General

Re: Crowdsourcing business plans for seasteads

Kelvin Silva — Fri, 07 Dec 2012 04:38:56 GMT

Put the shipping container house on those barges.

Then buy a bunch of those barges and make a barge city.

I love the idea of a container house. Id live in one..

Re: Crowdsourcing business plans for seasteads

Anenome — Fri, 07 Dec 2012 04:25:30 GMT

I wanted to update this page.

The Seasteading Institute has sponsored a lot of reasearch on seasteading, and has put forth their first proposal and design for a permanent seastead. They've produced voluminous pages of freely available research on a variety of factors, which can be found here.

If you scroll down a bit on that page to this heading, you'll find their design for a large-scale first seastead, which they estimate will cost some $115 million, and is entirely self-supporting, containing food, waste disposal, etc.

"Feasibility and Design of the Clubstead"

Re: Crowdsourcing business plans for seasteads

Anenome — Wed, 24 Oct 2012 07:32:06 GMT

Clayton:

Hmm, looks like there already are seasteads. Seems to me if the seastead people are serious, this is where they'd start. Buy one of these, anchor it 30 miles off the coast of San Francisco and start renting units.

Clayton -

...I take it you're not familiar with Blueseed.

Apparently 30% or so of their interested renters are already US citizens / entrpreneurs interested in working outside US jurisdiction.

Re: Crowdsourcing business plans for seasteads

Clayton — Wed, 24 Oct 2012 07:03:30 GMT

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Clayton -

Re: Crowdsourcing business plans for seasteads

Clayton — Wed, 24 Oct 2012 06:28:19 GMT

Here's what I'm thinking of... a flat deck-barge... mount a crane on this baby and you're good to go. You don't even need a super-structure because you're not going to be navigating anywhere. You can charter a tow boat whenever you need to move from one location to another. Otherwise, just anchor in a nice calm area of ocean and get down to business. One nice thing with the crane is you don't even need a dock - any ship or craft just pulls up alongside and personnel can move over a flexible bridge while you just load/unload any cargo - even including the craft itself if it's small enough to stow - with the crane.

This doesn't have the sex appeal of a Club Stead. But it won't cost $100M, either. I don't know what one of those flat decks, crane and any other retrofitting will run you but whatever it is, is peanuts compared to the price tage of a Club Stead.

Clayton -

Re: Crowdsourcing business plans for seasteads

Clayton — Wed, 24 Oct 2012 06:04:56 GMT

Hmm, looks like there already are seasteads. Seems to me if the seastead people are serious, this is where they'd start. Buy one of these, anchor it 30 miles off the coast of San Francisco and start renting units.

Clayton -

Re: Crowdsourcing business plans for seasteads

Clayton — Wed, 24 Oct 2012 05:47:13 GMT

@Ragnar: The problem with any dry land is that the "UN mindset" is that all dry land belongs to some official national government or other. (Unfortunately, I think they will do the same to "permanent ocean dwellings" if seasteading ever takes off).

One way around this might be to build an artifical breakwater anchored on an underwater "sea mount". Since the sea mount is submerged, it's not dry land and as long as it's outside of any EEZ, nobody can really claim it under current rules. But there's always the "Oh, that's part of our national heritage" crap.

I think if you're going to do it, you might as well go all the way and float freely. I think that the most conservative/cost-effective approach is to start with existing technology (e.g. a retro-fitted cargo ship) and build out from there. One thing to keep in mind in terms of weather is that because the seastead is always at sea and isn't necessarily going anywhere in particular, it can stick to areas of the ocean that are calmer and steer around potential storms.

Clayton -

Re: Crowdsourcing business plans for seasteads

RagnarD — Wed, 24 Oct 2012 04:56:40 GMT

I understand that part of the benefit of seasteading is mobility, however a lot can go wrong on the water, with that in mind I think a landed seastead marina would be a good lure, but I'm not sure what further legal problems would be created by building a structure up from a relatively shallow ridge in intl waters.

My thought is that the landed structure serves as a safe haven in the event of unforeseen, or underestimated weather/surf problems. It would also be of benefit as a breakwater for the seasteads themselves. I'm sure there would be many services to offer to smaller seasteads. As the community grew maybe the landed structure would grow into being the road between many seasteads.

Re: Crowdsourcing business plans for seasteads

Anenome — Tue, 23 Oct 2012 23:22:29 GMT

Will do.

Sentcha a friend request, your settings don't allow random PMs.

Re: Crowdsourcing business plans for seasteads

Andris Birkmanis — Tue, 23 Oct 2012 21:13:21 GMT

I misunderstood you, then. I thought you are gonna use a spherical hull.

I am mostly into "enterprisey" kind of programming, though I dabbed in quite a lot of areas, from 3D graphics to simulations to networking to databases to programming language design to statistics.

