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Roko's avatar

> larger seasteads will be like cruise ships with many residences / amenities on a single platform

yes, you could have a lot of cruise ship-sized platforms anchored next to each other. This is the most viable floating seastead because on the platform itself people can travel by foot and cargo on the platform itself can travel by small electric carts and elevators.

And I think you would probably have floating causeways between them rather than underwater tunnels. You then have sections of floating bridges for smaller boats to pass under.

Also likely some floating beaches for relaxation/leisure.

But it's still gonna suck because it will be cramped because the floating platforms will be expensive per unit area, and there will be occasional bad weather that will mess up the floating infrastructure.

It's much more realistic than individual floating homes and boat transportation though.

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Archer T. Ships's avatar

Cruise ship rooms are cramped because cruise ships are optimized for entertainment and travel. The operators expect that the guests will be spending most of their time in the ships entertainment areas or touring offshore at stops. The rooms are intended primarily for sleeping.

Seasteads will be optimized for wave resistance, and long term living. Living space will be more expensive than land, but not much more expensive. Current seasteads offer costs per square foot comparable to NYC/San Francisco. For example, the median cost per square foot for residential real estate in San Francisco is $970. Ocean Builders thinks they can hit a $500 K price point for the Seapod ECO (850 ft2) or $600/ft2.

In addition, there's a plausible incremental pathway toward larger seasteads. Multi-residential seastead like structures have already been built:

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vernon_C._Bain_Correctional_Center

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

We already have floating manufacturing facilities, nuclear power plants, dry docks:

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

https://gizmodo.com/the-floating-super-factories-spawned-by-our-insatiable-1558165801

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

https://oilnow.gy/featured/us3m-dry-dock-first-ever-for-guyana-set-to-expand-as-country-expects-larger-vessels/

https://en.cibercuba.com/noticias/2024-04-18-u1-e135253-s27061-nid280549-patanas-anclada-puerto-cubano-parte-hacia-guayana

There aren't large scale floating airports or ports yet, but they're on the horizon:

https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/floating-airports/index.html

How much do you think it would cost to build the minimum viable icestead? How big would it be?

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Roko's avatar

> incremental pathway toward larger seasteads

I don't think you really want to be incremental. Good, important things are hard and expensive. A viable sovereign seastead will be expensive because viable sovereignty requires lots of people and they need to be high human capital people - high IQs, ideally young or at least not old, etc.

If you're going to attract a million people, your minimum spend is $50bn. If 100,000 people, your minimum spend is $5bn.

If you make a half-assed seasteading community somewhere, it will be a fun little community that doesn't really achieve sovereignty. You will still be under the control of some existing government.

It's probably harder for an incremental seastead to be sovereign because it will start small, so it will locate itself very close to land. Close to land means you have a specific nation state that will want to fight you if you try to claim sovereignty.

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Roko's avatar

> How much do you think it would cost to build the minimum viable icestead? How big would it be?

Well you probably don't want to try to make it small, because you are making a city and cities have agglomerative effects and smaller cities tend to kind of suck and be a dumping ground for low-human capital people. Realistically I think you have to aim for 1 million people. Given that people will pay something in excess of $100k for a house or apartment, you should aim to spend at least $50bn on the land itself if you are serious.

Bear in mind that Elon Musk paid $44bn for a social network.

I think cost per square kilometer is gonna be about $50M, so you're going to spend $50bn for 1000 square kilometers, i.e. a 30km by 30km ice island.

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Roko's avatar

But it really depends what you mean by "viable". Anything is viable if you set the bar low enough.

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Archer T. Ships's avatar

Viable by whatever definition of viable you use.

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Roko's avatar

I think the relevant definition is really the ability to get a UN seat or be on the path to that. I.e. you probably need a permanent floating island and 1M population or the equivalent capability in machines/AI

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Roko's avatar

Do the question is at what point does it become naturally self-sustaining on a growth path?

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John (jc) Comeau's avatar

Did he never read Marshall Savage? Many of these points were addressed in the book.

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Roko's avatar

which book, exactly?

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John (jc) Comeau's avatar

The Millennial Project: Colonizing the Galaxy in 8 Easy Steps.

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Roko's avatar

And what exactly did he say?

