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Seasteading: Living Free On The World's Seas

MrRING

MrRING

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http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/lookout...artificial-libertarian-islands-140840896.html
Silicon Valley billionaire funding creation of artificial libertarian islands
By Liz Goodwin | The Lookout – 2 hrs 21 mins ago

Pay Pal founder and early Facebook investor Peter Thiel has given $1.25 million to an initiative to create floating libertarian countries in international waters, according to a profile of the billionaire in Details magazine.

Thiel has been a big backer of the Seasteading Institute, which seeks to build sovereign nations on oil rig-like platforms to occupy waters beyond the reach of law-of-the-sea treaties. The idea is for these countries to start from scratch--free from the laws, regulations, and moral codes of any existing place. Details says the experiment would be "a kind of floating petri dish for implementing policies that libertarians, stymied by indifference at the voting booths, have been unable to advance: no welfare, looser building codes, no minimum wage, and few restrictions on weapons."

"There are quite a lot of people who think it's not possible," Thiel said at a Seasteading Institute Conference in 2009, according to Details. (His first donation was in 2008, for $500,000.) "That's a good thing. We don't need to really worry about those people very much, because since they don't think it's possible they won't take us very seriously. And they will not actually try to stop us until it's too late."

The Seasteading Institute's Patri Friedman says the group plans to launch an office park off the San Francisco coast next year, with the first full-time settlements following seven years later.

Thiel made news earlier this year for putting a portion of his $1.5 billion fortune into an initiative to encourage entrepreneurs to skip college.

Another Silicon Valley titan, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, announced in June that he would be funding the "Clock of the Long Now." The clock is designed to keep ticking for 10,000 years, and will be built in a mountain in west Texas.
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More:
http://seasteading.org/
 
"a kind of floating petri dish for implementing policies that libertarians, stymied by indifference at the voting booths, have been unable to advance: no welfare, looser building codes, no minimum wage, and few restrictions on weapons."
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Sounds lovely :roll:
 
Really, the only people who would end up on board are the richest people.
Ordinary mortals won't get a look in.
 
It's interesting in the light of the recent Adam Curtis documentary All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace, in which Silicon Valley is presented as one big libertarian Ayn Rand fan club.
 
Or it will turn out to be as bad as Waterworld... ;)
 
The forums seem to have their fair share of people wanting to escape the New World Order.
 
Update ...

The Seasteading Institute's website:

https://www.seasteading.org/

... seems to be MIA.

In 2017 the institute agreed a Memorandum of Understanding with French Polynesia to develop a floating settlement in French Polynesian waters (the Floating City Project). The French Polynesian government voided the MOU and the prospective project later.

An island nation that told a libertarian 'seasteading' group it could build a floating city has pulled out of the deal
The Seasteading Institute set out on a mission to build a floating, libertarian utopia in the middle of the ocean.

French Polynesia, an island nation that once agreed to let the institute develop the "seastead" off the coast of Tahiti, has now backed out of the deal.

Locals in Tahiti feared that seasteading would bring tech colonialism to their shores. The project has long been criticized for its costs and elitism.
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FULL STORY: https://www.businessinsider.com/fre...with-peter-thiel-seasteading-institute-2018-3
 
In addition, Peter Thiel (perhaps the most prominent founding member of the Seasteading Institute) terminated his relationship with the institute and stated in a 2017 interview the concept is unworkable at the present time.

Tech billionaire Peter Thiel no longer thinks his dream of a floating libertarian utopia is realistic
Peter Thiel has all but given up on his dream of a libertarian utopia in the middle of the ocean.

In 2008, the billionaire venture capitalist and Trump transition team member launched a group on a mission to develop a floating city, called a seastead, that would serve as a permanent, politically autonomous settlement. He invested some $1.7 million in The Seasteading Institute, and resigned from its board in 2011.

In a new interview with Maureen Dowd of The New York Times, Thiel dismissed floating cities as an improbable architectural feat.

