

chr19• 7 years ago

If you are always buying groceries at the store next door, and one day find a store with better prices, would buying from the new store be "payment evasion"? The same applies to governments if your current one doesn't provide the service you need you have all the rights to try to find a better one. And whether you move to an existing country or try to create a new one doesn't make a big difference.

kyralis• 7 years ago

This is disingenuous. The store next door isn't providing you with any services beyond the grocery transactions you engage in. A country, on the other hand, largely does. If you actually move from one country to another legitimately, cut ties with the former, and engage solely with the services of the latter, then no one's going to accuse you of tax evasion either. Governments are much less transactional than it's often popular to make them out to be, because there are whole lot of background, foundational services that they provide the people seem to like to pretend simply appear out of thin air.

fareesh• 7 years ago

How does sewage treatment and trash disposal work in this kind of setup?

ceejayoz5• 7 years ago

Dumping in the ocean, I strongly suspect.

pitaj2• 7 years ago

Would likely involve incinerators.

michael_j_ward• 7 years ago

Two minute video answering the question[1].

Summary: they'll use a "urine diverting dry toilet" to collect the feces- which supposedly will be used for fertilizer.

They don't say what exactly will be done with the urine, so likely dumped back into the ocean.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gd2FCpU5wu8&list=PLDgJp6DTkM...

driverdan• 7 years ago

It's legal to dump human waste in the ocean once you're in international waters.

CaptainZapp3• 7 years ago

Can you provide more detail on that?

I don't think, for example, that cruise ships are allowed to dump their shit (and other refuse) into the sea, provided they're in international waters.

MaupitiBlue• 7 years ago

Just buy a sailboat.

return13• 7 years ago

more like , a big ship or something like a retired oil rig. It needs to go in deep waters (>200 miles off the coast) and stay there for extended periods of time (and weather). A cruise ship would be ideal as it can be relatively self-sustaining. A bunch of cruise ships would be enough to start a big city.

IfOnlyYouKnew• 7 years ago

People sail around the world all the time. As in: retirees in 30-feet yachts.

ifdefdebug• 7 years ago

I read: "Seasteading is building floating societies with significant political autonomy".

So when they go outside the jurisdiction (and protection) of a nation-state and their law enforcement, the first question that comes to my mind is: what about piracy?

And as a matter of fact, they have a youtube channel "tough questions" talking about that (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PLUZ9bzUGY) - tldr: it's gonna be private security firms, so it's not gonna be cheap ... and they claim only 2% of world's oceans are even considered piracy waters, but I think that's going to change as soon as there are wealthy communities floating in unprotected waters ...

pitaj2• 7 years ago

it's gonna be private security firms, so it's not gonna be cheap

One could say that police and military are not cheap either

Areading314• 7 years ago

Maybe they'll just have to go around and collect donations from residents to pay the security. And just require them to pay if they don't raise enough

...

morkfromork• 7 years ago

Reminds me of the movie Waterworld.

ShamelessC• 7 years ago

Also "Outer Heaven" from the Metal Gear Solid games.

amalcon5• 7 years ago

This is one of those concepts that seems to come out of thinking of the law as similar to software. It's not, because software is run by computers while law is run by humans.

If you find a straightforward loophole in software, the computer running it will e.g. happily hand you information you're not supposed to have[1]. If you find that kind of loophole in the law, then the humans running it will usually just tell you to go home. They know that you know what they meant.

Laws can still have loopholes, but they are generally more subtle and complicated. Fixing them often has obvious unintended consequences. They're more like speculative execution bugs[2] than buffer overruns.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heartbleed

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectre_(security_vulnerabilit...

jacquesm2• 7 years ago

The bigger mistake is that paper and being clever will trump the power of guns.

fouronnes3• 7 years ago

You know you're on HN when the law is explained with an analogy to computer code and not the other way around ;)

rwmj• 7 years ago

Getting way off-topic but Stanford Law School had a project trying to encode law as code: https://law.stanford.edu/codex-the-stanford-center-for-legal...

buboard12• 7 years ago

You believe that the existence of government-free land is a "loophole in the law" ?

M2Ys4U• 7 years ago

There is always a government.