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John (jc) Comeau's avatar

Find the book if you can. Interlibrary loan may be an option?

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Roko's avatar

it may not be worth it. But if you know the general gist of it I'd be interested

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Roko's avatar

Another thing I will add is that the most recent seastead to fail is the French Polynesian Floating Island which failed because the locals got angry about it and the politicians killed it

Near existing coastlines is not a safe place

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Archer T. Ships's avatar

Yes, that's another reason I don't think it's a good idea to immediately seek sovereignty near shore. Until you have a large enough constituency to defend yourself, you'll be at the mercy of the current rentseeking class.

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Roko's avatar

Well they weren't even seeking sovereignty as far as I am aware. It was going to be under the jurisdiction of the local government?

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Archer T. Ships's avatar

They were seeking partial sovereignty, similar to Prospera.

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Roko's avatar

In general I think the problem with this that you're looking to build something small and incremental.

Examples of success in gaining sovereignty don't look like that because sovereignty requires a certain scale - both for economic and military reasons.

On a purely economic front, you can build a few homes or a floating hotel as a novelty. But they will need to be close to land to be worth living in. And if you are close to land and you claim sovereignty, well.. we know how that one goes.

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Archer T. Ships's avatar

Where did I say that early, near shore seasteads should claim sovereignty?

As I see it, seasteads communities will initially start near large, existing cities, and gradually expand outward like an ice crystal. Concomitantly, the technology will improve, seastead builders will become richer, and the general population will get used to the idea of living full time on the water.

At a certain point, there will be enough money, expertise, and desire to move out into equatorial, international waters. Those colonies will also start small and grow. Only after they are big enough and powerful enough to defend themselves would I suggest that they declare themselves a sovereign nation. That probably won't happen until the population reaches the 100 K - 1 M range. Maybe icestead will be developed enough by then to play a role in this part of the process.

In the meantime, I think it would be a good idea to win over a small island nation. In the USVI, for example, it would only take a 20 - 40 K voting bloc of activists to sweep the elections.

https://archerships.substack.com/p/the-arawa-island-project

US citizens can freely live, work, and _vote_ in the USVI. But it's a territory, not a state, they can largely set their own laws, and they don't have to pay Federal taxes.

Palau, Kirabati, Saipan, Guam, Maldives, and the Marshall Islands are also prospects.

All of international law / maritime law is currently based around land based nation states. For example, in international waters, the laws of the state in which the vessel is flagged determine the laws on board the ship. So if libertarians wholly control the government of a small island nation, they can determine the laws not only on the island, but also those which apply on vessels flagged with their state, including seasteads.

> In general I think the problem with this that you're looking to build something small and incremental.

Yes, I want more seasteads to actually exist. I've seen a number of large scale seasteading projects fizzle out: Freedom Ship, Blue Frontiers, Blueseed, MS Satoshi. If your business plan starts, 'First, we raise $50 billion from Elon Musk', it's almost guaranteed to fail.

By contrast, Ocean Builders has already deployed seasteads on the water.

What's your plan for making your 1 M person icestead happen? Are you friends with Elon Musk? Do you know some Russian oligarchs itching to give you $50 billion to make happen?

How do you propose to persuade 100,000 (let alone 1 million) people to move to a novel man made iceberg in the middle of the ocean? It's taken 23 years for the Free State Project to get ~10 K people to move to New Hampshire.

Yet, among US states, New Hampshire routinely ranks in the top three for quality of life, income per capita, and ease of doing business, etc. Healthcare, jobs, and cultural life are all readily available. The main downsides of New Hampshire are a) the cold b) expensive housing. Yet despite the many upsides (and few downsides) of New Hampshire, of the roughly 15 million libertarians in the US, only a tiny fraction of them have made the move. Short of forcing a bunch of refugees or prisoners to move to the island (a la Australia), it's going to take a while to get people to move voluntarily. People don't like leaving their friends and family behind unless the new place offers a substantial improvement over what they can get at home.

With a few exceptions (Basilica) large cities don't spring from Athena's brow fully formed. They start as small ports, or geographically defensible villages near some resource (forests, farmland, rivers, etc), or Schelling points along trade routes between existing cities.

I expect early seasteads to do the same.