"They're not quite feasible from an engineering perspective," Thiel told The Times. "That's still very far in the future." ...
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FULL STORY: https://www.businessinsider.com/peter-thiel-seastead-dream-floating-city-2017-1
 
Maybe he read James Lovegrove's cult novel The Hope and, er, abandoned all hope.
 
An inaugural seastead has resulted in harsh action by the Thai government ...
US bitcoin trader and girlfriend could face death penalty over Thai 'seastead'
An American bitcoin trader and his girlfriend could face the death penalty after they were accused of threatening Thailand's sovereignty by building and living in a "sea home" off the coast of Phuket.

Chad Elwartowski and his partner Nadia Supranee Thepdet have fled their home, built atop a platform around 12 miles off the coast of Phuket, and gone into hiding after authorities revoked the American's visa.

He had promoted "seasteads" on social media and claimed his home did not fall under the sovereignty of any country, which Thai authorities have said is untrue. He repeated the claim on Thursday, writing the home is "outside of Thailand territorial waters." ...
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FULL STORY: https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/19/asia/thai-sea-home-us-bitcoin-trader-scli-intl/index.html
 
I had a notion years ago that, as climate change progresses, the rich might begin to inhabit floating platforms and perhaps even huge cruise ships, repurposed passenger liners, leaving the ordinary folk to eke a living from remaining resources on land, which will mostly be sold to the rich when they come into port. I wonder if seasteading is the first indication that the wealthy want to loose ties from us grubby lot and live the life they feel they can't within our politically entangled societies. They're deluded, no doubt, in the way so many idealists have traditionally been; their shared values won't prevent ideological fractures from forming, and now they'll all be stuck at sea together.
 
PeteByrdie said:
I had a notion years ago that, as climate change progresses, the rich might begin to inhabit floating platforms and perhaps even huge cruise ships, repurposed passenger liners, leaving the ordinary folk to eke a living from remaining resources on land, which will mostly be sold to the rich when they come into port. I wonder if seasteading is the first indication that the wealthy want to loose ties from us grubby lot and live the life they feel they can't within our politically entangled societies. They're deluded, no doubt, in the way so many idealists have traditionally been; their shared values won't prevent ideological fractures from forming, and now they'll all be stuck at sea together.
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Plus, given the actual skill-sets of many of our 'high socio-economic status' people, they'll all die in a decade.
 
Coal said:
Plus, given the actual skill-sets of many of our 'high socio-economic status' people, they'll all die in a decade.
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Potentially. At the very least, they would no longer be rich, in the sense of having more than their neighbours. So they would just be a commune basically. But they would need to trade with other countries and so would need to continue to accrue wealth in some way, so it's not as though they could remove ties from the international community. In which case, we're just talking about a high class get away really, even if it has independent status.
 
PeteByrdie said:
Potentially. At the very least, they would no longer be rich, in the sense of having more than their neighbours. So they would just be a commune basically. But they would need to trade with other countries and so would need to continue to accrue wealth in some way, so it's not as though they could remove ties from the international community. In which case, we're just talking about a high class get away really, even if it has independent status.
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What would they trade with?
 
Coal said:
What would they trade with?
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Exactly! So they'd need to continue being part of our morally corrupt society where people have reservations about firearms and the powers of big businesses are curtailed whether they like it or not.
 
That Thai floating home is surprisingly small. I think I'd get a bit claustrophobic in something like that. Presumably it's tethered to the sea floor otherwise it'd just float away. It all looks a bit 'Waterworld'. Would it be legally acceptable if it was sufficiently far from territorial waters & in open ocean?

There certainly seems to be a thing about billionaires buying in remote locations in the expectation of shit hitting the fan in some way in the not too distant future. I can't remember any names but I saw a programme fairly recently. These were people who'd made a fortune from selling their internet companies and suchlike.
 
I am mot sure what the point is in being mega-rich and living in such a horrible looking thing.
 
The controversial Thai seastead represents the first deployed prototype of a structure intended to be replicated to create a population of circa 20 such platforms.