It might be two guys with guns, or it might be a huge bureaucracy that runs on the rule of law or anywhere in between.

But it's always there.

amalcon5• 7 years ago

Well, yes. Maritime treaties exist to facilitate trade, so that you aren't subject to some absurd law just because that country decided your boat was in that jurisdiction. They obviously don't exist to give folks a place to commit murder without consequences.

Likewise, while starting a country is plausibly a moral good, enabling that is not the purpose of maritime treaties. Countries refuse to recognize other terrestrial countries all the time, even if they have clear borders and obviously-powerful governments internally (e.g. PRC and ROC each refusing to recognize the other, most of the middle east not recognizing Israel). Putting your country on a boat doesn't somehow increase your legitimacy before the international community.

encypruon• 7 years ago

Wasn't one of the largest tax fraud scandals[1] just that?

An international group of bankers, lawyers and stockbrokers - reportedly with links to the City of London - appears to have fiddled the tax system, employing practices which were at best unethical, at worst illegal.
With a bit of imaginative paperwork, and by exploiting a procedure which allows more than one person or institution to simultaneously own a share, they were able to claim numerous tax refunds. The practice was outlawed in 2012.

In my (incomplete) understanding this was a vulnerability in the law that has not been patched until 2012 when it had already been exploited for a while. It wasn't just tax avoidance but extracting money from treasuries, so it should be blatantly obvious that this was not the intent of the lawmaker.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-40199259

amalcon5• 7 years ago

From the article:

In the first type, German banks and stockbrokers bought and sold shares for foreign investors in a way which allowed them to claim a tax refund for which they were not eligible. Many question the legality of the practice.

This is more "nobody noticed they were doing it" than "it was obviously happening, and the government shrugged its shoulders." Obviously, unlike a computer, it is quite possible for humans to just not notice that you're doing an illegal thing.

In the second (a more complicated variation), investors and banks bought and sold shares just before and just after dividends were paid. With a bit of imaginative paperwork, and by exploiting a procedure which allows more than one person or institution to simultaneously own a share, they were able to claim numerous tax refunds. The practice was outlawed in 2012.

This is a subtle loophole, which probably did not admit an easy patch without serious unintended consequences (the category for which I used Spectre as an example).

gunn• 7 years ago

"On January 13, 2017 we signed a Memorandum Of Understanding (MOU) with French Polynesia [...] agreeing to cooperate on developing legislation for The Floating Island Project by the end of 2017"

Is there any more news on this?

return13• 7 years ago

polynesia pulled out of the agreement

On March 3, 2018, a mayor from French Polynesia said the agreement was "not a legal document" and had expired at the end of 2017 in response to a challenger trying to make it an issue for the May, 2018 elections.

christoph-heiss• 7 years ago

Off-Topic: The site horrible "jitters" when scrolling around, pretty much unreadable/unuseable. At least for me with Chrome 74 on Fedora. Firefox 67 is fine.

lucisferre• 7 years ago

Rogue waves will be fun.

ckastner• 7 years ago

It's a simple and frequent mistake to believe that sovereign autonomy is wholly self-determined, and seasteading is the prime example for this.

Sovereign autonomy is not determined by oneself. It is determined by others, specifically by recognizing the sovereignty. Without recognition, it's basically impossible to conduct any type of transaction with the outer world, for lack of jurisdiction.

djsumdog2• 7 years ago

It almost always requires violence to create a state, and at the very least, it does require the capacity for violence. A State has a violence on monopoly and the ability to defend itself from anyone else who says, "You are part of my State/Country/Kingdom".

If you could hire a private army, or maybe an army of pirates, Seasteading would work. But you have to pay them. Conquerors often paid armies by charging taxes to the lands they conquered, placing them in debt. The solders who were injured and missing arms/legs got their reward by collecting taxes and maintaining the taken land.

The book Debt: The First 5,000 Years, goes into this concept in great detail. Another book in this genre is The Dictators Handbook.

roywiggins2• 7 years ago

Everyone else might still ignore you. Nobody recognizes Abkhazia, even though it's kinda self-governing.