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Roko's avatar

> large cities don't spring from Athena's brow fully formed

That was different in the past. We have the technology to do things like plan cities now.

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Archer T. Ships's avatar

Yes, but do you have the _demand_ to do so. I don't think you're going to get $5 billion to build an 100 K icestead until you prove the demand is there to justify the cost.

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Roko's avatar

I think there is probably demand but the people who are funding this may not care, because let's way you only have 10,000 people who are both willing and suitable; you can institute a policy of rapid childbirth since you will own the seastead and then 20-25 years later you will have 100,000 people. Populations can grow quite fast if you have "root" control over culture and you are competent at getting stuff done.

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Archer T. Ships's avatar

I think you're going to find it hard to attract people if the government policy is to coerce them to have children:

You might have better luck with non-coercive means of having children:

https://archerships.substack.com/p/breed-em-for-freedom

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Roko's avatar

No need for coercion IMO. Cultural and financial incentives are enough

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Roko's avatar

But 100,000 people is about 0.1% of the population of Great Britain or 0.01% of the anglosphere

I am very sure that 0.01% of the anglosphere will do this

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Archer T. Ships's avatar

Yes, but if the Free State Project is any guide, getting people to actually move is going to be difficult.

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Roko's avatar

> Concomitantly, the technology will improve, seastead builders will become richer, and the general population will get used to the idea of living full time on the water.

The technology for what will improve?

I don't think tech is really holding this back much. And living on water is worse the smaller your seastead is. So small seasteads will be bad.

Small seasteads don't help large seasteads IMO.

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Archer T. Ships's avatar

Attenuating large waves in a cost effective manner is an unsolved problem. Oil platforms can resist large waves, but they cost a ~billion dollars, which only folks who expect to make much more than that drilling for oil are willing to pay.

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Roko's avatar

This becomes less of a problem for larger seasteads as they are too big to really care about waves, and they will position themselves in relatively calm seas.

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Archer T. Ships's avatar

Even normally calm seas occasionally get big waves. You can't design just for the average conditions, you have to design for the 100 year or 1000 year events.

Yes, if you can get to a big enough scale, then big waves don't matter as much. But getting to such a scale in an economically viable fashion is an as yet unsolved problem.

That's another reason to aim for near shore at first. If your design fails, at least people have a nearby shore to escape to if their seastead is destroyed.

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Roko's avatar

> But getting to such a scale in an economically viable fashion is an as yet unsolved problem.

No, this is backwards

The only way to be economically viable is to be large.

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Roko's avatar

> Freedom Ship, Blue Frontiers, Blueseed, MS Satoshi.

Ironically the problem with most of these is being too small and/or needing permission from governments. The Freedom Ship is perhaps the exception, and it is the only one where something actually succeeded (MS The World). MS The World doesn't need to be big because it moves (movement is a substitute for size because you get to visit lots of places with new and interesting things to do rather than having them all in one place). But movement excludes sovereignty.

> Ocean Builders has already deployed seasteads

Sure, but I don't really think that matters. These small floating houses don't really incrementally help with a sovereign (large) seastead.

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Archer T. Ships's avatar

> Sure, but I don't really think that matters. These small floating houses don't really incrementally help with a sovereign (large) seastead.

They provide a means for seasteading firms to make a profit as they a) debug prototypes b) establish supply lines c) demonstrate that there is demand sufficient to justify greater investment d) demonstrate competence to build / lead seastead cities.

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Roko's avatar

> a) debug prototypes

But it's a prototype of something completely different. A small seastead near the shore is nothing like a very large one in the deep ocean thousands of miles away from the nearest land.

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Archer T. Ships's avatar

Okay, but you've still not laid out a path to building such a thing. Do you think you'll be able to build such a thing de novo, with no smaller prototypes?

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Roko's avatar

Actually I spoke to the Seasteading Institute people today and they said that the main barrier to a Seastead is not technical, but one of scale - small seasteads are remote, boring places and so important people don't want to go to them.

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Roko's avatar

You can just make a prototype. It may be possible to get some value out of the prototype but it isn't essential. In fact you might have several prototypes - one at 1/1000th scale, one at 1/200th scale, one at 1/50th scale.

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