The company that designed, built, and deployed this inaugural prototype (earlier in 2019) is Ocean Builders:

https://ocean.builders

There seems to be widespread confusion about the relationship between the seastead and its first inhabitants (Elwartowski / Summergirl).

Ocean Builders deployed the prototype seastead, and the couple volunteered to try it out. The couple did not commission nor buy the seastead.

There has also been confusion over the Thai authorities' intentions with respect to the platform:

https://ocean.builders/official-statement-about-the-sinking-of-the-first-seastead/
 
A better project in my opinion would be to get an island, fit it out with vertical hydroponics and potentially vertical livestock farms, use renewables and batteries for power, and base ones community there. From there, funding research into in vitro meat production with a view to eventually getting rid of the costs and inefficiency of livestock farming would probably be the way forward.
 
hunck said:
That Thai floating home is surprisingly small. I think I'd get a bit claustrophobic in something like that. Presumably it's tethered to the sea floor otherwise it'd just float away. ...
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Yes - the Ocean Builders' prototype seastead is a tethered platform atop a floating vertical pillar, which Ocean Builders calls a 'spar'.

The use of such vertical spars (flooded in their lower sections) allows for a surprisingly stable base without being rigidly fixed to the seabed.

This vertical pillar approach is the tactic used for large offshore drilling rigs. It can also be seen as a descendant of the FLIP oceanographic vessel / platform launched in 1962 (and still in use today):

https://www.ship-technology.com/projects/flip-ship/
 
Is the vertical spar akin to the dampers used in skyscrapers?
 
The arrogance of these people is unbelievable, they think that they can live outside of any laws and that if civilisation falls they will rule as feudal monarchs over whats left on land as well. There is a similar (albeit landbased) movement in the US which builds Keeps and the owners plan being the local Dukes and Barons after the fall.
 
Frideswide said:
Is the vertical spar akin to the dampers used in skyscrapers?
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I'd say 'No'. Although there are tuned mass damper tactics involving vertical shafts or structures similar to the spar, it's not the case that all dampers use this structural form.

On the other hand ... I suspect a more refined / evolved version of the floating spar platform might well incorporate mass damper features to counteract motions and forces of wave action.
 
I find the whole technology fascinating.
 
Funny this thread should come to light again, I was reading this just this afternoon:

Bitcoin couple could face death penalty in Thailand for 'seastead' floating home in international waters

A bitcoin investor couple are on the run and facing potential death sentences after Thai authorities alleged their life on the open seas was a threat to national sovereignty.

United States citizen Chad Andrew Elwartowski and Thai national Supranee Thepdet, who goes by the English name Nadia Summergirl, had been living part-time in a small structure anchored outside Thailand's territorial waters, about 12 nautical miles (22 kilometres) from Phuket's shore.

But the couple fled ahead of Thai authorities raiding their floating platform home in the Andaman Sea, where the couple sought to pioneer the "seasteading" movement.

Seasteading promotes living in international waters to be free of any nation's laws.

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https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-04...ath-penalty-in-thailand-for-seastead/11031336
 
ramonmercado said:
The arrogance of these people is unbelievable, they think that they can live outside of any laws and that if civilisation falls they will rule as feudal monarchs over whats left on land as well. There is a similar (albeit landbased) movement in the US which builds Keeps and the owners plan being the local Dukes and Barons after the fall.
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I can't help but see the seasteading movement as having been inspired by the song 'Wooden Ships'. That song from a half-century ago described fleeing the aftermath of a nuclear war by taking to the seas. Save for that specific thematic allusion the song would presumably still resonate with folks who long to escape traditional human societies / strictures.
 
EnolaGaia said:
I can't help but see the seasteading movement as having been inspired by the song 'Wooden Ships'. That song from a half-century ago described fleeing the aftermath of a nuclear war by taking to the seas. Save for that specific thematic allusion the song would presumably still resonate with folks who long to escape traditional human societies / strictures.
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Nothing wrpng with democratic communities on the seas. But that's not something the Sealords are into.
 
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