Freak_NL2• 7 years ago

A State has a violence on monopoly […]

A game of Monopoly will turn the most affable man violent (you probably meant the monopoly on violence).

buboard12• 7 years ago

And how do you solve this chicken and egg problem? Declare autonomy peacefully -> get drowned with nukes. Declare autonomy with war -> be labeled a terrorist and get drowned with nukes. So, geopolitics have reached their final, permanent stage forever?

Freak_NL2• 7 years ago

It seems a lot harder than it used to be, but new countries do emerge from time to time. South Sudan is pretty recent. Got there with plenty of violence, but no risk of getting nuked as far as I know.

asdfman123• 7 years ago

Nation lines get redrawn frequently in major wars.

We are certainly not beyond having another major, cataclysmic war.

bubblewrap3• 7 years ago

What country would nuke another country for declaring autonomy???

randyrand3• 7 years ago

You don’t need recognition.

In fact, some sovereign nations lived for thousands of years without even being known to the outside world.

It’s nice to have though.

sandworm1016• 7 years ago

These guys are just like every other group that wants to setup their own society "free" of government. But look closely at their plans. They don't want to get rid of nation states. They just want to setup their own nation states under their own legal structure, one that sees them atop everyone else too poor to build their own floating palace.

Ask them their opinions on the big crimes (murder/rape/arson etc). Will they allow me to keep slaves on my seastead? Of course not. May I operate an industrial smelter and dump the waste overboard? May I buys some guns, capture other seasteads and setup my own dictatorship? These people don't want to escape the real laws, just the handful of minor regulations with which they disagree. These are nothing more than rich randians complaining about their tax bracket.

sammyo• 7 years ago

And if they ever manage to build a few houses on a barge outside territorial waters, about 12 miles, they'll call on the closest government for emergency rescue a few hours into the first good storm.

sandworm1016• 7 years ago

Or when they need an appendix removed. Then they want a "real" doctor, someone who learned their trade at a well-regulated hospital. Someone who is licensed by a medical board. Someone who has access to nice clean drugs manufactured in a lab subject to inspections. And then they want insurance coverage so they aren't out of pocket if something goes wrong during the operation. And then they expect some sort of rules-based enforcement structure to regulate all of these things. And don't forget some sort payment structure to support all these people ... This is getting complicated. Someone should write all these complicated rules down in a big book. Just don't call them laws.

mycall• 7 years ago

There are two big problems with 12 miles: 1) not far enough for economic zones [0] and 2) once you leave a country, you need a visa to return, which can be problematic.

[0] https://www.theadvocates.org/2019/05/couple-could-be-impriso...

apocalypstyx• 7 years ago

Pretty much what China Mieville pointed out about them.[1]

[1] http://inthesetimes.com/article/3328/floating_utopias

Nursie3• 7 years ago

"It is a small schadenfreude to know that these dreams will never come true. There are dangerous enemies, and then there are jokes of history. The libertarian seasteaders are a joke. The pitiful, incoherent and cowardly utopia they pine for is a spoilt child’s autarky, an imperialism of outsourcing, a very petty fascism played as maritime farce: Pinochet of Penzance."

That is cutting :)

An enjoyable read, thanks for the link.

chr19• 7 years ago

Why would anyone want to get rid of nation states? Merging them would create even larger and slower bureaucracies, breaking them into smaller pieces would not be allowed. The only solution is to let them be and try to build something new.

Ask them their opinions on the big crimes (murder/rape/arson etc). Will they allow me to keep slaves on my seastead?

Are you complaining that there are not enough crazy people?

No one wants to escape the real laws, because they are proven to be necessary for the society to work, and everyone agrees about them. The "minor regulations" are the laws that make all the difference.

These are nothing more than rich randians complaining about their tax bracket

When this "rich randians" make the technology for living and working in a floating city cheap, they not only will get what they want but also will make it possible for "brave marxians" to try out their ideas too, and maybe they'll finally will build the society that will show to everyone that high taxes and planned economy are the best things.

dexterdog2• 7 years ago

maybe they'll finally will build the society that will show to everyone that high taxes and planned economy are the best things.

I'm not holding my breath

hobofan• 7 years ago

No one wants to escape the real laws, because they are proven to be necessary for the society to work, and everyone agrees about them.