What kind of programming you need? :)

Feel free to PM.

Re: Crowdsourcing business plans for seasteads

Malachi — Tue, 23 Oct 2012 21:08:09 GMT

I second the use of shipping containers as structural components. Also check into OTEC or Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion, where you can use the thermal gradient from the surface to the deep, and produce electricity, purified water, cold water, and conceivably also hydrogen.

Re: Crowdsourcing business plans for seasteads

Anenome — Tue, 23 Oct 2012 20:57:39 GMT

Andris Birkmanis:

What gave you that impression? A dome is actually incredibly strong.

I didn't mean unstable in structural sense, I meant in "hull stability" sense: http://www.rcwarships.com/rcwarships/nwc/stability.html

Ah, you mean as a hull, gotcha. I thought you meant as the roof / superstructure. The current idea I have is to put the dome on a laterally extended concrete foundation, with I-beams as an internal frame for this foundation. Probably have to waterproof the I-beams with fiberglass first. On the edges of this put some floats all around, and then hang a concrete weight off the center-bottom of the structure a good twenty or thirty feet down. That combination of floats extended laterally as far as possible and a deep weight should give you maximum roll stability on the water and be very comfortable for occupants thereby, I call it a " T " configuration. It is the in-line float and weight systems, a so-called " I " configuration such as the oil rigs use that can be a major, major headache and are very uncomfortable on occupants for all their rolling and listing.

Andris Birkmanis:
Again, thanks for the links. Being a computer programmer and otherwise a geek, seeing the 3D printing on that scale is mindboggling. The possibilities are huge.

Yeah? What kind of programming do you do? I have need of a programmer for my autarchy concept, and am only just teaching myself basic Python currently. Maybe we can pow-wow :)

Re: Crowdsourcing business plans for seasteads

Anenome — Tue, 23 Oct 2012 20:39:04 GMT

The iceberg idea isn't that bad, tbh. I think, if you had enough excess energy, say via nuclear production, that you could just add on to the iceberg via freezing new water onto it.

Also, have you heard of pycrete?

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Re: Crowdsourcing business plans for seasteads

Andris Birkmanis — Tue, 23 Oct 2012 20:31:04 GMT

What gave you that impression? A dome is actually incredibly strong.

I didn't mean unstable in structural sense, I meant in "hull stability" sense: http://www.rcwarships.com/rcwarships/nwc/stability.html

Again, thanks for the links. Being a computer programmer and otherwise a geek, seeing the 3D printing on that scale is mindboggling. The possibilities are huge.

Re: Crowdsourcing business plans for seasteads

Anenome — Tue, 23 Oct 2012 20:16:21 GMT

Andris Birkmanis:

Thanks for the links, I will study them.

BTW, why a dome shape? I thought it's quite unstable.

What gave you that impression? A dome is actually incredibly strong. You know how archs are inherently strong? A dome is a rotated 360 degree arch. The only force they have to contend with is a flattening tendency, which is countered with both your rebar strategy (wrapping the dome like a barrel is wrapped with metal to contain it from expanding) and the way you anchor it to the ground-surface.

Also, if you were to put two domes together you'd get a sphere, which would be perfect as a floating structure I think.

Andris Birkmanis:
As an amateur designer I would imagine an inverted cone is both more stable and is easier to produce. I can understand the choice of the shape if it is crucial for low cost... Ok, maybe you can attach some ballast on a bunch of basalt rods...

A cone (pointing up as the walls and roof of the house) isn't as internally self-supportive as the dome is, and also much less beautiful :P

Andris Birkmanis:
Also, isn't 3D printing cheaper than manual construction only in "very Western" (high cost of living+unions) countries?

Manual labor is generally 85% of the cost of building any structure or home. By 3D printing it the internal walls and the like, you can recapture a great deal of that percentage, get labor costs down to perhaps 15% of the cost of a house. That turns into pretty massive savings.

I have built houses for a living in the past, so I know more than a bit about that. I think the potential for 3D printing in this area is pretty massive. There's already people working on this problem as well, check this out as an example. It's a machine "printing" a six-foot wall in concrete (~40 second mark):

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What I like about that is the curved aesthetic. I want to create seasteading as a sort of civilization 2.0, the evolution of the human species' means of living. And part of that is a new seasteading / libertarian visual aesthetic in living spaces, which embraces the curve. Traditionally the curve has been expensive and difficult to produce. But with domes and 3D printing, the curve is as cheap and easy as any other shape.

So take a dome, and imagine hobbit-hole architecture, with not flat vertical walls, but vertically and horizontally curved and curving walls.

And here's the guy working on printing entire houses. He's figuring ways to even print plumbing and electrical. That's pretty huge, that's a massive expense in a new house.

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