Are seasteads "technically impossible"?

In defense of the trailer parks of the sea

@RokoMijic (https://transhumanaxiology.substack.com/) been tweeting recently about his proposal to create enormous floating "icesteads"made of reinforced ice. British engineer Geoffrey Pyke experimented with building aircraft carriers out of ice during
the steel shortages of WWII, under the code name Project Habbakkuk.

I think giant ice ships are intriguing and deserve further experimentation. But I think Roko is wrong when dismisses current seastead designs such as the recently launched OceanBuilders prototypes:

"1. You can't walk on it and you mostly don't want to swim for everyday travel

2. Water is a very slow medium for small vessels - vessels have a "hull speed" proportional to the square root of their length.

3. Each building must be quite small and have its own foundation. They will bob around in the waves which will be annoying. Floating walkways are possible but will not be useable all the time.

4. In general, there can be extreme weather on the ocean. All small floating stuff can be destroyed in a freak storm. A seasteader recently died this way.

5. Due to the water and slow speed of small boats, you will have a massive transport shortfall.

People cannot walk or cycle. There are no trains. The boats are slow (10 km/hr).

You cannot run a dense city like NYC or SF like this.

Overall, dry land provides a bunch of important services.

• permanence and robustness

• protection against storms

• low friction/low drag transportation

• strong foundations

• absence of wave motion

• humans can self-transport by walking

Without these things, you basically get a sticky, short, isolated city. Like a trailer park in a swamp."

He concludes: "This is basically why seasteading doesn't work - it can't work technically."

My Response

Without these things, you basically get a sticky, short, isolated city. Like a trailer park in a swamp.

Venice was built on swampy islands separated by water. Yet it became a hub of commerce, science, art, and engineering for a thousand years.

Although the city eventually built bridges to connect the islands, travel was by boat for much of its history.

I expect that people will travel between seasteads via a variety of mechanisms, depending on the size and wealth of the seasteads:

1. Boats

2. Floating walkways

3. Seaplanes

4. Rope catwalks

5. Drone taxis

6. Airplanes

7. Underwater tunnels

Norway is already piloting floating underwater tunnels as a means of bridging their fjords.

With enough depth (~300+ ft) floating underwater tunnels won't feel the effects of the wave motion nor interfere with boat traffic.

Each building must be quite small and have its own foundation.

Initial seasteads, yes. However, larger seasteads will be like cruise ships with many residences / amenities on a single platform. Existing cruise ships support populations of 5000+ people (albeit with frequent trips to shore).

They will bob around in the waves which will be annoying.

Wave motion caused by severe weather is a difficult problem, it's true. But it's not an insurmountable problem. Oil platforms remain stable during the roughest weather in the North Atlantic sea.

Seasteads can deal with wave motion in a similar fashion, by using spar legs that don't absorb much of the wave energy:

See also the R/V Flip ship, whose spar design attenuated 30 ft waves to 3 ft of motion.

single family seastead exists now

Sure but they're not exactly going to replace civilization? Basically it is an extremely niche novelty product

You're correct, current seastead designs are not immediately going to replace civilization. They are an incremental step toward open ocean capable seasteads. Think of them as the Model T's of seastead designs: Innovative, useful, but still primitive.

As I see it, the initial market for seasteads will be in places where:

a) beach side real estate is very expensive
b) anchoring locations suitable for traditional houseboats near shore are in high demand
c) mooring spots in somewhat rougher waters are abundant.

Think Dubai, Hong Kong, Singapore, San Francisco.

This OceanBuilder's promo video illustrates how seasteads could expand beach front real estate.

There are also many island nations where dry land is scarce, but the submerged territory is enormous.

For example, the Marshall Islands are coral atolls that have only ~70 square miles of dry land divided among five "big" islands and 29 smaller islands. But the total area of their Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) is 463,000 square miles. (Alaska is 586,000 square miles in size).

The Marshall Islands depend heavily on tourism, which they'd love to increase. The islands only have a population of ~50,000 people, and the economy is so small that they have trouble preventing their kids from leaving for better opportunities in other countries. They'd also like to diversify their economy, so that downturns in the tourism industry (as happened during the Covid 19 pandemic) don't cause such hardship.

But the tropical islands have unusual habitats that the citizens don't want to see destroyed with new development. Nor do they want their land bought by foreigners.

Near shore seasteads would offer them a way to vastly increase the number of people who can visit and/or live there, without giving up their land, nor destroying their ecosystem.

French Polynesia, Kiribati, Maldives and many other island nations are in a similar state.

Keep in mind that the Ocean Builders initial prototype was anchored out in 300 feet of water 15 miles offshore from Phuket. That capability opens up a huge range of places seasteads could safely anchor.

So, as I see it, seasteading companies will sell to those markets initially, as they prove out the technology. Single family seasteads initially, but later hotels, airports, ports, factories. Once the technology is perfected, seasteaders will migrate out to regions of the ocean that most governments care little about, such as the Mascarene Plateau —a 44,000 sq mi underwater plateau in Indian Ocean with a depth that ranges from 30-500 ft deep.

Will we achieve “liberty in our lifetime” with icesteas / seasteads? Maybe—it’s too early to say. But I think it’s worth doing the experiment.