There are (next to) no laws that are internationally agreed upon.

antisemiotic• 7 years ago

When this "rich randians" make the technology for living and working in a floating city cheap, they not only will get what they want but also will make it possible for "brave marxians" to try out their ideas too, and maybe they'll finally will build the society that will show to everyone that high taxes and planned economy are the best things.

I'm looking forward to an union of floating egoists, equipped with fancy glasses, a gallant smile, and contempt for spooked randians and marxists, while unsucessfully trying to disrupt the dairy market.

jameslk• 7 years ago

I think the whole point is to test the assumptions on governance. Countries don't start with answers to those questions because they aren't problems yet and they may never be problems for them. And to assume those are solved problems anywhere else is myopic. Existing countries don't even agree how those issues should be handled.

seanalltogether• 7 years ago

Additionally they want (need) to leech off whatever larger nation they are floating nearest to. So they get to take advantage of all the benefits and conveniences provided by a mature country without contributing to the costs required to maintain it.

Its like all the people who claim they want to live out in the wilderness tax free and be left alone but in reality they live just on the edge of society so they can continue to come and go as they please.

bubblewrap3• 7 years ago

So if you live off the coast of some country, that country is liable to take care of you? Or maybe the seasteaders would simply pay for whatever services they need? Just like humans have traded for most of their existence? Or maybe by "take advantage of" you mean "trade"?

lojack• 7 years ago

I don't get the feeling from their site that their mission is to eliminate government or create a truly "free" society as much as it is to experiment with ideas around governance.

tylersmith• 7 years ago

This exactly. Many seasteaders are anarchists but many just want to be able to experiment with governance.

jmull• 7 years ago

It doesn't look like your criticism has much to do with what they are proposing.

ceejayoz5• 7 years ago

Plenty of apparently innocuous proposals have an agenda or ulterior motive behind them.

randyrand3• 7 years ago

Is there a difference between anarchy and libertarianism? I always thought there was...

thinkingemote• 7 years ago

I see then as hackers of society and laws. That they will probably end up with a replica is not the point. We hack to hack, to grok the systems. Let's not stop hackers hacking because we know better.

joe_the_user3• 7 years ago

Hacking a computer is great in that you probably cannot damage the internal components of that machine.

Hacking society has issues given that random internal change of a society can have serious consequences for the members of that society.

Modern democratic society has various safety nets that to various extents cushion members from random fluctuations that happen even without hacking.

Sure, it seems fine when a group of individuals start-up a system "knowing what they're getting into". But it's generally no really possible for 19 year old joining the latest new trend to really know what they're getting into. We saw a whole flock of cults and unfortunate effects coming out of the hippy communes in the 1960s. But when a commune went bad, it was somewhat minor because the people could just leave. I shudder to what happens if things go bad in a platform in the middle of the ocean (and recall problems have already appeared).

Nursie3• 7 years ago

But let's stop them (or at least criticise them heavily) when they're doing it just to avoid any responsibility to others, when they're doing it out of an idea of "I've got mine, screw you".

If they were genuine attempts to recast society in a new light, they would be interesting. Most of them are simply childish attempts to evade tax. And many, many people trying to opt out of things like social safety nets will end up needing them. Are we to leave them to die, as their choice would seem to dictate?

Gravityloss• 7 years ago

Yeah. Like some libertarians who want to live on a space ship with no darn environmentalists.

olalonde• 7 years ago

I have some questions for you. Is it possible to distinguish between someone who believes taxes are bad for society, or immoral, from someone who's unhappy about their tax bracket? Between someone who believes regulations do more harm than good from someone who is pissed off at a couple of minor regulations? Between someone who believes in experimenting with new forms of governance and someone who wants to dominate the poor?

Surely some of those ideas attract selfish people, but is it that unreasonable to think that a lot of them actually believe in the stated mission?

skywhopper• 7 years ago

Probably not really. If you really hate paying taxes you can convince yourself that taxes are bad. If you ignore all evidence to the contrary and just really hate filing paperwork and following rules, you can convince yourself that regulation is harmful. If you actually want to experiment with new forms of governance, you will need to convince lots of other people to go along instead of just declaring yourself sovereign and then complaining that other countries don't recognize your right to do that just because you're rich.

sandworm1016• 7 years ago

> Is it possible to distinguish between someone who believes taxes are bad for society, or immoral, from someone who's unhappy about their tax bracket?

Yes. All the flat tax supporters. A great many people, wealthy people, feel that taxation should not be progressive. They agree that taxes are necessary but disagree with them paying more than poor people do.

Also, use-based taxation proponents. They agree that infrastructure needs to be built and that taxes are required to do so, but do not believe that they should pay for such things if they are not using them.

So yes, there are a great many east lines to be drawn between people who think taxation is evil and those simply unhappy with how much they as individuals have to pay.

joe_the_user3• 7 years ago

I have some questions for you. Is it possible to distinguish between someone who believes taxes are bad for society, or immoral, from someone who's unhappy about their tax bracket?

If that is a problem, it is a problem for those advocating these policies. If you selflessly advocate policies benefiting the wealthy, low and behold, many of those seeking to benefit will appear. If these types generate corruption or exploitation, how do you filter them out?

In general, a lot of low-regulation, low-tax advocates claim that selfishness isn't a problem, that these approaches can benefit everyone even when everyone looks out for themselves.

The problem with such approach is they don't consider that those attracted to these approaches for selfish reasons aren't going to be satisfied with simply an efficient, meritocratic system that turns selfishness to a universal benefit and that instead the truly selfish cheat, take any resource they can get access to and essentially spoil many idealized "general benefit through individual benefit" systems, turning them into just "the strong prey on the weak" approaches.

And those on the sidelines looking at the situation can say, "Oh, looks a few people actually believed this stuff, too bad for them that the overall process was swamped by those just aiming for a buck." But this situation doesn't raise our overall admiration for any of them.

yongjik• 7 years ago

Is it possible to distinguish between someone who believes taxes are bad for society, or immoral, from someone who's unhappy about their tax bracket?

In the end, does it matter? We don't really know what each other is thinking. If we're debating social framework (like tax), we can only judge people based on their behavior. If their behavior is indistinguishable, how they arrived there is irrelevant, in a sense.

boh4• 7 years ago

Not really. People make moral arguments to justify economic gains. Whether they really believe in the argument makes no difference if the same argument is being made.

stcredzero• 7 years ago

So, basically following the precedent of human beings across all of recorded human history and almost certainly for much longer.

Ask them their opinions on the big crimes (murder/rape/arson etc). Will they allow me to keep slaves on my seastead? Of course not.

In 2019, savvy humans should look askance at everyone who proposes new governments or changes to existing governments without prioritizing a first-principles approach to preserving fundamental human rights. As far as we know, such a principles based approach -- which disperses power and takes into account people's natural tendency towards groupthink/tribalism, bias, and corruption -- does the best job of preserving human rights and increasing the general welfare. It's not perfect. It will have problems, but it's a lot better than everything else we've tried.

There isn't something magic in people that suddenly changes them to angels, if we'd only make some deep, profound realization. That's some of the oldest ideological snake oil there is. It's no more valid now in 2019 than when stone buildings were the technological marvel of the day and mythologies were the best societal and epistemological proposals going around. The best we have ever done is a set of rules that keeps individual people from being treated unfairly like garbage and acts to disperse power.

These are nothing more than rich randians complaining about their tax bracket.

Everyone is "nothing more" than _insert reductive term here_. History shall judge them by their works.

sangnoir• 7 years ago

So, basically following the precedent of human beings across all of recorded human history and almost certainly for much longer

Fair enough, but do they have a navy? A few months (years?) back, there was a "territorial dispute" between seasteaders and a South East Asian state - Singapore IIRC; the side with the tax-funded, floating gun platforms won.

dingosity2• 7 years ago

wow. i came here to post a few snarky comments. strangely happy to see others have beat me to it.

dredmorbius• 7 years ago

See also: "Galt's Gulch of Chile" (2014).

https://www.salon.com/2014/09/16/ayn_rands_capitalist_paradi...

DennisP3• 7 years ago

I read the seasteading book, and thought it made a fairly convincing case that seasteads could produce vast amounts of food, biofuel, and carbon sequestration.

I do think that setting out to build a "city" is not the way forward. Early experiments in deep-water aquaculture have been very profitable. Expand on that, and settlement will happen organically.

carapace• 7 years ago

Your comment reminds me of GreenWave: https://www.greenwave.org/our-work

Ecologically and economically sustainable underwater 3D farms.

DennisP3• 7 years ago

Yep, exactly the sort of thing I mean.

Another good book on the topic is Tim Flannery's Sunlight and Seaweed.

komali2• 7 years ago

Seems like Peter thiel was tired of not getting libertarians elected in the USA so he went and made his own country.

Obsolete political systems conceived in previous centuries are ill-equipped to unleash the enormous opportunities in twenty-first century innovation.

I wonder if woman's suffrage is included in his thoughts on obsolete political systems?

The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of "capitalist democracy" into an oxymoron

Tepix• 7 years ago

Let's ignore the contentious legal aspects and focus on the general idea: Create a floating structure that offers space for living, working or agriculture. Has this been done with areas that are much larger than a typical house boat?

What kind of waves/storms can these structures deal with?

DennisP3• 7 years ago

Cruise ships do pretty well. I looked up prices and capacities and found you can build a large cruise ship for about $100K per resident. The biggest ship I found could house 9000 people.

Seasteads would mostly use aquaculture, so you don't need much growing room on the ship. If you're close to a shipping lane you can trade for other foods you want, just like everybody else does.

_flcj4• 7 years ago

Large ships do very poorly in waves.

The last thing you want happening in a storm is to lose power. Without power you can't angle yourself perpendicular to the waves. When that happens, broadside waves make the ship bob like a corkscrew. If you don't capsize, this makes the situation beyond recovery.

Waves tend to make large ships lose power easily because the engine oil sloshes in the pan, or the sump pit. The oil pump or inlet is located in a fixed place and can't be moved around. We're talking large engines here. Anyhow, the pump can't keep up with the flow due to this sloshing effectively cycling its flow rate and the engine starts overheating and it has to be throttled down then later shut off so it doesn't seize up. Once the engine is shut off and the vessel is no longer under command, the sloshing gets worse. Emergency battery power drains quickly. Meanwhile the fuel - bunker oil - cools off and turns into asphalt - it needs to be heated up to 120+ degrees F to be usable.

Even if you don't shut the engine off, in stormy weather the fuel filters get clogged up faster and have to be constantly cleaned. The fuel itself, bunker oil, is chunky to begin with and the additional sloshing somehow gunks up the filters faster. In one famous case, the engineers had to do it every few minutes in a storm and that required complete enclosure disassembly and reassembly. That particular ship survived that storm, but not another.

YeGoblynQueenne2• 7 years ago

The ship that didn't survive- was that the El Faro?

I didn't realise this kind of malfunction of the oil pump was common. I thought it was particular to the design of the pump on that vessel.

rtkwe• 7 years ago

Most current plans don't use ships as the basis of a seasteading at least not currently. Most designs that have actually been tried are something like this [0] spar platform reminiscent of the RP Flip [1] which is extremely stable passively in waves. They have very small cross sections to the waves so mostly just bob up and down with the motion of the waves. We already know how to build these pretty large (see oil rigs).

[0] https://ocean.builders/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/spar.png

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RP_FLIP

dang• 7 years ago

A thread from 2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9519863

2012: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4435994

2011: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3310873

2010: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1088570

2009: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=441310

Others?

nradov• 7 years ago

These clowns have no clue what it takes to live on the sea. None of them have any serious experience in marine engineering, or in operating large ships or offshore platforms. They'll be begging the Coast Guard for rescue when the first big storm comes through.

buboard12• 7 years ago

I don't think they plan to build those megastructures with their bare hands.

village-idiot• 7 years ago

I don’t think that GP was implying that they would. Even a structure built by machines can fail catastrophically if poorly designed or operated. The ocean floor is littered with ships that weren’t “built with their bare hands”.

kyledrake• 7 years ago

If they even survive it. The open ocean is hostile beyond belief. Anyone trying to setup a stable city out there does not understand or respect it's terrifying power. https://youtu.be/aBM7NgMhg90

It takes a bay of some kind to do this semi-safely, but you won't find those 12 miles out from continents and if you do (basically reef atolls) they're almost certainly claimed by a government or very, very far away from civilization, and completely incapable of sustaining life in a way most people would want to live.

phkahler• 7 years ago

Most home owners associations are political messes. This seems like a slightly larger version of that but with far more responsibility in more areas.

crikli• 7 years ago

These folks take the Bluthton concept a bit too seriously.

dwighttk• 7 years ago

Odd that, unless I missed it, their blog mentions nothing about the Thai Navy destroying a seastead...

https://fee.org/articles/the-world-s-first-seasteaders-are-n...

tuxxy• 7 years ago

I've always been curious about initiatives like this.

What happens if there becomes resource exhaustion and similar problems? How would the safety of the inhabitants be ensured in events like that?

Traster• 7 years ago

I wanted to actually dig into this, and see if there's anything that's underlying the ideas that are worth really considering but I've got to say, this really turned me off:

"When an Island or Peninsula breaks free from a larger country and creates its own legal structure, dramatic increases in prosperity often occur within 1 generation.

Under British rule Hong Kong habour was little more than a dockyard for the Royal Navy. Now thanks to modern trade rules and numerous land reclamation projects, the skyline features an abundance of skyscrapers."

That's just dishonest. Firstly, Hong Kong was not just a dockyard for the British Navy in 1997, it was already an incredibly rich place, with many skyscrapers and huge amounts of autonomy. Try googling a photo of Hong Kong in 1997. Secondly, it is has not broken free from a larger country, it was returned from the British Empire to Chinese control.

"Before World War 2, rickshaws were the primary form of transport in Singapore. Now there is a vast public transport infrastructure, including high speed rail networks and expressways."

Okay, what a funky timeline. Before WW2 Singapore was very poor! Along with basically everyone else in that region. It gained independence in 1959, but let's not talk about what happened in between!

None of the examples they give seem to offer anything other than "Pro tip: Be a tax haven". Singapore, Mauritius, Hong Kong? Notice what these places have in common? Like Jesus Christ guys could you not find a single example of a country whose independence made it wealthy without being a straight up tax haven for the surrounding larger countries?

saalweachter• 7 years ago

There's a certain parallel to "a solution in search of a problem".

I haven't thought of a witty way to phrase the problem; "a utopia in search of a social movement", maybe?

It's really fun to design your new utopian community: the principles, the laws, the layout of the streets in the city (or the ships, in this case). But this is precisely backwards. You aren't playing SimCity, or SimSeastead. You can't just build (or make blueprints for) your ideal city, then summon a hoard of obedient minion-citizens to build it and inhabit it and behave in the way you have dictated.

The social movement has to come first: you need a large group of people, with similar aims and goals, working together, making decisions and plans a group. Then maybe you build a city. Or a commune. Or a co-op. Or who knows; the group may end up with other needs that you didn't anticipate.

Hypothetically you could build your community around your utopian vision, but why should they flock to you? All you've got is an idea. I've got some ideas, and so has every other person who might hypothetically be interested in joining your community. Why should I join you on your seastead instead of you joining me in my mountain enclave, or my seastead in a different ocean, or exactly like your seastead started out, except it's my seastead, I make the decisions?

Start by building a community, a movement. Or stick to writing fiction and playing the Sims.

hkt• 7 years ago

Libertarian wet dream if ever there was one. They'll learn by tragedy how international diplomacy works.

madhadron• 7 years ago

Does it seem odd to anyone else that French Polynesia is their testbed for "a floating legal entity designed to maximize personal and economic freedom," given that personal liberty and pursuit of happiness were not at all underlying principles of Tahitian society?

ivanhoe• 7 years ago

Sounds very similar to Sealand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principality_of_Sealand

wrongly• 7 years ago

Every July in the California Delta near Rio Vista I go to a weeklong festival called Ephemerisle, created 15 years ago to promote interest in seasteading. It’s full of Burners, SV people, and seasteading investors hanging out on yachts, barges, tugboats, and lots of DIY crafts: DeLorean hovercraft, flame boat with 100kW sound system, etc.

Seasteading

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